Showing posts with label cocktail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cocktail. Show all posts

12 July 2012

Jalapeño-infused tequila

Ingredients

We recently visited Mayahuel in New York. It's a great little Mexican place. Not fajitas and margaritas Mexican, but more Mexican-inspired American cuisine. The most exciting part was the various cocktails using jalapeño-infused tequila. Fun cocktails that had a slow burn associated with them. Yum! Well, as soon as we got home I started a batch.

I wasn't sure where to start, so we started with:
5 jalapeños
1 ½ cups tequila (I used Herradura reposado)
Preparing

I chopped the jalapeños and soaked them in tequila in the fridge. Three days, stirring each day.

Jalapeño-infusion

Then run the infusion mess through a sieve. This infusion creates a nice tequila with a slow burn. Amazing on its own, but better in a cocktail. More soon.

Jalapeño-infused tequila

By

28 August 2011

Hurricane

Hurricane Irene

It seems topical, what with hurricane Irene visiting us here in Boston, to have a post on the Hurricane. The cocktail that anyone who has spent more than an hour in New Orleans has had.

I had my first hurricane in 1997. I was an impoverished graduate student, and I paid $8 for this drink, and when I first sipped it I was sure I had been ripped off. I couldn't taste a whiff of alcohol in it. 30 minutes later, as I staggered down Bourbon Street, I felt differently.

For one hurricane:
1 shot light rum
1 shot dark rum
½ shot Galliano liqueur
2 shots orange juice
2 shots pineapple juice
1 shot passion fruit juice
¾ shot lime juice
3 dashes Angostura bitters
Mix and serve over ice. This isn't exactly the cocktail I had in New Orleans (I'll let you know when I find the recipe for that) but it was a pretty popular cocktail to survive a hurricane that was toothless (by the time it reached Boston).

Happy Hurricane Sunday.

Hurricane

By

03 October 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

... a lychee martini. Several years ago, I purchased the Nobu West cookbook, thinking I would cook from it frequently. As fancy cookbooks go, I haven't used this one much. I've failed several times at making the mochi ice cream in there, and haven't tried much else. But the lychee martini is a keeper.

Lychee martini
1 oz lychee liqueur
1 oz vanilla vodka
1 oz mandarin vodka
½ oz passionfruit juice
splash fresh lime juice
lychee (available at Asian stores in the canned fruit section)
Shake liquids over ice. Serve with a lychee in the glass.

19 September 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

a classic Cosmopolitan.

Cosmopolitan

Mix in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake, strain, and pour into a martini glass.
2⅔ oz. vodka (or Citron Vodka)
1⅔ oz. cointreau or triple sec
1⅓ oz. cranberry juice
⅔ oz. lime juice

17 September 2009

Foidka?



I can't wait to get my hands on some of this stuff...

05 September 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

a Dark 'N' Stormy!

Bouteille

The Dark 'N' Stormy is a rare bird indeed. It's a copyrighted cocktail. So if you want to make it, and you want to call it a Dark 'N' Stormy, you have to make it with Gosling's dark rum.

But here, we start (as with everything fun) from scratch. Let's make fresh ginger beer!

I used the recipe at Jeffrey Morgenthaler. Seemed like a good start:
2 oz ginger juice (juiced from 1 large ginger root)
4 oz fresh lemon juice, finely strained
6 oz simple syrup
20 oz warm water (cold if using the soda siphon)
1⁄16 tsp Red Star champagne yeast
You'll need to sterilize your bottles. I picked up a chemical bottle sterilizant (some sort of peroxide, I think) at the brewing store, same place I picked up the packet of champagne yeast. Follow the directions to clean your bottles. I used the nice capped bottle shown above, because it'll handle the pressure of carbonation without exploding all over your home.

