Tag: dehydrated

Which Liqueurs Crystallize When Dehydrated?

In the Solid Liquids Project I've experimented with various methods to dehydrate liqueurs into solids. I've found that not every liqueur does crystallize through conventional heating methods to boil off the alcohol and water. Ones that do not crystallize usually leave a thick, sticky, gummy glob at the bottom of their container.

I have not figured out why some liqueurs don't crystallize, though I've had some theories.

Here is my list of liqueurs I've tried to crystallize (most of them in silicone cupcake cups in the oven) and whether or not it worked.

Liqueur Crystallization

Liqueur	Crystallizes?	Notes
Campari	Yes
Midori	Yes
Amaretto	Yes
Luxardo Maraschino	Yes
Green Chartreuse	Yes
Rhum Clement Creole Shrub	Yes
Emmett's Irish Cream	Yes	Dairy
Aperol	Yes
Tuaca	Yes
Hiram Walker Triple Sec	Yes
Licor 43	Yes
Creme de Violette	Yes
DeKuyper Peppermint Schnapps	Yes
Pallini Limoncello	Yes	Beet sugar
Disaronno	Yes
Luxardo Bitter	Yes
Cointreau	Yes	Beet Sugar
Mandarin Napoleon	Yes
The King's Ginger	Yes
Wild Turkey American Honey	No	Honey
X-Rated Fusion Liqueur	No	Fruit Juice
Hypnotiq	No	Fruit Juice
Irish Mist	No	Honey
Courvoisier Rose	No	Fruit Juice
Velvet Falernum	No- Squishy, thick
Hiram Walker Gingerbread Liqueur	No- Mostly Solid
Combier Roi Rene Rouge	No- Mostly Solid	Cherry Juice?
Firelit	No- Hard puck
Potters Creme de Cacao	No-Thick, Squishy
Hiram Walker Blueberry Schnapps	No- Soft Squishy
Patron Citronge	No-Soft, squishy
Barenjager	No- Crusty top gel beneath	Honey
Drambuie	No- Crusty top gel beneath	Honey
St.Germain	No- Crusty top gel beneath
Cynar	No- Crusty top gel beneath
Solerno	No- Gel
J. Witty Chamomile	No- Crusty top thick gel beneath	Agave?
Benedictine	No- Crusty top gel beneath	Honey
Cherry Heering	No- Dense Gel
Root	No- Solid Puck
Kahlua	No- Full volume gel
Domaine de Canton	No- Gel
VEEV	No- Crisp, glassy puck
Ancho Reyes	No- Crisp, glassy puck
Creme Yvette	No- soft gel puck
Bols Yogurt	No- brown, crisp
Allspice Dram	No- thick gel
Rothman & Winter Apricot	brittle clump
Drambuie 15	No- Crisp, sticky clear candy
Pimm's	No- glassy shattering candy

It is possible that your results may differ for some of these, or that you have tried other liqueurs with successes and failures to share. If so, please let me know in the comments.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

October 18, 2011

Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Other Liqueurs: Problems

So far in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) I've been experimenting with the best way to get liqueurs into a solid/powder/sugar form.

I have performed all of these experiments with Campari so far, but now it's time to try some other liqueurs. Since Skyy Spirits is sponsoring this project, I began with other liqueurs from the company.

I put four liqueurs into the food dehydrator: X-Rated Fusion Liqueur, Wild Turkey American Honey, Irish Mist, and Midori.

After a standard amount of time (24-36 hours), only Midori had crystallized.

Second Attempt: A Long Time in the Dehydrator

The others remained partially liquid, like a thick syrup.

So I put them back in the dehydrator for another two days. They never crystallized, but when I let the trays cool, most of the liqueur did turn solid, forming almost a plane of glass that easily cracked.

I broke this up, but these liqueurs were still very, very sticky and would not be useful for rimming glassware and other solid uses.

Third Attempt: Using the Oven

Next I tried to use the oven to see if the temperature was the problem; perhaps these liqueurs needed higher temperatures to crystallize? I took the sticky solid liqueurs from the dehydrator and put them in the oven at 170. The result was just a sticky puck of gooey liqueur. Still not crystallized.

Then I repeated the oven attempt, this time using liquid liqueur (last time I took it from the dehydrator after that didn't work) but set at the lowest temperature, 140 Fahrenheit. This also did not achieve crystallization.

Fourth Attempt: Adding More Sugar to the Liqueur

What if, I thought, the problem is that there isn't enough sugar in the liqueur to crystallize? To test this theory (assuming it would fail, because as the liqueur dehydrates the water and alcohol disappear, making a concentrated sugar solution so it shouldn't matter how much sugar is in there as long as there is some) I added sugar to Wild Turkey American Honey.

This liqueur wouldn't actually hold much additional sugar. I added one part sugar to two parts Wild Turkey American Honey and it would not fully dissolve into solution.

