eleven months pass...
Old blog entries. Sorry if any formatting's fucked, but I'm pasting from a backup instead of finding links.
EGGNOG
This is a fairly sweet eggnog; you may wish to reduce the amount of sugar by as much as half a cup. This makes ... um, a quart? ish?
1 cup water
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/4 cup cane syrup (substitute more maple or sugar, not molasses)
1 can evaporated milk
1 can sweetened condensed milk
7 egg yolks
3/4 cup spiced rum
1/4 cup bourbon
1 teaspoon vanilla
spices
Combine water, sugar, and syrups in a pot and heat until sugar is dissolved. If any of the spices are whole, add them to the syrup now to steep (I used some whole mace, for instance). Nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, allspice, and ginger all make good eggnog spices.
Beat egg yolks until lemony-yellow, add vanilla, and beat in milks. When syrup has cooled a bit, add it and the alcohol and strain (some of the recipes I based this on suggested straining through cheesecloth or coffee filters; I don’t have cheesecloth, and it was too thick for coffee filters, so I used a fine mesh strainer). Store in the fridge in a tightly closed container.
Tastes best after aged for at least a week, but will keep for a couple months. (If not longer, given the alcohol and sugar.)
Obviously the rum and bourbon make a big difference here. I mean, I say that's obvious, but there's still always someone making it with their Uncle Ted's homemade plastic-handle rum and a cup of white lightning. You don't need to spend an arm and a leg, but you do want something decent or there's no real benefit to making your own -- and it's probably cheaper to buy a carton of mix and add your own hooch.
I use Prichard's rum for eggnog and hot buttered rum, but as a Tennessee rum, it's hard to find outside the area. Rhum Barbancourt is also good. Screech would be ... authentic.
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Hot Buttered Rum
I’ve been curious about hot buttered rum, and if you hit google you’ll notice that there are a shitload of conflicting recipes out there, which fall mostly into three types: melted vanilla ice cream with butter, spices, and rum; brown sugar batter with rum; and plain old butter and rum. In each case, the ”hot” comes from boiling water or apple cider which is poured over the rest.
You gotta break it down and look at why it’s around to figure out how you want to make it, is what I figure. Why hot? Why buttered? Why rum?
Rum was originally a Colonial America product as much as a Caribbean one – forces of history and economy have just shifted the industry to the tropics over time. It was the default ”store-bought” liquor in the early colonies, supplementing the applejack and moonshine you could make yourself.
The hot’s easy enough to figure out. This is a toddy without the tea, a Bennigan’s $7 coffee drink without the coffee or Bailey’s, a hot chocolate type drink for adults and wayward youth. And the butter’s easier to explain than you’d think. It adds body: just like milk in hot cocoa, creamer in coffee, and so on and whatnot, the butter –- which in most versions is completely incorporated, emuslified –- thickens the drink and gives it a hot cocoa-like mouthfeel without adding any ”milkiness.” Cream would make a very different drink: remember that 80% of butter’s volume is dairy fat with virtually no distinct flavor once it’s combined with other things. In Tibet, tea is made the same way – presumably because butter takes up less room and lasts longer, especially if it’s clarified.
So, onward. Here’s one way to make a hot buttered rum which comes out tasting vaguely like ”butter rum” but mostly like rum and sweet spices, with no pronounced ”butter flavor” (which is the only role butter plays in the ice cream version).
For two mugs:
6 ounces rum. This is about four shots.
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tablespoons butter at room temperature.
spices to taste – cinnamon, nutmeg, baking spice, etc
dash of salt
Boiling water. You can substitute cider, but you don’t need to.
Cream butter, sugar, and spices together while the water heats up.
Divide in half between the mugs, add 3 ounces of rum to each, and top off with boiling water. Stir well to incorporate sugar mixture.
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This other thing you can do
This is a good time to toss some cloves, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, or anything else you think of as "pie spices" or "mulling spices" -- couple peppercorns in there wouldn't kill you, some orange or lemon zest -- into some vodka, rum, bourbon, or brandy. Add it to cider, tea, or coffee to taste, after it's sat till Halloween. Alcohol infusions are pretty easy -- if you use a lot of spices, you can wind up with a strong liquid spice blend that'll spice up some cider without adding a noticeable quantity of booze.
I'll have a bunch more winter drink stuff @ redfusion.livejournal starting in a month or so.
The eggnog's real fucking rich, incidentally, and I know some people dilute it with milk. It's a sipper, not a chugger.
― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 6 October 2006 18:35 (nineteen years ago)
one year passes...