Many a chef, baker, mixologist, and home cook can characterize their relationship with flames as a love affair. We know how cooking over an open flame enhances food, so why not turn up the heat on our cocktails to enhance their flavor, too?
Unlike most hot and heavy love affairs that burn with a blazing passion and fizzle out just as fast, these grilled, smoked, and torched flavors will linger once you’re finished with them as a sweet and smoky memory, to be lit again at your whimsy.
For the following cocktails I used a Cameron brand stovetop smoker. It’s simple to use. Small wood chips sit on the bottom of the smoker, then you place a tray over the top and add your fruit, cut side up. Cover with the lid and place over medium heat. If you don’t want that smoky smell to linger in the house, this smoker is small enough to fit on an outdoor gas grill (just make sure you close the grill lid to help contain the smoke.)
Once you’ve secured your weapon of choice, it’s time to select your ingredients. I opted for lemons, apples, cherries, and rosemary. Depending on what you’re smoking, it could take as little as 10 to 15 minutes.
I have to admit, it wasn’t love at first sight with the smoked lemons, as they gave off a cleanser-type smell. But don’t let that turn you off. The taste, when juiced, is just what I was looking for, reminiscent of lemon bitters.
When you juice the lemon, it will be extremely soft and will want to squish through the juicer, resulting in bits of pulp in your juice. To avoid this (go easy on him, he’s sensitive), pour the smoked juice through a fine-mesh strainer and store in a container in the fridge until ready to use (within three days).
Things really started to heat up with some apples-on-grill action, carmelizing the apples over the heat. When placed in a container, the slices oozed grilled apple flavor and gave new meaning to simple syrup.
After that, no ordinary candle-lit dinner would do for the rest of my apple slices. I topped them with raw sugar and torched them until they became burnt to perfection. They say distance makes the heart grow fonder and boy did that ring true when I took them out of the fridge the next day and they beamed a glorious amber color.
Thinking that nothing could top my rendezvous with the apples, my heart surprised me and opened yet again to some cherries steeped in smoke. Hooked on that smoky experience, I torched some rosemary and then, in an all-or-nothing mood, the entire cocktail, just enough to enjoy the subtle smoky notes on the nose.
As with any love affair, you’ll want to collect something that you can remember your fall flames by. I took the leftover slices of grilled lemons and apples and separated them into two Mason jars. I filled the lemon jar with gin and the apple jar with vodka. I’ll see how they taste in a couple weeks.
