12 rose water substitute ideas + homemade rose water recipe

12 best rose water substitutes for cooking, baking & sweet making, including easy rose water recipe using hot water and substitutions that don’t include rose flavour.

Rose water has a very delicate, but distinct flavour, which is usually used in cooking, baking, traditional sweet making and also in preparing cosmetics, creams and face cleansing waters.

I often use rose water in my traditional sweet making recipes, such as Turkish Delight, or boiled sweets, but also in chocolate making where the subtle flavour of rose can be beautifully paired with lemon essence, herbs and spices.

When I was making chocolate bars for a local farmer’s market, my Rose Milk Chocolate Bar was one of the best sellers. It’s perhaps an unusual combination, but it works a treat!

Anyway, if you happen to come across a recipe that requires you to have rose water, but you don’t have any, what can you do?

Well, in today’s blog post I wanted to share with you my top tips for ingredients that you can use instead of rose water, in case you don’t have them to hand or don’t want to use rose water.

Talking about not wanting to use rose water, I completely understand that rose flavour is not to everyone’s liking, so replacing rose water with a different flavour is fine too. I’ll include plenty of examples of flavours that can work instead, so just carry on reading

MORE FLORAL INFUSED RECIPES

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Rose water substitute – to make sure you get flavour as close to the rose water as possible

Rose water essence

If your shop doesn’t have a rose water, you can also buy rose essence instead. Extract or Essence is usually stronger, than water flavouring, so just use about 1/2 of the quantity in your recipe. Add your flavouring, taste and add more if needed.

Rose oil

This is an oil-based rose flavouring, which is much more concentrated than rose water. It can be used successfully instead of rose water, but since it’s 5-10 times more concentrated than the rose water, you need to make sure you don’t use too much.

Start with 1-2 drops, mix or stir in to your dish, then taste and add more if needed.

Rose oil is perfect for any dish, but since the flavour is carried in oil, it might not be too stable when hot. This means that if you add rose oil to a boiling dish it might burn off the flavouring or it might change the flavour slightly. To avoid spoiling the rose oil, add it to your dish towards the end of cooking time, when it starts to cool down a bit.

Rose oil is also perfect for chocolate making, because you can’t add rose water directly to any solid chocolates (e.i. if you want to make chocolate bars flavoured with rose). Rose oil can be added directly to the tempered chocolate coverture and then used for creating chocolate bars, lollipops or other solid chocolate shapes.

Crushed rose petals

Depending on your recipe, you might like to try simply crushing few fragrant rose petals into your dish to add a hint of rose flavouring. It will not be as strong as professionally made rose water, but if you are set on a rose flavoured dish, it will at least give you undertones of rose flavour.

Make sure that you pick rose petals that have not been treated against any disease and don’t use rose petals that are gathered on bushes close to the roads and other dusty environments like town centres.

Crushed rose petals substitution for rose water is particularly good for adding to baking, cooking or infusing cream for chocolate truffles.

With some dishes, you can leave the rose petals in (they will just disintegrate) but with some (for example making rose petals infused ganache) it’s best to take them out by using a fine sieve.

Dried Rose Powder

Dried rose powder is very strong in flavour and you only need a teaspoon to make up a rose flavour. The rose powder is great for cooking, baking, lattes, cocktail or smoothies making and also for making homemade cosmetics and face masks.

Dried rose powder is also great when you want to ensure that you ad as little water into your recipe as possible. This is for example great for sweets making, frozen jelly puddings or whipped desserts.

Homemade rose water

Making your own rose water is actually not that difficult, but it means that you need to have rose bushes in your garden (or somewhere close by) and they need to be in a flower).

This homemade rose water is not exactly how a regular (shop bought) rose water is made, but it’s relatively quick and easy to do.

Version 1 – Distilled rose water – cold process

If you wanted to make rose water the correct way, you would need to leave the rose petals in cold water to infuse for a several hours, then take them out and distil the water.

This can still be done at home, but it does take time. I regularly make my own distilled water for making clear sugar lollipops or hard boiled pulled sweets recipe as our water is very hard.

All you need is the cold water infused with rose petals (rose petals removed) placed in a saucepan with a lid where you remove the lid handle on the top. It usually leaves a hole.

Place a heat proof plastic bowl inside the saucepan, close it with the lid upside down and switch on a low simmer. The water will start to evaporate and gather on the top of the lid, but because it’s upside down the evaporated water will drip into the plastic bowl inside.

Keep simmering the water until it goes dry, making sure that you stop at that point. And that’s how you distil water at home, my friends!

Option 2 – Hot infused rose water

You can make quick homemade rose water providing you are able to pick some fresh rose petals (again making sure that the rose petals come from untreated or dusty rose bushes).

To make about 300 ml (a medium size bottle) you will need about 2 cups of fresh rose petals (small pink roses are usually best, but any highly fragranced rose will be fine to use) and 500 ml (1/2 litre – about 2 cups) of water.

