Liqueur Is Quiqueur

LEMONADE SPRINGS

by

Sandye Carroll

Liqueur Is Quiqueur

I am not much of a hard liquor fan. The only straight liquor I like is Canadian whiskey, and I don’t like that very much. I never make mixed drinks at home because it’s boring. Besides, for whatever it’s worth, I don’t particularly like mixed drinks. What I do like are fortified wines, like sherry and port, and liqueurs. Someday, I will learn to make a passable imitation of a dry sherry or a marsala. Until then, I’ll have to be content to buy them. But, right now, I can make liqueurs. And I do.

Besides distilling, which I’m afraid to do, there are three methods for making liqueurs. The first is to fortify a wine with brandy or vodka, or some other booze. If you make fruit wines, like I do, this is a cheap and delicious technique. The second is to buy extracts, flavored to taste like Chartreuse, Benedictine, apricot brandy, or whatever, and mix them with sugar and booze to make an imitation whatever. They make good tasting liqueurs, but these liqueurs lack the smoothness and richness of liqueurs made with real fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices. The third method is to blend mixtures of fruits and seasonings with sugar and booze, and let them age into real liqueurs. This is the cheapest method, and my favorite.

The first thing you do is choose a flavor of booze which goes with the fruit you are using. For instance, gin goes very nicely with oranges. Then you alternate layers of fruit pieces with layers of crushed rock candy (which dissolves faster than plain sugar) in a jar. When the jar is loosely filled, pour your booze over everything until the jar is brim full. Cover the jar tightly and let the liqueur work at room temperature for at least six weeks. Six months is better. When you think that the booze has extracted as much of the flavor from the fruit as it can, strain ,off the solids, and bottle the liqueur tightly to age for at least six months. A year is much better. The aging will make the liqueur smooth, and combine all of the flavors into one complex blend.

Don’t throw away the fruit you used to flavor the liqueur. It is good to eat on top of ice cream, and it is. good to put into cakes or cookies. If you like to serve fruity sauces with ham or other meats, you might like to make a hot sauce using liqueur fruit. It’s not bad.

You can use just about any fresh or dried fruit available for fruit liqueurs. However, take my advice and avoid Thompson seedless grapes. They make a lousy tasting liqueur. And while I’m giving out tips, let me give you a few more. (1) For a clear liqueur, don’t press the fruit through the strainer when you are filtering the liqueur before aging it. Just let the liquid drip through the solids by the force of gravity. (2) Use cheap booze in liqueurs because long aging, and the sugar and fruit, will smooth over any harshness. (3) The fruit, especially if it is dried, will absorb some of the booze. Therefore, the amount of booze you start with is not the amount of liqueur you will end up with.

Making liqueurs is an incredibly hang-loose process. The only reason I am about to give you some recipes is that no one ever believes me. These are only examples of what you can do with the genre.

Dried fruits make great liqueurs because their flavor is more concentrated. Their one disadvantage is that they soak up more of the original booze than fresh fruits do, but then they don’t cut down the proof of the liqueur by adding water the way fresh fruits do. Also, dried fruits which have been used for flavoring liqueurs are much better for eating than their fresh forms are after that soaking.

My favorite liqueur of all time is apricot liqueur. To make it, wash dried apricots to remove the sulfur, and then dry them thoroughly. Layer them loosely in a jar alternating the layers with thin layers of crushed rock candy. When the bottle is full of fruit, fill it with vodka or gin, and seal it tightly. Let the liqueur work for six months, strain it, and then let it age for a long as you can stand it. A year is barely long enough.

You can make a variation on this theme by combining wine and brandy with the dried fruit and sugar. This wine cordial makes a lower proof drink than the hard liquor type, so it is especially important to use dried fruits here. Fresh fruit is full of water which is leached out of the fruit by the alcohol, thereby lowering the proof of the liqueur still further. To make a wine cordial, put about a pound of dried fruit into a jar, along with two cups of sugar, a fifth of red or white wine, and a cup of cheap brandy. Cover the jar tightly, and let the liqueur work for only four to six weeks. This is a wine cordial, so the flavors don’t have to be as intense as in a liqueur. After the cordial has served its apprenticeship, you have a choice. You can either strain off the fruit and age the cordial in airtight bottles just like you would any other liqueur, or you can keep the fruit in the cordial and serve it immediately. Fruit that is left in the liqueur too long will lose some of its appetizing color. Personally, I like the cordial better when it is aged, but it sure does look pretty to see a piece of brightly colored fruit sitting in the bottom of your glass of cordial.

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LEMONADE SPRINGS

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Not all liqueurs have to be made with fruit. Chartreuse and Benedictine, for example, are secret blends of herbs which supposedly grow in the mountains around the monasteries which developed these liqueurs. Herb liqueurs require careful blending and long aging. It is easier to make good liqueurs from nuts and seeds. Walnuts for example, make a very good liqueur, and coffee makes an incredible one. Coffee liqueur is very easy to make, but it is expensive, because a lot of booze is trapped in the cells of the ground coffee and is lost for good.

To make the liqueur, soak one pound of coffee (even old, stale coffee works well) in 2Vz fifths of dark rum for a week or so. Be sure to keep it airtight all of the time or the alcohol will evaporate. Filter the coffee out of the rum, and add one or two cups of sugar. You can use white, brown, raw or turbinado sugar, according to your taste. I like brown sugar, personally. Add the sugar slowly, tasting the liqueur until it is just sweet enough. Many people object to the cloying sweetness of some coffee liqueurs, so go slowly. Bottle, and let the liqueur age for at least six months.

One of the most unusual liqueurs you can make is made with oatmeal. It is Athole Brose, a Scottish liqueur, and uses Scotch, of course, for its base booze. It is supposed to be made in a half gallon crock, but maybe you would be forgiven a jar or bowl since this is a foreign country anyway. Mix together in the crock a half pound of honey (heather honey, I suppose, is authentic); a half cup of cold water, and a handful of oatmeal. When it is thoroughly mixed, it will be a thick paste. Slowly pour one quart of Scotch whiskey into the paste, stirring all the time with a silver spoon. Keep on stirring the mixture, with the silver spoon, of course, until a froth rises. Pour the mixture into bottles, and age it for at least a few days. It is meant to be drunk as a liqueur, but Gourmet magazine suggested folding it into thickly whipped cream, which sounds good if you are short of desserts.

Even father out than the oatmeal liqueur is milk liqueur. Although the process of making the liqueur is simple, the idea is fairly complex for it relies on the fact that milk curdles in alcohol. It is the whey in the milk that combines with the alcohol to make the final liqueur. The curd is filtered out of the liquid, and the liqueur comes out clear, golden and incredibly smooth.

This novel liqueur exists in such widely separated areas as Lithuania and Ireland. Mine is the Irish version. Mix together two quarts of whole milk, three pounds of sugar, one quart of the highest proof light-colored alcohol you can find (rum is nice, although unauthentic), one cup of lemon, and one or two vanilla beans. Shake everything together thoroughly, and let it work, tightly stoppered, for at least a few weeks. Filter the liqueur through filter paper. A strainer is not fine enough. I filter my milk liqueur in my Chemex coffee pot through Chemex filter paper. The curd, with the lemon and vanilla pieces removed, makes a nice addition to lots of desserts and cakes. After filtering the liqueur, let it age at least six months.

There is also Lithuanian milk liqueur, which may be slightly better than the Irish version. There are only six people in the world who know the recipe, however, and we are sworn never to reveal it.f3p&k