Bottling the Pamper Moose: Homemade Vin de Pamplemousse with Bergamot

This year's label

It's been said that San Diego's seasons can be divided roughly into four: Early Summer, Summer, Late Summer, and Next Summer. As local flowers start to bloom, nights remain chilly and one still does see young women wearing hot pants, scarves, and fleece-lined boots, but it's undeniable that Early Summer is on us once more. Summer can't be far off — and with it comes a craving for lighter and more bitter drinks. Whether that bitterness comes from hops, citrus peel, quinine, wormwood, or more esoteric bittering agents, count me in. This weekend I got a leg up on Summer by bottling a faintly bitter grapefruit aperitif for our yard drinks in the coming months.

The vin d'orange, a bitter orange wine I put up last month, is still maturing in big glass jars and will be for another several weeks, but a grapefruit version of essentially the same aperitif, vin de pamplemousse, only took a month to macerate. Yesterday I bottled six liters of the traditional before-dinner drink. The recipe isn't wholly traditional, however. Oh, the grapefruit (pamplemousse in French) is legit. Even the sweet oranges I sliced and threw in to soften the wine a bit wouldn't raise every eyebrow in France. However, I'd gotten my hands on a load of bergamot oranges and included one in the mix, an addition that may cause purists to sniff in disdain. Ah, well. Their loss.

Racked, clear, and bottled: grapefruit wine

Bergamot, tea fanciers know, is a type of sour orange that lends its distinctive, almost lavender-like aroma to Earl Grey tea. The fruit looks a bit like a lemon, but unlike a lemon's, the volatile oils in its skin are so potent that they easily overwhelm food and drink if not treated with care. The juice is mild enough and can be used much like lemon juice, but truly, a small amount of skin or zest goes a long, long way. Two common precautions against its dominance in cooking and preserves making are (a) to use small amounts relative to the other ingredients and (b) to blanch each fruit before use. I chose the former: only one bergamot to every six grapefruit and two oranges.

Even in southern California, bergamots can be hard to track down during their late-winter Early Summer season. If you have access, use one. If not, just toss in an extra sliced grapefruit.

Vin de Pamplemousse with Bergamot

2 white grapefruit
4 ruby red grapefruit
1 bergamot
2 navel oranges
1 2" piece of vanilla bean, split lengthwise and cut into thirds
4.5 L crisp white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc (e.g., Trader Joe's coastal)
750ml 80 proof (40% abv) vodka
1.75 cups/350 g sugar

Cut each piece of citrus into an upper and lower half. Slice each half into half-moon shapes, about 1/4"/6mm thick, saving any juice. Combine all the ingredients (including any juice from slicing) into a single two-gallon/8L nonreactive container with a sealable lid such as a jar or carboy.

Stir or shake it, then allow it to rest in a cool, dark place (a closet is fine: no need to refrigerate). Strain after one month into a similar large container. After one day, rack the cleared liquid off the  cloudy residue at the bottom of the container. Strain this through cheesecloth or other clean filter, and bottle in clean, sterilized wine bottles. Seal with new corks and label. Let rest a few months in a cool, dark place.

Makes about six liters.

Goes well with:

• That vin d'orange I mentioned. Good stuff. 
• Each year, I try to make a batch of creme de noyau using crushed peach pits and a recipe from an old, old Creole cookbook. I don't always get around to it, but when I do make some, here's the recipe I use. 
• If light wines aren't your speed, how about fifty oranges and a gallon of corn whiskey?
• Fany Gerson's recipe for pasita, a dark raisin cordial from Mexico.
• Finally, more old recipes: three separate recipes for syrup of violets spanning nearly 250 years. 

Bookshelf: The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook

I am not a traditionalist 

when it comes to preserving, 

but I am a stickler for texture, balance, and appearance. 

The essential question is, 

does a preserve taste and look great? 

The answer to this question 

should always be yes.

~ Rachel Saunders

Ping. Ping. Pop. Ping.

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but that’s exactly what I’m after. I’m sitting at the kitchen table listening to jars of marmalade cool. Over on the butcher’s block, as each hot jar’s temperature drops, the air inside contracts and a little vacuum is born, drawing in — ping — the raised center of its lid. A seal is made. Across the room, the oven, its duty now done, adds is own deeper pops and dings as it heaves itself toward room temperature.

I’ve been making booze longer than I've been making preserves, but I've been doing both for more than two decades. In fact, just about any fruit or vegetable that crosses our threshold may well end up in jars with sugar, vinegar, or salt. In the kitchen, there’re preserves pans, cases of jars, strainers, jar tongs, and a battery of spices and herbs. Liquor, too — well, that’s a given. The preserves section of my library is bulging with cookbooks, textbooks, and agriculture bulletins spanning three centuries.

