So what you’ve got to do is find yourself some muppets and lure them into the biggest jar you can find, then pour in the booze and close the lid…Oh wait, sorry, wrong blog. This one is about fat washing. Yeah, I know, old news, big yawn, but sometimes, like in the present sesame case, it’s pretty freaking good. Denise had been dicking around with this idea for awhile (once again I had no vision here, just experience) and I finally started to think about it for a new seasonal cocktail with apricot we named Lost Cause. A dukka inspired adult beverage that came out great. The nuttiness of the sesame is delightful but necessitate subtlety in order to work, otherwise it overpowers the potation.

Side note/duh moment: If you feel the finished mixture is too strong with the sesame flavor, simply add more Grand Dad. It’s that easy. If you’re working with spacial constraints you can do a super concentrated batch and then “weaken” it later. A bit like the frozen orange juice we drank as kids. Do people still quaff that crap? It was a major staple in my youth.

There’s a few important details about fat washing alcohol, or in this case, to be more specific, bourbon. I’ve learned what not to do by well, doing it wrong, uh, lot’s of times. Just last week I screwed up a batch. Here’s the biggest three pieces of advice I can offer up:

1. Do not shake the fat/booze mixture vigorously and then put it in the freezer. This causes all of it to emulsify for reasons unknown to me. Do gently rock the fat/booze mixture from side to side and then allow it to float back to the top before throwing it into the freezer.
2. Do have a really cold freezer. Ours gets below zero. It hovers around -5 and -10. This gets the mixture really cold and it’s super easy to separate because the oil freezes completely.
3. Do strain the mix immediately once you remove it from the freezer. Spacing out and letting it sit for even a minute can allow minute amounts of oil/fat to break free. Despite how it sounds, you don’t want any oil or fat in your booze at all. Removing any fat/oil once it gets to room temp is a massive pain in the ass and you’ll also lose booze in the process.

Let’s begin. Use something high proof.

We lean on OGD quite a lot around here and will continue to do so. Cheap and quality, along with 100 proof.

There’s no secret or magic to this. Just dump oil or fat into your chosen spirit. How much depends on you. Going too strong is better than going too weak here, however, as you can always add more booze to minimize the flavor.

For this recipe, I used an incredibly advanced method of measurement to extract the perfect amount of flavor. Three leveled pours from this one random ramekin over from the shelf where there’s a mish-mash of aimless leftover vessels from decades past. Surviving assortments whose brothers and sisters sacrificed for them to be alive. This is how my brain works. If you tortured me I really couldn’t tell you how much sesame goes into the mix per liter. Guesstimate is 150 ml? I know, I know, I’m writing a cocktail book and shit like this will have to be ironed out.

Once your fat/oil is in your jar, slosh it around a bit. The more you slosh, the more booze comes in contact with the flavor of the fat/oil. Alcohol is one hell of a solvent and will pull flavor right out of there.

Here we are. Before I put it in the freezer, I allow the fat to coalesce back to the top. Now, instead of putting it in the freezer rightside up, I put it in sideways. I do this for two reasons: 1. It makes pouring the alcohol out incredibly easy. You don’t have to poke holes in the top, etc. 2. There’s no room in our small freezer to stand a two quart jar anyway, so I found this out the easy way. Do I need to say that the jar won’t break if you leave room? Ok. Leave room in the jar, dummy, or the jar may crack. The OGD is still 50% water. If you have a super cold freezer, the alcohol will freeze and disconnect from the water content. Water, unlike anything else, expands when it transforms to its solid state.

This is how it looks after one day in the deep freeze. If you live in a place with winter you can just put it outside. Once you’re here, strain the booze out through a chinois immediately and don’t let it sit. If you want, you can keep the sesame for cooking.

After this step, I strain it all through a coffee filter to get any small oily Klingons out of there. The filter will absorb the oil.

That’s it. Pretty easy right? Go ham.