A recipe: Non Alcoholic Orange Bitters

....for grown ups on booze free days

Good morning!

Some of you may have seen over on instagram that I attempted to ‘do’ Dry January. The last time I tried - a few years ago - I lasted 5 days. This time I managed two whole weeks, then things got a little damp but not too wet until the last week in Jan when things got fairly normal for me. That is, a glass of wine, sometimes two, most nights of the week. And often more on the weekends.

So, I am clearly pretty bad at not drinking. I like drinking. Red wine mostly. Beer if I’m in a pub, but never at home. I like how it tastes, I like how it makes me feel, I like how its provides a full stop to my working day. I work like an absolute dog, and I work for myself, mostly at home. The temptation to just keep working is something that I find quite hard to resist. Plus, if I’m in the recipe testing phase of a book writing cycle (like I am now) I am usually writing during the day and cooking, testing, tasting, making notes during the evening. This means my days are long. When my family want to relax, eat dinner, chilli out, I am still in hyper alert work mode. It’s a very tricky thing to balance and I find relaxing very hard. I have been practising yoga for decades, I take a lot of hot baths, I have shelves full of essential oils and herbal teas. These things are great, life enhancing, but they just don’t give me the full stop a glass of wine does.

Also, I need to admit this, I have a hedonistic personality. I like to work hard, but I like to play harder. Parties are fun. I like parties. I like loud, dirty, bass-driven music. I listen to a lot of music. Music that makes me want to go out dancing and getting up to mischief with my mates. But this Christmas and New Year just gone the party went on a bit long, and the booze break was very good, necessary.

Me, in my element, at various points last summer…

Enough about me. So, what to drink when you are not drinking? I don’t like sweet drinks, my palate enjoys bitter, herbaceous, adult flavours. I only ever drink fizzy soft drinks when I’m hungover - a can of full fat Red Ambulance (aka Coke) with a side order of something pig related, sausage, bacon, is the only sensible thing the morning after the night before.

I’ve tried a lot of the non-alc ‘spirits’ and aperitivos and they always come up a bit short. Mostly because they are so goddamn expensive. For example, Pentire - something like £25 a bottle - and you seem to need quite a lot in the glass to give you any ooomph, feels a bit nuts to me. Like a bottle-a-week nuts, for something I feel a bit resentful about drinking (as in, wine would really be better). Don’t get me wrong I like Pentire but surely it’s possible to make your own thing to give a similar vibe?

So I googled around searching for soft drinks that taste good for grown ups - with bitter, interesting flavours that you want to sip and savour rather than simply gulp coz you’re thirsty (water, always water, for thirst). And I came across a recipe for orange bitters that I need to credit to Kevin Kos for [https://www.kevinkos.com/].

Obviously I did a bit of dicking about with Kevin’s recipe, couldn’t help myself, but his is 100% the base for mine. Yes, a good few of the ingredients will not be found down your local Sainsbury’s - but the overwhelming majority of us have access to the internet where you can easily, quickly, source anything your heart desires. I got the dried orange, glycerine and gentian root on Amazon, some of the spices from Steenbergs (a great resource). I have an Instant Pot (brilliant for pressure cooking stock or dehydrating stuff - my daughter uses it often for air frying brown student food - basically we use it a lot) with a sous vide function, combined with a vacuum sealer (useful for vac’ing down smoked meats) - so I had the kit Kevin said I needed but in all honestly, I think you could just do it in a covered pan (like a casserole dish) that you slid into a cool over - 80C or so - and left for a couple of hours to gently warm and infuse.

Here’s the ingredients list and quantities I used. I know there is an absolute tonne of ingredients - but how else do you get the complex, interesting, mysterious depth of flavour that makes it qualify as grown up? I also appreicate the piutlay of these base ingredients is a little spendy - but instead of the one bottle of non-alc summat you buy from the shops you have enough spices to make bottles for months, years even depending on how often you drink it.

A few notes on the unusual things - Cinchona bark is where we get quinine from (which provides the bitterness we love in tonic water), and gentian root is another full on bitter-taste. Cola nut powder (totally new to me and brought from Steenberg's because I was curious) is apparently a key ingredient in coke. Tonka is a rather dry old bean that was popular in restaurants a few years ago in ice creams and brûlées. I think of it like vanilla’s more complicated cousin, it has a strange indescribable taste. I like it. I certainly don’t think this list need be set in stone - leave something out, you probably won’t notice too much, but more things will make for a more complex end result.

• 20g dried orange peel

• 15g coriander seeds

• 10g cloves

• 10g gentian root powder

• 10g vanilla extract

• 10g orange blossom water

• 10g cinnamon stick

• 10g cinchona bark

• 7g black pepper

• 5g juniper berries

• 5g cardamon pods

• 5g allspice berries

• 5g star anise

• 5g cola nut powder

• 4g tonka beans

• 2g ground ginger

• 4 bay leaves

• 3 small sprigs rosemary

• 500ml water

• 150ml glycerine

So, after gathering and weighing out all the ingredients, I would add all the whole spices and barks into a spice mill or pestle and mortar and roughly grind - you just bung then and everything in a vac-bag and double seal it down. Then add the bag to a pan of water that you barely simmer (sous vide basically) - at about 90C and leave to infuse for an hour. Like I said - I am fairly certain you can add it all to a lidded casserole and ‘bake’ in the oven to infuse too.

Either way, you now need to strain it through a very fine sieve or better still through a muslin cheesecloth to get rid of the solids.

Kevin reckons you start to lose the aromatic vigour after a week or two - I am not convinced, its crazy potent stuff - so he suggests freezing to preserve. So I filled ice cube trays with most of the mix, frozen then squeeze out into a box and put back into the freezer ready to pull out mini cube by mini cube to add to your drink.

To use - you really don’t need more than a teaspoon, perhaps less, per drink as its so strong, so bitter. Just use to taste. I love tonic water and drink that on its own with slices of citrus. These bitters kind of replace the tonic and they are bitter enough, so I added then to plain soda water, again with some slices of citrus - grapefruit, orange and lime. I was really rather good - a complicated taste with the appropriate level of grown-up-ness for this wine loving booze-hound.

Yes, I am back on the wine, but the plan is to try and get my kicks elsewhere at least a couple of times a week.

If you make it, I hope you enjoy it. Let me know. If you have a sweeter tooth you may hate it - it is very bitter - but you could mix it with fresh juices to soften and add drop by drop to taste.

Big love

GT x