Don't Settle for Store-Bought Maraschino Cherries

Maraschino cherries from a jar leave a little —well, a lot, actually— to be desired. The highly processed, artificially flavored and dyed little lumps bear only a passing resemblance to real, fresh cherries. The good news is you can make much better ones yourself, and at a fraction of the cost of the fancier type imported from Italy.

I found a recipe on chow.com and made a couple minor changes. The first thing you will need is, of course, cherries! For truly authentic maraschino cherries you would need sour Marasca cherries, but these are pretty difficult to find. Fortunately, you can substitute more common varieties found in the U.S. such as Bing (that's what I used). For this recipe you will need one pound.

I didn't want to spend the money to buy a bunch of vanilla beans when I only needed half of one, so I substituted a half teaspoon of vanilla extract. I doubt it makes a noticeable difference, but go ahead and use half a vanilla pod if you're fancy like that.

The third ingredient which you're not likely to have in your cupboard already is maraschino liqueur; the preferred brand is Luxardo. Your grocery store probably doesn't have it, but I found it easily at a store that sells beverages… and also more things…

The only other ingredients you will need are water and sugar (or sugar substitute, I used Splenda and it works fine). You will also need some gear: a good cherry pitter (try Oxo), a quart jar that seals tightly (check Amazon for Fido flip top jars), and a sieve or strainer. Be warned that pitting cherries is messy and will splatter juice all over your favorite shirt, so an apron or a top you don't care about is highly recommended.

Now we are ready to get to work. First wash and pit your pound of cherries, but don't throw out the pits, we're going to use those too. Set the cherries aside, put the pits in a zip top bag, and wrap it with a kitchen towel. Get out your meat mallet or frying pan or something else heavy and smash those pits to bits. Now put your cherry pits, vanilla (1/2 teaspoon of extract or half a pod and its seeds), 3/4 cup of sugar (or Splenda), 1/4 cup of water in a little sauce pan. Mix it all together and bring it to a boil. Make sure all your sweetener dissolves in the water. Take it off the heat and wait for it cool to room temperature (about 40 minutes).

Once your syrup has cooled, strain out all the pit bits and the vanilla seeds and pod if you used that. Hang on to that pod if you have it. Add one cup of maraschino liqueur to your strained syrup and stir to combine. Next, pour your pitted cherries into your quart jar, and if you have a vanilla pod, stick it standing straight up in the middle. Pour your syrup/liqueur mixture over the cherries and make sure they are all submerged.

Now comes the hard part. Seal up your jar, put it in the refrigerator and wait… at least five days. After they've had some time to marinate, your cherries will be ready to garnish Manhattans, Rob Roys and many other delicious cocktails. Note that the alcohol is not cooked off, so these cherries are just for adults.

My guess is that once you've made your own, (somewhat) authentic Maraschino cherries, you'll never want to bother with those sickly-sweet, red dyed, processed little lumps ever again.

Cooking: What the Pho?

This post is overdue. Months overdue, in fact. Mea culpa. I made an attempt at homemade Pho, and I think I was moderately successful. I based my efforts on a recipe from NPR.org, here's the link: One-Day Pho.

The key to delicious Pho is the broth, so that's where we'll start. Here we have a couple cuts of beef shank. Notice the marrow in the middle of the bone. Bone marrow wasn't something I was very comfortable cooking with, but I knew it was essential for flavorful broth.

Next we have a large onion cut in half and two big chunks of peeled ginger. These are lightly charred under the broiler and then tossed in the pot with the beef shanks to simmer for a two or four or more hours.

Cinnamon, cloves, star anise and white peppercorns also add to the broth's flavor.

Here it all is in the pot. Add three quarts of cold water and it's ready to start simmering.

Here is the soup in its final stage after cutting the meat off the bones and straining the broth. I discarded the tendon because, honestly, it seemed gross and I didn't want to eat it, nor did I think anyone else would. I'm afraid I reduced the broth too much and put in too many noodles. I think it still tasted great.

Another great thing about Pho is the opportunity to customize your soup. Things you'll want to have on hand are fish sauce, Srirachca or other chili sauce, Hoisin sauce, jalapeño slices, Thai basil (or Italian basil if Thai is unavailable), cilantro, mint, bean sprouts, green onion and lime wedges.

Thoughts:

Be very careful with the fish sauce, adding a little bit at a time, to taste. The flavor is very strong and salty. Do not add the noodles until you are seconds away from serving your Pho or they will suck up the broth and get soggy. It's a good idea to keep the noodles separate and allow people to add however much they'd like to their individual bowls. I think a few more shin bones (without meat) would make the broth a bit more savory and flavorful. You can never have too much bone marrow, am I right?

I hope this inspires you to make your own Pho at home. It requires quite a bit of patience but not a whole lot of effort or skill (luckily for me). Best wishes to you and all your home cooking endeavours!

Brewing: Black IPA

For my third batch of homebrew I decided to attempt an uncommon but interesting and delicious style of beer, Black IPA. Black IPA combines the dark chocolate and coffee flavors of a Dry Stout with the strong hops and bracingly bitter qualities of IPA.

Adding flavor with steeping grain.

This recipe is made with malt extract so the first steps after getting all my equipment ready were to pour six gallons of spring water into my brew kettle and add the steeping grain in a mesh bag. Steeping grain is used in extract recipes to give your beer flavors like you would get using a full grain method. The grain should be steeped for at least 30 minutes but should be removed when the temperature reaches 170º.

After bringing the liquid up to a rolling boil I added my malt extract and my bittering hops. I used hop pellets which need to be put in a fine mesh bag before adding them to the boil. They're called bittering hops because they add bitterness (is this self-explanatory?) to your beer to balance out the sweetness of the malt. Different tastes call for more or less bitterness but without any hops your beer will likely be much too sweet for the vast majority of people. The malt and the bittering hops boiled for 60 minutes. I added more hops ten minutes before the boil was complete and again one minute before. These are called aroma hops and they impart their hoppy flavor to the beer. I will add even more hops seven days into the process. This is known as dry hopping.

Pouring in liquid malt extract.

Hop pellets

After boiling for an hour you get what's called sweet wort (pronounced wert). Now it needs to be cooled off. I use an immersion chiller which is a coil of copper tubing that fits in the brew kettle and has hoses attached for running cold water through it. The wort needs to be cooled to about 130º. Next I drained my kettle into my bottling bucket (a food-grade 6-gallon bucket with a spigot). This helps aerate the wort and it's easier to pour it into a big bucket rather than the narrow opening of my fermentation tank.

Chilling, literally.

Getting in the brewing spirit with a glass of my previous batch, a Belgian-style Tripel.

After taking a sample to test the wort's original gravity I transferred it into my fermenter, a 6-gallon plastic carboy. I pitched my yeast into the fermenter and put the stopper and airlock in place. Then I moved the fermenter into a dark closet where the temperature will remain fairly stable. Now I wait for fermentation to complete and for the chunks of vegetable matter (called trub) to settle to the bottom. This will take about two weeks.

Transferring from bottling bucket to fermenter.

Fermenter, stoppered and with airlock in place.

If you have experience brewing, you probably spotted a problem. There isn't enough head space (the space between the liquid and the top of the container) in my carboy. Some very active yeast and not enough space meant that some foam overflowed into the airlock. I pulled the airlock out and covered the hole with plastic wrap. Then I cleaned out the airlock, refilled it with vodka and put it back into place.

The recipe I used was put together by Club DOZE. I get my supplies and equipment from morebeer.com.