Acorn Shortbread

Back in October I wrote about the laborious process of making acorn flour.  I only was able to process three batches before my acorns deemed too wormy to continue.  My scant cup and a half of flour has been waiting in my 'fridge since then for a recipe worthy of my efforts.  Friends have had scads of ideas but all of them included lots of added flavor.  For all of my hard work I wanted the subtle nutty acorn-ness of the flour to come through.  Finally I decided on a simple shortbread.

All of my cookies start out, usually, with the original Betty Crocker Cookie Book.  It's where I learned to bake back in the 70's and it never fails.  The original shortbread recipe has been slightly altered to allow for my handcrafted flour (and my tendencies towards whole and organic foods).  At one time in my early adulthood I used to collect cookie cutters.  I still have them and to my delight there was an acorn leaf shape.  Perfection!

Acorn Shortbread

3/4 cup unsalted organic butter
1/4 cup unrefined sugar
1/2 cup acorn flour
1 and 1/2 cup unbleached white flour
1/4 t salt
fleur de sel

Mix butter and sugar thoroughly.  Work in flour and salt with hands.  Chill dough for at least one hour.  Heat oven to 350.  Roll dough out to 1/3 to 1/2" thick.  Cut to desired shape.  Sprinkle with fleur de sel.  Place on ungreased baking sheet for 20 to 25 minutes.  Allow to cool before removing from pan or cookies will crack.

Bayberry

As soon as I moved to New York I started going to the local beaches.  I'm not one to sit still for very long and as soon as the SPF was applied I'd go exploring.  Walking along the beach I'd look for shells and pretty rocks, but further up along the dunes were some other treasures to behold.  Beach roses, or beach plum, were the first discovery.  Even tho they're not a showy rose they have a wonderful rich fragrance.  The rose hip, or plum as they're called in this case, are much larger than your average hip and many people make jam with them.  I also found horsetail, a very old plant that's been around since prehistoric times.  Horsetail is loaded with calcium, so much so that one has to be very careful not to take too much for fear of calcium crystals forming.  There's plenty of bittersweet, too, and in the autumn the dunes are a sea of orange.

The best thing I've discovered on the beach, tho, are the bayberry bushes.  They're so huge yet inconspicuous that they could easily be overlooked.  Northern bay, Myrica pensylvanica, has leaves with a sticky spicy aroma and the waxy berries were used by American colonists to make clean burning candles.

The herb is astringent and stimulant and emetic in large doses.  A decoction is good as a gargle for chronic inflammation and is an excellent wash for the gums.

Culinarily the leaves can be used dried as in traditional bay leaves.  In that case harvest them in the fall when they've matured and turned leathery.  Leave them to dry completely and their flavor will intensify.  I use them in soups and stews all winter long.  In season I like to chop them up fresh and use them to season pork and chicken.  I haven't had a chance to see what they do in vodka yet but I'll be trying that soon.  I hear they did wonders in a bottle of gin according to Edible Manhattan.

My special interest in making botanical colognes got me thinking of using the leaves to try my hand at making Bay Rum.  I read many recipes and bought myself a few bottles (most notably Dominca and Ogallala, the reputed best available) and set to work experimenting.  Like all of my colognes they are a work in progress and the formulas will be tweaked and improved upon until I find just the right recipe.  I made mine with fresh bay leaves, allspice, cinnamon, dried orange zest, vodka and white rum.  The scent wasn't quite accurate so I admit to adding a couple of drops of bay essential oil (Pimenta racemosa), the optimal variety of bay leaves used in making Bay Rum.

My colognes, including Bay Rum.

More Cologne Experiments

I had such a great time making colognes this summer, and the results were so successful, that I tried my hand at a couple more.  The new brews, Fresh Mown Hay and Bay Rum, did not disappoint.

Fresh Mown Hay is a maceration of sweet woodruff (which is left to rest after harvesting in order to bring out it's distinctive hay like scent), orris root, benzoin, roses, vanilla, lemon verbena, linden blossoms and jasmine flowers.  The woodruff not only gives it it's signature scent but also considerable tenacity.  It is a rich, lush fragrance with an almost edible quality to it and conjures images of rolling in meadows.

Bay Rum was definitely inspired by the vast bay bushes lining most of the coastal areas in the New York area. I've been gathering them and cooking with them for many years and finally came around to making a fragrance. Over the summer I gathered leaves and dried them (I read they yield a better fragrance dried) and did my research on formulary and then started to experiment. Using the rinds of some mandarin oranges and freshly ground cinnamon, allspice and cloves I was able to replicate and expand on the traditional scent.

