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Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in the Microwave

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

In today's post we'll look at using the microwave. As I learned the hard way, what you don't want to do is stick a liqueur in the microwave and turn it on high. It fizzes, splatters, and burns.

So I attempted to dehydrate liqueur using a low-power setting. In the process I learned something about microwaves, or at least the microwave that I own: Lowering the power doesn't actually lower the strength of the microwave energy, it only changes the length of time it blasts that energy into your food.

So at the lowest power setting (10 on my microwave), it blasts the liqueur with microwave energy for 10 percent of the time, or for 3 or 4 out of every 30 seconds. The rest of the time it's just turning on the plate. The "defrost" setting is level 30, which should tell you how low the setting is.

The One-Shot Method

Because I don't want to stand around the microwave pressing stop and start, I tried to find the setting that would allow me to cook down a liqueur to a solid.

After several tries and lots of hot boiled Campari I determined that I couldn't microwave on any power setting higher than the lowest setting of 10. After just a few seconds the liqueur would start to boil rapidly, then it settles down in the remaining 27 seconds. However, after it cooks down nearer to the end (all the alcohol should be boiled off, but the water is still trapped in the syrup) it seems to boil faster, and overflows and splatters after only the 3-4 second heat interval.

Thus it seems that my microwave is too powerful to effectively reduce the last part of the liquid liqueur to a solid.

The closest I've come (so far) to making this effective is cooking it on the lowest power setting for 60 minutes (which reduces the volume by half, close to the final volume of syrup) then finishing the drying in the oven at 170 degrees Fahrenheit as this is low enough that the syrup doesn't boil over.

However, at least in initial experiments, it takes a very long time to bake off the final water – more than 5 hours. And in this case, I may as well just stick it in the oven at 170 degrees Fahreinheit over night.

The Babysitter Method

As the 'set it and forget it' method of programming the microwave proved ineffective, I thought I'd try the hard way. I put the same 2 ounces of Campari in the microwave and heated it for short bursts until it boiled. Then I'd stop, wait for it to settle, and hit it again. The point was to prevent overboiling and burning.

Don Lee reported success with this method, using short bursts at the beginning and end of cooking, and longer cooking in the middle.

I begun with 20 minutes cooking time on the clock, then kept pausing the heating as the boil became violent. Initially I'd do it standing there babysitting the thing, but then as it was taking forever I'd send emails and such in between heating bursts, allowing it to cool more.

Unfortunately, this method allowed me no long bursts of cooking – it kept boiling over at 10 seconds maximum. More than 85 short bursts over several hours later, it finally chrystalized, though there wasn't all that much of it left.

In conclusion, with my microwave and using Campari anyway, this method is a pain in the butt and not worth the effort compared with setting the oven on a low temperature and letting it cook down overnight.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 24, 2011
Sugarcane and Slavery

Boy is this ever a topic I'd rather avoid! However there is no denying the historic link between sugarcane production.

We were tracing the spread of sugarcane and the sugar industry from the Old World to the new. But slave labor used to harvest and process sugarcane began long before sugarcane was brought to the Caribbean.

Before sugarcane made its way to the Atlantic islands off the coast of Spain and Portugal, slave labor was used in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco. Warfare and plague had diminished the local labor force so slaves were 'needed' to harvest it.

Slavery and sugar remained tied for a very long time, most notably so in the New World. 11 million African slaves were exported from their homelands. Six million of them went to work making sugar- the most of any profession. When the Haitian Revolution occurred near 1800, ending slavery there, it cut off 43 percent of Europe’s sugar supply.

One cool note: female slaves were often the distillers of rum in the islands.

Abolition

(Anti-Saccharites parody cartoon.)

The abolition movement in England linked sugar to slavery, and encouraged people to boycott sugar. The movement was largely lead by women, who purchased the sugar for the home. They were known as anti-saccharites.

1807 the British House of Commons made the slave trade- but not slavery- illegal. It wasn't until the 1830s before it was by British law.

The Emancipation Proclamation that finally freed the American slaves took effect in 1865.

After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1884, all Caribbean sugar was made by non-forced labor.

