tell all your friends they can go my way

This post mentions free stuff. Check out the free stuff policy here.

Dig it.

This is a root beer float.

Are you excited?

You should be excited. This is a fine white powder that dissolves into a fast-melting creaminess in your mouth, tasting like root beer.

WAIT. I AM NOT A WITCH.

There are three keys. Let's Memento this and reveal how we got to be here.

Third: Tapioca maltodextrin is one of the food industry substances adopted by 21st century cuisine to manipulate texture. Technically it isn't a hydrocolloid, but tends to be spoken of in the same breath as them. Tapioca maltodextrin is a polysaccharide produced through partial hydrolysis of tapioca starch, resulting in a flavorless, nonsweet, starchy powder. It's used as a bulking agent in the food industry.

In the kitchen, you can use it to turn fats into dry powder. The powder will melt back into the fat once it's in your mouth. Or anyone else's mouth.

It's easy but takes some practice. Take a fat -- it's easiest if it's liquid -- and keep adding tapmalt to it until you have a clumpy powder (and then break the clumps up by passing them through a sieve). You'll wind up with something that looks like cookie dough or something at first -- just keep going. Tapmalt is a fine and very light powder -- you will use much more of it, by volume, than the fat you're using.

You need a high-fat substance to mix the tapmalt with -- it will turn gummy and terrible if you expose it to water. But it doesn't need to be pure fat like, say, coconut oil -- you can make powdered peanut butter just fine. I'd like to find out if powdered avocado is an option but haven't tried it yet. I have an idea for a powdered salad dressing but I'm not sure if it will gum up once exposed to the wet surfaces of things like cucumbers and tomatoes -- and it's certainly not the season to find out.

After a couple tests just to see how it mixed, the first thing I really made with tapmalt was popcorn butter.

This was involved, and silly, and self-evidently not worth the effort except as a way to play with various processes:

I popped popcorn;

simmered the popcorn in pasteurized cream;

cooled and strained the cream, which took a LOT of work since that popcorn happily soaked up all the cream;

refrigerated the popcorn-flavored cream;

churned the popcorn-flavored cream into butter;

melted the popcorn-infused butter;

mixed the popcorn-infused butter with tapmalt;

popped more popcorn and topped it with powdered popcorn-flavored butter.

It's worth pointing out, both the cream and the butter did have immediately recognizable popcorn flavor. Not "microwave popcorn butter" popcorn flavor, not "buttered popcorn Jelly Belly" flavor, but popcorn flavor.

Second: Remember fat-washing? Expose a fatty substance like butter or nuts to alcohol for a while, put the alcohol in the freezer, remove the fat that solidifies as it gets cold, and what you have left is an alcohol that carries the flavor notes of the fat -- because anything that is fat-soluble is alcohol-soluble.

But that's only half the story, right? Because you also end up with a fat that carries the flavors of the alcohol you soaked it in. If you mix a fat with a high-proof alcohol -- I don't know if this would work with wine or liqueur, but it works at base liquor proofs of 80+ -- the resulting "infused fat" very distinctly carries the flavors of the alcohol. You Freaky Friday everything up.

First: The folks at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction sent me a sample of Root.

We will cover Root in more specific depth later. It's a base-strength root-beer-inspired spirit that has less sugar and more alcohol than a liqueur -- so it certainly isn't root beer schnapps -- but is noticeably sweeter than, say, bourbon or vodka.

Mix butter and Root.

Freeze butter and Root. Strain solid Root-infused butter particles out of butter-infused Root:

Mix Root-infused butter with tapmalt.

Boom. Powdered root beer float.

Applications: give your friends a spoonful to impress them with your magic powers; mix with powdered sugar to dust absinthe truffles; perhaps mix with a little citric acid and a little baking soda to make some sort of root beer fizzy.

some days I feel like my shadow's casting me

Basically, think of this blog as a place where I list all the words that I know, in no order except as I think of them, and then tell you what I know about the words and some sentences they're useful in.  Only the words are food.

For instance: fat-washing is the infusing of alcohol with flavors from fat or something fatty.  That which is fat-soluble is also alcohol-soluble, so if you combine something greasy and full of flavor with some flavorless alcohol like 100 proof vodka, the flavor tumbles down the hill from the high point to the low one.  (I don't know if this means you can make bourbon-flavored non-alcoholic butter. That would be nifty, though.) 

You've heard about this because you're on the internet and you've seen bacon vodka or bacon-infused bourbon or a bacon Old-Fashioned, and so on. You introduce the fat to the alcohol, let them sit for a while, and then put the thing in the freezer so that the fat becomes solid and easy to remove.  That way you're not dealing with greasy vodka and bacony mouthfeel later.

For instance, I made butter-infused single-malt whiskey. (Not Scotch.  I used Wasmund's, an American whiskey made very similarly to Scotch.  "Whiskey" basically describes a process of distilling alcohol from grains, which may or may not be malted; malted grains are germinated (so that they sprout) and then dried to keep them from developing further. Single-malt whiskey is composed purely of whiskey produced by a single distillery; the term is associated with Scotch, obviously.  Whiskey terminology is complicated, fairly stupid, and widely misunderstood -- keep an ear out for how many times people in movies say "whiskey and bourbon," when bourbon is a type of whiskey.  For that matter, even most people familiar with whiskey think bourbon has to be made in Kentucky; most of it is, but the term describes a specific process and spectrum of ingredients, and bourbon can be made on the moon for all that it matters.)

I melted the butter, combined it with the whiskey, and let it sit for a few days before putting it in the freezer.  Unlike the people who've described fat-washing bacon and the removal of a disk of fat from the top of the frozen bottle, my butter stayed pretty well distributed throughout the whiskey.  But the solids were solid enough that they could be filtered out with a mesh strainer without a problem.

Took the butter-flavored whiskey, blended it up with vanilla ice cream, grade B maple syrup, and some dots of Angostura bitters on top.  Tada.  Butterscotch cocktail.