CORTAS Rose Water – 100% Pure & Natural Floral Essence for Culinary and Beauty Use (300ml, Rose Water)

Strong flavour

Not the cheapest rose water that I have ever obtained, but this comes well presented in a smart glass bottle. If this is a product that you use daily for your beauty routine, I would certainly recommend that you go for the 500ml bottle, because it's much better value!

Having never used rose water in cooking before, I have to admit, I expected this rose water to be sweeter. With drinkable “water with a hint of fruit” products readily available in the shops, I thought this would be along the same lines, a sort of drinkable gentle Turkish Delight. And while the scent is definitely that, and both pleasant and quite strong, there’s just a hint of an earthy bitterness in the flavour that stops it from being palatable straight from the bottle.The same earthiness comes through when drizzled on a fruit salad too in my opinion, and while it makes a salad bowl smell fresher and sweeter quite effectively, for me there’s something slightly ‘off’ about the flavour. In the old days, rose was used to mask the smell of bad water, but now ironically, it’s the rose itself that makes it taste off- not ‘bad’, just very much not what I’m used to. I need to raise my game and learn more about the proper culinary use of rose water, before the bottle runs out.It’s nicely if straightforwardly presented, in a simple and somewhat old-fashioned glass bottle with a screw top lid. Glass is the classic recyclable product in a way and I quite like it, it gives it a “just like Mum used to use” feel.The East End brand rose water in my local supermarket works out just slightly cheaper by volume than this, but this comes with the added convenience of delivery, so value-wise I think it’s OK (given that the price tag at time of writing is just under six quid for a 300ml bottle). I bought the East End brand one to see if I could spot any major differences for this review, but to my palate I couldn’t tell the two of them apart if I couldn’t see the label.I can fault my own ability to use this product to its best potential, but I can’t see a reason to fault this product itself.