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I always liked to please my women with light, pleasant drinks, but for the anniversary of the wedding I decided to cook something special.
This is not about a treat for guests, there I did not reinvent the wheel – a couple of bottles of whiskey and three wines. I wanted to do something for two, a kind of romantic drink of love.
Yes, it sounds so-so, but what came out of it has the right to be called that. There are two drinks around the world that have the title of the drink of love – champagne and amaretto. It is impossible to make champagne yourself, so my choice fell on the second option.
The story was shared by my subscriber Vyacheslav.
How to cook something you have never tried
By my 30s, I had never tried amaretto in my life, initially I thought it was something like Baileys, but everything turned out to be much more complicated. Amaretto, by its way of preparation, is a tincture in which a lot of ingredients are involved.
After rereading dozens of articles on the Internet, I tried for a long time to figure out where to buy apricot kernels. It is they who should give the drink that unique taste of sweet bitterness, as it was described by users on the network.
It is worth saying that I never found them for sale, but an apricot was just fruiting under my window, which I began to look askance at.
I discovered another secret for myself purely by experience – in the stones of our Russian apricots, the kernels are large, in the stones of imported and beautiful berries, they are small, and besides, they are tasteless.
If the bones are dried, it will be easier to crush them.
I had to spend more than two hours cleaning the apricot pits, splitting them with cleavers and extracting those very precious kernels.
Preparation of ingredients
After collecting a small glass of these kernels, I proceeded to buy all the remaining ingredients for my drink. I have purchased:
- Almonds – 100 g.
- Coffee extractor (in moonshine shop).
- Cinnamon.
- Carnation.
- Vanillin.
In recipes, it is advised to take either instant coffee, or make very, very strong custard. But it was always more convenient for me to use extractors for making coffee drinks, they are not so expensive, and their aroma is much stronger.
I toasted the almonds right away.
I always have sugar, water, pepper and some dried chili at home, so I didn’t have to buy this. All I had to do was decide on the basis of my liquor. I absolutely did not want to use purchased vodka.
Preparation of the basis
For the base, I decided to kick out regular moonshine, but with one little trick. By that time, I didn’t have a finished product, so everything was done from scratch – the simplest sugar mash (hydroM 1: 4) and turbo yeast were prepared in just half an hour.
Yeast coped with its task already on the fourth day, and I transgressed to distillation. Here it is very important to watch not only the heads, but also the tails, since the slightest unpleasant smell of the base can ruin everything.
I didn’t save raw, and raced three times, thoroughly cleaning my base. On the fourth distillation, I also passed it through a sukhoparnik, one-third full of fragrant African Arabica.
After the last pasture, I started preparing the syrup: coffee extract (2g) + sugar (250g) + vanillin (5g) were poured with distilled water and boiled until the sugar was completely dissolved.
I crushed nuts, apricot kernels and spices in a mortar and poured into syrup, mixing everything thoroughly, and then poured 500 grams of my coffee base into it.
Result
The drink stood with me for about three weeks in a dark but warm place. I didn’t touch it at all, didn’t stir it, didn’t open it, I just forgot about it.
When it came time to open it to pour into a beautiful bottle, I was immediately surprised by the pleasant aroma of my liquor. It was not coffee, for some reason it seemed to me that the smell was reminiscent of grinadine or pomegranate.
The dark and rich brown color was very reminiscent of whiskey, which was overexposed in a mordant barrel, and even a dye was added. I did not dare to taste it alone. The liquor had to be carefully filtered three times to remove the sediment.
When the “judgment day” passed, and all the guests were put out the door, my wife and I sat down together in the kitchen and decided to taste my efforts. It is worth saying that the taste turned out really magical – the drink is sweet, but after that it leaves a slight tart bitterness.
The only thing is that it turned out to be quite strong, closer to whiskey, and not to liquor. But, since my wife is a supporter of strong drinks, everything turned out perfectly.
And how do you pamper your ladies, because I’m sure that all moonshiners are trying to appease their soul mates so that they pay less attention to our hobby?