Five Spice Bitters in progress

My five spice bitters have been steeping for a few weeks. Today I strained off the alcohol and put it back in a jar. I broke up the bigger spices and put them in a pan and simmered them in water for five minutes or so. (photo above) I put this water-spice mixture in a jar and will let it sit two days before straining it and combining it with the alcohol again. I'll decide at that point if I want to add burnt sugar for coloring or not. Read more!

Five Spice Bitters

I was thinking about Chinese food recently and noticed that the ingredients of the typical "five spice" powder used to flavor Chinese and other Asian cuisines have a relationship with the base spices of many bitters recipes—things like clove, cinnamon, and anise. So I've decided to attempt a batch of "five spice bitters". There are apparently various ways to interpret the five spices you use to make the mixture. I admit I only researched the internet so if anyone has more detailed information I'd be grateful. Wikipedia notes that the basic principle is to combine "sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty". I found an example of one recipe here. After comparing that recipe to the ingredients listed on the jar I have in my kitchen (as far as I can tell the same one pictured on the Wikipedia site) and reviewing the helpful assortment of vintage bitters recipes in the book Imbibe!, I settled on the following combination:

2 star anise
1 tsp roasted szechuan pepper
4 cloves
2 inch-long sticks cinnamon
1 slice fresh ginger

I put these in a jar (photo above) with one cup of Everclear (check out the label below) grain alcohol (which I bought in Connecticut but which a local merchant has told me is now legal again in NY) and it is currently steeping for a few weeks. I shake it every day.


After two weeks or so, I'll strain this and add a cup of water and maybe some burnt sugar for coloring (this is a typical step for adding color to bitters though I haven't tried it on my batches of orange bitters) and we'll see how it turns out. The wild card is the szechuan pepper: I have no idea if this will make the bitters spicy hot or not.
I'll report back in a few months after I've had a chance to experiment with it a bit. Read more!

Spiked Red Currants

Our garden being overfull of currants of various sorts this summer, I decided to try steeping some red currants in liqueur à la maraschino cherries. I cleaned up some red currants and left them on their branches because they are so small. I placed these in a jar and filled it with some crème de groseille (i.e. red currant) that I made last summer.

They've been steeping for about four months and I tried some this evening. They are not going to replace maraschino cherries any time soon. They have an initial burst of sweetness from the liqueur, but then they become quite tart and of course they have all those hard little seeds. (I was hoping they would somehow disolve or soften.)

Well, it looks pretty anyway:

I made two cocktails using my new garnish. The one pictured here is a gin martini with a generous splash of crème de cassis (made from last summer's black currants). I also made one for Jessica which featured Grey Goose vodka (since I ran out of gin), juice of one lemon, and another generous splash of cassis. Both cocktails were good if on the sweeter end of what we normally like.

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