vir-gin and tonic and spiced butter rum and coke

Another Marx Foods contest - in this one, they sent out a package of ingredients and bloggers had to make both a cocktail and a non-alcoholic drink, using at least one ingredient in each drink. The ingredients were saffron, fennel pollen, dill pollen, juniper berries, long pepper, and dried pineapple.

I decided to use juniper berries and long pepper because they were the ingredients I had done the least with. The result: Vir-Gin and Tonic, with tonic water, juniper-blueberry-lime "shrub," and cucumber juice; and the Spiced Butter Rum and Coke.

Vir-Gin and Tonic

The idea here is not to emulate the gin and tonic per se, but to come up with a drink that is as refreshing and as complex as a gin and tonic, without alcohol. Gin's complexity comes from its botanicals, usually about a dozen of them - the most prominent of which, the only one required by law and definition, is juniper. That piney taste gin has - that's the juniper. I originally considered pairing it with spruce tips, but in a recipe contest I don't know how useful it would be to include an ingredient that isn't commercially available (mine were foraged in Alaska and purchased on eBay).

Instead, I combined equal amounts of cucumber juice, tonic water, and a sort of shrub. Shrub is a sweetened vinegar syrup that dates from Colonial times; mine uses lime juice instead of vinegar.

Cucumber juice:

Peel cucumbers and remove the seeds (which contribute bitterness) by scooping out the centers with a spoon. Blend and strain through a mesh strainer, pressing on the solids.

Cucumbers.


Cucumber pulp.


Cucumber pulp, strained, gelatin added.


Cucumber pulp, strained, frozen.



Cucumber pulp strained, frozen, strained - cucumber juice.

To further clarify, strain through cheesecloth several times or add a little dissolved gelatin - bloom a couple pinches of gelatin in a spoonful of cold water, heat it up to melt the gelatin, stir it into the cucumber juice, freeze the whole thing, and then thaw it in a strainer over a bowl in the fridge. As it thaws, the gelatin will bundle up the solids so that what thaws is just juice. If you use too much gelatin, it will stay too Jello-like when it thaws.

Juniper-blueberry-lime shrub:

Grind a spoonful of juniper berries.

Crush fresh blueberries lightly in a pan, heating over low heat until they darken and start to release their juices. Add a few spoonfuls of sugar - it depends on how many blueberries you're using, but you don't need a lot since the tonic water is sweetened - and the juniper berries and stir until the blueberries are fairly juicy. Remove from heat, let cool to room temp, and add an amount of lime juice equal in volume to the blueberries.

Let sit for a little bit, then strain. Chill.

Vir-Gin and Tonic:

Combine equal amounts cucumber juice, tonic water, and shrub. You get the tang of the blueberry and lime, the freshness of the fruits and cucumber, and the piney note of the juniper matching the bitter quinine of the tonic water. This is a "mocktail" that's more than an afterthought.

Vir-Gin and Tonic; Spiced Butter Rum and Coke

Spiced Butter Rum and Coke

I've talked about fat-washing before. Those flavor compounds which are fat-soluble are also alcohol-soluble; therefore, combine fat and alcohol, wait, and then remove the fat, and the flavor from the fat has transferred to the alcohol. This is why citrus liqueurs with a true fruit flavor are so much easier to make than other fruit liqueurs, for instance - because the flavor of the rind, the smell of the fruit, is contained in its oil, whereas the flavor of an apple or a grape is primarily water-soluble (which is why we ferment the juices to make brandy and wine, more often than we use them in infusions).

Bacon bourbon in Bacon Old Fashioneds gets a lot of buzz, because the internet loves bacon, but brown butter is more interesting to me. Brown butter is simply butter heated in a pan until it stops foaming and sizzling, at which point the milk solids have browned, giving it a richer, deeper flavor.

Heat a couple tablespoons of butter accordingly, and let the brown butter cool (it will be very hot). Add to a cup of rum and a long pepper, cover, and wait about four days.

