Project updates

The above picture is bacon fat left over from the bacon bourbon that I finally finished today. I'm looking forward to mixing this with a couple of different things tomorrow.

I smoked about 2 cups of light brown sugar, the smoking took all the moisture out of the sugar and it caked up. I ended up taking the smoked sugar and doing a 2-1 simple syrup. Its currently getting a pecan infusion and I'll strain that off tomorrow. I'm looking at this as an ingredient for my homage to the Screen Door's Praline Bacon.

The smoked maple syrup is amazing. I don't want to say too much about this yet, as I have some cool plans in store for it.

The peach vinegar really reduced, its a dark syrup now. I'm thinking of adding it to some aquavit and tonic to see how it does.

I'm smoking everything in sight today

Updates once its done, but I'm currently smoking some Fauchon Peach Vinegar, Maple Syrup, Light Brown Sugar and Cabana Cachaca as well as some Chinese 5 Spice pork chops for dinner. I have no idea what I'm going to get, or how succesful any of this will be, but half the fun is in trying right?

On a different note, I'm bacon obsessed. Really. The best bacon in Portland Oregon is the praline bacon served at the Screeen Door on East Burnside. I want to use my bacon bourbon in a cocktail that is an homage to the praline bacon at Screen Door. My thoughts are to either use a smoked brown sugar simple syrup infused with pecans, or to smoke maple syrup and infuse pecans. I think that the restaurant uses brown sugar, but sometimes flavors don't quite move as easily from food to cocktails. Anyway, the idea behind the brown sugar and maple syrup being smoked is obvious.

As for the peach vinegar, I thought it might make an interesting component for a drink. I have not spent any more time developing that idea.

As for the cachaca, orginally I just wanted to do a smoked rum and coke. But then I realized that I prefer Mexican coke, with cane sugar, so I thought cachaca would be an interesting addition, and the smoke might add an interesting note. I hope I don't evaporate it all ( a real possibility I think).

Weekend Update- Blood Orange Saffron Bitters, Bacon Bourbon and Chinese Apothecary Bitters

Well, I'm flying out to spend the week on Salt Lake City tomorrow. I don't think I could be more underwhelmed by a business trip. I already hate business trips as a general rule, but spending a week at the Salt Lake airport, eating in chain restaurants and dying for caffeine and a decent drink. Anyway, the thought of living a monk-like existence spurred me to focus on some of my projects.

First, my Blood Orange-Saffron Bitters (pictured above) looked and smelled fantastic. I put them into an American oak barrel for a little aging, just to add some more depth and complexity. I think I'll pull them out when I get back.

Second, I think I've perfected my bacon infusing technique after a conversation with Phil Ward of Death and Co. I started a Bacon Bourbon (I used Bulleit because I liked the flavor profile with bacon), which should be ready in a couple of weeks. I want to do a homage to the wonderful Praline Bacon served by the Screen Door here in town. I'm thinking Bacon Bourbon and a Demerara Pecan simple syrup and maybe some bitters and I might have a cocktail.

I checked on my Apothecary Bitters as well. I should really quit calling them a bitters until I taste them, but they look good but I just want to give it a little more time to allow a little more extraction. Sven the seahorse is still as hard as a rock. Somehow, I thought Sven would be a little more pliable by now.

I tried feni this weekend. Kazkar feni to be exact. Made in India, feni is either produced from Cashew apples (as Kazkar is) or Coconuts. Think really funky cacahca and you might be close to the taste. The bouquet smells of old sweat socks, but the product itself mixes nicely and I thought it worked incredibly well subbing for cachaca in a caipirinha. I'll get a review up soon, when I have some time to mix it and play with it a little more. Fun stuff though.

BLT in a glass

I like to think that I take a culinary approach to my cocktails. I've always been passionate about good food, and in my opinion, cocktails are just another type of cuisine, albeit a liquid one. One of my obsessions in life is bacon. Here in Portland, every chef in town seems to be trying to sneak it into their desserts. I wanted to try to incorporate its flavor into some cocktails. If you'll remember, I infused some everclear with bacon a couple of months back. I've got plenty of it laying around, and today I thought it was time to get to work on a BLT cocktail. I went to the basement and broke out the juicer, then walked to Whole Foods and bought a head of Green Leaf Lettuce and 2 slicer tomatoes. Now, not every cocktail that I make is succesful, sometimes I end up with something downright awful, but I'm always ok with that AS LONG AS I LEARN SOMETHING. Thats the key for me, experimenting and taking risks is ok, but I have to take something away from the experience.

I had assumed that lettuce, being 99% water, would juice down into little or nothing. I was ready to reduce my lettuce juice by 1/2 over some heat in order to concentrate the flavors. Boy was I wrong. Instead of a light watery juice which is what I expected, I got a dark green and heartily flavored juice. It was pleasant enough to drink by itself, and a real surprise to me.

The tomatoes juiced down quickly into a lightly foamy pink juice. Not much depth, but a nice tomato flavor to the juice anyway.

