Tag: dehydrated liqueurs

Orange Liqueur Dehydration with Tapioca Maltodextrin

It's nice when other people do experiments for you. Reader Jonathan Faircloth started a blog called The Zymologic Table to record the trials and tribulations of making orange liqueur dust.

Though it's not my experiment, this is a continuing part of the Solid Liquids project, in which I am searching for ways to dehydrate liqueurs and find creative uses for them. The index page of all the experiments is here.

After a failed attempt at dehydration through standard means, Faircloth picked up some tapioca maltodextrin and used it to dehydrate a liqueur into a sugary form. After a few trials of his own, it worked.

(Picture from The Zymologic Table)

He found that it worked at a 2:7 ratio of liqueur to tapioca maltodextrin. This might be a method to make dusts out of liqueurs and other alcohol to be used for rimming and other purposes when regular heat-based dehydrating doesn't work. (And as an added bonus, supposedly the alcohol is not removed in this method.)

As he was attempting to use an orange liqueur to rim a glass, he was dissappointed to find that when you do this, the orangeyness of orange liqueur goes away. So he added some orange zest into the tapioca malodextrin to get it back.

(Picture from The Zymologic Table)

I have similarly found that the essential oils evaporate (they are very volatile even at room temperature after all) when you dehydrate with heat, and you can put them back with citrus zests. I even temporarily forgot about that and dehydrated nearly a bottle of Cointreau only to be reminded that orange liqueur when the orange goes away just tastes like sugar. Very expensive sugar.

Looks like I'll be adding some orange zest back into the mix as well.

Keep checking Faircloth's site for his further experiments.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

October 14, 2011
Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Other Liqueurs Part Two

In yesterday's post in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) I had expanded beyond dehydrating Campari into dehydrating other liqueurs, namely X-Rated Fusion Liqueur, Wild Turkey American Honey, Irish Mist, and Midori. These are all part of the Skyy Spirits portfolio.

Of these four, only Midori crystallized like Campari had. I tried several methods to make the others crystallize but failed for the large part. I went over those in yesterday's post.

(Note: Before you get too deep into this, I just want to warn you that at this point I haven't figured out a solution to this problem and I welcome your suggestions.)

Nothing was working to make the others crystallize, but then inspiration hit.

Inspiration: What Do These Liqueurs Have in Common?

I realized that two of the liqueurs – Wild Turkey American Honey and Irish Mist – are sweetened with honey!

Furthermore, though I have no proof of this, I suspected that X Rated Fusion Liqueur may be sweetened with fruit juice.

Perhaps these other forms of sugar do not crystallize, or don't do so in the same way that cane sugar/sucrose does.

But first, I figured I should test the theory that X Rated Fusion Liqueur does not crystallize in the same way that known fruit juice-sweetened liqueurs do not crystallize. I placed X Rated Fusion, Hypnotiq, and Courvoisier Rose into cupcake cups and baked them at 140F for about 36 hours.

Courvoisier Rose came the closest to crystallizing, being a dense and sticky puck of liqueur. The other two were just gooey.

Though this doesn't necessarily prove anything, it's a clue that fruit juice-sweetened liqueurs don't crystallize the same way cane sugar/sucrose-sweetened liqueurs do.

A Further Test

While I was performing these experiments, I learned of the Stovetop Crystallization Method previously discussed. That method seems pretty foolproof, so I decided to test it on both X Rated Fusion Liqueur and on Wild Turkey American Honey just to be sure they don't crystallize even at high candying temperatures.

X Rated Fusion turned from pink to brown to black.

And even at high temperatures, it just formed a thick molasses-like candy syrup that would solidify as soon as you removed it from heat. These sugar pucks do not make good sugar crystals even after you crush them. The resulting sugar/powder is just as sticky as a syrupy liquid.

Wild Turkey American Honey performed similarly, except it does not turn black. It's more like a caramel at the end.

Again though this doesn't prove anything, it may be a clue as to which type of liqueurs do and do not form crystals when you dehydrate them.

In the next set of experiments, I'll look at a couple other honey liqueurs to see if they similarly do not crystallize while other liqueurs do.

Then I'll try to overcome this obstactle.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 30, 2011
Solid Liquids: Bulk Liqueur Dehydration in the Oven

This is just a quick post in the Solid Liquids Project (project index here) to note that you can dehydrate liqueurs in the oven in containers other than the silicone cupcake holders that I've been using.

Many people have SilPat non-stick baking mats. These are great but have the problem of being flat so liquids run off them.

However you can also get other silicone containers. I bought a breadpan-sized silicone pan from Amazon. It works just fine for dehydrating larger quantities of liqueurs.

As you dehydrate a liqueur in the oven, a surface crust will form trapping some still-liquid liqueur beneath it, so it's important to break it up as it gets near the end of baking. I just squeeze the silicone pan to crunch the innards.

The Solid Liquids Project index is at this link.

September 14, 2011