Blood Orange Negroni

A cocktail for toasting the holidays, and post-holidays

When you write and share recipes online or in a cookbook, as a baker, the most FAQ is if something can be frozen. I don’t know about yours, but my freezer is fully packed 365 days of the year. (There’s a scientific theory that if there is a void, something fills it, and my freezer is a prime example of that.) I kept dreaming about buying a separate freezer…until I finally did it and bought a mini one.

I wheeled the bulky purchase home, navigating the appliance down the cobbled sidewalk, 20 minutes from the store, back to our apartment. After I unpacked it and let things settle, I plugged it in, popped a thermometer in it, as the moment the marker dropped below the red zone (meaning the freezer was cold enough, I filled it with frozen cranberries, ice cream, ends of bread, bread crumbs, frozen dough, frozen tomatoes, back-up blocks of butter, and a package of American brisket (don’t ask…) that were constantly preventing me from closing my regular freezer door. I now sleep at night knowing that everything has its place in one of my two freezers, and I can close the doors of both.

My short answer is that “yes,” almost everything can be frozen. But few things improve in the freezer, with the exception of ice cream and vodka, which I tried to explain to someone who was offering shots of warm vodka at a party in Paris, and drinking tepid vodka is like drinking isopropyl alcohol. Uh…Non, merci…

Thankfully, unopened bottles of liquor don’t need to be frozen, since I still have a lot of them from writing a book on French drinks and spirits, and a few years of related recipe testing.

French sweet vermouth made in Chambéry

That said, I still have at least two hundred bottles here and there around our apartment. My philosophy about testing recipes is basically this: Spare no expense. A cookbook author’s job is to test a recipe so the reader doesn’t have to. There’s nothing worse than a recipe that calls for 8 fresh lobster tails or 4 cups of maple syrup or 2 flats of raspberries (which is 24 baskets, which I actually saw in a celebrity chef’s cookbook), and it doesn’t work. I didn’t make the raspberry sorbet but the only way you’d need that many raspberry to make a home-size batch of raspberry sorbet was if they were dried.

After I wrote Drinking French, I was surprised at how many people asked me how long liquor can be kept. The only liquors that don’t keep at room temperature are wine-based apéritifs, such as vermouth and Pineau des Charentes, which should be refrigerated once opened, and most aficionados say should be used within 3-4 weeks. (For the record, I’ve never been to a café in France where the vermouth was refrigerated.)

When I asked a prominent distiller in France what he thought about how long liquors last, he said, “They last as long as they taste good.” So there you have it.

Speaking of cookbooks, my friend Brian Hart Hoffman came to visit a few months ago and brought me a copy of his latest book, Holiday Coupetails, which he wrote with Brooke Bell. The best assistant I ever had in my life, when I was a pastry chef, was a woman who was currently in culinary school. She didn’t have any experience, but she’d been a flight attendant for Pan Am for over twenty years…and if she could do that job, I knew she could do anything. Which turned out to be true.

Brian also was a flight attendant, and believe me, he’s the steward you’d want on your flight. Bold, brash, and ultra-fun. I met him when his magazine Bake from Scratch came to Paris to feature me. Brian is hilarious, and we try to get together for a drink whenever he’s in town. His latest book is a line-up of cocktails served in coupe glasses, aka coupetails, for the holidays.

The book is a mix of classic and whimsical coupe-ready cocktails to fête the holidays, from Cranberry Mimosas and Holiday Sangria to green Grinch Punch, Warm Chai Eggnog, and Peppermint Bark Cocktail, which promises the flavor of chocolate-peppermint bark in every sip. There’s also a Peanut Butter Old Fashioned that uses peanut butter whiskey—who knew that existed?—whose website answers that with, “Why the hell not?”

Brian brought me a bottle of the whisky, which wasn’t quite to my taste, so when picking a drink from the book to share, I stuck to French liquors. I used the lusciously ruby-red Pinot gin made by my friend Mat Sabbagh in Burgundy, because I thought the gin, made with local pinot noir grapes from the region, would reinforce the lovely color of blood oranges. And because when Mat gave me a bottle, he said, “This is amazing in a Negroni,” so now was the time to use it.

Since Mat’s gin isn’t available stateside, if you want to keep things in the French lane, Citadel gin was the first gin made in France, and is quite reasonably priced as well, and excellent. Dolin bitters, alas, aren’t available in the U.S., But there are some wonderful red bitters made in America, so if you’re in the States, you can lean toward “local,” and I listed some American-made red bitters before the recipe.

I did have to wait until after the holidays to make this Blood Orange Negroni as I didn’t see any blood oranges at the market until a week or two ago. But it was worth the wait. I love slicing into each orange, seeing how different it is from the one before it. I also like the flavor of blood oranges, which are slightly tart with hints of raspberry.

Some blood oranges are dark red inside, such as Moros, which aren’t super juicy but have a highly concentrated flavor. There are others, such as Taroccos and Sanguinellis, which are variegated, and in France, they call them demi-sanguine, or partially blood oranges. I’m happy when they’re in season and happy to use them in this riff on the classic cocktail.

Blood Orange Negroni

One cocktail

Adapted from Holiday Coupetails by Brian Hart Hoffman and Brooke Bell

The best-known version of the Negroni is served over ice, in a tumbler, but for the holidays, this Negroni variation is served in a coupe. (Another Negroni variation, The Tunnel, also is served in a coupe glass.) Cocktails with fruit are generally shaken, which is how they present the recipe in the book, but I stir this one to keep it cleaner-looking. You’re welcome to shake it if that’s your preference. It’s your drink.

The most commonly known red bitter aperitif is Campari, which boldly announces its presence in any drink it’s added to. Bitter red aperitifs that are less aggressive, and more herbal-forward, are Forthave Red, Bruto Americano, and Faccia Brutto Aperitivo, which are made in America. Cappelletti, made in Italy, and Dolin bitter, made in France, are a little milder and don’t overwhelm the other liquors in the glass.

1 ounce gin

1 ounce bitter red aperitif

1 ounce sweet (red) vermouth

4 teaspoons blood orange juice

Orange twist, for garnish

1. Put all the ingredients in a cocktail mixing glass. Fill the mixing glass two-thirds full of ice and stir briskly until well chilled, about 15 seconds.

2. Strain into a chilled coupe glass. Garnish with orange twist.

   

   Blood Orange Negroni

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