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Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Other Liqueurs Part Two

In yesterday's post in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) I had expanded beyond dehydrating Campari into dehydrating other liqueurs, namely X-Rated Fusion Liqueur, Wild Turkey American Honey, Irish Mist, and Midori. These are all part of the Skyy Spirits portfolio.

Of these four, only Midori crystallized like Campari had. I tried several methods to make the others crystallize but failed for the large part. I went over those in yesterday's post.

(Note: Before you get too deep into this, I just want to warn you that at this point I haven't figured out a solution to this problem and I welcome your suggestions.)

Nothing was working to make the others crystallize, but then inspiration hit.

Inspiration: What Do These Liqueurs Have in Common?

I realized that two of the liqueurs - Wild Turkey American Honey and Irish Mist - are sweetened with honey!

Furthermore, though I have no proof of this, I suspected that X Rated Fusion Liqueur may be sweetened with fruit juice.

Perhaps these other forms of sugar do not crystallize, or don't do so in the same way that cane sugar/sucrose does.

But first, I figured I should test the theory that X Rated Fusion Liqueur does not crystallize in the same way that known fruit juice-sweetened liqueurs do not crystallize. I placed X Rated Fusion, Hypnotiq, and Courvoisier Rose into cupcake cups and baked them at 140F for about 36 hours.

Courvoisier Rose came the closest to crystallizing, being a dense and sticky puck of liqueur. The other two were just gooey.

Though this doesn't necessarily prove anything, it's a clue that fruit juice-sweetened liqueurs don't crystallize the same way cane sugar/sucrose-sweetened liqueurs do.

A Further Test

While I was performing these experiments, I learned of the Stovetop Crystallization Method previously discussed. That method seems pretty foolproof, so I decided to test it on both X Rated Fusion Liqueur and on Wild Turkey American Honey just to be sure they don't crystallize even at high candying temperatures.

X Rated Fusion turned from pink to brown to black.

 

And even at high temperatures, it just formed a thick molasses-like candy syrup that would solidify as soon as you removed it from heat. These sugar pucks do not make good sugar crystals even after you crush them. The resulting sugar/powder is just as sticky as a syrupy liquid.

Wild Turkey American Honey performed similarly, except it does not turn black. It's more like a caramel at the end.

Again though this doesn't prove anything, it may be a clue as to which type of liqueurs do and do not form crystals when you dehydrate them.

In the next set of experiments, I'll look at a couple other honey liqueurs to see if they similarly do not crystallize while other liqueurs do.

Then I'll try to overcome this obstactle.

 

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.

Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Other Liqueurs: Problems

So far in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) I've been experimenting with the best way to get liqueurs into a solid/powder/sugar form.

I have performed all of these experiments with Campari so far, but now it's time to try some other liqueurs. Since Skyy Spirits is sponsoring this project, I began with other liqueurs from the company.

I put four liqueurs into the food dehydrator: X-Rated Fusion Liqueur, Wild Turkey American Honey, Irish Mist, and Midori.

After a standard amount of time (24-36 hours), only Midori had crystallized.

Second Attempt: A Long Time in the Dehydrator

The others remained partially liquid, like a thick syrup.

So I put them back in the dehydrator for another two days. They never crystallized, but when I let the trays cool, most of the liqueur did turn solid, forming almost a plane of glass that easily cracked.

I broke this up, but these liqueurs were still very, very sticky and would not be useful for rimming glassware and other solid uses. 

Third Attempt: Using the Oven

Next I tried to use the oven to see if the temperature was the problem; perhaps these liqueurs needed higher temperatures to crystallize? I took the sticky solid liqueurs from the dehydrator and put them in the oven at 170. The result was just a sticky puck of gooey liqueur. Still not crystallized.

Then I repeated the oven attempt, this time using liquid liqueur (last time I took it from the dehydrator after that didn't work) but set at the lowest temperature, 140 Fahrenheit. This also did not achieve crystallization.

Fourth Attempt: Adding More Sugar to the Liqueur

What if, I thought, the problem is that there isn't enough sugar in the liqueur to crystallize? To test this theory (assuming it would fail, because as the liqueur dehydrates the water and alcohol disappear, making a concentrated sugar solution so it shouldn't matter how much sugar is in there as long as there is some) I added sugar to Wild Turkey American Honey.

This liqueur wouldn't actually hold much additional sugar. I added one part sugar to two parts Wild Turkey American Honey and it would not fully dissolve into solution.

So I gave it a hard shake and put it in a cupcake cup and put it in the oven at 170F. After a day it mostly crystallized, but still left a slightly sticky puck of non-solid liqueur at the bottom.

When I ground up this sugar in a spice grinder, it became a powder, but the powder was incredibly sticky. You couldn't use it to rim a glass or anything like that. In the storage container I put it in, it quickly formed a solid gooey mass.

I was slightly despondent: Only two out of five liqueurs that I tried to dehydrate were successful.Would these methods only work on a fraction of liqueurs?

But then inspiration hit....

To keep this post from being too long, I'll post the second half of it tomorrow.

 

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.

Book Review: Citrus: A History by Pierre Laszlo

Citrus: A History by Pierre Laszlo is a weird book. The first two sections contain detailed information about the species, spread, and cultivation of citrus around the world. The third section contains chapters like "Symbolic Meanings of Citrus" and "Image of Citrus in Poetry," which I didn't find terribly engaging. 

So let's dwell instead on the first parts where the good stuff is. Here are some facts I highlighted. 

"If Judaisn accounted for the cirum-Mediterranean spread of citrons, Islam established a major beachhead for the cultivation of citrus to the Iberian Peninsula."

