Old Pomegranate

On Tuesday I mixed a pomegranate cocktail as a sort of pre-dinner drink.  As the pomegranate I was given was bloody enormous I had plenty left for another fantastic drink.  I personally much preferred this one, but I'm sure it's completely a matter of taste.  It does, I think, include all of the required elements of a perfectly balanced cocktail: Sweet, sour, bitter and fruit.  It's also more complex than the pomegranate cocktail, but I recok it's worth it – and not nearly as tough as it looks.

As an old fashioned style cocktail it's strong.  One is enough.

Ingredients:

50g soft brown sugar
50ml water
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp cardamom pods
2 tbsp pomegranate seeds
12.5ml pomegranate molasses
75ml bourbon
Orange peel

1. First, you gotta make a spiced syrup.  This is probably the complex part, and it's not complex.  Crack the cloves and cardamom pods in a pestle and mortar then chuck them in the smallest saucepan you have.  Add the water and sugar and heat until the sugar is completely dissolved (this won’t take long).  Turn the heat off and let the mix cool right down before straining and bottling.  This will make way too much syrup, by the way, but it'll keep for at least a month in the fridge and I can’t really see a way of making it in smaller quantities.

2.  When your syrup is bottled and ready to go, you can get on with mixing the drink.  Start by placing the pomegranate seeds in a cocktail shaker or boston glass.  With a muddler / end of a rolling pin, crush the seeds gently – push too hard and you'll end up cracking the seeds themselves, which are bitter and unpleasant.  Add the bourbon to the mix and stir.

3. In an old fashioned glass mix the pomegranate molasses (despite the name, this is really sour – a proper kick of sharpness) and 50ml of the spiced syrup.  Stir together.

4. Strain the pomegranate juice and bourbon mix.  Add about half of it to the molasses and syrup mix and stir so that they're fully combined.  Add a handful of ice and stir again until properly cold.  Add more ice and the remainder of the juice / bourbon and repeat.  It has to be utterly chilled to be right.

5. Cut a thick slice of orange peel off the fruit using a vegetable peeler – I find that this takes away as little pith as you can get, which is (again) horribly bitter and should be excluded to the extent possible.  Twist the peel over the glass to release the oils, before adding to the drink and giving it one final stir.

 - GrubsterBoy - 

Pomegranate Cocktail

For my birthday I got given a pomegranate.

OK, this sounds a bit odd.  I recognise that.  I got given other stuff as well, just so we're clear.  But it was a majestic pomegranate.

See?  Beautiful.  Who wouldn't want that pomegranate?

After having eaten about a third of it with a spoon (it was enormous) I was keen to do something other than munch on the seeds.  So I decided to make cocktails.  This post, and Thursday's, charts those two drinks.

First up is A Pomegranate Cocktail.  Most people I suspect would call this a pomegranate martini.  I, on the other hand, am trying to lead a charge against the grim practice of naming any martini-less drink in a cocktail coupe a 'martini', so I've gone with something even more boring.  This drink is dry as a bone but very refreshing nevertheless.  If you wanted it less dry you could sub the gin for vodka, but you'd lose some of flavour.  It's a good pre-prandial.

Ingredients:

2 tbsp pomegranate seeds
3-4 stalks mint leaves
75ml London gin
Dash Angostura bitters

You'll also need a cocktail shaker and plenty of ice.

1. First, let's have a quick chat about peeling a pomegranate.  Basically, you want to exclude all of the whitey-yellow stuff, including the thin membrane that runs between most of the seeds.  This is time consuming and messy, as you'll end up inevitable spraying juice everywhere, but it's totally worth it because the nod-seeds bits are incredibly bitter.  So do it carefully.

2. Scoop one tablespoon of seeds into the cocktail shaker and fill about a third full with ice.  Add another spoon of seeds and more ice.

