I’m not sure what my attraction is to food that could kill me. I think it’s just that I like strong and unusual flavors, and these tend to come along with concentrated chemicals of other kinds.
I’m pretty sure it all started with Amaretti di Saronno, the wonderful little crunchy Italian cookies. They taste so intensely of (bitter) almonds that I just assumed they were made with the ground nuts, but they’re in fact made with ground toasted apricot kernels. The bitter almond flavor, as you’ll immediately guess if you had to read Ronald Dahl’s creepy short-story “The Landlady” in high school, indicates the presence of cyanide: more accurately, cyanogenic glycosides (CGG) that break down into hydrogen cyanide when digested by herbivores and omnivores. But it turns out if you roast or boil the apricot kernels for about 20 minutes, you can neutralize the CGG while leaving the aromatic compounds pretty much intact. So, I tried that and didn’t die, and the cookies were great! Here’s a recipe from Dominique Ansel if you want to try to make them: just replace the almond meal with the same amount of ground apricot kernels that have been roasted first at 350 for 10 minutes or until golden.
Next stop on the Scenic Poisonous Foods Byway: cherry clafoutis. Traditionally it’s made with whole cherries so that the CGG leach out into the flan and give it a lovely almond flavor. And then there’s this ingenious recipe from Stella Parks where she extracts cherry pits in cream overnight to make a pretty pink almond-scented whipped cream that garnishes her Ultimate Cherry Pie recipe. At about the same time as I tried her recipe, I also got interested in making bitters from various plants I had around (apples, lavender, etc.) And I had a cherry tree at the time (it has sadly since passed away). And so, after all this rigmarole, I wanted to try making cherry bitters. However, I still didn’t feel like dying. Googling produced, as usual, opinions ranging from “don’t do it!” to “don’t worry about it.” I wanted something a little more concrete. Enter Slovenian chemists to the rescue: the tl;dr is that if you ingest no more than 1.5 oz per day of cherry bitters made at a 20 pits/100ml ratio and steeped for at least 1 month (the CGG go down and phenolics go up over time), you’ll be fine. And I can’t imagine throwing down a whole shot of cherry bitters…so I think we’re good. I’ve found the bitters keep for about six months in a tightly sealed jar before they start losing their cherry/almond flavor and start tasting like slightly pickle-y vodka. Maybe they’d last longer in the fridge or freezer? I’ll try it this year b/c I made WAY more bitters than I can consume in six months.
Cherry bitters are good in Old Fashioneds, Manhattans, etc. Any oaky/woodsy cocktail with brandy, bourbon, or rye. They’re also awesome in whipped cream, replacing the vanilla. Here’s a recipe I made up that takes advantage of the resonance between cherries, woody maple syrup, and the stems-and-leaves flavor of Cynar (an amaro distilled from artichokes, among other herbs).
Cherries & Cynar
makes 1 cocktail
- 1.5 oz rye whiskey
- .5 oz maple syrup
- .5 oz Cynar
- .25-.5 oz cherry pit bitters
- .5 oz lemon juice
- 2 pitted bing cherries
Put cherries in the bottom of a rocks glass. Shake remaining ingredients with ice and pour over cherries.
The Rookery 