White Bull

Ah, finally, we've hit the last third of April and a recipe that has been lingering for a few years can now be published. There's a method to this madness. First there was Bucentaure (and a lot of the concept is laid out there). Then there was Bull with a Barette. (then there was Chimaera taking the base in another direction) And now we complete a trilogy --and a promise-- that sprung from trying to fit too many ideas into one glass: the White Bull.

(granted, I may have one more in me that incorporates egg white, saffron, and Suze, but we'll have to see how that goes..)

As tasty and structure-playful as Bucentaure and Bull with a Barette are, they're friggin' heavy aged-spirit cocktails hitting at a point when all the flowers are popping open. I consider White Bull to be somewhat more Aries-inflected, and not just because we're only a couple of degrees into the month of Taurus at time of posting: it's leaner, cleaner, small red berry-noted -- perfect for a spring that's still emerging in fits and starts from chilly breezes and drizzles that prolong the blooms. Not for nothing, it still possesses Taurus' sensuality. You could say it's an elaborate riff on summery Douro Valley sipper White Port and Tonic. And, whichever incarnation, it's still a Vieux Carré at core.

White Bull
1 oz Wray & Nephew Overproof rum
1 oz white port
1/2 oz pisco
1/2 oz Mahia fig eau-de-vie
1/4 oz Skinos mastiha liqueur
3 drops Fee Bros. cherry bitters
1 dash Dr. Adam Elmegirab's Spanish bitters
1 oz tonic water
lemon twist garnish

Build on good-sized rocks, give a little stir, and garnish.

Frankincense, sweet lime, clear golden light bitter, cherries, spiced figs and bright fruit, green ginger, grassy Jamaican funk as it evolves. Ethereal, fresh in a perfectly springtime manner, but packs a wallop.

Enjoy with Marcona almonds - you'll thank me.




I leave it to your imaginations and tastebuds, but I do invite consideration for ingredient evolution - particularly the bitter ingredients.

Mahia fig eau-de-vie is an underused, brilliant and rare flavor that needs to get a lot more love. As in La Primavera nella Campagna, I find that clear eau-de-vies offer delicate spring-like approaches for otherwise autumn-oriented fruits.


Thank you dear reader - a little over 5 years and now 100K hits. :) Hope I can keep being productive and worth your valuable time.

Impromptu: Peach Sunshine

Bear with me folks. Right as I was writing up my MxMo 100 post a month ago, I got a call that sent me into a tailspin (but from which I've largely recovered). Sitting down to type has been difficult since, though. I'll have more thoughts to share as I work through my backlog, but for now I figure the best way to stretch the blogging muscles is to dash off some of the less-than-prompt impromptus that have been piling up in the meanwhile.

So what do you do when you've hit the dog days of summer, have (at long last) just gotten a stack of Beachbum Berry books from Amazon, and are craving the mother's milk panacea known to man as coconut cream? You blend, baby, blend!

Then, once you work (ha! "work") through the Pain Killer, the Aurora Bora Borealis, several variations of the Pina Colada, and skip over the Chi Chi, you're left with half a can of coconut cream and a big blinking "what next?" sign over your head. It was about then that I posed the "coconut cream and a spice element" challenge to JFL over at Rated R Cocktails (I need to get some coconut milk so I can try the Lono Cup!). I had been noodling perhaps a more floral coconut-pisco-allspice dram recipe, but that'll have to stick in the back-craw of my brain for another time.

Instead, my eyes alighted on the good Jersey peaches my bf had brought over and that blinking slightly-fritzy sign over my head turned into a lightbulb!

It's time for this recipe to get published. It got a bit of a highlight over Labor Day weekend (cheers @MacCocktail!) and just today I got a needed kick in the rear when this sweet ditty showed up over on Stir & Strain. Elana's been doing great stuff with coconut cream this summer and completely hit it out of the park with a Pina Colada royale-type recipe. But yeah, there's a lot of similarity and here I am stewing around as a creative Hamlet (not in a good way) in the background.

The only nit I might have to pick is that, while both cocktails are perfectly good in their own right, this is annus 2015 of the Cocktail Renaissance and this is the cocktail blogosphere we're talking about. If a "Tropical Rum Peach Frozen Blended Cocktail" recipe hasn't been done yet, it and several similar ones (that arise from their concocters being in the same social and mind spheres) might well come along anyway, in short order or years down the road. Seriously, how many of us socially-networked cocktailians have absolutely delighted to see Tiki getting a huge spotlight this year, and wanted to go on a tear when the latest Tiki tipple from Rated R or cocktail virgin pops up in their feeds? If you expect a recipe to have lasting value, it would behoove it to have a proper name instead of being a generic no-name so people know what they're talking about. Besides, the T.R.P.F.B.C. is a mouthful of a name - surely there's something zingy that would suit the glassful of win that the cocktail is?

Peach Sunshine
half of a ripe peach, peeled, stone removed, slightly chopped
1 oz coconut cream (Coco Lopez or Goya preferred)
3/4 oz white grapefruit juice
1/2 oz lemon juice
1 oz gold rum (Prichard's)
3/4 oz madeira (Malmsey)
1/2 oz pisco
2-3 dashes allspice bitters
grated cinnamon and peach slice for garnish

Blend all but garnish with 4 oz crushed ice until smooth (add ice last as you're building).
Pour into goblet, garnish, ooooh..

Bright, fluffy, dreamy. Slightly-sharp peach powerhouse, resting on a luxurious coconut satin sheet, with warm hickory-noted rum, writhing Madeira-maple and spice beneath.

