44

Here is a wonderful little recipe I saw on a French Cooking show. It produces vodka infused with orange and coffee tastes, perfect for after dinner. It's dead easy and kind of fun, too.

44

Taken from French Food at Home with Laura Calder.

Ingredients
1 large organic orange, well washed
44 coffee beans
44 sugar cubess
4 cups vodka

Steps
1. Poke the orange with a skewer or knitting needle and insert the coffee beans through the slits in the skin into the orange flesh.

2. Put the orange in a sterilized preserving jar (with an opening large enough to fit an orange through), add the sugar, pour over the alcohol, seal, and shake.

3.Store in a cool, dark place, giving the jar a shake every day for 44 days.

4. Filter the liqueur through a coffee filter into a serving bottle.

Tay's Notes
A 1.14 Liter bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka works great for this recipe. So do the large-size Mason jars from Ikea. Save the bottle after you have poured the contents into the Mason jar and use it to re-bottle the finished product.

For best results, use 100% real Kona Coffee!

I think the filtering step can be skipped. It's just a few tiny specs of coffee bean floating around. But if you want perfection, try doing batches in a french press rather than using a paper coffee filter. One of those reusable metal basket filters might work, too.

Very nice. And it has a high WAF ("Wife Acceptance Factor"). I've also thought about printing some cool labels and slapping them onto the Stoli bottle to trope the packaging. But has the time? (Besides Martha Stewart). I'm considering giving homemade stuff like this away this Christmas.

The show "French Food at Home" that this comes from is total food porn. Anthony Bourdain once did an episode of his show--"No Reservations"--in which he demonstrated how the lighting, editing, and camera work of many food shows mimics "adult entertainment." The Food Network producers are very savvy, they understand something about voyeurism and the visual culture of seduction.

-t