The Seelbach cocktail

A good champagne cocktail is a thing of beauty.This is both good & not all that well known, which is a shame.
Its a slightly odd beast as it uses a lot of bitters, calling for anywhere between 7 dashes & a barspoon of both Angastoura & Peychaud's, which is responsible for the awesome colour.

Bourbon is used as a base rather than the more usual (in champagne circles) cognac. That & Cointreau provide sweetness, the Champagne brings dryness and the bitters depth & complexity. There are a couple of ways of making it, this is my preferred method.

25ml Bourbon
15ml Cointreau
7 dashes Angastoura bitters
7 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Stir down over ice & then strain into a champagne flute, top with good Champagne.

As you can see we tried a cherry garnish, which works well enough.

Filé gumbo

Its more than the line from a song, its an actual thing, that you can eat. You need filé powder (which is ground sassafras leaves) and Andouille sausage and some other bits & pieces too. Most importantly the Holy trinity of Cajun/Creole cooking :- Green bell pepper, Onion & Celery. I'll come clean of the 3 I only really like Onions, fortunately the others dissolve if you cook them long enough and gumbo gets cooked for a Loooong time.

The base of gumbo is a roux. Every single recipe I found suggests you need to drink whilst making the roux, so here goes. Fry some chicken thighs, till brown and the sausage, pour the fat into a big old pan, add butter & melt it and then add flour, turn the heat low & stir and scrape and stir & scrape. Keep stirring & scraping till the roux is Milk chocolatey coloured (about 2 beers of time, or 45 minutes for the more scientifically minded).

 DO NOT LET THE FLOUR BURN ! Because that wrecks everything & you have to start again. Whilst the roux is going on boil the chicken, which will make you a light chicken stock as well as cooking the chicken down for you.

Once you've a lovely roux, throw in the trinity veggies and any others you are using (I know Okra should go in at this point, but I'm not that keen, even if its where gumbo gets its name) and soften them. Add seasonings & spices. Then add your stock and your meat (Sausage & chicken) and let it bubble over a low heat for hours. I reduced my gumbo a little too much at the end, so it was thicker than most. Serve with white rice, a sprinkle of filé and some buttery bread.

Maybe not the most authentic gumbo as I amalgamated 3 recipes and information from an ex-NOLA resident, but it was damn tasty and next time there is cheap shellfish going I'll be making another.

The recipes are here

Chef rick duck & sausage

nolacuisine's filé gumbo

and the highly recommended baconconcentrate's gumbo-shops recipe

  

Andouille sausage

This post  suggested that Andouille (at least the cajun sort) was easy enough to make at home, the only slightly tricky ingredient was Prague powder. A hot smoked sausage, what's not to like there ?

First off you need some pork

and some spices (some of these are from the banger making)

The annoying part of making andouille is the chopping. The paupered chef recipe calls for half the pork to be chopped quite small & the rest to be minced. Grab your sharpest knife & cut the pork into chunks, put half of it into the mincer on a medium plate and then chop the rest of the chunks into tiny (about 1cm) cubes. Using cold hands mix the spices, the onion, the garlic, the cure & the meat (ground & chunked) into a large bowl and let it sit in the fridge for a while.

Break out the sausage stuffer and make the sausages. All the usual sausage stuffing things apply. One slight variation was I used pork casings instead of beef, it was just what my butcher had...

They then go rest in the fridge overnight prior to smoking. Since we had the smoker fired up for several little jobs & there was no pecan available we went with maple and let them smoke. Once done I quenched them as best I could and then sliced one open to see how it tasted.

It wasn't as spicy as I was expecting, but it was tasty, in fact it was rather moreish. If I hadn't promised some to a friend, and didn't have some cooking plans (hello gumbo) for it I think rather a lot would have been eaten there & then

In search of perfection:-Bangers

Ahh Sausages. I like the good old banger, in fact I like it better than some pure meat sossies. Heston Blumenthal had a look at Bangers (& mash) in his perfection series, and the banger needs filler. These are pork, some spices a little rusk & toast water. Like all HB recipes there were lows & highs. Most of the issues with this one were due to having an ordinary kitchen, with a fullish fridge & freezer.

