Chocolate Chili Panna-tini

Last week Brian from A Thought For Food shared his recipe for Chocolate Chili Panna Cotta which is his entry in the A Chile & A Spoon Blogger Recipe Challenge sponsored by Marx Foods. Voting is no longer open. We got to sharing tweets about it and I mentioned a possible pairing with our homemade Jalapeno Dessert Wine. Brian was intrigued.

I got to thinking about it a bit more and wondered what adventure a recreation of the dish as a cocktail would take me on. The quest for the Chocolate Chili Panna-tini was on!

There are basic recipes for chocolate martini’s everywhere. Not being a favorite of mine I can’t recall ever actually making one. I opted not to consult any recipes to determine my starting ingredients/proportions as a test of my growing mixology intuition. I knew the challenge to create the richness of panna cotta was going to take a few tries which I’ll walk you through.

I started with the following for a base cocktail:

1 part dark Crème de Cacao
1 part hand-infused vanilla vodka
1 part Ancient Fire Jalapeno Dessert wine
1/2 part Kahlua Mocha
1/2 part fat free half and half
4 drops Bitterman’s Mole bitters

I chilled the ingredients down and shook them well before pouring into a rocks glass for testing.

The chocolate flavors were excellent, but I felt the drink was little thin. The heat from the wine didn’t come through as much as I wanted which was a suspicion I had when I started. I added ¼ tsp of hand-infused habanero vodka to create some heat and determined that would be a too much for some people, but spot on for folks expecting the cocktail to have heat.

For the next round I dropped the wine and added 1 egg white to the ingredients before shaking. I also extended the shaking time to encourage the egg to foam up.

This time the drink had more body and texture from the egg white and with the heat is definitely fun and a worthy homage to the dish that inspired it. You could use regular half & half or cream which would produce even more body in the drink. Both Margot and I feel that this cocktail isn’t a volume drinker. I would expect you would want to switch to something else after 1 or 2 of them, even without the chili vodka. As a novelty or celebratory drink however, it presents flavors sure to please!

The Jalapeno Dessert wine would definitely pair well with the panna cotta (we know because we have had it with chocolate cheesecake) because the heat is fairly low and it doesn’t build beyond a point that casual sipping is no longer possible. For that reason I think the wine will not likely be as worthy to cook with as we had hoped. Since it is drinkable though, nobody loses! In the end we didn’t use it but found other ingredients that functioned much like we expected the wine to.

I didn’t get any good pictures through the process and can only say that maybe this drink demands you enjoy it firsthand and shies away from the camera! The cocoa bean photo above is a Creative Commons Licensed photo that makes a nice rustic touch for a spicy chocolate cocktail kicked up with mole bitters.

Cheers!


--Jason


Photo Citations

1 - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cocoa_beans_P1410151.JPG

Making & Using Jalapeno Wine

A few years ago I was introduced to cooking wine by Amy at Labelle Winery in Amherst, NH. At the time she had two different cooking wines available, one made from sweet onions and one from jalapenos. Since then she has also added an heirloom tomato cooking wine to her collection. To help buyers using the wines she also has recipe cards available with suggested uses for many of her creations, including a chili recipe using the jalapeno wine. I could not resist. The wine sat on my rack until early 2009 when I used it and the recipe to make a wonderful turkey chili that I shared with some of the guys at work. The wine was not extremely hot, I could actually take a sip and taste the flavors comfortably, but the flavors it imparted to the chili were out of sight! The chili did not last long and I have often thought of it since. Thank you Amy! Check out the entire collection from LaBelle Winery at their website at http://www.labellewinerynh.com/.

Earlier this year I happened across seven pounds of perfectly good jalapenos on the reduced produce rack on the day they were packaged for quick sale. I brought them home and promptly washed them and stored them in the freezer. I then headed over to Jack Keller's winemaking site and found a recipe for jalapeno wine. Check out the recipe at http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/reques32.asp. The recipe targets one gallon and with 85 clean and cut jalapenos I was going to end up with five gallons!

I am on the second day of the recipe right ahead of the yeast infusion. The aroma from the bucket is strong of fresh jalapenos and the liquid is a mildly hot sweet juice. Kind of weird, but I am sure this is going to be a very good project indeed. The solution has a greenish hue, which can be seen in the picture above. I expect the finished product to be gold in color and crystal clear. (You might be wondering what is floating in the wine at the top of the picture. That is tied off portion of the nylon bag with the peppers and raisins from the recipe in it)

You may still be asking yourself, "what can you do with jalapeno cooking wine?", and what am I going to do with five gallons of it. Rest assured I have many plans for this new batch of wine when it is ready.

I plan to try it in the following ways:

• Chili
• Spicy Bloody Mary's
• Marinades for chicken & beef
• Salad dressings
• Sauces & reductions
• A little sipping perhaps, depends on how hot it is
• Who knows what else, I am taking suggestions

Cheers!

--Jason