I have invented hot gingersnap rum.

[xiphias]

Despite, or perhaps because of, not having all the ingredients I wanted, and having to improvise, I made a tasty beverage.

See, yesterday, as I was trying to get stuff done, it Just Wasn't Happening. So I looked at what I HAD done, and what still needed to be done, and decided that I could afford to just declare the day a loss, and slack. The CRITICAL things all got done, so I just punted the rest of the list.

And I felt creative. And I wanted to play with some techniques which I knew about but hadn't played with enough.

One of them is "fat washing". See, most of the esters which are fat-soluble are also alcohol-soluble. So you can get a tasty fat, like butter or bacon grease, melt it, mix it with alcohol, chill it, and then skim the fat off the top, and a good percentage of the flavors will remain behind in the alcohol.

Now, as we keep kosher in the house, the only fat I had to play with was butter. But I didn't want to just do PLAIN butter. I wanted to do some sort of FLAVORFUL butter. I could do an herbes fines butter, and maybe mix that with gin, but I didn't feel like it. I decided I wanted to use mulling spices of some sort. And mix it with dark rum.

But I was also wondering what would happen if I actually made something closer to butterscotch and used THAT.

So I started by melting butter, then mixing in brown sugar. Except I didn't have brown sugar. So I used turbanado sugar instead. I added in some allspice, and that smelled good. And it smelled like it wanted ginger. So I put that in.

I got the whole thing cooking together, and it started smelling like gingersnaps. I decided that that wasn't a bad thing, and just went in that direction. Added some more sugar -- regular white sugar, because I was low on turbanado -- a little vanilla, a couple cloves.

Then, after it was all melted together and kind of gingersnap/butterscotch-y, I added in the dark rum.

And found that we had a lot less dark rum than I'd thought we had. So I still needed to add more. I went downstairs to get some Bacardi. Which we were ALSO out of. I looked at the "rum" section of our liquor cabinet, which is actually "rum and other alcohols made from sugar". I brought up the cachaca and the arrak.

The arrak was too harsh, so I poured a bunch of cachaca in. I stirred it around, and let it cook together a little (and lit it on fire once, just for fun, just for a couple seconds), and then took it off the stove and put it in the fridge.

After a few hours, I skimmed the butter off the top (and I've saved the butter. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but SOMETHING yummy. Maybe pancakes or something).

When Lis came home, she didn't want alcohol, so I kept it until tonight. And Lis just drank it.

And it was GOOD. (I already had known that, because I'd been tasting it all along.)

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Oooh, the fat-washing makes perfect sense, from what I've read of the sainted Harold Magee, but it wouldn't have occurred to me. Now I'm wondering if that's the secret behind Bakon.

And if ginger were one of the few things I can taste right now, I'd be *all over* gingersnap rum.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I'm certain that it is how they do Bakon -- if it actually tastes good. If they're saying there's "no chemical flavors", and if actual bacon goes into their factory, then I'd be absolutely sure.

Bacon bourbon is a common item on mixologist-based bars in the Boston area and in other mixology cities, and that's how that's made.

I admit to rolling my eyes at the whole "pure Northwest potatoes, column-distilled, avoiding the multiple heating cycles of pot stills which can 'bruise' the alcohol."

Alcohol doesn't "bruise". What the multiple heating cycles in pot stills do is actually leave some potato flavor in the vodka. Once you column-distil something, well, I suppose that, from a homeopathic point of view, there MIGHT be some relevance to what it was, but, as far as I'm concerned, if you column-distil alcohol from a mash made of purest dew-washed rye picked at dawn by virgins in white robes, and column-distil alcohol from a mash made of garbage you picked out of you compost heap, you get exactly the same thing. It's only when you pot-distil vodka that whatever you made it from is even RELEVANT.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

It's a Seattle product; they *live* on hyperbolic marketing terms up there.

(And yes, it really does taste good - or did when I could still taste stuff. Makes a kick-ass Bloody Mary, and an excellent vodka sauce for pasta. I've still got most of a bottle in my liquor cabinet awaiting the return of my sense of smell.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*giggles delightedly*
*steals your description of pot-distilling vs column distilling*

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

That sounds incredibly good, and incredibly fun to make, too. Thanks for the story -- I will certainly have to try this sometime soon.