Monthly Archives: November 2010
Gourmet Underground Detroit's content archives are organized by date and catalog the aggregated content of our Features pages as well as our blog.
The subtle flavor of corn smut
Well known in Mexico as the culinary delicacy huitlacoche, corn smut are fungal, blue-black tumors, or “galls”, that replace the normal kernels on a cob of corn. I first discovered this south-of-the-border specialty while dining at a hotel restaurant in Saltillo, Mexico. After an invigorating appetizer of sopa de tortilla replete with all the fixings (avocado, queso, crema and a small but blistering chipotle pepper), I inhaled a bloody beef filet stuffed with queso de Chihuahua and covered in huitlacoche.
For culinary use, the galls are harvested while still immature, fully mature galls are dry and almost entirely spore-filled. The immature galls, gathered two to three weeks after an ear of corn is infected, still retain moisture and, when cooked, have a flavor described as mushroom-like, sweet, savory, woody, and earthy.
Needless to say, it doesn’t make an elegant presentation for the uninitiated. Any of your friends that might not touch guacamole because of its appearance will run, panicky, from the dining table at the sight of it. But it’s harmless. In fact, the taste is rather subtle, as if you sautéed mushrooms with the forest peat still on them. Cold Bohemia cerveza, Cuervo Tradicional and a sangrita chaser might engrave the experience into your being.
In the U.S., corn smut is considered a blight on the crop and the USDA has spent a considerable amount of time and money trying to eradicate it. Apparently we need all the corn we can grow for snack chips and the High Fructose Corn Syrup prevalent in so many beverages and processed foods.
In an effort to have more Americans recognize it as a swell tasting food, a few chefs have taken to calling it Mexican truffles. So far, I’ve yet to see any increase in local availability but you can order a quesadilla filled with the stuff at one of the two Rojo Mexican Bistro locations in Novi and Rochester. You might also be lucky enough to find a canned version in a Mexicantown food market.
A Queen of Italy
Everything old is new again, and the milkman of yesterday have been reborn in the form of Detroit wine aficionado Putnam Weekley. In lieu of bottles of milk, Putnam is delivering bottles of wine as part of his new “Detroit Wine Truck” effort.
One week in to his delivery service, he’s done a number of interesting wine packages already, and the one I opted to try the first time around was the “Kings of Italy” consisting of a 2004 La Ca’ Nova Barbaresco and a 2007 Sant’Antimo “La Palazzetta” from Flavio Fanti.
Tonight, I opened the Barbaresco.
It’s smooth and refined, a bit more so than I expected. The nose is perfumy and pretty — like most barbaresco, it’s got a very feminine quality about it. The lightness is pushed aside by a potent prick of pepper. That shows strongly on the palate, where it’s tight, peppery, and astringent, but despite the tannins and at 13.5% abv, it’s a light and joyful wine, and there’s a real elegance to it. Some cherry and kind of a rose hip tea flavor. In 3 or 4 years, this might be the perfect Valentine’s Day wine.
Putnam wrote some suggestions for drinking the wine in a brief note that accompanied the two bottles. One of them was to fall more in love. I imagine that advice accompanied all the wines, but it seems particularly appropriate for this bottle.
Bourbon Milk Punch, to Your Taste
I first encountered Milk Punch through Paul Harrington and Laura Moorhead’s aptly named guide, Cocktail – The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, published in 1998 and filled with historical booze concoctions mostly obscured by the dark ages of Sex on the Beach and Long Island iced tea of the 80s and early 90s. Though beginning to show its age, this new early tipplers tome was one of the first to spotlight a revival in the craft of drink mixing.
Their recipe calls for an indecent three ounces of bourbon per drink with an equal amount of milk, one-half teaspoon dark rum, one tablespoon simple syrup and a dusting of nutmeg. I made them this way for quite awhile and you can well imagine how drunk I must have been. I even began adding crushed ice, as the high octane drink occasionally took some effort to finish.
As more enthusiasts mined history for the origins of classic cocktails like Milk Punch and began sharing their knowledge through books and blogs, it became evident that the recipe I was using was more of a deviation than a standard. It seems a more accurate milk punch is made with brandy (Harrington calls this version a Tiger’s Milk) and balances the booze out for easier drinking.
But I like bourbon. And the charred barrel flavors of vanilla and marshmallow mix particularly well with milk. So I mixed and drank, drank and mixed, and discovered the proportions that do me right.
This drink goes particularly well with the inside warmth and soft light of autumn and winter holidays. Egg nog be damned. Here is my recipe, with notes on how to personalize it to suit your own taste.
Bourbon Milk Punch
The base bourbon ~ 2 ounces: You can’t go wrong with Buffalo Trace here. Its intense charred oak characteristics may not make the best Manhattan but they pair well with milk.
The milk ~ 3 ounces: I am lucky enough to get a gallon raw milk share from a local farmer every week. It’s rich and creamy and makes a devastating milk punch. Calder’s Dairy natural milk is similar in consistency and a fine choice. For a special occasion, you can use equal amounts half-and-half and 2%, but I wouldn’t go any heavier on the cream as the drink is likely to become cumbersome. Of course, you can try skim milk but if you’re already drinking booze you might as well allow yourself all the pleasures. Almond or rice milk might actually work well but I suspect some alteration of ingredient measures would be called for.
The sweetener ~ 2 teaspoons: Simple syrup is fine. I like to use maple syrup. Even though its nutty sweetness isn’t obvious in a sip, it adds another layer of flavor.
More flavor ~ 2 teaspoons: I used Meyer’s Dark Rum for a good time but I was never particularly pleased with its raw character. Like the maple syrup, St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram will add even more depth without being intrusive. Alternately, a couple of dashes of vanilla extract will boost flavor in a more obvious way and is a good choice for those annoying guests who profess to find complex adult drinks objectionable.
The mixing: Shake with cracked ice and pour into a chilled old-fashioned glass with three to four whole ice cubes. Many recipes call for packing the glass with crushed or shaved ice but rapid dilution is not the way to treat this drink. No ice works well when using quality whole milk and if you’re in the partying mood. A proper shaking will create an agreeable frothy top.
The garnish ~ a dusting: Freshly grated nutmeg, grated fresh, from whole nutmeg, freshly grated over the top of the finished milk punch. The mystical properties of freshly grated nutmeg are undervalued in our mentally dysgenic society. It is all at once furtively sensual, evocative of faraway dreamlands, and mildly narcotic. The milk punch is nothing without fresh nutmeg. If the only thing you have is powdered nutmeg in a tin, you may as well use floor sweepings and hang yourself from the nearest church buttress afterwards.
Historically, the Bourbon Milk Punch makes all kinds of sense. New Orleans, where the drink was born and still heartily survives, is the place where barges of Kentucky barrel-aged corn liquor would have arrived via the Mississippi during a high water season at odds with the Midwestern harvest and distilling season. Nutmeg is a spice common in the Caribbean. One of my personal additions, Allspice Dram, is also a Caribbean spice.
The maple syrup was in my fridge and happened to work. Hey, it’s a new era. The drinks bible of the 21st Century is being written every day.
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