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I have a big folder of tasty-looking cocktail recipes that maybe I'll get around to trying sometime. Luckily my blog at FineCooking.com gives me an excuse to try a few of them.
For a recent post, I picked a recipe sent by Akvinta vodka and gave it a whirl, as I was intrigued by the vermouth and strawberry combination. As it turned out, I liked it.
So the recipe is in the post over there.
Remember the airline drink menu page? Probably not, because I keep forgetting to update it.
Except that I just did, and now I added Delta and KLM's drink menus to the page.
KLM carries Bols Genever and Delta carries Wild Turkey American Honey. Finally drinks on planes are getting more interesting.
I may still be figuring out the best techniques to use to dehydrate Campari and other liqueurs, but I have enough successful powder around now to start using.
My first drink was the Campari & Soda, using dehydrated Campari powder. It should be essentially non-alcoholic as the alcohol burns off long before the water before it becomes solid.
After a few tries to get the ratios right, here's what works.:
Take a 3-4 ounce glass of soda water,
add a tablespoonfull of dehydrated Campari powder,
and 1/2 teaspoon of 2:1 simple syrup. I found that 1:1 added the sweetness necesary that made it taste like Campari again, but it missed the syrupyness that makes Campari Campari.
It also lacks the brightness of Campari, and an expressed orange peel fixed that right up, so don't forget that even though it's not in the picture.
(Campari & Soda (left) and the non-alcoholic version (right))
The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
When I was last in France I had a chance to pop into the Camus Cognac visitors' center. I was familiar with the brand, having met brand owner Cyril Camus last year in San Francisco, and curious to try some of the non-US bottlings on-site. And now I have news to share from another lunch a couple of weeks ago.
These things don't form a narrative, so I'll use the list format to talk about it.
A few weeks ago I wrote about mizuwari, the whisky highball ritual sometimes performed in Japan.
One thing I didn't emphasize was that most of the time these highballs are usually made with blended whisky, not single-malts.
Now another company has announced the release of blended whisky made for the same purpose. Compass Box Whisky is launching a new range of blends called Great King Street. The first bottling, The Artist's Blend, will start hitting the US market in September. They're emphasizing this whisky's use in the highball.
Compass Box founder/blender John Glaser said in a press release, “As well as being delicious neat, Great King Street is equally enjoyable drunk with ice, as a refreshing Highball with soda water and ice, or in cocktails. One of the wonderful things about a whisky highball is that it slips down as easily as beer. This gives us whisky lovers a refreshing whisky-based drink for all sorts of different occasions—at the bar with friends after work, on a warm day, parties, receptions, even with food (particularly Asian food). We believe it is time for a renaissance of the Highball.”
Mad Men + Mizuwari + Great King Street. Does three make a trend?
And do we think that blended whiskies make better highballs, or are they just less expensive so we don't feel bad about watering them down?
In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.
In today's post we'll look at using the microwave. As I learned the hard way, what you don't want to do is stick a liqueur in the microwave and turn it on high. It fizzes, splatters, and burns.
So I attempted to dehydrate liqueur using a low-power setting. In the process I learned something about microwaves, or at least the microwave that I own: Lowering the power doesn't actually lower the strength of the microwave energy, it only changes the length of time it blasts that energy into your food.
So at the lowest power setting (10 on my microwave), it blasts the liqueur with microwave energy for 10 percent of the time, or for 3 or 4 out of every 30 seconds. The rest of the time it's just turning on the plate. The "defrost" setting is level 30, which should tell you how low the setting is.
The One-Shot Method
Because I don't want to stand around the microwave pressing stop and start, I tried to find the setting that would allow me to cook down a liqueur to a solid.
After several tries and lots of hot boiled Campari I determined that I couldn't microwave on any power setting higher than the lowest setting of 10. After just a few seconds the liqueur would start to boil rapidly, then it settles down in the remaining 27 seconds. However, after it cooks down nearer to the end (all the alcohol should be boiled off, but the water is still trapped in the syrup) it seems to boil faster, and overflows and splatters after only the 3-4 second heat interval.