Elderflower Liqueur

I posted during the summer about my forays into making elderflower liqueur.  Since then the macerated vodka has been sitting on a shelf waiting for me to pay some attention to it and turn it into a liqueur.  I had nearly a wine bottle full of elderflower vodka and a small bottle of St.-Germain to compare and contrast with my creation.

At the onset the macerated elderflower vodka that I made has a dankness to it, a very green note, one that would lock with clary sage, or lavender absolute.  At first I thought it was a honeyed note that was missing so I sweetened a small batch with Lancaster County, PA, honey.  The dankness in the honey locked with that of the elderflower so that experiment was set aside.

The second experiment I sweetened with white sugar.  In the past I've used raw cane crystals instead of sugar but they add a slight mollasses flavor to the brew, as well as an unpleasant dark colored slimy layer that floats to the top of the bottle as it clarifies.  I'm hoping for a better result with white sugar.

After doing a bit more research in elderflower liqueur I noticed that most of the recipes call for lemons or lemon rinds during maceration, often recommending meyer lemons.  Last winter I made meyer lemon vodka so I did a little tweaking with it.  I also took a look at my collection of perfume oils and decided on four notes to be added;  yuzu, wild sweet orange, neroli and peru balsam.  I made 10% solutions of each oil and added them one or two drops at a time.

Also in my research I learned that most people make an elderflower syrup and then add alcohol to produce a liqueur.  I confirmed this yesterday with a Swiss friend who explained to me how this was done in her country.  Some of the recipes I read also called for fresh lemon balm.

Many trials later I've come up with something I think is truly worth sipping.  I even "fixed" the first and second versions and bottled them separately.  The recipe is a little rough but I think I have a much firmer idea of how to proceed next season.  In the meantime I think a cocktail of elderflower liqueur and champagne would be perfect for the holidays.

Elderflower Liqueur

2 3/4 cups elderflower vodka

1/8 cup meyer lemon vodka

scant 3/4 cup sugar

5/8 cups water

13 drops yuzu dilution, 10%

15 drops peru balsam dilution, 10%

4 drops neroli bigarade dilution, 10%

6 drops wild sweet orange dilution, !0%

Acorn Flour

Last year a good friend went through the laborious process of making acorn flour.  I was intrigued, being the urban forager that I am, but definitely put off by the amount of work.  Then she showed up one day with a slice of bread she'd made and I've been determined to try making it ever since.  The flavor was so intense, rich and flavorful so I was surprised that she only used a third of a cup of the flour along with a melange of unbleached white and whole wheat.

It's acorn season and I've been getting an education in oak trees.  I've learned to identify white oaks, which apparently are some of the sweetest acorns to find.  They're also a substantial size making them worth shucking.  I've collected a couple of pounds from three trees up in Prospect Park and am planning to go back for more.  I can already tell that this hefty bag of acorns is only going to make a small amount of flour, so as long as I'm putting in the time I might as well go all the way and collect more.

I've gotten a lot of information on how to do this from Hank Shaw of Hunter Angler Gardener Cook.  His biggest piece of advice on collecting them was to look for little worm holes and discard those.   Acorns are bitter from their high tannin content and the tannin has to be leached out.  I've seen a lot of different versions on how to do this but his cold water leaching method seems to be the most reasonable.

First you have to shuck the acorns - under water!  With the pointed end facing up I used a hammer to crack the acorns and then threw them into a pan of water.  The hulls are kind of elastic so some come off the nut quite easily while others need to be wrestled with.  Then I threw them in a blender filled with a couple of cups of water.  When I had about two cups of acorns in there I blended them up to make what looks like a coffee milkshake.  The sludge was then transferred into a large jar and filled with more water and put in the refrigerator.  Every day I poured off the water and added more, shook it up and placed it back in the 'fridge.  I did this for a week and then lined a colander with cheesecloth and poured the whole mess through.  Pulling the edges of the cheesecloth together I gently squeezed out as much water as I could.

Now the goal is to dry out the mass.  Spread it evenly on a cookie sheet (preferably one with sides) and set the oven on low.  Mine doesn't have a low setting so I warmed it to the lowest temperature and then turned it off and set the cookie sheet inside.  You don't want to bake the acorns, just dry them out so keep your eye on them.  It took a couple of hours of turning the oven on and off and checking periodically before it was ready.  I used a coffee grinder free of coffee residue to grind the dried mass into flour.  I have a separate one I use for spices so this worked perfectly.  In small batches try to grind the flour as fine as possible.

