Because I’m fairly (like totally a lot) immature for my age, I love to daydrink. Or rather, I love any excuse to daydrink – bridal showers = mimosas, tailgating = light beer, and vacation is basically a hall pass. The current political climate = bourbon for breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, and dinner. But there’s one drink I just don’t get, and that’s the Bloody Mary. I love vodka. I love tomatoes. Just not together. They look delicious, colorful, even healthy. But blech. Like a hot bowl of stew spiked with tequila or something.
So of course I’m making homemade Bloody Mary mix for no reason whatsoever. Probably because I’ve been jamming all summer and looking for something new to can? Regardless, ATK’s Foolproof Preserving has a recipe, and I have 10 pounds of beautiful summer tomatoes and a new tomato press to play with.
This was my treat to myself on vacation – on clearance at the Williams Sonoma outlet. I saw it and thought to myself, “Now that looks impossible to pack.” So how does it work?
The instructions are unclear, but I manage to get it going – and it’s great! The juice and pulp squoosh out into a bowl while the seeds and peels squoosh out the other side. Juice spatters out the top, the sides, and somehow through the handle. It gets on the windows, counters, floors, and all over the front of my shirt. It’s carefully designed so as to not allow two bowls to sit side-by-side and catch everything. The garbage bowl goes into a one gallon paint strainer bag, which gives up an alarming amount of more juice.
Within an hour I have three quarts of fresh tomato juice and what looks like a Dexteresque crime scene in my kitchen. But look! Not a single seed! This is way easier (and messier) than pushing tomatoes through a sieve.
And then – here comes another recipe pet peeve – you have to boil the juice and reduce it until it’s down by a third. The book recommends 10-30 minutes, so of course it takes over an hour. I don’t know what sort of magical reducing stoves these writers use, but I don’t have one. I boil and boil. Eventually it looks a little lower in the pot, so I add:
2/3 cup lemon juice
2 ½ tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons prepared horseradish
1 tablespoon hot sauce
Salt & pepper
Then it gets canned and processed for 40 minutes.
And now the taste test. I look around. If this is terrible Bloody Mary Mix, it will taste weird and gross to me. If it’s the best Mix the world has ever seen, it will taste weird and gross to me. I need a volunteer. I ask around at work, and find only one single co-worker who actually likes them – not just in an every-once-in-awhile-on-vacation kind of way. He gets a jar with a free celery stick, and I rope my friend Susafrass (not her real name) into coming over to try it.
The verdict? Susafrass loves it, though she admits she’s a “slut for fresh tomato juice”. (I really hope I got that quote right.) Co-worker asks if there is clam juice in it and found it a bit watery (frownie face). Me? I think it’s weird and a little bit gross. So success?
illdothedisheslater 