Beyond apples and pumpkins
Beyond apples and pumpkins
Recipes from our lab's fall party
Our lab recently1 had a fall party, which sounded like a nice excuse to avoid research and post up in the kitchen for a few days. After securing approval from my roommate,2 I offered to host in our place and got to menu planning. Here’s what I ended up with:
Drinks
cider
unfiltered apple juice - spice - optional cognaciced PSL
decaf coffee - spiced pumpkin - oat milk - optional whipped creamchai
black tea - cardamom - whole milkmilk punch
mezcal - pear - white vermouth - ginger - mace - honeySavory
hot soup
roasted kabocha - leek - applecold soup
corn - thai basil - buttermilkSweet
cake
orange blossom & vanilla - guava curd - banana nutmeg cream
I was pretty happy with how things turned out, so I figured I’d make some attempt at documenting the process. In general, I wish I archived exciting kitchen moments more often, because when I don’t, the past memories all kind of just meld together within a few months. (This goal of building a more complete food archive is also the broader project this blog aims to serve, because since I started cooking, food has been at the center of many great memories.) Anyway, let’s discuss the menu.
When the prospect of a fall party came about, I was most excited to make pumpkin spice lattes: the Starbucks version is nice, but feels like it could use a whole lot more flavor. I’d seen a Serious Eats recipe for PSLs starting from real pumpkin and whole spices3, so I figured that’d be a fun item to structure a fall-themed event around.
Things snowballed from there. Spiced cider seemed obligatory for a fall event. Some sort of cocktail seemed nice, in which case food — the two soups — would also be necessary. And if we’re doing savory, why not also make a cake? There’s not always a good reason for cake, so I leap at the ones that do come up. And chai has been on my mind, so let’s throw that in there too. (As most recreational event hosts learn, it’s easy to get carried away when your plan is just words on a Google Doc. After all, translating those words to real things is the hard part.)
Here are some notes on each item that I made, along with recipes where applicable. While there were some classic fall things, I didn’t want to just shove apples and pumpkins into everything, so some parts of the menu may not scream fall.
spiced cider
This one was pretty simple and easy to freestyle. I bought a gallon of Trader Joe’s unfiltered honeycrisp cider, threw it in a pot, and held it at a low simmer for a few hours with cinnamon, mace, and a bit of clove. As usual, I went easy on the clove, since I find that its flavor can quickly dominate. (If you have extra cider, boiling it down further into a syrup also seems interesting…)
Ingredients:
One gallon unfiltered apple juice
2 sticks of cinnamon, 4 blades of mace, and 2 cloves (or any other blend)
Recipe:
Bring everything to a boil, reduce heat to low, and keep at a bare simmer, uncovered, for at least 30 minutes and up to a few hours.
iced PSL
This was probably my favorite item. I’m now totally sold on the idea of using real gourd to make PSLs, and making them at home more broadly. However, the Serious Eats recipe that I tested initially fell short of expectations. There wasn’t much spice flavor nor pumpkin flavor, the drink had weak presentation, and the pumpkin mixture doesn’t last as long in the fridge, since it’s pre-blended with milk.
I much preferred Diaspora Spice Company’s syrup-based approach, which was equally simple and more convenient.4 I followed their recipe to a tee to make the syrup (besides the fact that I didn’t use Diaspora-brand whole spices). You simmer cubes of pumpkin (I used kabocha) with a pumpkin spice powder, sugar, maple syrup, and water, and then everything then gets blended up. This syrup tastes great, I’d honestly make it in the middle of April.
For assembly, I went iced-only (managing both hot and iced coffee seemed like too much work, plus the iced version looked better). I stirred about 4oz oat milk with 1oz syrup over a large ice cube, layered over 2oz of strong decaf coffee, and then topped with a dollop of whipped cream. The whipped cream also had a little bit of the syrup + pumpkin spice powder to further layer in the flavor. And while I usually prefer whole milk, I liked oat milk here: it has a thick, full texture and also foams up well if you shake it up before pouring into the glass.
chai
This was a standard chai. I’ve written a chai recipe here. The only difference from then is that now I prefer my chai with no spices beyond cardamom and ginger, but you should feel free to go wild with whatever else you think sounds good.