The easiest way to strain anything fat-washed is to put it in the freezer, so that the fat becomes very solid, and then pour it through a mesh strainer or cheesecloth. I allowed a few bits of butter fat to remain in the spiced butter rum because I like the effect of butter flecks on the surface of the drink.

Long pepper is really, really awesome. Chile pepper and black pepper eclipsed it in part because it's harder to grind than they are, but for centuries it was a major commodity in the spice trade. The flavor is more complex than even the best black peppercorn - the heat of black pepper, but with a pronounced fruity fragrance, pronounced enough that it's the dominant smell even in this drink. The pepper heat is mainly in the aftertaste, and it blends in perfectly with Coca-Cola's botanicals (which are nearly as numerous as gin's). The butter adds richness that goes well with the sweetness of the soda, without the mouthfeel of actual hot buttered rum.

Add spiced buttered rum to cold Coca-Cola to taste - I suggest a shot of 1 1/2 ounces in a rocks glass of Coke. Normally I add lime juice to rum and Coke; I wouldn't add acidity here, with the butter flavor.

marx chiles contest: curry duck confit with red rice hash

Friend of the blog, Marx Foods, is having a dried chiles recipe contest for which they provide the chiles and in which this post is my entry. They sent me a sampler of dried chiles to choose from: organic habaneros, puya, japones, mulato, aji amarillo, and cascabel. Once all the entries have been sent in, I'll link you to Marx's blog post where you can vote for whichever recipe you like.

Though I didn't use them in this recipe, the puya chiles were a nice find - similar to guajillo, the chile I use the most, but a little hotter.

But I decided to use the aji amarillo here, because they were the only chile that I'd had fresh but not dry. Aji amarillos are a yellowish-orange Peruvian chile, a variety of the Capsicum baccatum species - the same species that includes Peppadews and Lemon Drop chiles. All three chiles are noted for their sweetness, fruitiness, and moderate to high spice level, which was perfect for what I decided to make:

Curry duck confit, with red rice hash.

Two duck leg quarters, plus any excess skin and fat from the duck, if available
About two tablespoons good curry powder
Two dried aji amarillo chiles, crushed; use more chile if you want a high heat level
About two teaspoons salt, divided
Coconut fat, amount variable
One cup rice
Two to three very fresh red tomatoes
Tablespoon minced fresh ginger
Four small links sweet Chinese sausage

I think it's probably clear that I often cook Southern food. In this case, you have Southern dishes (Country Captain chicken - a fruity tomato-based chicken curry; and red rice - rice cooked with tomatoes and usually peppers, a sort of simplified jambalaya) melded with some Asian concepts (curry itself, obviously; fried rice; and the Chinese sausage in the rice hash).

Obviously the aji amarillo chile is neither Asian nor Southern, but the color reminded me of curry, and the fruitiness works with both the rice hash and the traditional inclusion of raisins with Country Captain.

Curry duck confit

There's a reason I'm not calling the duck "Country Captain duck" - it wasn't cooked in tomato, the tomato is only present in the rest of the dish. Instead, I used coconut fat - the health food section of your supermarket may have it - to cook two duck leg quarters duck confit style. The coconut flavor really permeated the duck, as much as the curry flavors did - you get a similar flavor profile to coconut-milk-based curries.

Duck confit was originally a way to preserve duck in salt and fat. Because modern duck confit is usually made with much less salt, it shouldn't be kept for years on end, nor stored at room temperature. In this case - as in most cases when I make duck confit - the goal wasn't to preserve it at all, although I do believe that the flavor of duck confit improves if you let it stay covered in fat in your fridge for a week.

Cover the duck legs with the curry powder, three quarters of the crushed chile, and half the salt, and let them sit in the refrigerator overnight. Add enough coconut fat that, once it and the duck fat have melted, the legs will be covered in melted fat. That's a judgment call, obviously, but it's easy to add a little more coconut fat during the cooking process. The fat shouldn't be bubbling violently during cooking the way it would if you were frying, so it's okay if the level of melted fat comes fairly high up on your cooking dish; if you're worried about anything bubbling over, use a lower cooking temp and a longer cooking time.