Thus it seems that my microwave is too powerful to effectively reduce the last part of the liquid liqueur to a solid.
The closest I've come (so far) to making this effective is cooking it on the lowest power setting for 60 minutes (which reduces the volume by half, close to the final volume of syrup) then finishing the drying in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit as this is low enough that the syrup doesn't boil over.
However, at least in initial experiments, it takes a very long time to bake off the final water - more than 5 hours. And in this case, I may as well just stick it in the oven at 170 degrees Fahreinheit over night.
The Babysitter Method
As the 'set it and forget it' method of programming the microwave proved ineffective, I thought I'd try the hard way. I put the same 2 ounces of Campari in the microwave and heated it for short bursts until it boiled. Then I'd stop, wait for it to settle, and hit it again. The point was to prevent overboiling and burning.
Don Lee reported success with this method, using short bursts at the beginning and end of cooking, and longer cooking in the middle.
I begun with 20 minutes cooking time on the clock, then kept pausing the heating as the boil became violent. Initially I'd do it standing there babysitting the thing, but then as it was taking forever I'd send emails and such in between heating bursts, allowing it to cool more.
Unfortunately, this method allowed me no long bursts of cooking - it kept boiling over at 10 seconds maximum. More than 85 short bursts over several hours later, it finally chrystalized, though there wasn't all that much of it left.
In conclusion, with my microwave and using Campari anyway, this method is a pain in the butt and not worth the effort compared with setting the oven on a low temperature and letting it cook down overnight.
The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
Boy is this ever a topic I'd rather avoid! However there is no denying the historic link between sugarcane production.
We were tracing the spread of sugarcane and the sugar industry from the Old World to the new. But slave labor used to harvest and process sugarcane began long before sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean.
Before sugarcane made its way to the Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain and Portugal, slave labor was used in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco. Warfare and plague had diminished the local labor force so slaves were 'needed' to harvest it.
Slavery and sugar remained tied for a very long time, most notably so in the New World. 11 million African slaves were exported from their homelands. Six million of them went to work making sugar- the most of any profession. When the Haitian Revolution occurred near 1800, ending slavery there, it cut off 43 percent of Europe’s sugar supply.
One cool note: female slaves were often the distillers of rum in the islands.
Abolition
(Anti-Saccharites parody cartoon.)
The abolition movement in England linked sugar to slavery, and encouraged people to boycott sugar. The movement was largely lead by women, who purchased the sugar for the home. They were known as anti-saccharites.
1807 the British House of Commons made the slave trade- but not slavery- illegal. It wasn't until the 1830s before it was by British law.
The Emancipation Proclamation that finally freed the American slaves took effect in 1865.
After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1884, all Caribbean sugar was made by non-forced labor.
Sugar After Slavery
After slavery ended, new labor was needed to harvest sugar cane, as many former slaves weren't about to take it up again.
Laborers came from many places, but especially from China and India. They worked as indentured servants, paying off their ride to the new island for several years. Indentured workers were called coolies.
This and other policies kept former slaves from buying land and becoming economically equal to whites.
After 1869, Trinidad granted small parcels of land to people who completed their indenturship. They bought up 23,000 acres between 1885 and 1895.
On Mauritius, nearly half a million Indian workers imported between 1834 and 1910. At one point they produced 9.4 percent of the worlds sugar supply, mostly providing it to Britain.
Though it was far from smooth sailing, eventually things worked out. According to Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott:
“Mauritius is an anomaly in the colonized sugar world. Its minorities, Creole and white, have accepted its Indianness- at 68 percent of the population, it has the largest concentration of Indian outside India- and a succession of Indo-Mauritian leaders have governed. An elite minority speaks English, the country’s official language, while everyone else speaks French-derived Creole. Hindu and Muslim holidays are observed, and since 1877, the Mauitian currency has been its rupee. Mauritius’s unique circumstances and the dynamics of its society have enabled its people to unite in racial harmony. Ironically, they have embraced sugar as their common denominator.”
