Started my almost forgotten "cooking" again, figured I'd share my special recipe for adult population, hoping someone would share one on return. Ok, mine is not really cooking. I happen to live in one of the states where purchase of 95% grain alcohol is legal. Here is what you'll need: 2 lbs of cranberry, frozen 2 bottles of grain alcohol, 1.5 L total. About 350 grams of sugar (about 1.5 cups) Wide-mouth large jar Water, good quality 1st stage. Pass cranberry through meat grinder, rub in sugar, load into the jar. Add 1 bottle of alcohol, close the lid tightly. Place jar at room temp in a dark place (away from kids!!! They might think it's fruit punch!) Shake the jar once daily After 4 days, pour the liquid into a temp holding bottle, add second bottle of alcohol to the jar. Again, shake daily, this time for 10 days (second extraction is longer because cranberry has less stuff to give) After 10 days combine with the 1st pour. Filter, this is a little tricky. I do 3 filtering. First through large metal one to remove most of the cranberry. The second is through smaller, about 1 mm diameter. The last filtration is through folded x4-x8 paper towel. The result should be clear ruby-colored liquid. Add 1:1 water. Resulting liquor is about 35% alcohol by volume with no aftertaste, goes down VERY smoothly.
A variation of above for brave 1:1 cranberry to alcohol, cranberry in kilos, alc in liters. So for 6 lbs of cranberry, you'll need same two bottles of alcohol. This time cranberry has to be fresh, not frozen. Beware of the juice, grinding will be messy. You'll need more sugar -- 20% off mass of cranberry minimum, close to 1 lbs for this example. Extraction and filtration are the same. However do not dilute at all. Resulting mix is about 60% alcohol by volume, and you drink it as is. Be careful, this stuff is strong and treacherous. It goes down really easy -- no aftertaste, just warmth spreading through the body, especially if cranberries were ripe and fresh. But after 3-4 shots getting up becomes a challenge.
Why would you go and waste good grain alcohol by diluting it? Here's my recipe 2 bottles of grain alcohol, 1.5 L total. Enjoy
I do a pint each of strawberries (halved) raspberries, blackberries and blueberries, maybe 2-3 tablespoons of simple syrup and fill up the infusion jar with Tito's. I give it a very light shake every day but not hard enough to dislodge the glass filter marbles. If it's not sweet enough you could then add a little more simple syrup. And it lasts a while. _
Tito's is a great semi-premium vodka, great for mixed drinks or on the rocks with lime. For my taste, no better premium martini vodka than Belvedere. _
One of my favorite scenes from one of my top 5 movies. We came out of that movie and my buddy said "I can't believe no one has every done that to you". _
Never heard of anyone liking cranberries on her period. Being sour - sure. Liking .... youve got yourself someone special
When I was stationed in Hawaii, a friend of mine who was a photographer in our squadron got sent temporary duty to Vietnam to takes pictures of our deceased POWs getting exhumed. While he was there, he found this one market where they sold Snake Wine. Basically, Snake Wine is a bottle with a dead cobra in it, infused with grain alcohol, although sometimes it's just rice wine. The one he bought was grain. Anyway, when he got back to the house that 5 of us were renting (great fucking house in Pearl City), we hammered that shit down in one night. It wasn't bad, actually. Musky, almost tasted like Heineken mixed with Everclear. The next day it seemed like a shame to chuck the bottle, since we had a perfectly good bottle with a perfectly good dead cobra in it, so after every party on the weekends, we'd dump what was left of the near-empty liquor bottles into the snake bottle, and Snake Shots became the punishment for anything really dumb someone did during a party. Only took a majority vote. Fast forward a year, and our parties had kind of dwindled, but the snake bottle was still there, mocking us. One of the crew ended up getting orders to go to North Dakota, so we hooked up a righteous get together at the house, and I ended up getting half smashed by 10pm with all of the vodka infused watermelon and jello shots being passed around. I had just gotten off this relationship with a chick I liked and everyone else knew was a turbo bitch, so I was moping a bit and nobody was feeling sorry for me. This chick I've never met before, and she was tasty, starts hitting on me and I'm not in the mood for it, blow her off in front of a few of my friends, then I get pulled aside about 10mins later and am informed that the vote was taken. Snake Shot, bitch. My friend Pat pours the shot (I couldn't even recognize the snake anymore, it looked like mush) and there's some kind of gray oil and scales floating on the surface of the shot. Bottoms up. I sat there for 3 hours, motionless and sweating and hallucinating a bit, then I threw up into the pool and went to pass out. Don't infuse booze with dead snakes.
Cool snake. Where were you stationed? My younger brother did two stints at Kaneohe Bay back in the late 80s and early 90s. Visited him a few times, loved that side of the island. _
