Road trip to Montreal with maple bacon soda - no Flea this week

We're taking our first mini vacation in a long time and driving up to Montreal for the music festival Mutek, which is coincidentally the same weekend as their Beer Festival!  We have reservations for Au Pied de Cochon, and are very excited to take a break for 4 days.

And equally important is the cargo we'll be taking up with us!  One liter of our experimental maple bacon soda.  We tried this a few month ago and decided it'd be fun (or foolish) to take a bottle up with us to try impress Au Pied de Cochon.  It's currently carbonating in our fridge.  (Just to recap, in order to extract bacon water you have to cook the bacon in water, then take this fatty bacon-water and add it to a gelatin mixture, freeze it in an ice cube tray, then as the bacon-gelatin mixture melts, the fat is left behind leaving a clear fat-free bacon liquid which you can then add maple syrup to)

This does mean that we won't be at the Flea this weekend, but our bottles will still be available at Blue Hill and Palo Santo.

Maple syrup & bacon soda

We're in the middle of phase 1 of our maple bacon & syrup experiment. We bought Ridgewood smoked bacon from Choice Greene, the fancy market one block away, and fried it up in a pan for about 15 minutes over medium heat. Water was then added, and we let it simmer for an hour.

The result is a fatty bacon liquid!

We added gelatin to the mixture, poured the mixture into ice cube trays and let it freeze over night.

The next day, we moved the bacon-gelatin ice cubes out of the freezer, and into the fridge, letting the ice cubes melt very slowly, collecting the fat-free bacon water, which after 48 hours was 125ml.

Next step - maple syrup!

35ml of maple syrup was added and the mixture diluted to 450ml. The mixture was a good balance between maple, bacon saltiness and sweetness.

Now we wait and carbonate.

spiced chocolate soda

Made a chocolate soda today. We decided to make it as if we were doing a normal spiced hot chocolate (just with water instead of milk) and then remove all the fat and solids using a gelatin clarifying technique leaving us with a nice spiced chocolate water that could be carbonated.

I first learned about using gelatin to clarify broths from the ideas in food blog when I was trying to make a light clear bacon broth for a recipe with scallops and a bean puree a couple years ago. They had a great bacon broth recipe online, check it out here. The basic idea is the same as the old French technique of using egg white- the gelatin creates a 3D matrix that acts as a filter for all solids and fats. You add a bit of gelatin while the liquid is warm and then you freeze it and let it slowly melt in the fridge over a filter. This keeps the fat and gelatin solid and they trap all the other solids with them in the filter letting a crystal clear liquid drip down.

The chocolate water came out quite tasty! The method does need some tweaking though. 1st-recovery was low. I started with a liter of chocolate and only ended up with about 300 mL of chocolate water at the end. I think the gelatin ratio needs to be even lower because of the higher fat content of the chocolate vs. a meat broth. 2nd- not enough spice! The cinnamon, the clove and the hoja santa come through nicely but the chile spice is not really there. May need to use fresh chiles instead of dry or more of them or just lengthen the boiling time to extract more from the dry chile. Otherwise it's good- nice and clear and light but still very chocolatey! This is all probably too much work to scale up especially since we could just make a chocolate syrup and add carbonated water much easier, but it's fun to experiment!

The recipe:

226g (8oz) baking chocolate

1 dry gaujillo chile

2 dry ancho chile

1 tsp hoja santa

3 sticks cinnamon

1 tsp clove

1 L of water