In Hawaii, the indentured laborers were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino. Chinese workers were later banned from immigrating because the powers that be felt there were too many who stuck around after their indenture time expired.
What fascinates me about the post-slavery indentured servant era of sugar production is the racial and cultural makeup of Caribbean islands that results from it. There are interesting mixes of whites, blacks, and Asian/Indian populations that vary depending on the island. The cross-cultural pollination over many years has lead to some fascinating local customs, celebrations, and cuisines that we think of as unique local island traditions when we visit on vacation. You go to Martinique and it's all very French and people drink champagne on the beach. You go to Trinidad and eat roti and other Indian food for every meal. As it turns out, those traditions developed due to the unique mix of people from diverse parts of the world, united under a shared history of sugarcane.
The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
When we last left off looking at sugarcane's spread from India/Indonesia to the rest of the world, the sugar industry had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, including Madeira and the Canary islands.
During this time, the powers in Europe were developing a taste for sugar.
Sugar was only known in Europe after the 8th century. This is about the time that references to growing cane in the Mediterranean appear. Molasses reached England by late 1200s, coming from Sicily.
King Henry III (in the 13th century) ordered three pounds of sugar “if so much is to be had,” as it was rare luxury item.
But by 1319 one Venetian trader carried 100,000 pounds of it to London. The sweet tooth for sugar developed fast.
Starting in 1470, European countries radically changed how sugar was produced. They imported crude sugar and refined it locally. This changed the power dynamic – refineries had power and profits - and plays into how the sugar colonies in the New World were treated.
Sugar's Voyage to the New World
Columbus carried sugarcane from the Canary islands to New World on his second voyage to Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1493. However they were more concerned with finding gold than farming, so the sugarcane failed.
Later they brought in experts from the Canary Islands to help get it established. It was first grown in the new world in Santo Domingo (though it failed a few times first) and was first shipped back to Europe in 1516.
Portugal soon got into the sugarcane farming business as well. Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon Portugal by 1526 in large quantities. The Portuguese ruled the 1500s in terms of sugarcane dominance.
In early 1500s, Spain conquered the Mexican mainland, and used the Caribbean islands more as protected harbors along shipping routes than as sugar growing islands. From 1580 to 1650 (when the English and French got into the game on smaller islands) the Caribbean didn’t produce all that much sugar for export.
In 1625 Brazil was still supplying nearly all of Europe with sugar, but when English colonies got into full swing they drove Portugal out of the Northern European trade areas.
Until the mid-1600s, the British navy drink was "beer sometimes supplanted by brandy." Then the British started making rum. Barbados was settled in 1627 and sugar was grown there. Then after the 1655 British conquest of Jamaica, they started replacing the brandy ration with Jamaican rum. (Rum is distilled from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production.)
In 1731 rum became part of the official ration all the way up until Black Tot Day in 1970. Navy rum didn't just provide tasty nutrients, it killed bacteria in the drinking water.
Though the Portuguese, Spanish, and British were growing sugarcane, French prices were the best in Europe. Unable to compete, England just supplied its own needs from its islands, keeping pace with increasing demands.
As we touched on before sugarcane was even grown in the New World, England eventually forbade colonies from refining their own sugar. This kept the sugar colonies“infantilized and dependent.” Europe kept all the control, kept wealthy landowners in power in the colonies. The sugar colonies were to be used, not respected.
In the early 1600s, the British, Dutch and French all established Caribbean plantations. Years later in the 1800s, Cuba and Brazil were the major producers. Between these eras, sugar production increased as people got a taste for it. The technology to grow and refine sugar didn't change much in this era, but consumer demand did.
In the next post we'll look at sugar production and the labor used to do the work.
*Bonus fun fact* The West India Docks in Jamaica had gang members with the best names: The River Pirates, Night Plunderers, Heavy Horsemen, Scuffle-Hunters, and Mud Larks.
The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
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