Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [101]
This is a shortcut bitters I liked very much that you can make with ingredients you may already have in your cupboard. Don’t bother with a premium bourbon. I used Jim Beam.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Easy. Fun.
Cost comparison: Homemade costs $0.64 per ounce. Angostura: $2.25 per ounce.
Peel from 1 orange
One 750-milliliter bottle 80-proof whiskey
6 vanilla beans, split in half lengthwise
1 teaspoon anise seeds
2 juniper berries
2 whole cloves
2 allspice berries
2 teaspoons cardamom seeds
1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees F.
2. Put the orange peel in the oven—you can set it directly on the rack—and roast for 1½ hours, until very dry.
3. Combine the orange peel and all the remaining ingredients in a large jar. Cap the jar, give it a vigorous shake, and let it sit at room temperature for 2 weeks.
4. Strain into a clean jar or bottle. Store in a cupboard indefinitely.
Makes a little over 3 cups, more than enough bitterness to last a lifetime
MARASCHINO CHERRIES
Some people think a twist of orange peel makes a more elegant garnish for a cocktail than a lipstick red cherry, and they are right. But elegance is overrated. There’s something festive and charming about a drink embellished with a crunchy cherry, round and red as the nose on an alcoholic. I mean, clown. I poured so much money into attempting to make my own maraschino cherries that I could put a small down payment on an orchard. The results:
Maraschino recipe number one came courtesy of Melissa Clark’s In the Kitchen with a Good Appetite and involved soaking sour cherries in Luxardo, an expensive liqueur made from Croatian Marasca cherries and their crushed bitter pits. Clark: “They were seductively crisp-textured and steeped with an exotic, piney, floral flavor that was just sweet enough but balanced by the tart tang of the cherry.” Since I could find neither fresh nor bottled sour cherries, which is what Clark calls for, I rinsed the goop off the sour cherries in a can of pie filling and macerated them in the Luxardo for five days. At the end of that time, I tasted one. It was too alcoholic, and it had neither snap nor stem. It was like eating a small, booze-soaked prune. Fail.
I moved on to maraschino cherry recipe number two, which I found in the online archives of the Seattle Weekly. (The author refers to the store-bought maraschino cherry as a “humiliated, flavorless fruitard.”) This recipe called for brining fresh bing cherries and covering them in Luxardo, which I now had on hand. This approach held promise. While pie cherries are limp to begin with, bings are naturally crunchy and it was just a matter of capturing and preserving that. I carefully pitted the cherries, keeping the stems attached, and dropped them into the brine. Yet even these firmest of cherries lost all their structure during their saline bath. They came out salty and, again, overly boozy for my tastes. I know “overly boozy” is a strange criticism from someone who loves booze, but it seems wrong to garnish alcohol with more alcohol. Aren’t garnishes about complementary contrast?
I found the alcohol-free recipe I was looking for in Linda Ziedrich’s brilliant Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. (Despite what I’m about to say about this particular recipe, if you buy one preserving book, Ziedrich’s is the one.) In the head-note, Ziedrich explains that the gaudy American maraschino cherry we all know and joke about was invented in Oregon during Prohibition. Because the local trees produced yellow cherries, red dye came into the equation. Ziedrich offers a recipe developed by Oregon State University that entails brining with alum (aluminum