First off make toast, but make it in the oven, at gas mark 4 for 30 minutes or so. Whilst that's happening fire up the BBQ, you are about to char pork back fat over smoking woodchips. This was my first arghhh moment, my wood chips were a bit too wet and smothered the charcoal, still a blow torch rescued that.

Once  the fat starts to go things get quite exciting in the BBQ. Gloves & eye protection are recommended as a lot of hot fat spits around. Once its all charred, blistered (and smelling awesome) take it off the heat & pop it in the fridge to cool. Also in there will be a large bowl of water & toast, oh and the pork mince. Cold is quite a vital part of banger making, the fat & meat (and spices & filler) need to emulsify, let it get too warm & it'll split. Blitz the charred fat and it looks pretty unpleasant.

Chill down the bowl & blade on your food processor & blitz the mince in batches, it needs to be smooth & not to rise above 10c. I have a tiny food processor, so this & the next stage were quite hard work and could be an area of improvement for my next batch. The meat and food processor bits go back in the freezer to get everything down to close to 0c, whilst you blend the spices, rusk, golden syrup  and toast water

   That gets to chill too. Then you blitz all the bits, fat, spicy toast water & meat again in small batches keeping a check that they never get above 10c, whilst that's going on let the sausage casings soak (put the now sausage meat back in the fridge to chill)

   Then its time to stuff your sausages. If you can get help with this part do. 2 pairs of hands make it pretty easy. Having spent a few hours getting to this point, surrounded by lumps of fat, piles of meat & collections of spices I was pleasantly surprised to see sausages magically emerging from the combination, mincer, pasta maker sausage stuffer machine.

  To enjoy them to the full Heston recommends poaching at 65c for 320 minutes & then frying, I couldn't wait I had to try the sausages.

  Well worth it.

Yes its fiddly & a bit of a pain, no its probably not hugely economic to make small batches (we got about 15 bangers) but your own home made sausage is a pretty awesome thing. I've got casing left, so I might have a stab a Lincolnshire style next. Unless that is you know where I can get some hippopotamus.

(Blue) Rose Vodka

I grow roses, I concentrate on "blue" ones due to limited space. Queen of the violets is an old double rose with a deep perfume & a good strong purplish colour, ideal for making scented/flavoured vodka.

The Vodka quickly leaches the colour from the rose, but it ends up a light golden/yellow colour rather than a stronger pink .

I just put a bloom or 2 in vodka, with out any sugar (though 25g/500ml is reckoned to be a good amount) and let it stand for a few days to let the flavour develop properly. Once that was done I strained & bottled.

But why stop with 1 single variety of rose vodka ? Twice in a blue moon seems to be having a late summer/early autumn flush  and whilst being closer to a hybrid tea rose than the bourbon/old fashioned roses it still has a very strong perfume. So it was out with the secateurs and a few snips had a couple of those blooms in a bottle.

Tasting both is interesting, whilst they are both obviously rose flavoured they are quite different. The Queen of the violets vodka is heavy & very rosy. The Blue moon on the other hand is a bit more delicate and has definite vanilla notes. Now all I need to do is find a cocktail for it. It'll work in my Turkish delight drink, but there must be other uses though...

Macaroons V1.0

In my world Macaroon means coconut, yes the French, almond kind are lovely, but really they need a better name. Oh yes they need rice paper too.

A coconut macaroon is a simple beast, where you mix egg white, sugar & dessicated (or flaked or shredded) coconut together & bake till golden. The end result should have a bit of bite surrounding some chewy moistness. There will probably be chocolate too, because well why wouldn't there be ?

  This has an extra embellishment, lime.