My latest find is Rachel Saunders’ The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook. That Saunders draws inspiration from California produce is unmistakable. The white guava-Meyer lemon marmalade, for instance, does not hail from Helsinki. Her aprium jam with green almonds calls for ingredients one rarely sees in Kansas and, while such trees can be found here in San Diego, Sorrento lemons bursting with oil are far from common. Think of these ingredients as the exotica of the book, inspiration for when you get your hands on something more than apples, figs, or oranges.

Saunders formed her jam company, Blue Chair Fruit, after of what sounds like an obsessive ten years learning the ins and outs jam-making working with the stellar produce available to Bay Area cooks. Clearly, she’s done a lot of thinking about the stuff and the book reflects that.

Divided into three broad sections, it covers techniques and gear; jams and jellies by season; and fruit-specific recipes. You won't find pickles, chutneys, compotes, or any of the other usual recipes one finds in other preserves books; just fruit-laden jams, clear jellies, and peel-flecked marmalades (and one candied orange peel recipe; it's a good fit). Ingredients range from commonplace fruits such as cherries, apples, rhubarb, and apricots to a few items that may take some tracking down: orange flowers, rosewater, and liqueurs of elderflower and ginger.

The thing about cookbooks — and this holds true especially for books discussing something as temperamental as preserves — is that recipes don’t always pan out. It’s no fault of the home cook; some recipes simply aren’t tested, are scaled down improperly from large-batch resstaurant recipes, or are written badly. A few weeks ago, I set out to make hot pepper jelly. For quick-cooked jelly like that, I normally research several recipes to get at the heart of proportions and compare techniques. Just reading the first recipe I pulled off the shelf, I realized its volumes and weights were off. Without even trying it, I knew that recipe would not work.

Not so with Saunders’ book. Every recipe I’ve tried works. The ping-ping marmalade on the butcher’s block? Saunders’ recipe. She calls for white grapefruit, so I raided a stash of them that our neighbor Carlo picked from his backyard. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s getting marmalade soon. But it’s not just that one recipe: every single recipe I’ve tried from The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook sets. Though yields are sometimes a bit off, I’m less concerned about that than I am of something tasting and looking great. Her stuff does.

If Saunders’ recipes sometimes seem long — well, they are. But they are not confusing. They are long because they go into precise detail while still leaving room for adjustments of ingredients, flavorings, or gear. Know who else had long recipes? Julia Child. Hers worked, too.

Next up? Peach jam. Perhaps with 100-proof Kentucky flavors. As usual, I’ll pull several recipes to cobble together my own, but the first place I’m headed is The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook.

Rachel Saunders (2010)
The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook
384 pages (hardback)
Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 9780740791437
$35.00

Goes well with:

• Lucy Norris’ book Pickled — on an array of pickle recipes collected in New York from dills to ducks tongues. 
• The River Cottage Preserves Book — a pocket-sized book on preserves more broadly. Originally published in the UK, but available in an American edition.

Given a Glut of Grapefruit

Fruit experts disagree about the origins of grapefruit,
how it was named, and even what species it is,
but there is little debate
about how delicious grapefruit are
and how they perk up tired taste buds.

~ Alice Waters
Chez Panisse Fruit

Not long ago, I was blessed with a huge bag of grapefruit. More precise, perhaps, to say that my friend Carlo called to say I could harvest as many as I liked from his side yard. Otherwise, they would just be left, untended, unloved, on the trees. The thought of hundreds of orphaned grapefruit was almost more than I could bear.

It turns out that dozens of grapefruit also were more than I could eat. At the end of a week, some peel had been candied, some dried and powdered for marinades and stews, the flesh sliced into a bowl with oranges, bananas, maraschino, and mint for a fruit salad. There was sufficient grapefruit bitters to last through the summer.

Breaking out the reamer, I juiced the remaining fruit. The dozen or so fat yellow globes yielded a liter of strained juice. Tasty enough—if tart—to drink straight up. Better to hit it with a splash of seltzer. Better still to measure it into a cocktail shaker to perk up them tired cocktail taste buds.

For sipping tequila neat, I favor more aged selections, but inocente puts out a clean blanco, a triple-distilled 100% blue agave tequila that stands up quite nicely to puckery grapefruit juice. Out it came.

