Temporary February Roundup

In February, I played with acids. Here are photos until I get my blogs written up:

Punch #4: Whiskey

For February, I am going to be doing some tremendously basic and simple punches, and altering only the acids I use to see if I can make punches out of citric/succinic/phosphate acid solutions instead of citrus. So, for my final punch of January I decided to try out an ingredient I haven't used before: coconut sugar.

I first made an oleo-saccrum out of oranges and lemon peels and coconut sugar. (2 oranges and 2 lemons and 4oz coconut sugar). It ended up not being very sweet, so I decided to add some orange curacao and make a "whiskey sour"

My recipe was:

2 cups black tea
1.5 cups Wild Turkey 101
2oz Meyer Lemon Infusion (110 proof vodka + meyer lemon peels, infused for 5 days & strained)
2oz Pierre Ferrand Orange Curacao
4oz Orange/Lemon Coconut Sugar Oleo
4oz Lemon

This was mostly for the process, so here's some photos!



The base. Look how dark that ended up.




Immediately after adding the base, it curdled impressively.




Straining...





The final result was nice and clean! The specs in that picture are nutmeg, not particulate. The coconut sugar wasn't as noticable as I hoped; perhaps next time I use it I'll try for a less impactful base spirit.

Punch #3: Tea Rum Port Punch, Attempt 2

Last week's punch was a success for making punch, but less so for the flavor, which was kind of boring. SO, I decided to change things up a bit.

First,  I wanted a richer oleo saccrum. So I made orange oleo with demerara sugar.

Second, I wanted more bite. So I upped the rhum agricole in the recipe.

Finally, I changed up the tea a bit. I wanted more warmth, chocolate, and ginger, and the Chocolate Chai tea had all of that, along with a nice black tea base.

2 cups Lemonlilly Chocolate-Chai Tea

1 cup Havana Club Anejo Reserva

.5 Cup Taylor Fladgate Late Bottled Vintage Port 2011

.5 Cup Overproof Rhum agricole from Guadaloupe (I wanted to bring the proof back up and add some bite to it; use Wray & Nephew if you don't have, y'know, random bottles of rhum agricole you want to use up)

8d angostura bitters (since I’m not doing a pre-infusion of spices, I wanted some allspice warmth)

4oz (by weight) Orange Coconut Oleo-saccrum

3.5oz Orange Juice

.5oz Lime juice

1 cup milk

Here's the tail end of the first straining. You can see how much color the curds have taken from the port in the base.

This batch ended up with a nice, dark ruby color and much more what I expected flavor-wise. It's important, I feel, to use intense flavors in your punch base, because the milk washing process strips some of those phenolic compounds away. Using a harsh rhum agricole worked out extremely well for me, as it meant you got a reminder that this was a punch rather than tasting like a smooth glass of spicy kool-ade. (And, as I mentioned, Wray&Nephew Overproof has a similar profile, so I suggest adding a few ounces of that to a strong rum punch if you want the punch to taste and smell a bit like rum, as rum tends to incorporate pretty fully into milk punches otherwise.)

Punch #2: Tea Rum Port Punch

This week I’m continuing my simple proof-of-concept punches and adding some ingredients I haven’t played with much: port and flavored teas.

For Christmas, I got my loving wife some tasty teas from a few different shops in town. I particularly like blends from a spot called “Lemonlilly” near Dupont Station. I decided to use that and some port to make an interesting punch.

Here’s the recipe:

2 cups Lemonlilly Chocolate-Chai Tea

1.5 cups Havana Club Anejo Reserva

.5 Cups Taylor Fladgate Late Bottled Vintage Port 2011

3oz Overproof Rhum agricole from Guadaloupe (I wanted to bring the proof back up and add some bite to it; use Wray & Nephew if you don't have, y'know, random bottles of rhum agricole you want to use up)

8d angostura bitters (since I’m not doing a pre-infusion of spices, I wanted some allspice warmth)

4oz (by weight) Lemon Oleo-saccrum

3.5oz Orange Juice

.5oz Lime juice

1 cup milk

And here’s some photos of the process:

Here's the assembled punch base. Notice the nice dark red color.

Right after adding the punch base to the milk. Looks delicious and not at all like chunky barf, huh?








The final product! It turned out pretty well, but honestly way too easy to drink. Tremendously smooth  and lacking a bit in character. I'm going to change up the recipe a bit for next week.

Milk Punch #1 Test Punch: More pictures

Here's the curds!




Pretty boozy. I guess fry 'em up or something?

Punch #1: Test Punch

Welcome back! Did everyone read this article:

http://www.cooksscience.com/articles/story/the-key-to-crystal-clear-cocktails-milk-really/

?