Cook the duck at 250-275 for most of the day. You get to where you can tell if it's ready by looking at it, but what you want is for the duck to be very tender, almost like pulled pork, and for all of the fat to have cooked out of the skin; the bone of the drumstick will be at least a little loose. Let it cool on the stovetop and then refrigerate it until you're ready to make your dinner.

Red rice hash

The red rice hash is easiest if you make the red rice the night before. I used my rice steamer - adding the rice, a large fresh tomato (chopped), the rest of the chile, the rest of the salt, and the minced ginger, and adding the appropriate amount of water. This made it pretty easy to get the amount of water correct, because I just added it to the fill line. If you use another method to make your rice, just account for the liquid the tomatoes are going to add. Once the rice is cooked, spread it out on a plate (to help it dry out a little) and keep it in the fridge overnight.

The Chinese sausage I used is sold frozen, in packages of four small links (each one about half the size of a hot dog), in Asian markets. It's greasy, it's sweet - sweet enough that the sugars caramelize when you cook the sausage long enough - and it's mild, with a little tanginess.

To assemble the dish

Reheat duck long enough to melt the fat, heat the duck up, and crisp the skin;

Chop up the Chinese sausage and heat it in a pan with the rice on medium to medium-high heat, turning periodically to help crisp the rice. You will not need to add cooking fat; if the rice is still especially wet, just let the sausage cook a while first. You definitely want to crisp up a lot of the rice, so that you have the textural contrast;

Sear two halves of a big fat tomato (ends trimmed off) in a pan with a little bit of the duck/coconut fat.

Serve with lime wedges to be squeezed over everything. The acidity of the lime and the fresh tomato is really needed in order to cut through the richness of the duck, the coconut fat, and the Chinese sausage.

kabosu, yuzu, sudachi

This entry is about free stuff. Check out the free stuff policy here.

Marx Foods sent me three bottled citrus juices to play around with: yuzu, kabosu, and sudachi. I wanted to try sweet, savory, and cocktail applications with all three.

What I figured out pretty quickly is that the question here is not just "what can you do with these juices?" - it's "of the things you can do with these juices, which of them really show off the individual character of each juice?" And that list is much shorter. After all, even out of season it's pretty cheap to pick up some fresh lemons or limes - so there's no reason to use an expensive bottled juice in a dish where all you're going to taste is a little acidity. Just like you aren't going to put porcini mushrooms in chili, you don't want to use sudachi juice in a pitcher of punch with eleven other ingredients - it's not going to stand out.

Let's talk about the juices themselves first. Each of them, while more acidic than orange or grapefruit juice or anything else you'd drink a glass of, is noticeably less acidic than lemon or lime, and I had to correct the first things I made accordingly. I happen to have citric acid on hand - it's cheap enough, you can throw some in the dishwasher to make your dishes cleaner, and Amazon carries it - so it's easy for me to adjust acidity, and using citric acid to do so instead of lemon or lime juice preserves the original flavor. All of the desserts in particular benefit from a pinch of citric acid - it really brings out the flavors of the juice.

But I needed to try them straight, even if they're not meant to be drunk that way. A quick breakdown of the juices - first how the label describes them, then how they tasted to me.

Kabosu juice

label: "flavors and aroma of LEMON with accents of MINT and MELON"

me: a definite herbaceousness which I think is what they're calling mint - basil was what came to mind for me, though, because it certainly has none of the menthol of mint. I taste more navel orange than lemon, just tarter. This is the least tart of the three, to my palate - I didn't think to pick up pH papers to actually check acidity, but tartness is really the balance of acidity to sugar, I think, so a really objective measurement would have to measure Brix too. And I'm not picking up a refractometer.

Yuzu juice

label: "flavors and aroma of ORANGE, LEMON, and TANGERINE"

me: yuzu is really its own flavor. How would you describe lime, after all - "like lemon, but sharper"? The closest analogues to yuzu for me are lime and grapefruit, not orange or lemon. This is one of my favorite fruits - it's really terrific stuff.