Close the shaker and shake vigourously.  This bursts all the little seeds.  I do it this way because the seeds are also quite bitter and dry, so to avoid them overawing the drink you want to burst the little red pockets of juice without crushing the seeds.

3. Open up the shaker and add the mint, gin and the bitters.  Note that this is strong – effectively a triple measure – and you should really stick to just one.  It's a martini-style drink, though, so always likely to be punchy.  Close the shaker again and shake until ice cold.  Strain into a cocktail glass.  Garnish with a mint leaf and drink right away, whilst chilled.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Strawberry Daiquiri

It's London Cocktail Week.  So this week I'll be bringing you a cocktail recipe. 

 

A little while ago I was asked if the blog was an outpouring for a deeply held campness.  I'm not sure it is (or that any campness is that deeply held) but if there was ever a post to put this into context, this will be it: the campest drink ever, the strawberry daiquiri. 

 

To be honest, the noble daiquiri deserves better than this.  Much, much better.  It deserves a kind of respect that mixing it with all kinds of weird fruit.  But I had some strawberries left over from something else and wanted them to go in a drink.  So here it is. 

 

Ingredients:

 

2-3 barspoons (is this the same as a teaspoon?) caster sugar
50g ripe strawberries
Juice of half a lime
50ml golden rum

 

Start by hulling and quartering your strawberries.  Sprinkle one barspoon of sugar over them and leave them in the fridge for a few hours to macerate.  When they're ready, get them out and blitz in the food processor.  Strain the liquid through a sieve, using a wooden (not metal) spoon to force the juice out without the seeds. 

Put one to two barspoons of sugar (depending how sweet you like your drinks and remembering that you'll have extra sweetness from the strawberries) into a shaker and add the lime juice together with a barspoon of water from the tap.  Stir until the sugar has dissolved.  Add the rum and 50ml of the strawberry juice.  Fill the shaker up with ice and shake like crazy until properly dissolved.  Strain into a martini glass and serve, preferably with a pretentious slice of strawberry.

I think you're meant to drink this with your pinky finger sticking out. 

 - GrubsterBoy -

Food Porn #9: Pimms

OK, so more drink porn than food porn.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Rhubodka

It is most definitely forced rhubarb season.

There’s something really funny – almost dirty – about the term ‘forced rhubarb’.  But it’s effectively the luscious, sweet-sour pink stuff that we all really know and love as rhubarb.  It’s in season from December through to February, so we’re kind towards the end of this year’s run – but it’s not too late to still grab some!

For me, each year, that means one thing: Rhubodka, a glorious fusion of vodka and rhubarb, making a delicate liqueur.  It’s spectacularly easy to make, as well (like most infused alcohol drinks, like sloe gin or damson vodka / gin).

Ingredients:

500g forced rhubarb

250g granulated white sugar

1 litre vodka (Doesn’t need to be anything particularly fancy, but stay away from that Tesco’s blue & white stripe stuff, yeah?)

You’re also going to need a 2 litre mason / Kilner jar – something big, and solidly built (this last part is actually essential for this recipe).

Just a quick note on how to buy rhubarb: I could wax lyrical about this stuff all day, but I won’t (count yourself lucky).  It’s fantastic stuff (Is it a fruit? Or a vegetable? Or, even, a salad?) and should be treated well.  Just a follow a few rules: get bring, pink, healthy looking stalks, preferably from Yorkshire, which is the Mecca of rhubarb.  Also, the more spindly the stalk, the more pink there is in proportion to the rest of the fruit – which means the more of a beautiful, delicate pink colour the liqueur will end up.

Oh, one thing: Don’t eat the leaves.  They contain oxalic acid, which is toxic. 

1. First, sterilize your jars – wash them thoroughly in warm, slightly soapy water, then leave them to drip dry for half an hour in the oven at 130-140°.  Get them out (wear oven gloves) and let them cool right down.