In particular, I was fascinated by the assertion that you could use cold milk, as well as letting the punch rest a longer amount of time before straining. That could make creating milk punch at home a much less labour-intensive process, more akin to making bread (one of my favorite home projects) where you work for a short time, let your product rest, and then return to it a couple times. I decided to do a proof of concept, using some infused liquor I had lying around.

A couple years ago, before I moved to my current apartment, I put a bunch of spices and peels in a jar containing the bottom of a couple bootles of liquor so it would all be easy to move and I could use it for a punch base (among other things, it contained dried pimento, cassia cinnamon chips, orange and lemon peel, Rittenhouse Rye, and St. Remy). During the process of moving I forgot about it for a couple weeks and then the end result was so intense that it was pretty undrinkable. I put it aside in case I put together some weird punch or something where it could work, but knew my weird jar would be unreplicable.

Now, though, since I mostly just want to test my new milk-punch process, it’s a perfect guinea pig, since I don’t mind if it goes wrong. And who knows, I might be able to make something drinkable out of it?

Using my trusty notebook of my old recipes, I went through and figured out the ratios of all my old punches. They varied, but most of them stayed pretty close to this ratio:

4 parts strong

4 parts weak

1 part sour

1 part sweet

2 parts milk

So, usually pretty close to the classic 4 strong/6 weak/1 sour/ 1 sweet recipe. The strong were my base spirits and modifiers; I tend to use at proof or overproof spirits as a base, as they infuse flavors a bit better if I’m adding citrus or fruit to them, and helps shore up the abv when adding modifiers. For example, my next recipe will include both standard 40 percent ABV Havana Club, a 136 proof rum agricole, and a port. Barrel-aged spirits contain polyphenolic elements, which can further help the milk curdle, but they will lose some of those flavor elements in the clarifying process

Weak is mostly water (i boil water in a kettle in advance and then let it sit to room temperature, or use water that has been filtered and sits out to get rid of the flouride; I might get distilled water in the future), but I often like using tea to add a nice subtle flavor element, and once again the tannins seem to help with curdling. Green tea or english black teas make a nice starting point, but you can add even stronger, more flavorful teas to add some interesting character. This month, since I’m focusing on simple processes my first month, I’ll be using teas to add character rather than infusing my spirits with spices, herbs, and/or fruit.

The sour is typically citrus. For less acidic citruses, I add a bit more. I’ll play with other acidic sources in February and if successful use them in future punches.

Finally, the sweet. I like making oleo-saccrum rather than just throwing sugar in, because it’s the classic punch thing to do. Oleo saccrum I’ll talk about more in the future, but basically it’s the oil of a citrus peel extracted via osmosis into sugar. I’ll try using different sweeteners, but a base idea for oleo-saccrum is:

Peel the skin off 4 lemons or 3 oranges (or around 3 grapefruit). Make sure there is no pith.

Muddle into 4oz sugar by weight. Seal in an airtight bag or container and let sit until sugar is clear with oil.

You can add the juice of the citrus back to the new oleo and it is a “sherbet”. Alternatively, add some of the water you are using for the punch for easy extraction of the remainder of the peels. I use cheesecloth on the peels to get every last bit of saccrum out.

So, my first recipe was:

2 cups mystery brown liquor infusion

2 cups water

4oz lemon oleo-saccrum

4oz lemon juice

1 cup milk.

Combine ingredients of the punch base, then put milk in large bowl. Add punch base TO the milk, then cover and place in fridge overnight. The next day, pour through a fine mesh strainer (one you can use for pasta, like you get a kitchen supply or dollar store) lined with a large coffee filter over a clean pot. After all the liquid is filtered through once, pour it *slowly* (as to not jostle the collected curds too much) through the curd-holding filters again to further clarify the mixture.

Doing this was a quick and easy process -- it took me less than an hour of actual paying-attention work, and could easily be done without adding a lot more time for two to four times the ingredients. More than that would take a bit more time just in the pouring and filtering step, but not much beyond that.

And low and behold, here’s the result:

Flavor-wise, it went from an undrinkably harsh collection of spices to a weird amari variant with a creamy mouthfeel. A pretty great result for just a proof of concept. As you can see, a lot of the color was stripped out. For reference, here’s the color of Rittenhouse (the mixture was actually daker than this):

Intro to Milk Punch Blog

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:

http://www.cooksscience.com/articles/story/the-key-to-crystal-clear-cocktails-milk-really/

So check that out; I’m going to make some punch now, and I’ll post tomorrow with my results and process.