Vodka
Indulge me please as I shift gears from cured meats to one of my other passions: the Bloody Mary. I really, really love a good Bloody Mary. In my opinion it’s one of the most perfect cocktails ever invented. I could drink them morning, noon and night (to say that a Bloody Mary can only be enjoyed during the day truly under-utilizes this classic drink). I love the spice of a Bloody Mary, the heat. I love chomping on the celery stalk between sips. I love mixing one up, carefully adding each ingredient like a mad scientist in the lab. And once I’ve stirred everything together and taken that first sip I have the same feeling that I imagine Jonas Salk had when he realized he had come up with a vaccine for polio.
All my life I have been on an Ahab-like quest to make the perfect Bloody Mary. And recently I have ratcheted-up my efforts by starting to infuse my own vodka.
It’s easier than you think – all you need is a bottle of decent vodka, whatever it is you want to infuse it with and a big jar to hold everything together.
Since I like my Bloody Mary spicy I thought the first infusions I would try would be more on the savory side instead of sweet. I picked up some fresh horseradish (an obvious accompaniment to the Bloody Mary) and some jalapeno peppers, along with two bottles of my preferred vodka. I sliced the horseradish up into long strips and put it in a jar which I then filled up with vodka. I took the jalapeno pepper, poked a few holes in it with a fork and threw that in another jar, in which I added some garlic cloves before pouring in the vodka.
I think at this point I made my first mistake. Perhaps I should not have thrown in half a dozen garlic cloves with only the one jalapeno pepper. Perhaps I should have included more peppers to balance it out. But I didn’t - I just sealed up the jar and stuck it in the "laboratory". And then I waited.
Here’s where I might have made another mistake. I should have probably filtered the infusions within a few days instead of waiting a few weeks. Because as they sat in their jars, the flavors just got stronger and stronger – which sounds good if you’re making a sweet vodka, but maybe not so good if you’re making something that turned into garlic vodka.
That’s right, what I had on my hands after a few weeks was a bottle of garlic vodka. Now this might disgust some of you, but I’m the type of person who doesn’t think it’s been a good day unless I have the smell of garlic on my fingers. And when I use it now to make a Bloody Mary I think it tastes pretty good – then again, when have you added garlic to something and it hasn’t been good?
The horseradish vodka turned out to be even better and now I can't imagine ever using regular vodka in my cocktails again. Recently I infused some with chopped habanero peppers - it’s hot, but not as hot as I was expecting. And, to make something a little more sweet for the ragazza, I infused some vodka with pineapple. I'm very happy with that one - I think it's my best one yet and it's going to be great for drinks in the summertime.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do for my next infusion - maybe I’ll try use use some of what I've been doing for the Charcutepalooza . Bacon vodka has been done to death…but what about pancetta vodka? Or maybe even duck prosciutto vodka?
<insert mad scientist laugh here>