Sudachi juice

label: "multiple flavors and aroma of LIME with accents of PEPPER and CUMIN"

me: I understand the pepper in the aroma, I guess, but I don't get cumin at all. Lime, though, yes. This is a less tart lime with something a little spicy and vegetal going on.

SWEETS

Kabosu bars

I made kabosu bars, for instance, using a regular lemon bar recipe, with about 25% more juice in order to really focus on the flavor. They were still too flat-flavored, so I included some citric acid in the confectioners sugar on top, and that did the trick.

Is it good? Yes.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes. You can definitely tell these aren't lemon bars.

Yuzu pie with huckleberries

A key lime pie - 1 can sweetened condensed milk, 3 egg yolks, and 3/4 cup juice blended together and baked for 20 minutes in a Graham cracker crust - with yuzu juice instead of key lime, a little citric acid added (critical when there's all that sweetened condensed milk), served with huckleberries on top.

Is it good? Absolutely delicious.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Hugely. You would easily be able to tell one citrus juice from another in side by side tasting, since nearly all the flavor comes from it.

Yuzu pudding cake

This type of pudding cake separates into two layers as it cooks - a light cake on top and a pudding underneath it. For some reason the top blackened very quickly, but doesn't taste it at all. I used yuzu juice and a hit of citric acid in place of the Meyer lemon juice called for in this epicurious recipe.

Is it good? Yes.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Less than in the pie, but yes, definitely.

COCKTAILS

All of the cocktails use a pinch of citric acid with the juice.

Hemingway daiquiri with yuzu

A Hemingway daiquiri has a little grapefruit juice and a little maraschino liqueur added to the standard daiquiri. I used yuzu juice and a touch of citric acid in place of the lime juice, and served with frozen grapefruit segments.

2 oz rum
.75 oz yuzu juice
1 teaspoon maraschino liqueur
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon grapefruit juice

Is it good? Pretty good but pretty sweet.

Does the yuzu make a difference? Somewhat. The maraschino drowns some of it out.

Kamiyama Bitter

I based this on the proportions of the bitters-heavy cocktails I make a lot, where cocktail bitters like Angostura or Peychaud's are used in place of a base liquor. Donn's Mix is a cinnamon-grapefruit syrup sold by Trader Tiki.

1 oz Ango orange
1 oz Trader Tiki's Donn's Mix
1 oz sudachi juice
1/2 oz blanco tequila

Is it good? It's not bad. It might be better with regular Angostura bitters.

Does the sudachi make a difference? No. There's a definite citrus flavor, but between the bitters and the cinnamon, you'd be hard pressed to identify this as sudachi instead of any other citrus.

Peacock Room

I've been wanting to play around with Pimms in things other than Pimms Cups, so this was a good opportunity. This is vaguely like a Corpse Reviver #2.

absinthe rinse
1 oz Pimms
1 oz yuzu juice
.75 oz Cocchi Americano
.75 oz gin
a couple Coca-Cola-infused cherries (optional)

Is it good? Yes. The spice of the Pimms works well with the Cocchi, the cherries, and the yuzu.

Does the yuzu make a difference? More than the daiquiri, so it's a step in the right direction - but not quite there yet.

Taketa Sour

I didn't want to combine maraschino with these juices again, so made something similar to a Last Word, with the more subtle St Germain instead of maraschino, dialed-down Chartreuse, and black raspberry infused mezcal.

1 oz St Germain
1 oz kabosu juice
.75 oz black raspberry infused mezcal
.5 oz Chartreuse
pinch citric acid

Is it good? It's quite, quite good. The best drink so far.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes and no. There's a definite pronounced citrus character despite the strength of the other flavors. I'm not sure it's notably different from what you would get from lime, though.

Kabosu gimlet

So I dialed it back to basics - focus everything around the juice.

1.5 oz gin
1 oz kabosu juice
.75 oz simple syrup
.5 oz douglas fir eau de vie

Is it good? Yes.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes. You're definitely tasting kabosu here, not sudachi, not yuzu, not lime or lemon.

SAVORIES

Sudachi Faux-Dobo

Marinate chicken in 1/2 cup sudachi juice, 1/4 cup soy sauce, tablespoon pepper vinegar; bake until very well cooked, transfer to stove top, add 1/4 cup sugar.