Sugar After Slavery

After slavery ended, new labor was needed to harvest sugar cane, as many former slaves weren't about to take it up again.

Laborers came from many places, but especially from China and India. They worked as indentured servants, paying off their ride to the new island for several years. Indentured workers were called coolies.

This and other policies kept former slaves from buying land and becoming economically equal to whites.

After 1869, Trinidad granted small parcels of land to people who completed their indenturship. They bought up 23,000 acres between 1885 and 1895.

On Mauritius, nearly half a million Indian workers imported between 1834 and 1910. At one point they produced 9.4 percent of the worlds sugar supply, mostly providing it to Britain.

Though it was far from smooth sailing, eventually things worked out. According to Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott:

“Mauritius is an anomaly in the colonized sugar world. Its minorities, Creole and white, have accepted its Indianness- at 68 percent of the population, it has the largest concentration of Indian outside India- and a succession of Indo-Mauritian leaders have governed. An elite minority speaks English, the country’s official language, while everyone else speaks French-derived Creole. Hindu and Muslim holidays are observed, and since 1877, the Mauitian currency has been its rupee. Mauritius’s unique circumstances and the dynamics of its society have enabled its people to unite in racial harmony. Ironically, they have embraced sugar as their common denominator.”

In Hawaii, the indentured laborers were Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino. Chinese workers were later banned from immigrating because the powers that be felt there were too many who stuck around after their indenture time expired.

What fascinates me about the post-slavery indentured servant era of sugar production is the racial and cultural makeup of Caribbean islands that results from it. There are interesting mixes of whites, blacks, and Asian/Indian populations that vary depending on the island. The cross-cultural pollination over many years has lead to some fascinating local customs, celebrations, and cuisines that we think of as unique local island traditions when we visit on vacation. You go to Martinique and it's all very French and people drink champagne on the beach. You go to Trinidad and eat roti and other Indian food for every meal. As it turns out, those traditions developed due to the unique mix of people from diverse parts of the world, united under a shared history of sugarcane.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 23, 2011
The Spread of Sugarcane in the New World

When we last left off looking at sugarcane's spread from India/Indonesia to the rest of the world, the sugar industry had shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, including Madeira and the Canary islands.

During this time, the powers in Europe were developing a taste for sugar.

Sugar was only known in Europe after the 8th century. This is about the time that references to growing cane in the Mediterranean appear. Molasses reached England by late 1200s, coming from Sicily.

King Henry III (in the 13th century) ordered three pounds of sugar “if so much is to be had,” as it was rare luxury item.

But by 1319 one Venetian trader carried 100,000 pounds of it to London. The sweet tooth for sugar developed fast.

Starting in 1470, European countries radically changed how sugar was produced. They imported crude sugar and refined it locally. This changed the power dynamic – refineries had power and profits – and plays into how the sugar colonies in the New World were treated.

Sugar's Voyage to the New World

Columbus carried sugarcane from the Canary islands to New World on his second voyage to Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) in 1493. However they were more concerned with finding gold than farming, so the sugarcane failed.

Later they brought in experts from the Canary Islands to help get it established. It was first grown in the new world in Santo Domingo (though it failed a few times first) and was first shipped back to Europe in 1516.

Portugal soon got into the sugarcane farming business as well. Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon Portugal by 1526 in large quantities. The Portuguese ruled the 1500s in terms of sugarcane dominance.

In early 1500s, Spain conquered the Mexican mainland, and used the Caribbean islands more as protected harbors along shipping routes than as sugar growing islands. From 1580 to 1650 (when the English and French got into the game on smaller islands) the Caribbean didn’t produce all that much sugar for export.

In 1625 Brazil was still supplying nearly all of Europe with sugar, but when English colonies got into full swing they drove Portugal out of the Northern European trade areas.

Until the mid-1600s, the British navy drink was "beer sometimes supplanted by brandy." Then the British started making rum. Barbados was settled in 1627 and sugar was grown there. Then after the 1655 British conquest of Jamaica, they started replacing the brandy ration with Jamaican rum. (Rum is distilled from molasses, the byproduct of sugar production.)

In 1731 rum became part of the official ration all the way up until Black Tot Day in 1970. Navy rum didn't just provide tasty nutrients, it killed bacteria in the drinking water.

