If anyone has been reading this blog, I apologize to you for being negligent in keeping up with it. The holidays really take it out of me and I’m just recently feeling up to getting back to work. In addition, the urge to create art has taken hold of me and I am deep in the process of completing multiple pieces. If you don’t believe me (and there’s no reason why you should, I could easily be lying to you), just check my gallery. I’ve added a few new pieces to it. I am working towards resuming my outreach to the public and further building this blog, my Instagram, etc. That being said, I haven’t yet finished a blog post to my own satisfaction. I don’t wish to leave anyone high and dry, however, so I’m going to put one of my older writings up and hope it entertains you. The Thirsty Carnivore is one of the blog posts I wrote as a freelancer, for a bar-focused blog. Enjoy!
The Thirsty Carnivore
Vegans be damned! I want meat! I’m such a carnivore that I consider fish to be a vegetable. Which is why it makes me happy when bartenders incorporate meat into their drinks. I can get drunk and get my meat on at the same time. This practice isn’t anything new. The first time I heard about this was when I was leafing through a cook- book from the 1950’s. It was the kind of time capsule throwback that presupposed that only women would be reading it, because what would a man be doing in the kitchen? Ah, those were the days. But I digress. This was the first cookbook I had seen that had an entire chapter dedicated to cocktails. I was looking over all of their concoctions when I came across the Bull Shot.
Rumored to be thought up by some mad chemists from Detroit’s Caucus Club sometime around 1952, the Bull Shot is basically one part vodka to two parts beef broth, with some Worchester and Tabasco thrown in to give it some panache. Garnish with a wedge of lemon and you’ve got a drink straight out of “Mad Men”. With the new found popularity of bone broth, I’m seeing this drink, and others like it, pop up in bars every- where. Right here in Portland, the bar, Three Degrees, has a creation called TD’s Bloody Mary, beef consommé being a main ingredient.
Now that I’ve become more ambitious and experimental in my drinking, I have discovered a myriad of distillers, bartenders and aficionados that have attempted to magically combine the realms of meat and booze. These can be placed into three categories.
The first, and most common, is the garnish. If you happen to be a fan of the bloody mary, you have no doubt noticed an increase in the garnishing flair applied to those drinks. It’s like they’re putting a goddamn flower arrangement on the freakin’ thing, so that you have to eat the equivalent of an entire salad to even take a sip. To have the occasional bacon strip or strip added to this mix is not unusual, but now the kid gloves are off, and I won’t be surprise when I get a rack of ribs on top of my glass. For a refreshing change, I’ll go to Hamlet, that capitalizes on its swine based theme with the Meat vs. Melon. In dramatic counterpoint to the heat of a good bloody, the Meat vs.
Melon combines chilled gin and melon juice, elegantly garnished with a strip of air dried prosciutto.
In the second category, I present to you the infusion. In Portland, where bacon is so revered that I’m surprised we haven’t founded a religion based on it, there’s no shortage of alcoholic bacon creations. Bacon infusion is so common place now, however, that it is almost main stream. The Betty Crocker website has a recipe for it (http:// www.bettycrocker.com/how-to/tipslibrary/ingredients/how-to-make-bacon-infused-vodka) for fucks sake! Take, for instance, Alaska Distillery and their Smoked Salmon Vodka. There are a number of establishments that are utilizing a practice called fat washing. To fat-wash an alcohol, a fat or an oil, such as truffle oil, is poured into a container of booze and allowed to sit for a while at room temperature. The container is then placed in a freezer and the fat content allowed to solidify. Once that happens, the solid layer is re- moved, but the alcohol will have absorbed some of its flavors. There is a recipe for a Duck Fat Sazerac that I’ll be making as soon as I get my hands on some duck fat.
Third is the most unholy of alchemy, making alcohol from meat itself. This isn’t usually done, because the process of fermentation needs sugar to work, not protein. If we’re not too caught up on using actual meat, there are several forms of alcohol that are made from the fermentation of animal products. It’s been conjectured that mead is the earliest alcoholic beverage, made from the fermentation of honey, and there are a number of cultures that have beverages made from fermented milk, such as the drink, Kumis. If we actually want to delve into booze from fermented meat, we can, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. You may wish to stop reading here if you have a weak stomach, or are planning on eating anytime soon.
A winemaker out of Minnesota, Ray Reigstad, has made Army Worm Wine. Also known as Tent Caterpillars, that are native to North America, and can infest and damage certain crops. So when several of them descended on Reigstad’s property, he figured he’d do something useful with them. Having made wine in his basement for over a decade, he had a process in mind. Collecting seven pounds of worms in a bucket, he first poured boiling water over them to kill them. Then he added sugar and yeast, along with a few other ingredients and let it sit. After 4 months, he had a crisp, white wine that has been likened to a pinot grigio.
So, rejoice paleo people! Our love of flesh doesn’t need to stop when we belly up to the bar. You can eat your protein and drink it, too. Next time you’re out drinking, ask your bartender what they do with their meat. Er, maybe not. That got me kicked out the last time I asked.