Funny aside: 10 years ago, I briefly got into homebrewing, and made some mead. Mead is fermented honey, and as such, it ferments rather slowly. Well I bottled 5 gallons of mead that I thought was done, and loaded up the wine bottles in my basement. Over the next few weeks, I guess there was a wee bit more fermentation going on in those bottles... One day, my roommate came home and slammed the door, just enough excitement to decarbonate a bottle. It blew the cork out, and sprayed carbonated mead all around the room. Well he rushed over and grabbed that bottle, knocking several more bottles... Pretty soon, there was a chain reaction of wine bottles blowing corks and spraying carbonated mead all around. When I arrived home, half my mead was gone, and he was not amused.

But that is not this story...

Okay, chop up a decent sized piece of ginger root.

Ginger

And run that root through a juicer or food processor. Squeeze the ground ginger through a fine sieve to recover ginger juice.

Ginger juice

It's an opaque yellow colour. Yum! Mix all the ingredients together, and pour into a pressurizable bottle. Wrong kind of bottle, and you'll be blowing carbonated ginger beer all over your home.

Ginger beer

Let sit for 48 hours at room temperature, then put it in the fridge. You really don't want to go longer than that, or you'll explode the bottle.

Now comes the relaxing part. Mix 1 1⁄2 oz Gosling's dark rum with ginger beer to taste, over ice.

Enjoy.
Dark 'N' Stormy

08 August 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

... sangria!

Rioja and fruit

I've been looking for a good sangria recipe for quite a while. I found one here, at Livefire. It's very simple:

I've modified it slightly:

750 ml bottle of Rioja
500 ml bottle of sparkling water
1 lime
1 lemon
1 orange
1/4 cup brandy
4 tbsp simple syrup
1 tbsp cinnamon
a smattering of blueberries
Slice the fruit thin (including the blueberries). Mix with the brandy and wine, let sit as long as you can stand it, then add everything else and serve over ice.

Sangria

Delish. There's something super decadent about blogging with a sangria in my hand...

27 June 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

a chocolate martini! This is my wife's favourite cocktail.
2 oz vodka
1 1/2 oz crème de cacao
good-quality cocoa powder
Hershey's hug or kiss
Rim the glass with vodka and then the cocoa powder, then place your Hershey's hug into the glass. Shake the vodka and crème de cacao with ice. Pour and serve.


Chocolate martini

23 May 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for...

... a martini!  

A thyme martini, that is.

This martini is one of my favourites.  It's one I discovered in graduate school in Houston in the late 90s, and it's followed me through 3 cities over ten years.

This martini is a simple one if you have easy access to fresh thyme (I grow it in a pot in the backyard specifically for this martini):

3 oz good quality gin (I use Bombay Sapphire)
3/4 oz green chartreuse
sprig thyme

Mix gin and chartreuse, shake in a martini shaker with ice, and strain into a martini glass.  Crush the sprig of thyme (to release the nice flavors and scents) and drop into the glass.  Serve.  The flavour of the gin, chartreuse and thyme mix perfectly.  This seems an obvious mix, as the flavours of all 3 are complementary.  Perfect on a hot afternoon or a cool evening.

16 May 2009

A lazy Saturday calls for margaritas!


I've been on a mission for several weeks to make the perfect margarita. I'm not there yet, but this recipe is a pretty good one. Not too bitter, not too sweet and plenty of yummy tequila flavour. And perfect on a barbecue day...

This recipe is a slightly modified version of one passed on to me by a very good friend in Maryland.

We start with a decent quality tequila (I prefer Herradura añejo for this), Cointreau, agave syrup and fresh limes (don't ever make the mistake of using bottled lime juice for this - it's appalling).



3 oz decent quality tequila
2 oz Cointreau
2 oz fresh lime juice (squeeze it yourself!)
1/4 oz agave nectar (or simple syrup)




The handy part of having a little lime juicer like the one above, is it is extremely convenient for rimming the glass. Just run the lip of glass quickly through the lime juice, and then again through a small pile of kosher salt. And voilà! Rimmed glass! (ahem. did I say that?)

Right. Mix the ingredients listed above, add ice (as desired). Run through the blender (or not - today I prefer it on the rocks). And serve. A beautiful start to a Saturday evening.

---

July 14, 2009 UPDATE

Use the darkest agave syrup you can get your fingers on. It adds a much nicer, richer flavour to the margarita.