It's a lot of work for a small amount of flour, that's for sure.  While the first batch was drying in the oven I started shucking the second batch.  I figure I have three more trials to go and I'm hoping to be done in time for holiday baking.  I'll let you know how it goes, and whether it's worth the labor.  If it's as delicious as I remember I'll be thoroughly gratified.  Hank Shaw also has some delicious sounding recipes on his blog which you can find here.

Cologne Experiment Results

The results are in!  My experiments macerating dried flowers, roost, rinds and herbs are completed and I have detailed notes on the results.  After a month's time the liquor was strained off and clarified and then some were matched with hydrosols.  Certain recipes didn't work at all and were discarded but most of them yielded results.  I was really surprised by the tenacity of the different brews, some of them will last days on a tester strip. 

Summer Splash came as a real surprise.  The floral note that resulted from roses and lavender macerating with vetiver, sweet annie and orange peel was astonishing.  It was blended with lemon balm hydrosol to create a summery splash.  This one changes over time in a most interesting way.

Florida Water epitomizes summer for me. There is a large Latino community intermingled in my Brooklyn neighborhood and a lot of the pharmacies cater to this clientelle so are stocked with Florida Water. I have memories of my first years in Brooklyn discovering the pleasures of an evening shower followed with a splash of Florida Water. Orange blossom and clove are the distinctive notes in the cologne so I decided orange blossom hydrosol would be used with a maceration of meyer lemon rind, sweet woodruff, lavender, benzoin, cinnamon and clove. The results smell surprisingly like the water I used all those years ago, and I think it could be considered suitable for men as well as women.

Verbena Water is the result of macerating fresh lemon verbena and sweet woodruff from my garden, dried jasmine, linden blossoms and vanilla pods and then mixed with verbena hydrosol.  It's as fresh as it sounds, the softness of the woodruff and vanilla pared with lemon verbena counterbalance each other beautifully.

Rose Garden is a blend of dried roses, angelica root, jasmine, vanilla pods and lemon verbena which was then mixed with rosewater to create a veritable rose garden in a bottle.

Violet Water is the result of orris root, sweet woodruff, benzoin and jasmine marrying beautifully to create a woodland violet sort of fragrance which was then blended with cornflower water.  Violets contain a chemical called ionones which give them their characteristic fragrance.  Orris root, the dried and aged rhizome of the Iris pallida, also contains ionones but also has a woodland quality to it.  There are no violets in this blend so the name is merely a suggestion.

Each cologne is bottled in a one of a kind vintage glass bottle collected from the beaches of Brooklyn, NY. They've been scrubbed clean and sterilized but they're old and scratched to different degrees. Expect some wear from tumbling in the ocean for who knows how long.

Making Elderflower Liqueur

Elderflowers macerating in vodka

A few years ago elderflower became the new darling of the artisanal cocktail explosion.  It was hard following up something as popular as yuzu but those people at St-Germain know what's good.  Elderflower liqueur has been on every mixologist's short list in recent past, specifically St-Germain.  I was astonished to discover that this strange, subtlety flavored libation is a new invention and not the ancient tradition their advertising campaign would have you believe.

Elderflowers grow all over Prospect Park and another artisanal cocktail enthusiast told me that he'd made his own liqueur from the flowers in the park.  I made a point of getting together with another friend, a local forager and farmer, to hunt for the blossoms.  Armed with wildflower guides we set out and identified plenty of look a likes but came home empty handed.  A second foray found what we were looking for.

I've read that the flowers must be picked in the morning when they're at their most fragrant, and that they should be used within two hours of picking.  The stems are toxic and undesirable so the flowers were cut from the stem and placed in a wide mouth jar.  When the jar was full I covered the flowers in vodka and capped it.  I'd also read that the flowers will float to the top, and that the flowers that come in contact with air would turn brown.  The flavor is not altered, it's just not very appetizing, so I placed a clean lid from a slightly smaller jar upside down on top of the flowers to weigh them down under the vodka.  Every day I removed the second jar lid and shook the jar, then replaced the lid.

I macerated the blossoms for a little over a month.  Each day when I shook it I would compare the aroma with the small bottle of St-Germain that I have.  It was only in the last week or so that I began to notice a similarity, prior to that I was wondering if I had the wrong genus.  I find a honey note in St-Germain so now that it's been strained, like many of my other herbal liqueurs, it's waiting for that special local honey to be ready before it's bottled and labeled and ready to use.  Results to follow.

Cologne Experiments

I'm having way too much fun riding out the heatwave researching old forumlary on the internet in search of cologne and toilet water recipes.  After years of collecting fragrant herbs, dried flowers, roots, powdered gums, tree resins, barks, citrus rinds and spices I wanted to see if macerating in vodka would produce results.  All of the old recipes I found used essential oils, absolutes and tinctures but I wanted to see what I could come up with with just the raw ingredients.