mezcal milk punch
mezcal - pear - white vermouth - ginger - mace - honey
The milk punch probably took the most work, since I couldn’t really find a great example of what I was looking for to start from. I ended up just deciding on some flavors, taking an educated guess on ratios, testing, and adjusting. Beyond mezcal, I wanted the key flavors to still feel fall-adjacent, so I went with pear, ginger, mace, and honey, and tried to layer these into the cocktail in multiple ways. To prevent the cocktail from tasting flat, I also added a bit of an herbal white vermouth and some green tea. I didn’t want the cocktail to taste citrusy (I was going for deep spiced notes rather than bright lemony ones), so I instead of the typical lemon/lime juice, I used citric acid powder. Finally, the milk punch method softens the flavors and makes everything sing in harmony.
Anyway, here’s the recipe. We’ll start by making a few different subcomponents, we’ll combine them at a specified ratio, and then milk-filter the entire thing. The amounts below will give you enough stuff for around 1.5L of cocktail, which will make about 15 of them.
The brands I used were: Montelobos mezcal, St. George spiced pear liqueur (thanks Gabriel), and Contratto white vermouth.
Ingredients
Alcohol: 1 bottle mezcal, 1 bottle pear liqueur, 1/2 bottle white vermouth
Fresh pear
Fresh ginger
Whole mace (can substitute nutmeg)
Honey
Tea (loose leaf or tea bags)
Milk
Recipe
Pear- & ginger-infused mezcal: Cut a full pear and a 2-inch knob of ginger into slices. Add to a mason jar with 600ml mezcal, and steep for at least a day and ideally longer. (Or, you can just sous vide at 150F for 3 hours.)
Mace-ginger-honey syrup: Mix 200ml honey, 100ml water, 6-8 blades mace, and a sliced 1-inch knob of ginger, bring to a boil in a sauce pan, cover and let sit until fully cool. (Or sous vide at 150F for 3 hours.)
Acid-adjusted tea: Mix 10g of citric acid powder (available online) with 200ml of steeped black or green tea (I used one tea bag of each). Alternatively, you can also just replace this with 200ml of lemon juice.
Combine ingredients: In a a very large mason jar or pot, mix the (strained) 600ml of mezcal, 450ml of spiced pear liqueur, 150ml white vermouth, 200ml honey syrup, and 150ml of the acid-adjusted tea. If you don’t have a large enough vessel, you can do this in two halves, scaling the volume amounts appropriately.
Milk curdling and clarification: Pour the combined cocktail, slowly, into another large container with 400ml cold whole milk. Then filter all these contents (e.g. in a Chemex) through a paper coffee filter. It will filter very slowly and require multiple additions. But once it’s done, your cocktail can be bottled and chilled, and it’s ready to serve.
For garnish, I added blades of mace to a clear ice maker,5 which I think people liked. Also, the ice cubes smelled very faintly of mace, which I don’t think anyone noticed but I enjoyed. The other garnish was rimming a corner of each glass with a mixture of salt, dried ginger, freshly grated nutmeg, and a bit of sugar, which hopefully further accentuated the flavors I was going for.
I was excited about the result here, mostly because it won enthusiastic approval from my usually stoic roommate. It also wasn’t unreasonably labor-intensive, especially since I already had most of these things (besides the alcohol). My one note was that there wasn’t enough pear flavor: I thought the pear liqueur would do more heavy-lifting, but it seems like it needed more support — perhaps from more pear in the mezcal infusion.
pumpkin soup
The idea for the soups was to have one hot one and one cold one, and so this pumpkin soup was the warm, spiced one. This was a pretty standard pumpkin soup, but it was delicious. Here’s an example recipe that’s pretty similar to what I did (though I used fewer spices/aromatics to let the kabocha shine more).
Roughly, I roasted the kabocha in large chunks at 400F. While that was going, I sautéed chopped leek, diced apple, grated ginger, and a bit of garam masala in butter. Once the leeks had softened (but hadn’t taken on any color), I added some TJ’s chicken stock, added the roasted squash after after separating from the peel, and blended everything together. I added some apple cider vinegar and white pepper to taste, and then finished with a splash of cream.
