As a quick aside before we even start here…Think of this: Back in the day, people would have milk delivered to them. Fresh from the udder, delicious, and depending where and when you lived, probably raw. Pasteurization was a thing in the late nineteen hundreds, as well as homogenization, yes mostly to control and sterilize mass production of milk, but there were still many years where the bottles came with a nice, stiff cap of rich cream delivered by some smiling dude in a white uniform who would leave your week’s supply on the doorstep.

Odd little turn of events here I thought I’d share. Maybe some bar ethics at play? I don’t know…But here’s the really weird scenario: We have a buy out at the restaurant with a visiting chef. The chef is coming in and using our kitchen to cook for some people. Yeah, a bit odd, but whatever. Anyway, the chef is asking for me to make this special clarified milk punch for the people attending the event.

Before we start, let’s review the recipe:

20 oranges, peeled 

10 lemons, peeled

28 oz lemon juice

1/2 pineapple, peeled, and cut into 1-inch cubes

6oz English Breakfast, 32 oz boiled water, steeped for 10 min 

1 bottle smith & cross rum 

1 bottle buffalo trace bourbon

1/2 bottle Batavia Arrack or vodka

1/2 cup vanilla extract

16 each whole cloves

20 each whole allspice 

10 each black cardamom 

10 each cinnamon stick

10 each whole star anise

20g Black Peppercorns

20g Pink peppercorns 

1 gallon milk 

2 QTs sugar

1. In a 18 qt cambro, combine the citrus peels, lemon Juice, pineapple, tea with the leaves and all of the alcohol with vanilla.
2. In a saute pan, toast all the spices until fragrant and add to the cambro.
3. In a pot, bring the milk to a simmer with sugar to ensure it dissolves. It doesn’t need to be boiling hot, just warmer than everything else. 
4. Slowly pour the milk into the jug of punch. This should curdle right away. Cover the jug and let it sit for at least 24 hours. 
5. Strain out your punch over a chinois with cheesecloth in a larger cambro. Then do a second strain over a coffee filter. Allow your punch to sit. It should now be crystal clear with a slight yellow hue, If it’s still cloudy. Strain again. The straining process will take anywhere from 1 to 3 hours so be patient. Don’t force the straining, let gravity do its work.
6. Store your milk punch in the fridge and serve over a block of clear ice and garnish with an orange twist and 2 splashes of bitters. The huge block of clear ice really helps the cocktail look even clearer.

So, before I start anywhere, I have a serious issue with making this punch because the ratios are way off. I mean, 28 oz. lemon juice to 2 quarts of sugar is bananas.

Also, telling someone to strain all this through a coffee filter is also totally insane as it won’t take 1-3 hours like the recipe states but easily over a day or longer. It almost makes me want to post my straining method and how I clarify my punch quite easily in under an hour…But not quite, it’s the one “secret” I’d like to take with me into my cocktail book mostly because no other cocktail book has ever gone into the process…So far anyway…

I do have to float my own boat for a second here. I’m no expert, and I’m a total space cadet, but I do make a damn good clarified milk punch. Yes, it’s overdone and this strange thing bartenders love to do. No, I didn’t figure it out on my own. One of our old bartenders, Kimmy, taught me. She did the total opposite of what all the so called online bartenders and cocktail aficionados do. No heating of the milk, no adding the punch to the milk, no need for coffee filters or even a centrifuge and it works like a charm. Anyway, thank you, Kimmy if you’re out there…Otherwise I’d never have served it or just continued to strain it painstakingly through a coffee filter…

Sigh. So the conundrum is this: Make this recipe or tweak it to my own specifications? Hmmm…

While I decide, let’s at least go over why the ratios are so wonky. Clarified milk punch isn’t going to vary so much from a regular cocktail. Normally my ratio template goes like this:

4 cups booze

3 cups milk

2 cups strong tea

1.5 cups citrus juice

1 cup syrup (.5 cups sugar)

.5 cup strong booze

.5 cup orange juice

From here you can tweak and add things. The punch ends up being around 14% ABV. How I got to that I cannot tell you. Denise did the calculation for me. This, for the most part, follows a classic 8:5:3:2 daiquiri ratio (booze, water, citrus juice, simple syrup) which coincidentally is the Fibonacci Sequence or the golden ratio. In case you’re wondering, the milk breaks and ends up being half whey, half curd or so. Maybe a little more whey. So the ratios for a clarified milk punch end up being a little more skewed toward the dilution, but not that much.

Anyway, the chef’s recipe goes like so:

4.5 cups booze

3 cups strong booze

4 cups tea

3.5 cups lemon

16 cups milk

8 cups sugar (so this would be 16 cups of a syrup)

So, you can see my cause of distress here. This recipe has about twice the amount of booze which is fine in a “more the merrier” kind of way, but more than twice the amount of milk and eight times the amount of sugar. Yeah you read that right and I’m going to jot it down here because I don’t trust my own math brain. If I add a half cup of sugar (simple syrup is half sugar, half water or half berries, whatever) and double it, that makes 1 cup of sugar. This chef is asking for 2 fucking quarts of sugar? That’s 64 oz. of sugar. A half gallon of sugar. Holy shit. This can’t be right. It’s unpalatable.

Yeah, I guess my mind is made up. I think I’ll first have to contact this person to make sure this recipe is correct. Also, there’s so much sugar in this it would take a goddam week to pass through a coffee filter. I suspect this recipe was actually never made by anyone.

On another note, with twice as much milk breaking, there’s going to be twice the curd to filter through. Not to mention, all that curd will be chock full of the spices, tea, pineapple chunks, and peels which I haven’t even gone over yet. 10 each star anise will basically make this puppy only taste of anise.

Oh yes, another flavor point. Leaving the tea in the punch overnight can also be a bad idea. If you’re not careful, it can lead to it being incredibly overpowering and tannic. I’m thinking that’s why there’s so much milk in this recipe, to wash out all the tea flavor.

So, then the next step is to ask: How would I take this recipe and tweak it in order to make it actually taste good? Well, cut the sugar way back for one. Juice the pineapple, cut down on the spices, and use real vanilla instead of a half cup of extract.

And that’s the conundrum. Whether or not I should just make the damn punch their way and stay out of it but there’s this part of me that just can’t do it because we’ll still serve the stuff and I want it to be good. Oosh. I’ll post back about it if I remember…