Moreover, while with some coconut cream cocktails you want nothing to get in the way of the mouth-coating richness as you sink into tropical paradise, sometimes there's more to it. Rated R Cocktails did a Pina Colada Redemption series a couple years back, whose recipes I tried out when working through that first half of the coconut cream this year. The Pina Colada (JFL Style) isn't entirely to my tastes - the lime juice is a tad too sharp, lemon might work better there. But there's a lot to consider in the entire series*, particularly the point about the Pina Colada not being a properly Tiki cocktail for its lack of balance. It's a total sweet bomb. The JFL Style adds more sour and a dash of bitters to the mix, which turns the drink more refreshing in nature. I kept that in mind for this recipe, not just with the citrus fruit but with the madeira as well, and it helps the peach pop like nothing else.

*go check out the Shipwreck, named after one of the best G.I. Joe characters!

The name itself is pure off-the-top-of-the-head when trying to combine peach and Tiki worlds, though on later checking I see it's been used in a lot in preserve and quickbread recipes too. A natural connection for many, no doubt. I almost considered calling this Twilight Peach for the darker spirits used, but the unfortunate young adult book linkages and perhaps getting called out as confusing Nintendo's two biggest franchises put the kibosh on that. Apropos and for the record, Gamecube enthusiasts, I do think this recipe would be fit for a 3-D Mushroom princess on vacation.

Mixology Monday, March 2014: Preserves, part 2

[Insert picture here when taken - this particular composition needs natural, morning light, and a very specific prop. It'll be up Wednesday morning. moving real slow this week -- The Management]

Welcome back to Mixology Monday here at Feu de Vie! We've got a second, much more classically-hewing recipe for this month's theme: Preserves. (Head on over to Craig Umpleby's A World of Drinks, where there will soon be a round-up post of all the delightful concoctions.)

One of the best things about being a cocktailian and someone who late-bloomed from being a picky eater is discovering the wide range of flavors and foods in the world at an age where it can best be appreciated. Even better, so many new fruit flavors and more can be explored within the relatively "safe" medium of a preserve. Heck, as soon as I moved out from home it was a bottle of currant jelly and a bottle of apricot preserves, and it was all downhill from there (with maybe a little tequila thrown in for good measure).

Following up on that initial impulse, visits to HomeGoods and other stores with obscure offerings are a regular occurrence now. And, despite the gigantic brand name (literally, just look at the lettering on any of the blue-and-yellow buildings), IKEA has been home to some can't-find-anywhere-else ingredients: gooseberry preserves, pear soda, the best price anywhere on lingonberries, and then, the very-new-to-me pièce de resistance: cloudberry jam.

Ethereal, floral, much like honey but fruitier and more floral again.

JAM SOUR. Full stop.

But before getting to the recipe to showcase these show-stoppers, first a little background on these rare delicacies. A drupe like raspberries and blackberries but bright golden orange with rosy undertones, cloudberries tend to grow at mostly northern latitudes comprising Scandinavia and the British Isles, Russia, Canada and Alaska, and go by other names like salmonberry and bakeapple. In Sweden, they are Hjortron (ready-made for a Jeff Bridges-meets-Dr. Seuss mash-up - and I'm not talking White Russians). In Finland, they are Lakka.

So to show off these little gems, a nice dry white spirit was in order. Having used tequila and rum of late, and gin being a bit of a flavor show-off itself, grape-spirited pisco with brandy's affinity for fruit flavors seemed the right way to go. Further, the honeyed aspect of the jam put in mind a number of other honey-sweetened sours like the Brown Derby, the Airmail, the Bee's Knees, etc.. The Brown Derby's grapefruit led me to the Seventh Heaven and the El Floridita, and then finally searching Kindred Cocktails for "pisco" and "grapefruit juice." A number of Pisco Sour riffs popped up, most hewing rather closely to the style of the Miraflores, the direct model I used here.

Ah, so the cloud-berries of Scandinavia and the towering heights of the Andes. Sounds like a recipe for climbing a beanstalk to the whimsical heights of the Mushroom Kingdom.

Lakkatu

2 oz pisco

3/4 oz ruby red grapefruit juice

1/4 oz lime juice

(fat) 1/2 oz cloudberry jam

1 egg white

1 dash Teapot bitters

2 dashes Boker's bitters

garnishes: dropper of dark-colored (pimento) bitters for egg white art, 

unshelled lychee nuts or rambutan

Dry shake, wet shake, double-strain into a chilled coupe.

Garnish like you're 7 years old on summer vacation in the mid-'80s.

So it's not lychee or rambutan season, apparently, let alone would fresh cloudberries be available. *sigh* [the final pic will be worth it -- that is to say, substitute a fresh lychee or rambutan for the dried jujube hanging off the glass, and fresh cloudberries instead of raspberries for the Spinies]

A simple, happy sour, with or without garnish. The cloudberry features strongly, supported by the grapefruit juice (I also tried both white and pink grapefruit here - the bitterness of both detracted and stood out like a sore thumb), the hint of lime keeping the recipe bright and shapely. To mimic Miraflores' dual bitters, I selected a pair from Dr. Adam Elmegirab's collection (their rum base harmonizes well here): the strong/spicy Boker's to weight and whimsical Teapot to match the Nintendo attitude and further decorate the cloudberry. The pimento bitters for decoration also mimics the Peychaud's bitters' anise, while providing handy colorant for a certain image.


Cheers to Craig for a wonderful hosting job and a fun theme, and to Fred, as always for the cat wrangling - may you never be turned into a wolf and have to hunt down 20 cats in an abandoned one-street western town, just for a measly piece of heart.