I’m not much of a man for New Year’s Resolutions, but I have made one for 2017. My goal this year is to make a batch of clarified “English” milk punch each week. I want to figure out the best methods for making them, play with interesting recipes, and see if I can come up with a workable method for making it at home as well as in large batches for a professional setting.
Clarified milk punch is, in essence, a fat washing of a pre-mixed cocktail. What you’re doing is adding an acidic mixture to milk, allowing it to curdle, then separating the curds from the rest of the drink through a basic filtration process. The acid typically comes from citrus, but that is one of the variables I’ll be playing with, specifically in February. The filtration process includes filtering the final product through the curds themselves, and strips out tannic and other harsh flavor compounds, as well as a solid amount of the color of your base ingredients, incorporating them together smoothly and giving the final product a smooth, creamyr mouthfeel (likely from the whey). It is not to be confused with the New Orleans/Southern Milk Punches, which staight-up are creamy drinks not dissimilar to something like a White Russian (in that they include milk/cream; they tend to be a lot more complex flavor-wise).
I first started playing with clarified milk punch, and punches in general, when I was working at large music venue back around early-mid 2013. A few months after I was made head bartender, I realized that the 250-person venue with the tiny, poorly-placed well wasn’t very conducive to a complicated cocktail list, especially since we already were pouring a bunch of finicky craft beer and needed the well space for shots+sodas. I turned to my bar books and, lucky me, found out that David Wonderich had published a book of punches a few years earlier. Punches like the Spread-Eagle and the Fish-House were whipped up in two-gallon forms and sold quickly, along with a few of my own using the classic ratios, but I was concerned with how the punches would lose or change character due to high citrus contents. I read an article somewhere where a dude at a high-end Scandanavian bar praised milk punches as something they could make and would even “age” nicely. Intruiged, I hit the books again and started whipping up Jerry Thomas’s Milk Punch, straining it through the huge conical kitchen strainers into painstakingly cleaned and sterilized cooking oil drums.
Here’s a nice write-up of a classic clarified milk punch recipe: http://imbibemagazine.com/clarified-milk-punch/
My first attempts were messy and not entirely successful. I used the classic technique of bringing the milk to a boil before adding the infused product. Lacking detailed instructions, I made few mistakes. The first time I added the milk to my punch base, rather than vice-versa. The milk didn’t curdle as well as I hoped. Oddly, despite what you might have learned about the order of operations, adding the punch base to the milk rather than vice-versa ends up changing how the curds are structured.
Also, whenever the straining became an interminably slow drip I would remove the curds and put in a new filter. This meant that there was a lot of cloudy particulate in my final product, even after 4 or more strainings. After a couple attempts, I realized that the curds themselves served as a tool for filtration, and changed from a conical strainer to a large fine-mesh strainer. I would sometimes later do subsequent strainings in the conical strainer if there was too much particulate matter in my large batches -- the conical shape meant that the particulate curds would build up at the bottom and could serve as a makeshift additional filter. I also ended up trying different filters -- coffee filters, pastry filters (those turned out best for my large batches), and several layers of good old cheesecloth. Eventually I also used a superbag for straining, which solves a lot of the problems.
I also played around with ingredients, adding stuff like pineapple, tea, and using a bunch of different base liquors for the punches. Classic punch recipes translated nicely to milk punch, and a tea-based punch with green chartreuse as a modifier ended up being absolutely delicious.
I left that bar at the end of 2014, and I’ve bopped around to a few bars since but none of them was really the right fit for clarified milk punch (a couple were too structured and corporate for me to sell the bosses on a huge batch of punch, and a couple were too wild and unstructured for it to work). Since then, a few places in Toronto embraced clarified milk punch, but few have kept it on the menu consistently. (My buddy Vince Pollard worked at Geraldine and then Bar Raval, both of which benefitted tremendously from his milk punches.) However, I’ve missed making my own, and after finishing my experiments with aged egg nog last year I decided to be more ambitious and play around with milk punch again. Fortuitously, a pretty great article about milk punch came out last month, which I highly recommend an enthuisiast read:
So check that out; I’m going to make some punch now, and I’ll post tomorrow with my results and process.
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