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Solid Liquids: The Deconstructed Midori Sour

Just for fun in the Solid Liquids Project I put some dehydrated Midori to good use. 

I made a Deconstructed Midori Sour. 

You dip the lemon in dehydrated Midori, bite into the Midori-coated lemon, and then do the shot of vodka. 

With people who do the lime-salt-tequila shot, they use the lime to and salt to hide the taste of bad tequila. In this case, the lemons were so tart that the sugar in the Midori wasn't enough to balance it out, so you need to vodka to chase the lemon rather than the other way around.

Anyway, this is all in good fun. 

 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.

A Note About Dehydrating Honey-Based Liqueurs

In the Solid Liquids Project I found that liqueurs sweetened with honey do not crystallize. (At least the honey-sweetened liqueurs that I tried.) I theorized on why and how we might over come this in this post. 

However, in reading an unrelated book, I think I found the real reason these liqueurs are not crystallizing.

I was reading Bi-Rite Market's Eat Good Food: A Grocer's Guide to Shopping, Cooking & Creating Community Through Food and found the following in the section on honey:

Honey is a super-saturated solution, which means it has a tendency to crystallize (come out of solution) and turn solid over time. Because of this, most producers filter and pasteurize their honey to prevent crystallization and create a more uniform product. 

Eureka! If it's one thing alcohol producers want, it is products that are consistent and don't spoil or separate in the bottle. My guess is liqueur producers who use honey use pasteurized honey, and that this is why liqueurs sweetened with honey have not crystallized in my experiments. 

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 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.

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. 

Solid Liquids: Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

In the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) we are experimenting with the best methods to dehydrate liqueurs, and then putting the dehydrated liqueur to good use.

This is one of those uses.

I've been using a food dehydrator as one method of dehydrating liqueurs. It works well enough, though other methods are faster. In order to use it, I insert plastic trays into the dehydrator shelves so that the liquid won't pour through the holes.

These trays are actually designed to make fruit leathers. The instructions on how to do so come with the tray, so I knew as soon as I got enough liqueur sugar I'd be using it for this.

First Try

On my first attempt, I followed the instructions a little too closely. Basically you use apple sauce to form the base layer of the fruit leather, then add other fruit to it to flavor it. The example recipe given is to use:

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
2 pints strawberries, de-stemmed and with bruises cut off

To this I added 1/3 cup dehydrated Campari sugar and mixed it up in the blender.

I spread this out over two of the circular trays and let it dry for 14 hours, which was a little bit too long as the fruit leather was cracky in some parts and they didn't roll up.

They were delicious, but unfortunately you could barely taste the Campari; only a little bitterness.

Second Try

On my second attempt I left out the strawberries as a flavoring agent, and I did much better. My recipe was simply:

Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
1/2 cup Campari sugar (in the future I'd use 3/4 cup)

Add ingredients to a blender and blend until blended. Spread out over one tray in fruit dehydrator and dehydrate for about 12 hours, until there are no sticky spots. For thinner roll-ups, spread out over two trays.

These were done to the perfect amount, and rolled up quite easily.

 

They were also delicious. The Campari flavor kicked in as you chewed the roll-up and in the after-taste. They were amazing but as I say in the recipe, could use more Campari!

Campari Straw Attempt

For both recipes, I attempted to roll up the roll-ups into a straw, because a Campari straw would be fabulous.

On one attempt I rolled a roll-up around a chopstick then waited to see if it would stick. It did not so I then weighed it down and put it in the oven to see if the ends would melt together. They did not, so I put it in the microwave to see if I would accomplish it that way, but it just came apart.

 

 

Alas. I'll keep working on this.

 

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.

Sugarcane and the Environment

For the most part rum is made from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. So when we study the issue of the environmental impact of sugarcane production we need to keep in mind that molasses is the waste product of sugar production. Rum is recycling!

That said, we're studying not just sugar but sugarcane production so let's look at its impact. Most of this information comes from Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott (2008). See the references page for more information.

In Cuba where they couldn’t purchase pesticides and fertilizers due to economic issues, they made their own version of organic sugar farming. 

Sugar beets are a rotational crop so they don’t need much fertilizer or pesticide. It doesn’t cause much erosion or contamination. 

The sugar industry ruined the Everglades. It was protected by President Harry Truman, but sugar planters drained it and plantations' phosphorous runoff hurt much of the topsoil. 

Abbott writes about sugar's impact: “The World Wildlife Fun reports, cane has likely ‘caused a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop, due to its destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the polluted waste-water than is routinely discharged in the sugar production process.’”

 On the other hand, “Although Brazilian cane production is notoriously destructive to the environment, cane-derived fuel is precisely the opposite. It is much cleaner than fossil fuels and contains no contaminants such as sulfur dioxide. It emits much less carbon dioxide and protects the climate by vastly reducing carbon emissions, hence reducing pollution. It is sustainable. It yield 8.3 ties as much energy as as that expended to make it and, as new cane varieties are developed, will yield even more. Even its by-products are valuable, and Brazilian mills process them into electricity for their own use and to sell to the national grid.... Cane-based ethanol is the Twenty-First Century’s miracle-in-waiting.”

 

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. 

Dehydrating Liqueurs: Stovetop Crystallization Method

So far in the Solid Liquids project, I experimented with using the food dehydrator, oven, and microwave to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored sugars. The project index is here.  

Well, thanks to a Facebook friend, I now have a much more efficient way than all the others I've tried. Lauren Mote, co-owner of Kale & Nori Culinary Arts, wrote me to tell me the way she's made liqueur sugars. She wrote:

So I have found the easiest way to do this is actually culinary and through "almost" candy making.

If you cook down the spirit, and remove the water molecules, the liquids eventually crystallize.... the trick is "agitation". When you're trying NOT to crystallize, which is making candy, brushing the edges of a pot with water constantly prevents crystals from forming in the sugar. However, when you agitate the liquid and sugar, the crystals form. Continue to agitate, on low heat past the candy making stage, do not burn it. You will concentrate all of the flavour, without a microwave. Once the crystallization starts, it's really really really fast! Remove from the heat, keep mixing until the mixture turns light and powdery. Let cool on a SilPat non-stick baking sheet. Once cool, blitz in a food processor and sift through a tea strainer. What you're left with is completely concentrated, amazing powdered spirit. I did this with Cointreau and it was really amazing.

I wasn't sure I was doing it right but I tried it out with Campari, and it works! In short, add the liqueur to a metal pot,

Heat it so that the alcohol burns off, then it starts going into the candy phases as the water burns off. 

First it boils, then it gets thicker, then it starts to froth. Eventually the frothiness gets really big, like it's going to overboil.

Stir it with a metal spoon (perhaps you have a barspoon around). Not long after this point the frothiness dies down a little. You'll notice sugar crystals on the bottom of the pan as you stir it and the volume of the liquid seems to shrink a lot. Though it still looks quite liquid, it's ready.

Pull it out and as fast as you can, scrape it onto a silicone Silpat or other non-stick pan. You'll see that it is sugary and full of crystals. This dries really quickly.

Then you can stick it into a spice grinder and get your powdered liqueur.

The process takes less than two hours, and it seems to work with larger quantities of liqueur just as fast. Sweet.

In future posts, we'll finally start dehydrating liqueurs other than Campari.

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.