The idea here is to make something similar to adobo - vinegar and soy sauce - but with citrus juice. There's no added citric acid here.

Is it good? Yes. The sauce is the perfect offset to the richness of chicken thigh and the gelatinousness of long-cooked chicken wings.

Does the sudachi make a difference? More than I thought it would. Adding too many other ingredients - the garlic, peppercorns, and bay leaves traditionally used in adobo - would have muddied the waters too much.

Sudachi chicken and potatoes

This is kind of fiddly.

Brown a stick of butter: simply heat it until it foams, stops foaming, and there are a lot of visible brown solids. Let cool somewhat.

Blend the brown butter with 6 peppadews, 3 garlic cloves, 1/4 cup of sudachi juice, and 1 cup of chicken broth.

Bake chicken in the resulting sauce for at least an hour (at about 375-400), until the sauce has visibly reduced. Remove the chicken, add small whole potatoes to the broth, and cook for another hour so that the potatoes soak up the sauce. Transfer chicken, potatoes, and sauce to a larger shallow pan and cook for an additional half hour in order to crisp everything up.

Is it good? Yes. Rich, with the slight spice of the peppadews and the tartness of the juice offsetting the richness.

Does the sudachi make a difference? It's not entirely lost but would be no worse with lemon.

Kabosu Fried Chicken

Make a sauce of about 2 parts Kabosu juice to 1 part Korean red pepper paste, with a little bit (1-2 Tablespoons) of brown butter, a litle sugar, and a little cornstarch dissolved in cold water. Heat the sauce until it thickens.

Lightly bread and fry pieces of chicken and then toss them in the sauce.

Is it good? It's delicious - spicy, tart, and sweet. Awesome junk food/bar food.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Yes, although the spicier you make it, the less you will notice the specific citrus characteristics.

Spicy cod with kabosu

Stir-fry together sliced Korean green chiles (mild to medium), grated ginger, soaked and crushed fermented black beans or storebought black bean sauce, a little Thai chile paste, a little cornstarch dissolved in cold water, and a few tablespoons of kabosu juice until the sauce is noticeably tart.

Sear chunks of cod and then add them to the sauce to finish cooking. Serve with rice.

Is it good? Very tasty.

Does the kabosu make a difference? Not really - any source of acidity would be the same.

INCIDENTAL USES

Mango slices with kabosu juice and black sesame seeds.

You can use the juice as a condiment by itself, of course - sprinkling it on fried fish, raw greens, cucumber and onion, kimchi and sesame seeds, fresh fruit, and so on. You can also use it in vinaigrettes. However, unless you're serving it with something very bland - a simple green salad, maybe - you're not going to pick up many flavor specifics. While this is one of the most common uses of these juices in Japan - as well as in ponzu sauce, yuzu juice with soy sauce - the fruits are also cheaper there.

They'll come forward better added to tea. I didn't think lemonade-type drinks quite worked - the flavor seemed too diluted.

All in all, what are these juices best for? I would definitely make the faux-dobo again, which was not only one of the tastiest things I made but something that showed off the flavor well. Cocktails that really focus on a citrus juice as the main flavor - such as a whiskey sour, gimlet, or sidecar - all work well, but any more complicated flavors will drown out the nuance. And desserts work well across the board.

Bottled vs Fresh. I've never had fresh kabosu, but I've had fresh sudachi and fresh yuzu several times and cooked with them extensively. Is there a difference? Sure. It's similar to the difference between fresh lemon juice and a good bottled brand, though more care seems to be taken here than with most supermarket lemon juice. You do lose some flavors because you get none of the oil or the flavor compounds that disappear with age - but you're still getting real yuzu and sudachi flavor, not some imitation extract. I noticed no real difference in the desserts between the fresh and the bottled. The difference is only really notable in beverages - cocktails and tea. Even so, fresh yuzu is hard to find, only available for a brief part of the year, and costs a lot - as compromises go, bottled yuzu juice is a good one.