Though the Portuguese, Spanish, and British were growing sugarcane, French prices were the best in Europe. Unable to compete, England just supplied its own needs from its islands, keeping pace with increasing demands.

As we touched on before sugarcane was even grown in the New World, England eventually forbade colonies from refining their own sugar. This kept the sugar colonies“infantilized and dependent.” Europe kept all the control, kept wealthy landowners in power in the colonies. The sugar colonies were to be used, not respected.

In the early 1600s, the British, Dutch and French all established Caribbean plantations. Years later in the 1800s, Cuba and Brazil were the major producers. Between these eras, sugar production increased as people got a taste for it. The technology to grow and refine sugar didn't change much in this era, but consumer demand did.

In the next post we'll look at sugar production and the labor used to do the work.

*Bonus fun fact* The West India Docks in Jamaica had gang members with the best names: The River Pirates, Night Plunderers, Heavy Horsemen, Scuffle-Hunters, and Mud Larks.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 22, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in the Oven

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

In today's post we'll look at using the oven. Following the suggestion of Don Lee on this eGullet thread, I purchased silicone cupcake cups to experiment with. They can be used in the microwave or oven and are easy to clean.

In all of my oven experiments, the procedure was the same. I filled the cupcake cup with 2 ounces of Campari, put it on a cookie sheet, and put it in the oven. Most of the time I cooked the liquid for 12-24 hours.

Dehydrating Campari at 140F and 170F (in separate trials), the liqueur would dehydrate and get clumpy. I'd then squeeze the cupcake cup a bit to break up the clumps and expose any wet spots so that it would dry completely. In the end I had a combination of powder and pebble-sized clumps of dehydrated Campari.

At 200F I had clearly reach some sort of candying state with the sugar. It looked like it was still watery with liquid, but on further inspection it was closer to a melted lollipop- very brilliant liquid sugar. On removal from the oven it formed a hard puck shaped like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

At 250F the sugar burns a bit, becoming brown in color and smelling more like molasses. It also stays liquid and forms a hard puck in the bottom of the cupcake cup.

On tasting after grinding these with a mortar and pestle, I found that the 250F Campari tasted like brown sugar or molasses with a bitter Campari twinge to it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected but I am not sure how I'd use it. Campari gingerbread cookies, perhaps?

(Campari cooked at 200F vs 250F)

The 200F powdered Campari had a distinctly sharp bitterness to it. The 170F Campari powder had the best and most Campari-esque flavor of all, with that great Campari brightness still present and a balance of sweetness from sugar with the heavy bitterness there too. The 140F powder was also very good, but I prefer the 170 at least on this first experiment.

Another reason to use the lower-temperature Campari powder is that the others were harder to crush up (like crushing a lollipop instead of granola). They also seem to want to stick together. After crushing, they get clumpy. (I tried reheating at a lower temperature to see if it would stop clumping, but it just formed back into a blog and I had to re-crush it again!) Clumpy clusters are probably be fine for baking purposes, but not practical for rimming cocktail glasses.

Long story short: Oven at 170F worked best for me.

In the next post, we'll look at using the microwave to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 18, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in a Food Dehydrator

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

For now let's talk about the food dehydrator. I have a Nesco food dehydrator, which has a heating element and a fan in the lid. The racks in it are perforated for drying solid material, so I purchased additional solid-bottom racks made for making fruit rolls.

I poured 8 oz of Campari in one rack and turned it on. After 24 hours it was still a bit sticky. Towards 36 hours I noticed some parts that were clumpy so I broke those up to expose still-liquid parts beneath. (It turns out this helps no matter which dehydration method you use.) It might not take 36 hours to dry next time.

You can see it formed some interesting crystal patterns as it dried.

I scraped off the Campari initially with my fingers, then found a flat plastic serving spoon turned upside down made a good scraper.

I then put everything into a mortar and pestle and ground it up.

From 8 ounces of liquid I got about 3 ounces of Campari sugar. (A little less than 50% of the liquid volume has proved consistent using other methods.) That means that Campari has a ton of sugar in it. So much for my all-Campari weight loss program!