I then toasted some whole grain bread (Dave's Killer, good stuff) and began to chop it fine to use to rim the glass. It didn't hold terribly well, and if I retry this, I'll have to think about a better way to attach it to the glass because it did add a needed component to this cocktail.

Bear with me (I'm experiencing a HUGE nicotine buzz, see the next post, so I'm feeling a bit off as I write this). But I digress. It was cocktail time.

Since I was using everclear, I decided to only pour 1 1/4 oz rather than the 2oz I would have poured had it been bacon infused vodka.

Next, I added (this is in a shaker, fyi) 2 oz of lettuce juice, followed by 2oz of fresh tomato juice, I added some ice and shook the hell out of the drink before pouring it in a martini glass garnished with toasted breadcrumbs on the rim.

I tasted it and it was there. Its a BLT quite literally in a glass. Proportions are a little off at this point. The everclear makes this drink hot, and I'll redo it with vodka so that I can get more bacon flavor in the drink. I was surprised how assertive the lettuce had become. I had a BLT alright, but it was like eating a sandwich with triple lettuce, just not quite right. It was also a little bland, so I stirred in a pinch of sea salt and it brightened the cocktail right up,

Next time, I'll use half as much lettuce juice to tomato juice, but like an old bartender used to tell my about my experiments when I was a new bartender, "There's a cocktail in there".

Bacon... continued

So I live in a bacon obsessed town. Really. Here in Portland, we've got VooDoo Doughnuts doing a Maple Bacon doughnut (not so good, I've had it and they use cheap bacon), Le Pigeon doing a bacon cornbread dessert, and my favorite brunch place, the Screen Door, doing a praline bacon thats to die for. Last night, I threw the bacon/everclear mix (after it was strained off) in the freezer, wrapped it in saran wrap, and forgot about it until today.

When I got home today, I opened the door to the freezer, and rather than a thin layer of fat on top of the alcohol, which is what I expected, I instead found the awful mess pictured above. I thought something had gone horribly wrong, but I though to myself, "What the hell, put it through a coffee filter and see if you can salvage it", and damn if I didn't. The fat had basically almost formed veins in the liquid while it was in the freezer, and when I put it through a coffee filter, it took the fat right out, leaving me with a pale golden liquor with a very nice bacon scent.

Tomorrow, I'm going to use the bacon everclear to make my mother in law's recipe for german eggnog (for the record, I seriously have the best mother in law anyone could ever have. She's a great cook and has a wonderful sense of humor). I think the bacon will add an extra dimension to the eggnog. If not, well, I've already gone too far not to share the results with you. I should have some of the bacon everclear left over too, and I'm thinking of doing a BLT concept. Maybe bacon everclear, lettuce juice (can you juice lettuce or is it just water?) and maybe garnish it with a cherry tomato. Or maybe the bacon everclear with tomato water and lettuce juice. Its too early to think too much about it.

Bacon, eggnog and cherry bombs

One of my recent experiments has involved infusing everclear with bacon. I posted the above two photos so that you could see the bacon infusion after approximately three weeks and also what the everclear looked like after straining the bacon off. I have to say, all I did was cook some bacon to the crisp side, let it cool down, and then added it to a fifth of everclear and put it in the basement for three weeks. This is all part of my master plan to make a bacon infused German eggnog, but of course, before I can start the eggnog, I needed to get the bacon flavor into my liquor.

When I went to take the bacon out of the everclear this evening, I was quite surprised to find that the bacon was still crisp. I found it slightly alluring, and I really wanted to try it. One of the lesser establishments where I used to work used to take jars of maraschino cherries and they'd pour out the juice, refill the jar with Bacardi 151, and let them steep for a few days. They called them "Cherry Bombs" and sold them 2 for .50. I don't remember too much about them except that between the staff and all the homeless people we attracted with a .50 buzz we had to make a jar every day or so. I don't think people ate the cherries for the flavor, and unfortunately, the bacon was the same way. The everclear had rendered it tasteless, but it retained its original crispness and I did catch a bit of a buzz off of the piece that I ate. Somehow, I doubt bars will replace cherry bombs with bacon bombs, but who knows?

I've wrapped the strained everclear with plastic wrap and I've currently got it in the freezer overnight. I spotted some fat globules (I think) in the liquid and figured that freezing it will hopefully bring the fat to the surface so that I can skim it off tomorrow. The liquid itself is a lovely pale golden color, and there is a mild aroma of bacon to the liquid. I'm hoping for the best, as I prepare for a very public failure if it doesn't work.

On another note, I was quite flattered to read a blog today by someone who is a cupcake baker. Apparently, my article in the current Imbibe Magazine inspired her to make a cupcake with a similar flavor profile. I was quite thrilled to read it (I'll post a link once I have her permission) and thought that it was so supremely creative that I'm tempted to get in the kitchen this weekend and make a batch of her cupcakes. It completely made my day.

I think I'll sit here for the rest of the evening nursing my Averna and OJ and hope for the best tomorrow. Lets hope the eggnog works itself out.