Tag Archives: alcohol: rum

Pumpkin Bourbon Eggnog & Coquito

cocktails, non-fiction January 25, 2015 Leave a comment

So I realize I’m a month late with this particular post but my life took a turn for the discombobulated. I apologize. Here we go.

We begin with this ONE simple fact: my domestic engineer ideas are usually terrible. … Ok, the ideas aren’t terrible, I’m terrible at executing them.

I decided my contribution to Christmas would be this pumpkin bourbon eggnog recipe I’ve been dying to try. Like most of America these days, I love all things pumpkin. I also like all things bourbon. And I like eggnog. And I was doing all this before it was cool (especially the pumpkin thing).

This recipe was about 57 million times easier than the the recipe used in my Rompope experiment.

PBE recipe

So here’s what I learned about eggnog:

IT USES RAW EGGS.

Everyone freaks out about raw eggs, which I don’t fully understand, because everyone USED to consume raw eggs, and nobody was worried about salmonella THEN. Still, I didn’t want to kill everyone at Christmas, so I checked it out further.

In the United States, salmonella poisoning is most commonly caused by two types of bacteria, called Salmonella serotype Typhimurium and Salmonella serotype Enteritidis. This bacteria, as well as other forms of bacteria that make you sick that you can pick up from eggs, does not occur naturally IN the egg. It’s ON the egg SHELL, which becomes contaminated during processing/handling due to the unsanitary conditions that Big Agriculture allows in the name of making a prophet.

Usually, salmonella will get into an egg when the shell is cracked and the egg comes out. How do you avoid contamination? Well, obviously no method short of fully cooking your eggs is a 100% guarantee, and the risk of salmonella poisoning is small anyway, but you can take precautions to help further reduce risk. If I have to use raw eggs, I clean them. First, I let them sit in a white vinegar and warm water bath for 5-10 minutes. Then, I rinse them in warm water with a gentle, non-toxic soap – I specifically use Method soap.

After that, I crack them and do whatever I have to do, and so far, no gastrointestinal disasters 😀

Anyway, I was having some kind of issue with the eggs. I could.not.separate.them.

The yolks kept breaking, which meant I had to keep starting over, because if any of the yolk gets into the whites, the whites won’t whip into a meringue.

A LOT of eggs later, I finally managed to separate the right number, all at once.

This recipe is super simple. Basically, you heat the pumpkin, spices, milk, cream, and bourbon in a pot, then later add the egg yolks.

PBE pot

egg & pumpkin mixture

Then, you whip the egg whites into a meringue…

PBE merengue

meringue!

…and then fold the egg whites into the pumpkin mixture.

The taste was good, but I didn’t love the texture of the meringue folded into the mixture. I suppose it’s possible I done fucked this up, but nobody loved the mixture.

PBE plus egg whites

finished product

It looks grainy, it was too foamy, it just…wasn’t perfect. Not anything I’d serve at Christmas.

I decided to store it in the refrigerator overnight in the hope the meringue would kind of…deflate…no such luck, but the taste was even better after letting it sit overnight, so….

I made it again! Minus the meringue (which made dealing with the eggs a lot easier). I also cut the bourbon. A lot of my family is elderly and won’t drink anything too strong. It’ll mix with their medication and I’ll be staring down the gun at the more handicapped, psychotic version of ‘All in the Family.’

The texture was much better this time.

PBE minus egg whites

finished product 2.0

And the taste was better after leaving it overnight. However.

It stopped being a liquid and became a little too viscous. A lot too viscous.

PBE day 2 spatula

it barely dripped off the spatula

I had to enlist my mother’s help here. I don’t like doing this, because she tends to take over and do it a thousand times better than I ever could (to be fair, she’s got 30 years experience on me). But I couldn’t come up with a way to reheat the eggnog without breaking the cream (keeping it from curdling).

We left it out at room temperature, but that didn’t help either.

By this point, Christmas was approaching very fast. I think it was two days away, and I was doomed, because I couldn’t make the eggnog the night before, like I wanted, and there was no way to make it and serve it Christmas day without inconveniencing those doing the cooking.

So I did something risky.

I moved on to a different (but similar) recipe entirely. Enter Coquito. We had been gifted Coquito by someone at work. It’s apparently traditional in South American and Hispanic cultures, and one of my coworkers passed out her mom’s homemade version as a gift.

coquito recipe

Similar recipe, less work, but really risky because hey I’d never done it before and when it comes to stuff like this, I need practice.

I had to go out and buy ingredients (although I thankfully I already had rum, the liquor store was a madhouse), but it turned out really great, even after refrigerating it…it was still a liquid, for example. I added drained, sour cherries to marinate and soak up some of the alcohol (good move!).

Annnd EVERYONE liked it. Or they were too nice to say they didn’t. But considering everyone came back for seconds, I think they liked it, and my aunt kept the leftovers.

