Eccentric Flower:201012/The Bulgakov

Many long years ago, when I was barely in high school, brethren and sistren, my classmate Tamara bequeathed to me knowledge of a mystical piece of information: Vodka, the most boring alcoholic substance in the world and even then rapidly becoming tagged in my mind as "thing useful only for adding to fruit juices and sodas to make them alcoholic," could be made extremely interesting by steeping other things in it for an extended period of time.

Her favorite - and the beverage in question - was pepper vodka. This was created by steeping two or three bird peppers or similar thin red hot peppers in a bottle of vodka for an extended period of time. Simplicity itself.

I never did get to try Tamara's version of pepper vodka, but I experimented with a couple of variations over the years and they were all good. Based on a limited sample set, I have arrived at two pretty sturdy conclusions.

1) It's hard to make a bad batch of pepper vodka; pretty much any combination of non-green peppers you use will be interesting. (Green peppers tend to give the vodka a "bell pepper" taste which I don't find welcome. I like it in food but not in my booze.)

2) There is no point whatsoever in buying commercial pepper vodkas. What you make will always be much better than those. And it's not like the process is hard.

Last night we cracked into the bottle of pepper vodka seen in this photograph. (Isn't that pretty?)

Here is the recipe for making that particular vodka (but do read the warnings and the anecdote after it).

You will need:
1 bottle of vodka of your choice
1 cayenne pepper (that's the long red one in the picture)
2 habanero peppers

Get a good brand of vodka. Experience has taught me that infusions do not rescue bad vodka; you just end up with a bottle of bad vodka with a different flavor. (Vodka has no flavor, but you can still taste the difference between a good and a bad vodka. The good vodka is smooth; the bad vodka rasps your throat all the way down.)

Take precautions for habanero-handling; i.e. wear gloves or be prepared not to touch your eyes or any other sensitive tissues for a while. The "hot" in hot peppers is an oil, and soap and water don't completely wash it off. I didn't use gloves, because I can't stand doing any knifework in gloves, and while I was smart enough to avoid mishap, when I took out my contact lenses - several hours and many hand-washings later - I could still definitely tell I'd been in contact with habaneros earlier in the day.

Cut or pull off the stems and other stemmy bits off the peppers. They may make the vodka taste like twigs.

Cut the habaneros in half and remove the seeds; also pluck or carefully cut out as much of the white internal ribs/tissue (the correct term for this white stuff in peppers, believe it or not, is actually "placenta") as you can, without removing too much of the colored flesh.

You can try seeding the cayenne, but it may be too thin to seed easily, and those don't have as much placenta so you may not want to bother. (The placenta, like citrus pith, has a tendency to make the vodka bitter). But even if you don't seed it, slit it all the way down its length with the knife, to allow the vodka to penetrate better. Pepper skin is a fairly impermeable membrane.

Pour out a small shot of the vodka to make room for the things you're going to put in the bottle. (Do I need to tell you what to do with this vodka? Na zdrowie!)

Carefully - don't want to splash vodka out - put each pepper or piece of pepper into the bottle. The habanero halves will need to be squnched a little to fit down the neck but it can be done.

Reclose the bottle tightly and put in a dark, non-refrigerated place - like the back of your liquor cabinet - and leave it alone. Let this sit for at least a month. As Alton Brown says, your patience will be rewarded.

Now, when you take this out, please use your judgement. I have never had any home-infused booze grow nasties, and I'm not sure what kind of bacteria could thrive in alcohol anyway, but I make no guarantees: If you take the bottle out and the things in it have grown fur or turned a funny color, then you may want to not risk it. Or at the very least, try only a small bit of it and make sure it doesn't sicken you.

After that, I put it in the freezer. Why not freeze it from the get-go? Because freezing slows the infusion process down as well. Keeping it in the freezer also helps my anxieties about what happens when you get the level of vodka in the bottle low enough that the stuff in it is exposed to air. I figure if it's been impregnated with vodka and it's kept too cold for microbes, I am doubly safe. Besides, vodka should always be served very cold.

(Some people strain their vodka into a clean bottle after infusion and throw the bottle that has the various organic remnants out. I don't ever have a spare clean liquor bottle and I hate straining things through a funnel; I always spill too much somehow.)

Now, all that said, you may want to tinker with this recipe. Because, honey, this is one hot vodka. You understand, "how hot" is a subjective judgement. My wife, who makes her own hot sauce and has an asbestos mouth, thought it was just the right amount of heat, very pleasant. I made the cocktail below and it was just at the limit of enjoyability; I liked it, but afterwards my lips burned and my mouth hurt. If it had been one iota hotter I wouldn't have been able to drink it.

It's also a fairly one-note flavor. You want to mix it with other things; that way you're not just using the vodka to add alcohol to something but also adding heat. Think of it as liquid, alcoholic pepper, and not much else. (I'm going to try a more complex infusion next time to get some other flavors into the booze along with the peppers.)

Pepper and citrus are used together to great effect, particularly in Central American foods and drinks, so my first thought for this was to substitute it for tequila in my Non-Blender Non-Frozen Margarita recipe. This turned out pretty good, but I think next time I will substitute it for only half the tequila. (Imagine: calming a drink down by increasing the tequila!)

I simply cannot resist the temptation to make a semi-obscure literary joke, and thus I dub this drink The Bulgakov. Because it is a Russian Margarita that has the devil in it.

1/2 to 3/4 ounces Cointreau (a generous half ounce)
1/2 ounce Rose's lime juice (no substitutions allowed!)
3 ounces pepper vodka, or 1 1/2 oz. pepper vodka and 1 1/2 oz. good tequila
approximately 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt (I don't measure it) (normal salt will do if you must)

Put all ingredients - yes, including the salt - into a shaker with ice. Shake very vigorously until quite cold. Strain into glass and put on your fireproof lipstick. Serves 1.

If you do not care to try to make pepper vodka, you can just make this drink with three ounces of tequila and it will be the best Margarita-that-is-not-a-goddamned-Slurpee you ever had. And you don't have to fool around with salting the rim of the damned glass.

Holidailies readers who find this topic relevant to their interests may also be interested in the previous three entries in what is apparently a slowly continuing series:

The Bourbon Grifter
The Wry Smile
Singapore Lemonade