Taking a Tiki Shortcut with Simbre Sauce

Last summer, I uncovered a stash of underpriced Zaya Gran Reserva rum in a coastal mom and pop liquor store. I rolled away with a single drink in mind and half the stock in my trunk. This aged rum from Trinidad and Tobago is big-flavored, slightly sweet, and a lot of my friends use it as a sipping rum. In my book, though, Zaya shines as a mixer, especially when it’s one of multiple rums in a drink. In fact, the odd snifter and Mai Tai aside, we’ve used almost all of it mixed in a Depression-era tropical concoction: The Nui Nui.

The drink dates back to the late 1930’s and is credited to legendary self-promoter and tiki forefather Don The Beachcomber. How much do we like the Nui Nui? So much that we’ve downed three bottles of Zaya since this summer — and each drink, the way we make it, calls for only an ounce. The other ingredients are just fruit juices, Appleton rum, and a syrup we’ve dubbed Simbre Sauce.

We came up with Simbre Sauce because of the sheer volume of Nui Nuis we were downing. The sauce has perfectly legitimate non-boozy uses and sometimes gets drizzled on ice cream or yogurt and granola around here. But its real purpose is to cut down the time it takes to make a drink. Rather than pouring the various syrups and tinctures called for in the original recipe every time we wanted a batch, our friend Douglas pre-batched them as a single syrup to streamline the process. I dubbed the result Simbre (SIM-bray) Sauce after an old name in his family.

Simbre Sauce

350ml cinnamon syrup
175ml vanilla syrup
175ml pimento dram (an allspice liqueur)
5ml Angostura bitters

Mix, bottle, and store under refrigeration.

Ingredient notes: I use homemade syrups in the concoction above, but Trader Tiki’s range of tropical syrups make blending something like this a snap. If you do use Trader Tiki syrups, be aware that the cinnamon is strong and you may need to use a little less. This is good: it leaves more to go around. If you want to make your own, add 6 4” cinnamon sticks to 2 cups of water and 2 cups of sugar in a pot, simmer about 2 minutes and allow to cool before straining and bottling.

Trader Tiki himself crafting Nui Nuis

For the pimento dram, unless you're the sort to make your own, use St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram. Eric Seed of Haus Alpenz has been importing the stuff and since I bought my first bottle, I’ve never been without some.

And now, the Whiskey Forge variation of this old tropical drink. It lacks the traditional long orange peel and uses block ice rather than crushed ice. If you want to make one that adheres to the old method, see Kaiser Penguin’s take on it below.

Simbre Nui Nui

3 oz Appleton Estate V/X
1 oz Zaya
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz fresh orange juice
1 oz Simbre Sauce

Combine the ingredients in a shaker and shake with ice. Strain into ice-filled mugs. Sip. Smile.

Goes well with:

• RumDood looks at Zaya
• I show a few ways to make vanilla syrup.
• Trader Tiki’s Hand-Crafted Exotic Syrups
• St Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram at DrinkupNY
• Kaiser Penguin’s take on the Nui Nui 
• Beachbum Berry's Tiki+ App is Back

Rowley’s House Pickles with Pimento Dram

Every few months, I put up a few jars of mixed pickles for my lunches and occasional dinner if we’re grilling burgers or brats. Recently, I’ve begun spiking those batches with the Jamaican allspice liqueur called pimento dram. The change is good.

Pimento, as allspice is known in Jamaica, is the berry of a Caribbean myrtle tree (Pimenta diocia). It’s one of the few spices native to the new world and—in the US, anyway—is often included in baked desserts. Those who know it in cocktails, however, or in the cooking outside the US understand its savory role well. In fact, it’s responsible for the characteristic taste of Jamaican jerked chicken and pork, and can be found in sauerkraut, ham brines, pickled fish, jugged hare, picadillo, and Indian curries. I’ve also used it in shrimp ceviche and bread & butter bar eggs.

Here, I used a dose of it to oompf up our house pickles. If you don’t have any pimento dram on hand, you can either order some from Haus Alpenz here, substitute lightly toasted and barely cracked whole berries…or see Paul Clarke’s directions for making your own here at the Cocktail Chronicles.