Everything worked out! Christmas miracle 2014!

Rompope

cocktails, non-fiction November 23, 2014 Leave a comment

I bought a book called Winter Cocktails: Mulled Ciders, Hot Toddies, Punches, Pitchers, and Cocktail Party Snacks by Maria Del Mar Sacasa at TJ Maxx for super cheap. Pro Tip: ALWAYS check out the cheap books in non-bookstores. You’d be surprised at what you’ll find.

As I mentioned in my update, I am testing cocktails for both practical reasons and love of alcohol and glamor. Considering my friend and I  want a seasonal cocktail menu in our future speakeasy, we’re currently running at winter at full speed (it’s November), and I love visiting liquor stores…here we are.

I started last weekend with the relatively simple mulled white wine recipe. Due to a communication mixup, I didn’t actually have any brandy or pear eau-de-vie so I substituted triple sec…which worked well enough, although I’m going to try it again.

This week, I went with the Rompope recipe, which I’d never even heard of until opening this book.

According to this book, ‘rompope’ is a derivation of the Spanish ‘ponche de hueve’ (egg punch) and first brewed by 17th century nuns in Mexico. Rompope and Conquito (another recipe later in the book) are milk punches. It can be served warm or cold – I went warm.

Now, this recipe isn’t that complicated…
rompope recipe

and the final result was delicious…
rompope mug

but it was labor intensive – it took the better part of three hours including prep & cleanup. AND THERE WAS A LOT OF CLEANUP. You can’t even see the huge mess the stove is in this photo.
rompope mess

First, the recipe calls for blanched almonds. I had trouble finding these in stores, so I blanched my own. Blanching and hand skinning the almonds took about 25 minutes by itself. This only becomes a big deal because the rest of the recipe takes forever. After finishing that up, I used the food processor to grind the almonds and sugar into paste…which is where I would go back later and write in “Shortcut 1.” More on that later.

Next, you bring the milk (and lemon rind, vanilla extract, baking soda, and cinnamon sticks) to a boil then allow them to simmer. You know what you don’t do? TURN YOUR BACK FOR 30 SECONDS. I had the Islanders and Penguins game on in the background and I had JUST checked the pot when I heard the Isles’ goal horn. In the 30 seconds it took me to watch the goal, the pot boiled and spilled over everywhere, burning on the stove. AWESOME.

After doing the best clean up I could without burning off my finger prints, I got back to work. I let the pot simmer for 20 minutes. Carefully following the directions, I whisked the almond paste with the egg yolks and the rest of the sugar…which is where I learned “don’t use a whisk.” The sugar, almond paste, and egg yolks only balled together inside the whisk, like a bright yellow ball of sugary sunshine in a cage. I had to jab it out with a butter knife.

Anyway, after taking the milk off the stove and removing the solids (lemon rind & cinnamon stick) and confirming the milk at the bottom of the pot got burned, I poured the useable milk into the yolk/sugar/almond mixture, mixed it together with the spatula and put it back in the pot, where it would sit on the stove 5-7 minutes on low heat, “thickening.”

7 minutes later, there was absolutely no thickening. I had a feeling that maybe the “almond paste” was getting in the way. Remember Shortcut 1? Shortcut 1 is “Buy almond paste.” My food processor could not get the almonds fine and pasty enough to dissolve in the milk mixture…or be something you could drink, anyway. Since at some point I’d figured out that I was basically making liquid custard, I realized that the heat wasn’t high enough and the almond “paste” probably wasn’t helping, so I strained the almond paste out of the liquid with a tea strainer. That took 5-10 minutes. I cranked the heat up to medium (rather than low) and let go for another 7 minutes.

I knew at about minute 5 that I’d made the right move, because it coated the back of the spoon, which was a hint to “it’s ready” in the recipe.

The stuff was delicious, and with the rum mixed in, it was very good.

Unfortunately, there was tons of it. I had a mug, I handed out a mug to everyone in the house, and the pot was still half full. I poured the leftovers into a tempered glass pitcher. The book says Rompope keeps for a month in a sterilized glass bottle, but I didn’t have one of those, so I went with the pitcher. If I die of some kind of bacterial gastroenteritis, you’ll know why. I won’t have leftovers around that long, but who knows how fast bacteria can kill you?

The finished product was sort of a twist on egg nog. Different taste, same texture, but it was really good.

So, Rompope, which was delicious, was a 3 hour milk punch trial by fire that I just wasn’t ready for. Part of that was my own fault (pot boiling over) and part of it was OMG SIMMER IT FOREVER. There was also a lot of it. Only use this particular recipe if you’re having 4-6 people drinking it.

This is also a recipe you don’t want to try for the first time when guests are coming over. Unless you are some kind of liquid custard whiz, I suggest trying this before making it in case you have anyone you don’t want seeing you embarrass yourself. I also suggest making it days ahead of time, which can be done too.