I've started two traditional cologne recipes, a violet water, something akin to 4711 and a Florida Water, as well as one true experiment.  It's been about ten days and I can already tell which ones have promise and staying power.  My plan is to let them sit for 30 days and then strain them off, filter them and let them settle.  Then I'll pour off the clear liquor and blend it with hydrosol.

When deciding on what to use for each experiment I'm still thinking like a perfumer and making sure I have top, middle and bottom notes.  I've been aging some orris root powder for a number of years now and it's developing a subtle sweetness that I hope the tincuring will release.  I also have powdered benzoin, cedar bark, vanilla pods and vetiver roots to play with.  Dried roses and lavender make up the bulk of the heart note but I'm also using a generous supply of jasmine sambac flowers that I've dried over the past year.  The linden blossoms that I collected last year have found their way into one as well.  For top notes I have citrus rinds that I dried over last winter including mineola tangerine and meyer lemon.  From my herb garden I've added sweet woodruff, lemon verbena, lavender, basil, sweet annie and rosemary.

So far I'm loving the process and the romance of it all.  When I was a child my grandmother bought me some cologne that I used as a kind of splash.  I have such fond memories of warm summer nights splashing on her cologne after a bath and going to sleep smelling sweetly.

I'm also enjoying using the fruits of my labor over the years, and feeling like a real apothecary.  I looked around during the process and thought that it looked like a film set of an apothecary at work, yet it wasn't contrived at all.  I find I'm repeating to myself, "oh, true apothecary".

Spring Foraging Inspires (What Else?) New Cocktails

I took a long walk in Prospect Park last week with fellow naturalist and forager Josh Kalin in search of elderflowers in hopes of making elderflower liqueur.  With a little internet research I learned a few ways of creating it and how to identify the plant.  Unfortunately our search wound up empty, at least as far as elderflower was concerned.  We determined that the flowers weren't open yet and made arrangements to hunt again another day.

Not to be deterred we walked on and started hunting for other bounty.  The park is loaded with garlic mustard, a non-native "weed" that the park would rather eradicate.  It's one of the plants I don't feel any hesitation about harvesting knowing that it does more good than harm.  We also harvested violet leaves and flowers, curly dock and gout weed, and stopped to sample a few other things along the way as well.

Still, I had cocktails in mind, or at least the macerated elixirs that plants and spirits engender.  I remember long ago chomping on sassafras along the Long Meadow.  Josh remembered another sassafras tree in a wooded area and took us to the spot where he'd harvested before to make a sassafras root liqueur.  We climbed over a lot (I mean a lot) of downed trees from last year's tornado, as well as some of the other violent storms we've had the past year, looking for the small saplings that sprout but die soon after since there's not enough light to sustain them, all the while tripping over tree branches.

I picked both leaves and pulled up sapling roots.  The leaves I left to dry overnight since they seemed very watery.  The roots I gently scrubbed clean and left to dry overnight.  Then they were carefully cut up with my garden clippers as a knife didn't seem to do it.  They've been sitting in vodka for over a week now and I think I'll leave it a bit longer.  So far it smells earthy, licorice-y and definitely has notes of root beer.  The leaf I filtered the next day.  It's incredibly dark and viscous, I can't even see through the bottle.  I filtered it six days ago and there's no sediment and it hasn't clarified at all.  It tastes really nice, tho, and very different from the root.  I'm thinking sassafras and soda's in the garden this summer.

The best recent discovery was the sweet woodruff in the herb garden, but that's another story for later.

New Flavors for Vodka

Every so often I get inspired to make some new cocktail fixings.  I thought that before the winter's bounty of citrus fruits were over and done I should try infusing some zest and see what I could come up with.  Meyer lemon was the first venture.  It's a lighter and fresher version of a regular old lemon, much more perfumed.  It probably won't hold up to stronger mixers but I think it would be lovely with tonic or club soda.  From there I made pink grapefruit and minneola tangerine.  I'm imagining paring some of these with vanilla for some interesting creamsicle variations.

horseradish root

Also had the good fortune of being present when the horseradish roots were being dug up in my community garden.  I've always thought horseradish vodka was a natural, being halfway to a Bloody Mary already.  My specimen was long and thin and fairly easy to clean so I opted out of peeling and just chopped it up.  I used about two and a half tablespoons of chopped fresh horseradish to one cup of vodka and let it sit for just a day before straining.  I also made a batch with a teaspoon of crushed black peppercorns.  I'm so intrigued by the possibilities that I ended up buying another horseradish root and making more.  I have fresh tomato season in mind, so this second batch is being put away for safe keeping.