2. Wash the rhubarb thoroughly, and then chop it into chunky chunks. 

3. Chuck the chunks into the jar and, using the end of a rolling pin or something similar, roughly crush the rhubarb chunks.  You’re not looking to totally macerate them, just mess them up a bit to release some of the juice and maximize the surface area for the vodka to interact with.

4. Add the sugar, close the jar, and shake like billy-oh.  Make sure that the sugar and the fruit are really combined.

5. Add the vodka, close the jar up tight again, and shake again. 

6. Keep shaking every day for the first week or so.  Then you can take it easy, provided that all of the sugar has dissolved into the liqueur.  Leave the mixture for about 3 months, then strain.  Fortunately, this is one of those mixtures that, because there is no seed or pith in rhubarb, leaving it too long is unlikely to cause a massive issue.  Also, it’s much, much quicker than the sloe or damson mixtures – it can be drunk immediately it’s strained, and can even be strained sooner than 3 months if you’re desperate. 

Drink straight, over ice, or with tonic water in a 3:1 ratio.  You can vary the recipe as well – it works well with a half-thumb-sized bit of peeled root ginger, sliced and mixed in.  Or, alternatively, throw a couple of sprigs of rosemary in there and see how you come out.

But, most of all, enjoy.

- GrubsterBoy -

Whiskey Sour

The best drinks are, without a doubt, simple.  Aside from the old fashioned, there is not a lot simpler (in my mind) than the humble whiskey sour.  Following on from a tradition of making mixed drinks to hide the harsh nature of badly distilled, cheap whiskey, it is a simple (albeit effective) mix. 

Just as a quick note, I used egg white*.  Highly controversial – apparently this makes it a Boston Sour, but whatever.  You don’t have to use this, and reputedly it's lazy cocktail-craft, but I think it improves the drink as it adds a silky texture.  Any anyway, everything's better with foam.

Ingredients (per head):

Juice of half a lemon
50ml bourbon (I've used Four Roses, which is just about the best easy-sippin' bourbon out there.  But this is a drink that can adapt to harsher, less refined bourbons – and actually benefits from it in some ways.  So you can even go as far as using good ol' Jim Beam if necessary.)
2 tsps caster sugar / 25ml simple syrup
Half the white of an egg

Put the sugar, juice and bourbon into a shaker and mix like hell until dissolved**.  Add the egg white and lots of ice and shake, rattle and roll.  When you're done, add more ice to a fresh glass and fill to the brim. 

As this is an American whiskey drink, it can only really be served with two garnishes: A fat slice of fresh orange and maraschino cherries (make them here!).

Booze and food matching?  Well, it'd be perfect to sip alongside a good ol' chilli con carne.

 - GrubsterBoy -

* I was about to say, omit this step if you're pregnant.  But, if you're making this drink and you're expecting, I'm guessing that the ingestion of raw egg is actually not your biggest problem...

** To make life easier for yourself, you could make a simply syrup for cocktail making that'll keep in the fridge for a few weeks: Heat equal parts sugar and water over a pan until the sugar's dissolved.  Allow it to cool.  Be proud of yourself. 

Bloody Mary

After all of the excess of yesterday, this is what you need to kick start boxing day. 

Ingredients:

250ml fresh tomato juice (use decent stuff, please)
50ml vodka (again, don’t go cheap…)
25ml madeira or cream sherry
1tsp Tobasco sauce
1tsp celery salt
3tsp Worcestershire sauce (this is personal preference, you may want to tone it down a touch…)
1 thick lemon wedge
1 celery stick (to garnish)

This is really simple.  Just put everything except the lemon wedge and the celery stick into a jug with lots of ice.  Put more ice into a glass. (By the way, you may want to try a celery salt rim on the glass if you're feeling fancypants.  But if you just need a quick fix, don’t bother.) 

Squeeze the lemon wedge in the jug and discard / add to glass.  Stir the contents of the jug like crazy until everything is properly combined and nice and cold.  Strain into glass and drink.

That's it. 