So mulch together 100g of sugar, 2 egg whites, 160g of coconut the zest & juice of a lime. Once its all come together roll out bite sized balls. Line a baking tray with parchment (or greaseproof) and put rice paper on top of that (if you can't find plain get edible/funny money from your local sweetie shop). Put the coconut balls onto the rice paper allowing for spreading whilst they cook & slip the whole lot into an oven at gas 4 for 20 minutes or so (once they are golden brown they are done).

Whilst they cool melt some dark chocolate (about 25g will do) and drizzle it over the macaroons. Cut or tear them from the rice paper (and stuff yourself with the chocolate spattered trimmings). Enjoy (keep them in an airtight container, but honestly they won't last long .

Bourbon steak

I saw a feature about The pyromaniac's cookbook and knew immediately I had to have it. It was one of those cookbooks that just needed to be on my shelf. Finding out it had a BBQ chapter alongside the Cocktails one was the icing on a fairly large tasty looking cake.

The unseasonably warm weekend signalled BBQ time, the quickest of flicks suggested Bourbon steak would be ideal.

Get yourself some nice steak, season it (the book suggests using smoked salt, if you have it then why not ?) and go get the charcoal going. Once the flames have died and the charcoal is kicking out fierce heat, stand your bourbon by the grill to warm. Then throw the steaks on. Cook them till they are slightly underdone to your taste and take them off the grill. Lift the grill out and put a heavy pan into the coals. Add a generous amount of butter, some chopped shallots and when its all melted & sizzling put the steaks in. Pour over a serious amount of bourbon and step back (you may need to light it with a spill or match).
Whizz the flaming pan & steaks to your guests & serve.

one day a year everybody is Irish

Or so they say, Harry Craddock from the Savoy decided to add his take

1 Large Measure Irish whiskey(*)
1 tsp Green Chartreuse
1 tsp Green Creme de Menthe

Shake serve with a green olive.

(*)It needs to be irish, it just doesn't work otherwise

This is a surprising drink, in that it works at all, since the design on first glance seems to be use Irish ingredients & make it green. The olive is a bit unnecessary in my opinion, but then I'm not a big a fan of olives. Give it a try you might like it

The blackthorne

St Patrick's day DISASTER there is no Jameson's in the house.

There is though some Middleton...
Middleton is a premium spirit, so I'm pretty loathe to go with plan A) which is "everyone's Irish" from the savoy book as the Chartreuse & Creme de Menthe are likely to kill the whiskey dead. The Blackthorne however is pretty much a Manhattan with the bonus of a dash of absinthe.

So the Blackthorne

60ml Irish Whiskey
30ml Sweet Vermouth
Dash Angastoura bitters
Dash Absinthe

garnish is a lemon twist (if you have one).
The absinthe pays for itself here, the anise taste is submerged in the drink, but the mouth feel gives a menthol coolness making the entire thing taste fantastically clean & strong.

Job for the weekend, try it with an inferior whiskey & see how the taste alters

Dessert, guess what it is jelly

And what a jelly. It's poached peach & Chartreuse.

I took a couple of liberties, first off I made a gold leaf suspension top using a sparkling Chardonnay and I used a set of moulds giving me 5 jellies to serve.

The gold leaf suspension isn't difficult, but you have to have an eye on the cooling of your jelly, it has to be thick enough to support the gold leaf, but still pourable. The Chartreuse Jelly is very strongly flavoured (and quite alcoholic), its made with about 40% of the volume being Chartreuse, 10% being the peach syrup (we used tinned peaches, as my tame historian suggested they'd be most likely in Titanic's kitchens)   and the remainder being water. Add an extra leaf of gelatine to the usual 5 leaves to 500ml ratio since there is a lot of alcohol around and you are good to go. Fill the mould 3/4-7/8 full & leave to set, once it's set enough to support the peaches add peach slices and the rest of the jelly. Set & serve (with cream or ice-cream, the jelly is a bit rich on its own)