For serving, I put out some fried shallots and Kenny’s chili oil, both of which really improved the dish, I think.
corn soup
The corn soup was the cold, fresh counterpart to the other one. My corn soup largely draws from Melissa Clark’s recipe – I really enjoy the combination of corn, basil, and buttermilk, and the effort/flavor tradeoff is so good (you just blend everything together. using canned corn, it actually takes 10 minutes). This time around I used thai basil, since a bunch of it was growing in my hydroponic herb garden. The added anise flavor actually came through, which I thought was nice. This soup was garnished with some sliced basil and basil-infused olive oil.
orange blossom & vanilla cake with guava curd and banana-nutmeg cream
This cake was pretty fun to make, and taught me a couple new skills that I can use in future bakes: how to make a guava curd and how to make a fruit whipped cream.
I’m excited about the guava curd because I like guava flavor and I have a bunch of guava paste, but I think the paste is sometimes hard to use (it’s very sweet and thick, and diluting it with hot water doesn’t solve all the issues). A curd seemed like a good opportunity to cut some of the sweetness and produce a soft, spreadable consistency. This is useful for cakes like in this case and could also be nice to fill a tart or just spread on milk bread (like kaya toast).
I couldn’t find a recipe online for guava curd, so I had to design one from scratch. I started with a lemon curd recipe to get the ratio of sugar : acid : liquid : eggs : butter, and then swapped a bunch of things around to make it fit. Instead of adding any sugar, the sugar was contributed entirely by the guava paste; since I was not using lemon juice, I replaced the acid with citric acid powder and the liquid with coconut milk; the eggs and butter could stay the same after that.
Here’s the resulting recipe:
4 tbsp butter
4oz coconut milk
150g guava paste
5g citric acid
2 eggs
Add everything besides the eggs to a saucepan. On medium-low heat, as the saucepan warms, gradually break up the guava paste. Once at a simmer, whisk constantly until everything is smooth. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk the eggs, and temper the eggs by ladling in some of the saucepan mixture. Once the egg mixture has tempered, add everything back to the saucepan and cook until the mixture thickens and bubbles. The curd was a little runny still, so I thickened it with gelatin to avoid it from spilling out of the cake (but if you’re using it for another application, this is probably unnecessary).
The other exciting thing was the fruit whipped cream, which was a recipe from the genius Stella Parks. The key idea is to that if you want to get a lot of fruit flavor into a whipped cream, you should use freeze-dried fruit. It’s super concentrated in flavor, so you can add enough to strongly flavor the cream without destabilizing it (which might happen if you use jam). As a bonus, it actually stabilizes & makes the whipped cream thicker, because the dry fruit powder is hygroscopic and sucks a nontrivial amount of the water out of the cream, effectively increasing the cream’s fat percentage.
I made the whipped cream with freeze-dried banana, to continue with the tropical-ish theme. I personally think nutmeg pairs super well with banana (as does clove), so I also grated in a bunch.
The rest of the cake was standard: I’ve been using this KA recipe for my base cake layer recently, and I added 1 tbsp orange blossom water here. I think it works okay, but I’m still not perfectly happy with it (accepting recommendations for a simple, unfussy, layer cake base recipe).
Ultimately, I wasn’t completely satisfied with the cake due to some small issues that compounded (the cake felt a bit overbaked; the layers weren’t thick enough, I should’ve just done 2 instead of 3; I didn’t make enough cream, so the cream layers weren’t thick enough; the vanilla/orange blossom flavors in the cake base were muted). But it was still a good learning experience and went better than some of the other cakes I’ve made, so overall happy with it.
…and that’s everything I made! This cooking bonanza was very fun. Thanks to my labmates for coming and for saying lots of nice things about all the stuff.
Not so recent anymore. I started writing this a few days after the party in late october, and then life happened
He’s also my labmate and a close friend, but roommate was the operative part there.
Actually squash, strictly speaking. pumpkins are squash
Diaspora Spice Company is an awesome brand more generally, check them out! I’ve never actually tried their spices (thanks Mom for always keeping me stocked), but I hear they’re great, and the branding is very fun. Also, I appreciate & benefit from their recipes — everything they put out looks reputable, well-tested, and not unnecessarily complicated.
Clear ice is very cool. It’s one of those things, like a really nice monitor, that seems unnecessarily until you have it, but then once you do (maybe) you’ll be convinced.
A clear ice maker is basically a multi-chamber silicone mold that allows the ice cubes to freeze from the top. Impurities get pushed to the bottom. I don’t fully understand how it works, but it works, and if you figure out a simple explanation, please explain it to me :)