I guess you'd call this a starter -- at least I like to start my meals with a fine drink!
I'm trying to play along as an amateur foodie with the Steemit-IronChef competition. See this post for the current week's challenge. I might be going out on a limb here with a cocktail, but it involved cooking and it's both yummy and pretty!
I live in apple country, as it turns out. There are three commercial orchards within a short bike-ride of my house: 1, 2, 3 -- so there's no shortage of apples here. It's a little late in the season for picking from trees, but there's still plenty of apples around and cider, too!
This recipe required:
4 oz bourbon
1 oz amaro
a heavy dash of apple bitters**
2 oz boiled cider syrup
apples as cups
tiny pluto basil blossoms as garnish
** Apple bitters is a whole huge process that takes several weeks to make, and is thus beyond the scope of this article, but I had some on hand. You could use any fruity bitters in its place, but it was fun to recapitulate the theme.
To make boiled cider, press 40-50 apples in a cider press or buy a gallon of cider, and then bring it to a boil in a large pot and continue boiling it until the volume has reduce to at least 1/4, but preferably more. It never really takes on a syrupy texture, but it's thicker than cider and the flavors are super-concentrated. This takes about two hours of boiling on my stove.
To make the cups, slice to tops off the apples and use a large table spoon to carve out the bulk of the apple's interior. They get fragile after a while, so I switched to a couple of thin-edged measuring spoons to carve more safely as the cup got thinner. I swished them in a healthy dose of lemon juice to preserve their appearance while waiting for things to come together.
Once I had the syrup and the cups ready, I just loaded up a medium-large chunk of ice and poured some of the cocktail to fill it up.
I had in mind to garnish with an apple blossom and I could have pulled that off, if it were June. But I used tiny little sprigs of 'Pluto' basil with blossoms on top instead. It's pretty darling, really.
Oh hey! I forgot to do the thing where I include a postit with my name and date when I was actually doing the prep, so I'm just throwing this one at at my desk so that you can see I really do have this drink. Sorry for the messy writing, I'm in a hurry at this point. :-)
