Cranberry-Apple

03.14.10 Does Cranberry + Apple = Cranberry-Apple?

The question that has been on our minds recently is: is mixing two infused vodkas equivalent to having both of the ingredients infused together? For example, is half a shot of strawberry vodka plus half a shot of vanilla vodka equivalent to a shot of vodka that was infused with strawberry and vanilla simultaneously?

Normally, we'd use 1 cup fruit for 750ml vodka. That is approximately 1 apple. Since cranberries have a strong tart flavor, we do not want it to overwhelm the more subtle apple. So, we are guessing that we should use half as much cranberry as we normally would. We used a Macintosh apple and half a Fuji apple, both proportionally equal in the two infusions.

375 ml Fris

1/2 cup frozen cranberries, cut in half

1 apple, thinly sliced

187.5 ml Fris (6.25 oz)

1/4 cup frozen cranberries, cut in half

187.5 ml Fris (6.25 oz)

1/2 apple, thinly sliced

3.21.10 Needs more Apple

Filtered all 3 infusions. The apple was definitely not strong enough, so we added more apples (1 Pink Lady, 1/2 a Macintosh), again split proportionally equal between the two infusions.

03.28.10 Done?

Filtered the apples out of the cranberry-apple and apple infusions.
E: nice balance bet apple and cranberry tartness. No vodka flavor at all. A very nice rose coloring. Ben: I know it's vodka but I don't taste the alcohol. Tastes like cranberry apple. The thing that struck me the most is that there's no alcohol flavor.

Apple:
E: tastes like apple juice, but still some vodka flavor, could go for another round to make it better.

Citrus

3.14.10.  Happy pi day! 

We are attempting to make a citrus infusion. We are infusing orange, tangerine, lemon & lime.  In reading online we have found that there are several techniques used for citrus infusions.  Some recommend using just the zest, some say slice the fruit, some say to slice the fruit but cut off the pith, some say to use the whole fruit with ~20 holes poked 1/2 inch into the body of the fruit, some have tried a combination of zest and slices.

We decided to zest the fruit as that seems to be the most popular technique.  Some day, we'd like to try using the whole fruit with the wholes poked through the rind.  The tangerine wasn't as good as we would like it to be, so we are omitting it. 

750 ml Vikingfjord vodka
2 tsp sugar
zest of: 
1 orange
1 lemon 
2 limes


3.21.10  Taste test
This is coming along well.  It could be done now. We'll let it go for a bit more and see how the flavor comes along.  


03.28.10
E tasted this one.  Emilio says its bitter and will need sugar.  Ben tasted mostly citrus, not sour, a bit of bitterness. 
To be on the safe side, Emilio filtered this. 


04.11.10 
L was finally in town and tasted this one too.  She agrees that it is a bit more bitter.  It's still good and definitely drinkable.  However,  it was definitely better at the 7 day mark.  We'll have to see what we can do to doctor this one up and make it a bit better. 


Recipe


750 ml vodka
2 tsp sugar
zest of: 
1 orange
1 lemon 
2 limes


2 week infusion time

Rum Infusion: Ginger-Star Anise-Vanilla

2.21.10 Ginger-Star Anise-Vanilla RUM infusion

This infusion was commissioned by our friend Jen. She's not much of a vodka fan, and asked us to do a rum infusion for her. She wanted star anise, and then we suggested something to take the edge off of that flavor. She decided to go with Vanilla and Ginger. This is new and fun for us because it is uncharted territory and we have no recipe to go off of.

Cruzan Aged Rum (1L). very strong alcohol flavor. not a spicy rum.

E: "Tastes like rum"

L: that's not helpful.

E: it's neither sweet or bitter.

Neither L nor E cares for the flavor much.

We're guessing on the quantities and this will have to be monitored often for flavor balance. Also this is a 1 liter infusion, not our usual 750 mL.

Ginger took 18 days last time, Vanilla goes for forever, and we're guessing star anisie will be quick, maybe 5 days like black pepper was.

Trying to figure out strategy on this one. We're trying to scale correctly. We're going to do a 1/2 cup of ginger, 2 vanilla beans and we'll figure out the star anise later. We want to make sure Vanilla and Ginger are represented before adding the star anise, which we think will quickly over power the other flavors if we're not careful. In an effort to speed up the process we opted for more Ginger.

1L Cruzan Aged Rum

1 c sliced ginger

2 Tahitian grade A vanilla beans, sliced lengthwise

3.06.10 Balancing the ginger and vanilla

Filtered out the ginger. very gingery, the vanilla was there but it needed more time. L really liked how the vanilla smoothed out the sharpness of the ginger.

3.11.10 This is really good!

Vanilla flavor is coming along very nicely.

9pm. Added 1/3 cup star anise. We have no idea how long this will take, so we'll have to do frequent tastings to keep the flavor in balance.

3.12.10 Anise overkill. :(

8:30am. Woke up and saw that the color of the rum had changed quite a bit. L decided to give it a taste, and the star anise was definitely done, E tasted it. We both agreed that the anise is done and pretty much the only flavor component, so we filtered it immediately, but retained the vanilla beans We're going to give this one another taste later and figure out if we have to infuse more ginger to give it more balance.

Yes. We will have to add more ginger and continue to let the vanilla strengthen.

