So remember when, a few years back, I gathered lots of wild Concord grapes and made grape cider and grape bitters? Well, I hadn't quite finished making the bitters.
I had soaked the grape skins and pits in grain alcohol for months, and did eventually strain it, but that is as much as I did. I even moved it into this place amongst the fridge items as purple colored grain alcohol. I got sick and tired of not working with it, so I figured I'd do some more research and finish it up.
Basing my recipe on this process, I steeped a mix of spices in my grape alcohol for two weeks, shaking it every day. I am now bringing to a boil water with my strained spices, and I will let that steep for a week, shaking every day. I will then restrain it, and add both the water and burned sugar to my alcohol. And that will be my bitters!
The spices that I used for 1/2 cup of alcohol are as follows: 4 pieces of fresh lemon peel, 1 cinnamon stick, 1 cardamom pod, ~40 rosemary leaves, 5 black peppercorns, 6 allspice berries, ~25 coriander pods. The spices are steeping in 1 cup of water, and I will use 1/5 cup burned sugar.
Hopefully this will be tasty!
Ooh, interesting! Glad the roast lamb worked well, too. I haven't had a proper roasted lamb shank myself in absolute ages -- I'll see what I can do about that.
ReplyDeleteIn the meanwhile, wedding updates? I won't be around for it, but I want to know what food you're serving ;-)