So I gave it a hard shake and put it in a cupcake cup and put it in the oven at 170F. After a day it mostly crystallized, but still left a slightly sticky puck of non-solid liqueur at the bottom.

When I ground up this sugar in a spice grinder, it became a powder, but the powder was incredibly sticky. You couldn't use it to rim a glass or anything like that. In the storage container I put it in, it quickly formed a solid gooey mass.

I was slightly despondent: Only two out of five liqueurs that I tried to dehydrate were successful.Would these methods only work on a fraction of liqueurs?

But then inspiration hit….

To keep this post from being too long, I'll post the second half of it tomorrow.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 29, 2011
Solid Liquids: Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

In the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) we are experimenting with the best methods to dehydrate liqueurs, and then putting the dehydrated liqueur to good use.

This is one of those uses.

I've been using a food dehydrator as one method of dehydrating liqueurs. It works well enough, though other methods are faster. In order to use it, I insert plastic trays into the dehydrator shelves so that the liquid won't pour through the holes.

These trays are actually designed to make fruit leathers. The instructions on how to do so come with the tray, so I knew as soon as I got enough liqueur sugar I'd be using it for this.

First Try

On my first attempt, I followed the instructions a little too closely. Basically you use apple sauce to form the base layer of the fruit leather, then add other fruit to it to flavor it. The example recipe given is to use:

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
2 pints strawberries, de-stemmed and with bruises cut off

To this I added 1/3 cup dehydrated Campari sugar and mixed it up in the blender.

I spread this out over two of the circular trays and let it dry for 14 hours, which was a little bit too long as the fruit leather was cracky in some parts and they didn't roll up.

They were delicious, but unfortunately you could barely taste the Campari; only a little bitterness.

Second Try

On my second attempt I left out the strawberries as a flavoring agent, and I did much better. My recipe was simply:

Campari Fruit Roll-Ups

2 cups unsweetened apple sauce
1/2 cup Campari sugar (in the future I'd use 3/4 cup)

Add ingredients to a blender and blend until blended. Spread out over one tray in fruit dehydrator and dehydrate for about 12 hours, until there are no sticky spots. For thinner roll-ups, spread out over two trays.

These were done to the perfect amount, and rolled up quite easily.

They were also delicious. The Campari flavor kicked in as you chewed the roll-up and in the after-taste. They were amazing but as I say in the recipe, could use more Campari!

Campari Straw Attempt

For both recipes, I attempted to roll up the roll-ups into a straw, because a Campari straw would be fabulous.

On one attempt I rolled a roll-up around a chopstick then waited to see if it would stick. It did not so I then weighed it down and put it in the oven to see if the ends would melt together. They did not, so I put it in the microwave to see if I would accomplish it that way, but it just came apart.

Alas. I'll keep working on this.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 21, 2011
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
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
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
Solid Liquids: Dehydrated Liqueurs on Cocktail Menus
I've spent some time researching powdered/dehydrated liqueurs online to see where and how they've been used. Turns out: all around the world. Below are the few I found.

It seems that for the most part these dehydrated liqueurs are used as a powdered rims on cocktail glasses, as garnishes sprinkled on top of egg white drinks, and in one case as a popcorn flavoring.
- Araka in Clayton, Missouri uses Campari powder to rim glasses.
- The bar Mea Culpa in Ponsonby, New Zealand, had the following drink on their menu: ANGEL DUST - Cherry & orange macerated Rittenhouse Rye, Liquore Strega, White creme de cacao, Benedictine foam, Campari powder
- This drink from Josh Pape of Chambar Belgian Restaurant in Vancouver, BC contains toasted cashews, gin, pink grapefruit cordial, sherry, apple juice, egg white, and has Campari powder on the rim.
- Eau de Vie in Sydney offered, according to this post, "The Countessa, a reimagined Negroni with Aperol, served up in an exquisite coupe, on the side a half time slice of orange, dusted with Campari powder and caramelized with a blowtorch behind the bar. "
- Val Stefanov of Ontario, Canada used dehydrated Campari to make Campari cotton candy.
- Tom Noviss of Brighton made a Campari powder-rimmed drink with 42BELOW Feijoa vodka, Xante Pear, Avocado, and other ingredients.
- Anvil in Texas used dehydrated Campari and Chartreuse crystals. They also used some on popcorn!
- Callooh Callay in London was using dehydrated Campari in a version of the Negroni.
- Der Raum in Melbourne used it on a tasting menu.
- At Elements in Princeton, New Jersey, they make The Skål! Cocktail with akvavit, Pedro Ximénez sherry, dry vermouth, lemon juice, and lingonberry preserves. Garnished with a rim of dehydrated Chartreuse.
What other drinks have you seen? Any other liqueurs besides Chartreuse and Campari?

For the Solid Liquids Project project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.
August 2, 2011