Both Marleigh Riggins at Sloshed! and Chuck Taggart on The Gumbo Pages have written about Eric Alperin’s tequila-and-Campari cocktail, the sculaccione. I enjoy it as well, but bitter is sometimes a hard sell around this house. Fortunately, the Italian amaro Aperol (flavored with orange, gentian, and rhubarb among others) plays bitter roles with great success. With the switch of spirits, I dubbed this one the

Gudageen

2 oz blanco tequila (inocente Platinum)
¾ oz fresh lime juice
½ oz fresh grapefruit juice
½ oz Aperol
½ oz simple syrup
dash Angostura bitters

Shake with ice. Strain into an old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice.

Given the hundreds of cocktails in Dale DeGroff’s The Craft of the Cocktail, a casual reader might be forgiven for skimming right past the salt-and-pepper martini. Me? I’m not an unbending martini purist, but the glut of chocolate martinis, appletinis, and endless what-the-hell's-this-itinis has made me leery of deviations from the classic gin-and-vermouth formulae, so it was a while before I sampled this grapefruit-spiked version. Plymouth gin is lovely in this one. Oh, if I could only have back those misspent days.

Salt-and-Pepper Martini

1 ½ oz. gin
¾ oz. lemon juice
¾ oz. grapefruit juice
1 oz. simple syrup
2 dashes of Angostura bitters

Shake all the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled salt-rimmed martini glass.

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Bitter Me This: Grapefruit Bitters

Bitters is for cocktails, as salt is for soup.

~ Robert “DrinkBoy” Hess

A short post today, as I’m getting ready to roll out of town for a roadtrip to Los Angeles. Pics to come later.

Bitters is a decidedly old school cocktail ingredient enjoying a renaissance these days. Well, among some bartenders, anyway. It’s a pity how often I order a Manhattan and still need to specify “with bitters” because younger barkeeps don't know. But a lot of professional bartenders and home enthusiasts are getting into the game, not only using commercial examples such as Fee Brothers, The Bitter Truth, and Regan’s Orange Bitters No. 6, but also by making their own “house” bitters.

Why bother with bitters? Well, because they make cocktails taste great, that’s why. Intensely gaggy, puckering and, well, bitter on their own, cocktail bitters don’t make a pleasant tipple. But they do make a tipple pleasant and often smell great. Just a few dashes can make the difference between an “eh” experience and a flat-out “wow.” As the man says, they are as salt for soup. I've been known to dash some into cupcake frosting. Yes, on purpose.

Taking cues from Chuck Taggart over at the Gumbo Pages, John Deragon, and Jeffery Morgenthal, I made a batch of grapefruit bitters not long ago and am pleased with the results.


Grapefruit Bitters
(adapted from The Gumbo Pages)

I’ve included a dose of Bacardi 151 here for two main reasons: (1) I needed to pour some out of a bottle of 151 to make room for a bunch of allspice berries while trying out a homemade version of pimento dram and (2) I used some big honkin’ grapefruits—local oro blancos—so I needed more high-proof spirits than Chuck’s recipe called for to cover the ingredients.

Base
750ml Wray & Nephew Overproof White Rum (126 proof)
4 oz (120ml) ml Bacardi 151
2 large grapefruits
2 tablespoons whole coriander seed
2 oz fresh ginger, peeled and finely diced
¼ cup roasted unsalted almonds

Caramel
6 tablespoon sugar
3 (45ml) tablespoons water

Peel the grapefruits and finely chop the whole peel, including (and especially) the white pith that makes these bitters bitter. Put the pieces with the ginger and rums in a large glass jar with a silicon or rubber gasket seal.

Heat a dry skillet over a medium flame. Toast the coriander seeds until they are slightly darkened (brown is what we’re going for here, not anything even close to black). Put the seeds into a mortar and lightly crush them. Alternately, spread the toasted seeds on a cutting board and use the flat of a 8-10” kitchen knife to push against them to lightly crush them. You’re only looking to break the seeds into 2-5 pieces for greater flavor extraction, not pulverize them.

Roughly chop the almonds and toast them lightly in the dry skillet. Add to the jar. Seal, swirl it about, and store for one week. Give it a gentle shake whenever you pass by to remind it who’s boss.

After a week, strain everything through a fine sieve lined with a cotton strainer, several layers of cheesecloth, or a coffee filter. Using a funnel, pour it into an empty liter bottle.

Finish your bitters by adding caramelized sugar syrup -- place the sugar in a small, heavy pan (unlined copper if you’ve got it) and heat over medium heat until the sugar melts and turns light-to-medium brown. Sugar turns quickly, and burns readily. Watch the pot carefully and remove it from the heat as soon as it gets almost to the color you want. Remove from the heat and carefully add the water. Stir and/or swirl until all the sugar has dissolved. Add the caramel syrup to the bitters and let stand until it's clear, then decant into small bottles.


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