To make your homemade rose water

• Place the rose petals into a medium size pan and cover with the water
• Cover with a lid to make sure the water doesn’t evaporate
• Simmer over fairly low heat to make sure you don’t burn the rose pettals
• Stop when about 1/2 of the water has evaporated
• Leave to cool down in the saucepan
• Pour out over a fine sieve to catch the remaining rose petals into another bowl
• Keep in sealed glass bottle (or plastic container)
• Keep in the fridge and use within a few weeks

Rose flavoured herbal or dark tea or teabags (not rosehips)

I’ve recently bought dark tea flavoured with rose flavour and I’ve also tasted fruit teas with rose flavour. They are both equally useful for flavouring dishes where you also add water.

You can use the tea to diffuse into the dish and take it out (either in a tea bag or use a tea strainer). You can also make a very strong tea rose essence by using 2-3 rose tea teabags and only adding 100 ml of boiling water. Leave it to diffuse or even simmer for a few extra minutes to really get the flavour out.

The fruit rose tea is particularly good if you want to flavour and colour your dish at the same time, such as rose flavoured milk pudding or making your own sweets or turkish delight.

Strong rose tea also makes a great base for iced tea or you can turn it into a simple rose syrup following my other recipes.

SUGAR SYRUP RECIPES

• Pear Simple Syrup >>
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• Brown Sugar Syrup >>

Rose Turkish Delight

If you are making sweet rose milk pudding, jelly or other sweet type of food, it might be worth trying rose flavoured turkish delight.

Chop it into small pieces and add to your recipe instead of the rose water. The amount will depend on how strongly flavoured your turkish delight is and how strongly flavoured you want your final dish to be.

Don’t forget that turkish delight contains a lot of sugar, so make sure you add less sugar to your recipe.

Fry’s Turkish Delight

Similarly as before – Fry’s Turkish Delight will work as a subtle rose flavouring if you crumble or chop it into your dish.

The only slight problem is that since it’s chocolate coated you’ll either have chocolate flavour in as well or you will need to carefully pick it over to get rid of the chocolate layer.

Rose flavouring for cocktail or drink making

Have you noticed how rose flavoured drinks and cocktails have become popular recently?

Well, because of that, you can often pick rose flavoured syrups and concentrated flavourings for making these drinks at home. The only problem is that they are usually mixed with sugar and not as strong as rose water.

Rose lemonade

If you need just a subtle rose flavour and you are looking for a rose water substitute for a pudding or a dessert, something like a shop bought rose lemonade will actually do a pretty good job of flavouring your dish.

Since rose lemonade is not as concentrated as rose water, I would use it to replace any liquid in the recipe. For example, if I was making my chocolate pudding, but as a rose pudding, I would make up the milk ingredient (500 ml or 1/2 litre) with say 1/3 of cream and 2/3 of rose lemonade.

That way I have still milk element in my pudding (which is what I need for the recipe to work) and I have enough of rose lemonade to give me enough flavour. I would also change slightly the sugar amount, since rose lemonade already has sugar in.

Rose Jelly (Edible)

Rose jelly can be effectively used for flavouring both sweet and savoury dishes with rose flavour. Just add 1-2 tablespoons to your dish at the end of your cooking process, stir in and taste. Add more if needed.

Rose Jam or Marmalade

In the same way as rose jelly, rose jam or marmalade can be used for flavouring, but since jam and marmalade contains quite a lot of sugar, you might want to use this rose water substitution for sweet dishes only.

Make sure you also adjust the sugar ratio in your recipe.

Rose water substitute – when you don’t want to or need to replicate the rose flavour

Any suitable fruit, floral or herbal essence (edible)

• Orange extract or essence
• Lemon extract or essence
• Lavender extract or essence (or crushed dried lavender buds)
• Raspberry extract or essence

Any other essence that you like the flavour of

• Almond
• Mint
• Vanilla

Spices

If you want to just add some flavour, but it doesn’t have to be rose, you can easily just add a hint of spice with the following sweet spices

• Cinnamon
• Cardamon
• Aniseed

or spice mixes, such as

• Mixed Spice >>
• Apple Pie Spice >>
• Oatmeal Spice >>

Rose water substitution for Turkish Delight

When you think of rose flavour, most people, especially in England will struggle to come up with dishes that are flavoured with rose, but they will always think of Turkish Delight (and possibly more recently ‘Rose Lemonade).

If you don’t have a rose water or rose oil to make your own Rose flavoured Turkish Delight, the following flavour combinations work beautifully. They will not taste like rose, but they are beautiful together, plus some also have a floral undertones like rose.

• Lavender
• Lavender & Lemon
• Lemon
• Lemon & Pistachios
• Orange
• Orange & Walnuts
• Orange & Hazelnuts
• Raspberry & Lemon
• Raspberry