Home-made crème de cassis, part two

Back in July I put a jar of blackcurrants and grain alcohol. Yesterday, I got the jar out of the cupboard to do the last steps to make it crème de cassis, with the help of my devoted assistant, Aldara.

This summer, Jessica made some jelly from the other currants we harvested—redcurrants and gooseberry. She ordered a jelly strainer on-line so I set it up to strain the currant-infused grain alcohol into a pot:



Assistant Aldara enthusiastically spooned out the first few scoops of currants, dropping only a small handful into the pot. I then poured the rest of the mixture into the strainer and we waited a half hour or so for it to strain out all the alcohol:



I ended up with a little over 2 cups. Most of the recipes I found on-line call for an equal amount of water and an enormous amount of sugar: over a pound for 4 cups of liquid. I decided to underdo both other quantities so I added a cup and a half of water and started with 8 oz. of sugar. I brought it to a boil and cooked the mixture for 2 minutes (I don't know how rigorous a timing that is in terms of sterilization, but after all there's a hell of a lot of booze in there!). I let it cool and after tasting it, decided it was a little too bitter. Not bad, but the crème's role is partly as sweetener after all. I added another 4 oz. or so of sugar and heated the pot enough to melt it.

I poured it (once more through a strainer (and funnel, of course)) into this pretty bottle I have that used to contain Los Danzantes mezcal (there's also some in a less pretty bottle):




Since our household is awaiting a second baby there's not a lot of drinking going on these days, but I think I'll hazard a little kir for me and th'wife at lunch today.

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Home-made crème de cassis

A couple of weeks ago I put up my annual batch of crème de cassis using the bounty from this year's garden. Here's the black currant bush, already denuded:

And here's a colander full of fresh black currants:

The first time I made this, a few years ago, I found just one recipe on line (in French) after a considerable amount of searching. I tried to search again and now, of course, there are tons of different recipes (still almost all in French) on a variety of websites and message boards. The most interesting departure from what I did before was on where you macerate the currants in burgundy wine. Mm, I think I'll try that next year! Another interesting detail a lot of recipes featured was to put in a few leaves from the plant as well. To me they had a spice, slightly anisey taste:


The recipe is straightforward. Measurements vary but basically you clean the currants and cover them with grain alcohol (I'm all out, good thing it's legal in NY, now—at least that's what I've heard).


Now the currants need to macerate. The biggest change to my method this time around is that whereas previously I have steeped the currants for three days, I found that most recipes recommend something more like three months, so I'm giving it a try.


The jar is sitting in a cupboard and come September I'll strain out the alcohol, boil it, and add some water and sugar—a bit less of both than is called for with the aim of getting a less-sweet and more "currant-forward" liqueur. I'll post photos when the time comes. Read more!

some favorite cocktails: The Preview

From the cocktail I drink the most to perhaps the favorite cocktail I drink the least. You have to be in the right mood for the slightly odd Preview and it requires a delicate ratio of ingredients not to make it too sweet. (I find this is always the case with cocktails that involve Cointreau.) It shares with my martini recipe that classic proportion of main ingredient plus small amount of secondary ingredient plus accent.



I read about this in Terry Sullivan's "Mixology" column in GQ, which I liked a lot the occasional times I would find myself reading that magazine (on airplanes primarily). Sullivan claims this cocktail was a favorite of "that other guy in the Rat Pack", Peter Lawford. This link appears to be an unattributed copy of the recipe (and anecdote) as it appeared in Sullivan's column.

Two unusual things about this cocktail are that it features Cointreau without its usual citrus juice accompaniment and that it is accented with a splash of anise liqueur. What made me want to try this one out—aside from the gin, of course—is that I had enjoyed the combination of orange juice (Cointreau's underlying flavor) and anise liqueur in the embarassingly-named Monkey Gland.

When I get this one right—and I confess I often put in too much Cointreau—this is a rather exotic-tasting drink, the sweetness of triple sec countered by the anisey herbiness of the liqueur. The louching of the anise also creates a beautiful pearlescent glow, like a martini with some plutonium in it.

Here's how I make it:
about 3oz. gin
scant 1/2 oz. cointreau
a few drops of absinthe or pastis

You can lace the inside of the cocktail glass with the anise liqueur but I usually just dump it all in the cocktail shaker, shake it not-too-hard (it's nice to keep this one as clear as possible), and pour. I'll sometimes garnish it with orange peel if I have some handy. Read more!

¡No Patxaran!

Patxaran or Pacharán is a Basque liqueur that I discovered in Spain a few years ago. I had it first in Gijón or maybe in La Coruña outside the País Vasco and later tried some in Bilbao and San Sebastián, where I also bought a bottle to bring home. The ingredients are simple: it's anise liqueur infused with "endrinas" which are apparently sloe berries. There's also a bit of coffee bean and, according to this pretty detailed Wikipedia article, vanilla. It's often home-made or at least regionally produced (the bottle I brought home was made by the store where I bought it). People drink it on the rocks and it's a wonderful lazy summer afternoon drink when you want to sit in an outdoor bar watching people go by.

I made my own bottle—after a fashion—this summer and it was a passable success, though I don't know that I would serve it to a Spaniard!

It came about because Jessica had a bunch of different currants from our garden. We'd already made some jelly, some very good crème de cassis and some pretty but fairly inedible spiked red currants and were trying to think of something new. Then I remembered a bottle of Cristal aguardiente from Colombia that someone had left after a party at our house. When I finally got around to sampling it I was surprised to find that it was anise-flavored (aguardiente is usually unflavored unless otherwise labeled; not so in Colombia it turns out). I dedided to make a variation on patxaran, replacing the "endrinas" with a mixture of black and red currants and gooseberries. I steeped the currants in the aguardiente for a few weeks and also threw in a a teaspoon of coffee grounds. That turned out to be a mistake as it was a bit too much and it was really hard to filter out effectively. Next time I'll just throw in a couple of whole coffee beans.


I filtered it a few times and bottled it in the unattractive Cristal bottle (it says something about how rushed and between-other-projects this was that I didin't even remove the label). As I said, I wouldn't enter it into a competition but it turned out all right, just a little tart and with the coffee undertone a little too pronounced. Since it's not made with sloe berries I decided to call it ¡No Patxaran!

I'm sorry about not having taken photos of process but this blog can't be a high priority project, and there's a limit to my wife's tolerance of this kind of time-frittering:
[cartoon by Virgil Partch, from Bottle Fatigue] Read more!

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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