"Sour limes (the kind most often found in the grocery store) originated in northeastern India and were brought by the Arabs to al-Andalus."

Three orange trees planted by Eliza Tibbets in 1873 were the foundation of citriculture in California. One of the trees survives to this day. 

It wasn't until 1795 that British seamen started getting lime juice to prevent scurvy, earning them the nickname "limeys." Scurvy dropped from 1457 cases in 1780 to 2 in 1806. 

Humans don't have the ability to synthesize Vitamin C, but most animals do. 

Nobody used to drink orange juice. It was during an orange glut in California that the idea occured to an ad man to sell more oranges and save trees from being cut down. He created the slogan "Drink An Orange" and sold it to Sunkist. In the early 1920's orange juice became part of the American breakfast. 

Frozen concentrated orange juice was first developed in 1945-46.

So: The book has some good information and some not-so-useful stuff. 

There are a few other books on citrus - has anyone read any? Any good?  

Making Sugar from Cane and Beets

In the continuing study of sugar, today we'll look at how sugar is made today. 

According to Sugar.org, this is how sugar is made from either beets or cane. 

For sugar cane:

❧ Grinding the cane to extract the juice;
❧ Boiling the juice until the syrup thickens and crystallizes;
❧ Spinning the crystals in a centrifuge to produce raw sugar;
❧ Shipping the raw sugar to a refinery where it is,
❧ Washed and filtered to remove remaining non-sugar ingredients and color; and
❧ Crystallized, dried and packaged.

Beet sugar processing is similar, but it is done in one continuous process without the raw sugar stage. The sugar beets are washed, sliced and soaked in hot water to separate the sugar-containing juice from the beet fiber. The sugar-laden juice is purified, filtered, concentrated and dried in a series of steps similar to sugar cane processing.

The below illustration I took from the pamphlet on Sugar.org called "How Well Do You Know Sugar?" located at this link. 

(Click for larger size pop-up. Image property of Sugar.org.)

 

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. 

Sugar Production in Modern Times

In the Sugar Spirit Project we've looked at the history of sugarcane and sugar production (project index here).

In this post we'll look at sugar production today. Some of this information may be out of date due to the date of my reference books/websites, so please take it all with a grain of salt.

Nowadays, sugar is not longer a major export in the Caribbean except for Guyana, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

In India, the sugar industry is not large plantation-based but from small peasant holdings. The cane is processed by private companies or cooperatives. This is because citizens were already occupying the land and couldn’t be forced off when sugar cane was planted. 

In China sugar is not an item of mass consumption. It is also not a plantation culture. 

In Cuba, after Fidel Castro’s revolution, they increased minimum wage for cane cutters, and expropriated sugar plantations and mills. Keep in mind US interests controlled much of the sugar cane production in Cuba. So the US retaliated by importing sugar from elsewhere. 82% of Cuban sugar was exported to the US so it was a major economic problem. Eventually they sold it to Eastern European countries.

But communist employment didn’t inspire the hard labor required to cut sugar, so the harvests did poorly. Eventually the harvest was militarized. Then when the Soviet Union crumbled so too did 85% of their sugar exports. Half of its 156 sugar mills closed and 60% of its fields were converted to vegetable farms or cattle fields.

Brazil is today’s largest sugarcane producer. In the 1970s due to oil shortages, sugar cane was processed into fuel as well as sugar.

The world's biggest sugarcane producers in order are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, Pakistan, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, Argentina, and the Philippines. Half of the supply comes from Brazil and India. 

The sugar industry in Brazil employs over 1 million Brazilians and is more than 10% of the country’s agriculture. Gas there is required to contain at least 25% ethanol. About half of sugarcane grown is converted into ethanol; most of the rest is exported. 

It takes 3 days to transform sugarcane into ethanol.

In the US, corn yields a ratio of 1.3 units of energy produced vs. expended to produce it. Beet sugar yields 8.3. Yet corn is cheaper to grow so it is grown instead. 

Per hectare (2.47 acres) sugar cane yields about 20 tons of dry material, half of which is in sugar of some form; the other half is bagasse – trash for fuel, etc. 

Four U.S. states produce sugar cane:Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana and Texas. Sugar beet farms can be found in California, Colorado, Idaho,Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,Oregon, and Wyoming.

According to Sugar.org, we now use more of other sweeteners (I'm guessing high fructose corn syrup) than sugar from cane and beets. "Sugar remains the predominate sweetener in every country except the United States, where in recent decades man-made sweetening agents have been created and mass produced."

 

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. 

A Honey and Tequila Cocktail

In a recent post on FineCooking.com, I posted a recipe by Brendan Dorr of B&O American Brasserie in Baltimore, Maryland. I tried it at home and it's some tasty stuff.

Go get the recipe here.

An Amusingly Disgusting Way to Drink Vodka in Sweden

While I was in Sweden with Karlsson's Gold vodka, we learned a traditional way to drink vodka. It is called Kaffegök, and it is gross.

You take a cup and put a coin in the bottom.

Then you fill it with coffee until you can't see the coin anymore.

Then you add vodka until you can see the coin again. That's how you know you have enough vodka in there.

Then you drink it. Damnnnn that's some kinda breakfast.

 

Creepy Cover of Mixology Magazine

There are few things I like as much as having the cover story in a magazine.

The latest Mixology Magazine arrived from Germany and it has wonderfully creepy cover illustration to pair with my Bloody Mary story. 

The story isn't online yet, but should you want to make hearty use of the Translate button on your browser you can read my enormous story from  last year on the Mai Tai.