The Campari that I couldn't scrape off the plastic sheet washed off surprisingly easily with hot water, so the mess isn't bad.

All told, this method was easy to execute but can take quite a while. The dehydrator doesn't generate a ton of external heat (a concern in the summer when its hot enough already) but enough to be noticeable. Also noticeable is the sound of the fan running.

In the next post, we'll look at using the oven to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 17, 2011
The Spread of Sugarcane in the Old World

In the last post we looked at what sugarcane is. Now we'll see where it came from and how it traveled around the world.

Sugarcane is a tall grass native to the region of the India and Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated in New Guinea, perhaps independently in Indonesia.

In 325 BC Alexander the Great’s general Nearchus said, “A reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit.”

Around the same time, sugar was referred to as khanda, from which we probably derive the word candy.

In China there are references to sugar in 286 BC. Sugar spread with Buddhism and the Buddha was even referred to as the “King of Sugarcane.”

Sugar loaves were probably first produced in India 2000 years ago. Sugar loaves are hardened in ceramic molds or cones from which the more liquid molasses was drained, leaving behind the dark-brown, crystalline loaf.

Dioscorides (circa 40—90 AD) wrote, “There is a kind of concentrated honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins.” This shows he was familiar with the crystalline form of sugar.

Sugar making in Egypt probably came before Arab conquest. The Arabs were experts at irrigation and used their skills to grow sugarcane and spread it to new places. Arabs spread it to the Mediterranean, Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, and Spain.

During the First Crusade (1096-99) Christians discovered Arab cane farms. Soon they were growing and transferring sugar cane to new locations.

From the Canary Islands it traveled to the New World. We'll pick up sugar's spread to the West in the next post.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 16, 2011
Studying Sugar: A Resource List
In the Sugar Spirit Project, I've had to use several sources to research material, so I figured I'd list them on this page should you want to read them yourself or check my work.

I'll add to the list as I use more resources.
- Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History By Sidney W. Mintz (1985). This book traces the history of sugar but is primarily a sociological study of sugar consumption in England. It traces how sugar became so popular so fast.
- Sugar: A Bittersweet History By Elizabeth Abbott (2008). In-depth sugar history, spread of sugar, lasting effects of sugar production, finals notes on environmental concerns. Contains a lot of information on sugar and the slave trade.
- Sugar.org, the website of the Sugar Association. Some brief but good information in the Downloads section.
- The Wikipedia entry for Sugar is surprisingly good.
- The sugarcane Wikipedia entry is not bad either.
- The USDA plants database entry is pretty cool.
The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
August 12, 2011
How NOT to Dehydrate Campari

I figure, why not try the method that looks easiest first, even if it seems doomed to fail?

That's what I decided to do as an experiment in dehydrating liqueurs down to sugar: to see what happens when you cook Campari the fastest way possible to get all the liquid out.

I put two ounces of Campari in a silicone cupcake cup and tossed it in the microwave. After 30 seconds it boiled over. First it came to a rapid boil, then turned to a real frothy boil.

After the liquid evaporated more, the boil turned more gentle; around three and a half minutes in. But soon enough, at four minutes, came the smell of caramelizing/burning sugar.

At five minutes most of the liquid was gone, and then the sugar started blackening. The Campari turned black, puffed up, and started smoking. I had to open all the windows in my apartment to keep the fire alarm from going off.

A black crust formed where the red sugar was. After removing it from the microwave, it cooled quickly then I tried it. Surprisingly, it tastes just like a burnt marshmallow; just a little more molasses-y. There was no Campari taste to it at all.

In conclusion: That Didn't Work.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 11, 2011
An Oral History of Liqueur Dust

In studying the methods bartenders have used to dehydrate liqueurs into flavored powders, I mentioned that I didn't know the complete origin story of the practice.

Luckily, Jacob Briars, currently the global brand director for Leblon cachaca (and formerly with 42Below vodka), sent me an email with the full story as he remembers it.