Hope you all had a good day yesterday, and good luck today.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Margarita

I know plenty of people who hate (and I mean hate, not dislike, not are less impartial to, I mean hate like the fiery pits of hell type hate) tequila.  GrubsterGirl loves tequila.  Honestly, she actually loves it.  For example, when a Bloody Mary is on the cards, she'll always go for a Bloody Maria (done rather well at The Gilbert Scott).  So we tend to have quite a lot of it in the house most times.

 

The only discernible use that I can find for the stuff is cocktail making.  Sure, the barrel aged stuff has more than a hint of scotch about it and shouldn’t be mixed with anything.  But the hard stuff?  Mix it up.

 

The king of tequila cocktails is quite simple, and it goes like this:

 

Ingredients (per head):

 

Juice of half a lime (about 12.5ml, but some limes are juicier than others)
50ml Golden Tequila (Jose Cuervo will do just fine)
25ml Cointreau
10-25ml Agave Syrup (to taste)

 

Combine all the ingredients in a mixer, add copious amounts of ice, and shake like crazy.  Use the old lime peel to moisten the rim of the glass, and then salt.  We use smoked Maldon sea salt because we're pretentious like that (and because I accidentally bought it when shopping and have been trying to figure out what to do with it since then…).  Add new ice cubes to the glass and strain the contents of the mixer into it.  Serve (with or without pretentious lime wheel decorations).

Beware, this will make a big, strong cocktail.  Which is ideal after a long day of the office but absolutely lethal if you have a second.

 - GrubsterBoy -

Sloe Gin

It's properly November now.  Winter in the air, temperatures dropping, the heating is properly on (yes, it needs more than an extra jumper), hot drinks are de rigueur,  Christmas lights are blinking into action, and we’ve had the first frosts of the year.

 

What's that you say?  First frosts?  Can only mean one thing: sloe-gin-making-season is upon us.

 

 

Making sloe gin – in fact, making any kind of liqueur, pickle, jam, chutney, conserve, etc – I find remarkably satisfying.  There's something so wonderfully homey, so fantastically back-to-basics, down-to-earth about using some ancient and time honoured tradition to preserve flavours and fruits, creating a whole new concoction from the raw materials you have to hand at the time.

 

A few weeks ago I did damson gin.  This recipe is basically the same, albeit with sloes and a little less sugar.  Both recipes are adapted from the Cottage Smallholder blog, which is fantastic and a must-read for anyone looking to make fruit infusion liqueurs. 

 

What's more, this has been a bumper year for sloes.  We wandered off to a blackthorn bush we know of nearby and found it positively drooping under the weight of all the fruit – the amount I've made was not the total of the bush's produce; it was the amount picked by the time the pickers got fed up.

 

 

Ingredients:

 

450g Sloes
75ml Gin
150g Sugar
Small handful of blanched almonds (Sadly, GG is allergic to nuts, so I left this out – but it's generally accepted that this brings a touch of magic to sloe gin.  Also, you can add three drops of almond essence on bottling, if you prefer.)

 

1.5 litre kilner jar for steeping

 

First thing first – I just made the requisite amount from the sloes I had (1,456 grams...) so the pictures show a quantity far outstripping the amounts above.  I just keep the proportions the same.  Second, this will produce a less sweet and sickly concoction.  If you like it sweeter, taste it after straining and add sugar to fit your preferences. 

 

Second: Choice of gin is not too important.  Don’t go for really, really cheap gin – it's flavoured artificially – so what's the point in making flavoured gin if all you're doing is masking artificial flavourings?  But don’t spend too much on it.  I generally use supermarket brand gin, which is good enough (although having said that, it's probably artificial...).  I also had a rummage around the spirits cupboard and found quite a few almost-empty bottles to use up.  Someone will probably say you shouldn’t go mixing gin, but meh.  Also, vodka works equally well with both recipes – last year we made damson vodka, not gin – but we went for gin this time around.