Rowley’s House Pickles with Pimento Dram
(based on a recipe from Quick Pickles by Dan George)

Vegetables & Prep
3 lbs Kirbys or other small, thin-skinned pickling cucumbers
3 Tbl kosher salt
4 Tbl olive oil
1 lb mixed heirloom carrots, peeled and sliced into coins
3 bell peppers (red, yellow, orange) chopped into 1” chunks
1 large onion, peeled and chopped into 1” chunks
10 fat cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped

Spiced Pickling Syrup
5 cups cider vinegar
3 cups brown sugar
2 Tbl Creole or Dijon mustard
1 Tbl each brown and yellow mustard seed
1 Tbl pimento dram OR 1 tsp dry toasted and cracked whole allspice berries
2 tsp coriander
1 tsp fennel seed
1 tsp green cardamom pods
1 tsp whole cloves
1 4” cinnamon stick
4 bay leaves

Trim ends of cucumber and slice each into thick coins (about ½” thick). In a stainless steel or glass bowl, toss sliced cucumbers and salt. Mix gently but thoroughly. Refrigerate cucumbers and salt for 1-2 hours.

Drain and rinse the salted cucumbers under cold running water.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large non-reactive saucepan, then sauté the carrots, onion, garlic, and bell pepper pieces at medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to sweat and just begin to soften—about 5 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat and set aside.

In a small frying pan, dry roast the mustard seeds, coriander seeds, fennel seeds, cardamom pods, and allspice berries (if using) over medium high heat just until you hear the seeds begin to pop. Transfer to a medium nonreactive pot. Break the cinnamon and lightly toast it. Add it with the remaining syrup ingredients to the pot and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, stirring until the sugar dissolves.

Add the cucumbers to the vegetables in the large saucepan. Toss gently to combine. Bring the pickling syrup back to a boil. Pack three large preserving jars with the vegetables. Add pimento dram (if using) to the syrup, pour the hot liquid over the vegetables, and seal the jars. Set the jars aside to cool. Once cool, refrigerate.

Yield: slightly less than 1 US gallon/4 liters

Pickled Shrimp, a Lowcountry Ceviche

It’s hot in San Diego. Miserable hot. Playing in the hose hot. To escape the worst of the heat, I turned on the stove—briefly—yesterday morning to blanch shrimp for an old version of a cold ceviche that South Carolinians would recognize simply as pickled shrimp.

The recipes for both the shrimp and the spice mix for the boil are adapted from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, though I altered the proportions for a bigger batch. In heat like this, I’m firing up the burners as infrequently as possible, so the bigger batch gets us through two days with minimal extra hotness. Most of the batch got toted along to a poker game last night with a mess of sangria, but there’s still a few to throw in a green salad for lunch or a light dinner. They're snappy little appetizers for cocktail parties and handy to have on a picnic. Better with beer than wine, though: the residual acidity in the shellfish can clash with red wines in particular.

An ingredient note: the original recipe calls for sour oranges, but those are infrequent finds here. The mix of fresh juices below is an attempt to recreate that Seville/naranja agria taste. If you have blood oranges, then by all means use them for the orange juice component in the juice blend. They make a better-tasting pickle and I regret we had none on hand. Still, though, this was tasty. And house is cool as a cucumber today.

Pickled Shrimp

First make the pickling solution.

3 large dried bay leaves
1 oz pimentro dram or 5 whole allspice berries
1.5 oz coriander seeds, dry toasted for 30 seconds until aromatic
1.5 Tbl black peppercorns
1 Tbl kosher salt
1 Tbl sugar
1.5 tsp Aleppo or other red pepper flakes
1.5 cups rice vinegar
2/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1 cup fresh grapefruit juice
1 cup fresh Valencia or blood orange juice

1. Grind the bay leaves, allspice (if using), coriander, peppercorns, salt, and sugar in a mortar or spice mill into a rough powder. Add this powder to a 3- or 4-quart nonreactive container.
2. Add the vinegar, juices, red pepper, and pimento dram (if using) to the container and set aside.

Second, blanch the shrimp.