You are right, like so many great bartending tricks it has its genesis south of the equator, in early 2006 as I recall, maybe even earlier. As far as I understand it, here is the potted history of 'dust':

Many bartenders will have noticed that spirits that are high in sugar will often crystallize around the mouth of the bottle – Campari, Frangelico and Chartreuse are particularly prone. (Campari's dirty secret is that its inherent bitterness masks an insane amount of sugar that would shame most liqueurs)

The first person I know of who thought of a cocktail application for this was Mick Formosa, who used to run the bar at Ginger in Melbourne, 2005-2007. Previous alumni of this place include Sam Ross, Sebastian Reaburn and Jason Williams, and in the mid 00s it could have made a good claim to be one of the best bars on earth. Sadly the recession saw the end of Ginger and it closed 2 1/2 years ago.

Anyway, I digress. As I understand, Mick was cleaning the bottles as per usual one Sunday night and noticed the Campari crystals, and tried tasting them. He immediately thought of the possibility of using these in a drink, and texted a similarly adventurous bartender, Sydney-based Ben Walsh, who was running the superb Victoria Room. Ben set about trying to produce Campari dust on a bigger scale, using a roasting pan in a barely heated oven (from memory he used the pilot light in a commercial gas oven, which was more than enough heat) until dehydrated, then grinding the dried Campari into a powder using a mortar and pestle. Between two great bartenders in two great bartending cities, this technique caught on quickly.

Later that year (2006) it saw its first major public outing when flavored 'dust' was used by the Australian team at the 42BELOW Cocktail World Cup as a sugar to make a flavored candy floss (called fairy floss in Aust, and I think it's called Cotton Candy in the US?) This application – using various dusts to create powerfully flavored 'boozy cotton candy' also swept across both Australia and New Zealand, but it always seemed to work best with the bittersweet Campari. Floss made with things like Cointreau just ended up tasting like orange.

In 2007, again at the 42BELOW World Cup, another Australian team made a 'dust' out of Chartreuse, and used it to rim the glass for their cocktail and also as a garnish. In that year, the judges included Dale DeGroff, Angus Winchester, and Colin Field (Ritz, Paris) and all took this technique back with them, where it eventually started to be talked about in the US, Europe and the UK.

I've had lots of dusts in NZ and Australia and made many more myself, but none is ever as good as that Chartreuse dust (55% abv Green, btw) that I saw in that comp. Possibly the only use of a 'spirit gimmick' that tastes better than the spirit itself.

I think for this to work, the base flavor needs to be both powerful and memorable. So flavors that can be mistaken for something else in a cocktail, e.g. orange liqueur dust just tastes like orange peel, don't seem to be effective. But liqueurs that are high in sugar, with a striking visual appearance and taste profile, are perfect for this technique. Hence, Campari, Chartreuse, Fernet Branca, are about the best bets. And tho the taste isn't all that unique, color-wise Cheery Heering and blue curaçao will also work well.

Anyway, great piece and I look forward to seeing this develop.

Thanks Jacob!

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

August 11, 2011
Sugar Spirit: What is Sugarcane?

In the Sugar Spirit project, we're going to look at sugar's history and production, but first we should establish what sugar and sugarcane are.

Sugar and Sucrose

When we talk about sugar, we mean table sugar, or sucrose.

To chemists, sugar refers to a class of 'edible crystalline carbohydrates' that also includes fructose and lactose. But most of us aren't chemists so we won't use the word 'sucrose' so much as just 'sugar.'

Except for now: Sucrose occurs in all green plants. It is a plant food manufactured photosynthetically from carbon dioxide and water.

For table sugar, the plants harvested to make it are sugarcane and sugar beets. We'll get to sugar beets later.

(Sugarcane harvest demo in Guatemala.)

Sugarcane

Sugarcane is a large grass of the family Gramineae. There are six known species.

The most widely grown is saccharum officinarum, which depending on your source is called “noble cane” or “sugar of the apothecaries.” Its stalks that grow as thick as two inches, and 12-15 feet high.

Sugarcane is a subtropical and tropical crop requiring large amount of water and labor. In farming, it is propagated asexually from cuttings of the stem. It becomes ripe in the dry season after anywhere from 6 to 18 months depending on the climate.

In the next post, we'll begin to look at the spread of sugarcane from the Indian Subcontinent to the rest of the world.

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

August 10, 2011