 

 

1. Pick your sloes.  As ever, please don’t go stealing fruit from other people's trees – you never know whether they plan on doing exactly the same thing, and there's nothing more depressing than going to a carefully nurtured patch only to find that someone's nicked all your fruit.  Just ask the landowner – you can even offer a bottle of the finished product by way of payment, if you're feeling generous.

 

Sloes are seriously beautiful fruit, too. 

 

 

And perfect for Instagram-ing...

 

 

Before you go any further, now's a good time to clean them thoroughly.  Pluck out their little stalks and remove all the leaves.  I forgot to do this, and it turned into a bit of a nightmare later on.  Remember, if you leave this stuff in it will infect the flavour of the finished gin.

 

2. Freeze the sloes overnight.  This does one thing with two bonuses: It the freezing juice bursts all the little cells inside, leading to: One, the release of more juice; and two, it simulates the frosts, breaking down the cellulose inside which (I understand, although only vaguely) improves the flavour.  This year the sloes came early, so I couldn’t really wait until they'd been properly punished by the frosts.  Fiona at Cottage Smallholder ran an experiment to see what produced the best sloe gin – sloes frozen by the frost, sloes frozen in the freezer, or sloes unfrozen altogether.  The result was the frosts, but the freezer in second.  So unless you're in a position (a) second guess what the weather might do; and (b) be on hand to pick them as soon as the frosts have arrived, this method seems the best bet.

 

I simply packed them all into freezer bag and lay flat in the freezer for overnight.

 

 

They came out looking fantastic.  You can almost taste the wonderfully, Christmassy spirit already. 

 

 

 

Whilst they're frozen they're like little marbles – they're the right size, and they sound, look, feel and roll like little marbles.  Ever so cool.

 

3. Defrost them thoroughly.  Laying them flat on a baking tray helps speed this up. 

 

4. You need to prick your sloes.  Some people say that freezing them does this for you, but I'm not really satisfied with that, to be honest.  So get out a cocktail stick (or several), put on an apron and get picking.

 

They are squirty little blighters, so be careful – don’t do this kind of work over an antique table whilst sitting on a cream coloured sofa.  Like we did.

 

 

Once you're done, you should have a bowl full of sloes and they're juice.  Don’t waste anything by washing up the bowl now.  I pour a glassful of gin in there, give it a rinse, and add it to the steeping jar to capture all the – but I'm getting ahead of myself...

 

 

5. Tip all the sloes into the jar.  Add the sugar and your almonds (if using them).  Pour the gin over the top.  Keep the bottles – you'll see why below. 

 

 

Seal and give it a shake.

 

 

6. Now go stick it in a cupboard, shaking daily for the first week or so, until all of the sugar has dissolved. 

 

7. Leave it alone.  Seriously.  This brew needs a good six months, minimum.  Leaving it too long will ruin the flavour, sure, but that's unlikely to happen until they've had a year or more. 

 

8. At the end of the steeping time, strain and bottle (told you you'd need those bottles).  Strain it through a fine cheesecloth or muslin.  Don’t be tempted to squeeze the bag – it won’t do any good, and will only add sediment, which you don’t want.  If you have the time, leave it to drip overnight.

 

I actually did last year's batch a few weeks back, so here are some pictures of that process.

 

After ten months in a cupboard...

 

...strained...

...and bottled for maturation.

 

9. Now it needs time to mature – sorry, but really does.  Leave it another six months, minimum.  Remember – you're making sloe gin for next Christmas, not this Christmas.

 

10. Drink.  A fantastic cocktail is what a friend of mine calls the Sloegasm: A measure of sloe gin topped up with Champagne or prosecco or Cava or English fizz – basically, an English Kir Royale.

 

 

 

 - GrubsterBoy -

 

PS: As a quick note: This sloe gin is made by simply steeping the sloes in gin for a long time.  There is an alternative method that involves fermentation.  But I'm saving that for next year.