3.28.10 Under reconstruction

1 cup of sliced ginger was added to try to balance the flavors again. The vanilla beans are still in the vodka as well.

Prickly Pear

3.13.10. Prickly Pear

Found prickly pear fruit in Reading Market today. L has always wanted to try to make something with them. She cut one up and we liked the flavor. Light and sweet, a texture like watermelon, with BB sized edible seeds. Since we had bought a bag of 7 for $1 and had plenty left, we decided to try to make an infusion with the remaining fruit.

When working with the fruit, be a bit careful. The ones at the stores have generally been scrubbed down to remove all of the very fine cactus spines. However, as L had discovered that morning at the market, not all of them get caught and she ended up having several stuck in her hands until we got home and could find the tweezers. :) So, start by scrubbing the fruit down to try to remove any remaining spines. Then, slice the ends off the prickly pear. Make a cut down the body of the fruit, and then peel the skin off. This should leave the pink center of the fruit. For our infusion, we cut the fruit into pieces ~3/4 inch cubes. Since the flavor of the prickly pear is very light, we chose to use Fris vodka since it has the least flavor and burn of the vodkas we had at the time.

375 ml Fris vodka

6 prickly pear fruits, peeled and cubed (~1.5 cups)

3.21.10 Taste test

This is coming along nicely. It will definitely need another round of infusion, but we didn't have time to get to Reading Market this weekend to pick up more prickly pears.

Big Pepper

3.13.10. Big Pepper

Started the "big pepper" infusion from the Fris website. Used the Vikingfjord vodka...figured this infusion would burn anyways, so we could get away with using a vodka that had more burn than usual. We altered the Fris recipe. Their instructions say to infuse for 2 days. We know that we generally like our infusions to taste much stronger than most recipes, so we doubled the ingredients. This is what we did:

750ml Vikingfjord vodka

1/2 fresh poblano chile, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh serrano chile, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh jalapeno, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh red bell pepper, sliced and seeded.

3.16.10 Done! 2.5 Days infusion time.

6am. filtered. This turned out well. It tastes mostly like bell pepper, with a tiny hint of spice at the end. We may tweak this one to give it more spice.

Recipe

750ml vodka

1/2 fresh poblano chile, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh serrano chile, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh jalapeno, sliced and seeded

1/2 fresh red bell pepper, sliced and seeded

Infuse for 2-3 days.

Coconut

11.22.09 Coconut, by popular request

Emilio split the coconut open with a hammer and a chisel...it was moldy. boo. Try again later this week.

11.28.09 Getting the Axe

The night before E poked through the coconut shell and drained the coconut water. He started by trying to chisel it open, but eventually brought out a small axe.

After successfully cracking the shell, the meat had to be pried from the shell.

Then we had to cut off the bit of shell that had stuck to the meat. We decided to expose as much surface area of the coconut as possible, so opted to grate the coconut, but after 2 small pieces of coconut, L realized that this would take forever. She decided that dicing was the way to go.

After chopping several more pieces to the consistency of coarsely grated coconut, E took over. This was going to take for-ev-er. It was only then that he realized (thank goodness!) that he has a food processor. That speeded up the process quite nicely, and E was very happy about that.

From the one coconut, we ended up with 2.5c grated coconut.

We were going to do a 1/2 size of this, but after all the work it took to make it, we decided we didn't want to do this again anytime soon and we chose to do a full size. We didn't have an infusion jar large enough to hold the whole coconut and the 750 ml vodka, so we decided to use a large 1.75L empty bottle of Fris. Getting the coconut into this jar was also a challenge, after attempting to get it into the bottle via a homemade tin foil funnel, we went for the old approach of using E's hands as the funnel while L dumped the coconut in.

Here's what we ended up with: 750 ml Fris, 2.5 c grated coconut and 1 tsp sugar.

12.31.09 Taste Test

We've tasted this along the way. The coconut has absorbed a lot of the vodka, and filtering won't be sufficient, we will also have to press it to extract the absorbed vodka. L: it is starting to _finally_ taste like coconut, but it has a long way to go. E: it has a long way to go, but it's finally starting to taste like coconut, and it has some nice crunchy bits too.

3.13.10 Not really done, but we're sick of it.

We finally got around to filtering the coconut vodka. We first ran the vodka through a wire strainer to get out the large chunks of coconut. The coconut seemed to have absorbed some of the vodka, so we wanted to press it. We tried a french press, but that didn't work at all. So then E came up with the bright idea to put the coconut in a colander and use a bowl to press on it. That method worked pretty well and we were able to get some of the vodka out. We had started with 750 ml, and in the end we had 700ml, which is not bad at all given that we'd tasted it multiple times during the infusion process. We ran it through the gold coffee filter and declared it done.

Our thoughts on this infusion: It would not be something E would want to do again. There is not enough coconut flavor to make it worth it. He said, "I'd rather buy a coconut rum." It still has a medium vodka burn and moderate coconut taste. It's not as strongly flavored as we'd like our infusions to be. The burn decreases when its on the rocks.

Recipe

750 ml vodka

2.5 cups grated coconut

1 tsp sugar

Infusion time: 3 months.

The vodka needs at least another round of infusion to really make the coconut flavor strong.