1 gallon water
4 Tbl shrimp boil (see below)
3 lbs medium shrimp, heads off, peels on

1. Heat the water and shrimp boil spice mixture in a large stock pot. Rinse and drain the shrimp while the water heats.
2. Let the water boil 2-3 minutes.
3. Add the shrimp (in two batches if necessary) to the water, turn off the heat, and let it rest one minute. The shrimp will turn pink and firm.
4. Using a strainer, scoop out the shrimp and throw over ice to stop the cooking.
5. Peel the shrimp, slip them into the pickling solution, and cool.

The cooled shrimp are ready to eat within four hours and are best if eaten with 24.

The shrimp boil spice mix is also from the Lee brothers’ cookbook, though I prefer to make mine more of a powder than the rough grinding they call for. This is a decent all-purpose seafood boil and would be fine for crabs, crawfish, and other shellfish as well as broiled or grilled fish.

Shrimp Boil

1 Tbl peppercorns
1 Tbl celery seeds
6 bay leaves, snipped with scissors
½ cup kosher salt
3 Tbl ground cayenne

Place all ingredients in a spice mill (I use a Krups coffee mill for spices—and nothing but spices). Grind to a medium powder. Store in a jar.

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Bread and Butter Bar Eggs

This Spring, my bread and butter pickles took a hard left turn. Bread and butters, after kosher-style dills, are arguably the most well-known cucumber pickle in the US. My recipe is pretty consistent from batch to batch, but this time I couldn’t leave well enough alone and got chickens involved.

As I’ve mentioned before, pickled bar eggs are a particular favorite of mine, even if they are a bit old fashioned (or just plain divey). Here and there, you still find bars that have a large glass jug with pickled eggs bobbing around in vinegar and bay leaves. Whether they really rise and fall with changes in the barometric pressure—as some flannel-mouthed bartenders claim—is a question for another day.

Some of my pickled egg experiments don’t turn out as well as hoped (the Cape Malay masala version needs work). Overall, though, eggs make great spiced pickles, exactly the kind I’d like to see more often grace back bars for hungry drinkers. The smack and tang of vinegar also make them a good mid-day snack when I’m peckish, but don’t want to eat a whole meal. A pinch of salt, maybe some Sriracha hot sauce, and I'm good.

When the latest batch of bread and butter cukes was down to just a few slices, the jar still held nearly a quart of pickle juice flavored with seeds of celery and mustard and the ubiquitous turmeric (the rhizome that turns ballpark mustard yellow). Rather than pitch it, I cooked a batch of eggs, slipped them into the spiced liquid, and pushed the jug to the back of the fridge. After two weeks, the eggs firmed, turned a luminous turmeric yellow, and took on the definite sweet-and-sour tang of the original pickle.

Here’s the shortcut to make them without the cucumber prelude. Remember, hardboiled eggs are a mistake. If you’re boiling them, you’re doing it wrong. See here for easy instructions on cooking eggs without that sulfurous, stanky green ring.

Bread and Butter Bar Eggs

2 dozen hard-cooked eggs, peeled
1 lb onion
1 ½ Tbl kosher or sea salt
1 ½ tsp celery seed
1 tsp powdered turmeric
¼ tsp cracked allspice (or 1 tsp pimento dram)
1 Tbl each brown and yellow mustard seeds
4 cups cider vinegar
3 ½ cups light brown sugar

Peel and slice the onions into half-moons, about ¼” wide. Toss with the salt in a nonreactive bowl and set aside for an hour. Rinse and drain.

In a nonreactive pot, add the remaining ingredients (except the eggs) and bring to a boil. Stir as needed to dissolve the sugar. Reduce the heat and simmer 3-5 minutes. Remove from the heat, cover, and let cool to room temperature.

Place the eggs in a nonreactive container, such as a big glass preserving jar or food-grade plastic, and pour the liquid over them. Cover and refrigerate. The eggs should be fully pickled in two weeks, but even a few days will make a dramatic difference.

Serve with beer, whiskey, boilermakers, a pinch of salt, and a grind of pepper. Get all fancy if you like and slice them into quarters lengthwise for adding to salads. Toss them in a picnic basket or a shoebox lunch.

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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