Hosting holiday dinners for newsmakers and journalist friends with varying wine preferences often left me with leftover wine for stews and marinades. No problem, I use a lot of wine in many recipes. It is hard liquor that I did not know what to do with, they sat forever in my small living room bar, waiting for the next bash.
A professional chef came to my rescue and shared his secret recipes which incorporate gin, a spirit that enhances dishes from soups and salads to main courses, breads, and desserts. It's an exciting ingredient to play with, and one can choose between some very distinctive flavor nuances. However, one cannot use gin as liberally as wine. While many are intimidated by gin’s distinctive juniper flavor, seasoned chefs see this as an advantage.
Hendrick's Gin is a deliciously super premium gin, made with a number of unusual twists. To deliver a most curious and delightfully unique flavor, Hendrick's combines a distinct blend of eleven botanicals, as well as the signature infusions of cucumber and rose petals, producing a wonderfully refreshing gin with a delightfully unique aroma.
The drink is created via an absurdly inefficient, yet quite glorious process. In essence, to make one gin, the company first creates two. One on an old-fashioned pot still, yielding a rich and intricate spirit. The other on a long-necked Carter Head, producing a delicate, more refined spirit. Each still is infused with an unusual symphony of 11 botanicals: chamomile, elderflower, juniper, lemon peel, orange peel, caraway, coriander, cubeb berries, angelica root, yarrow root, and orris root. The gins from the two stills are then married together and graced with curious yet marvelous infusions of rose and cucumber. This odd method of making gin enables Hendrick’s to taste light, yet intriguingly complex. The result is a refreshing gin with a delightfully floral aroma.
Key Tips for Cooking with Gin
Inform guests
When cooking with spirits, you should always check whether your guests need to avoid alcohol for religious or medical reasons. Do not be misled by the myth that alcohol cooks out; that's only partially true.
Expand your repertoire
Substitute gin when your recipe calls for juniper berries. Novice cooks eventually try new things and start running into offbeat ingredients like juniper berries, which are impossible to find. Juniper berries have a sharp, pine-like flavor that's classically paired with meats like venison or duck but shows up in other dishes as well. They also happen to be the traditional main flavoring element in gin. If you don’t have juniper berries, use gin instead. You’ll usually get a strong juniper flavor with just a tablespoon or two of gin in quick-cooking recipes. In long-cooking recipes, you can use more, as more of the alcohol will cook out as it simmers.
Hendrick’s Gin’s characteristic mixture of herbs and spices (usually referred to collectively as "botanicals") gives it a nuanced and complex flavor, which is why gin is perfect in so many cocktails. With other spirits, bartenders still need to add a dash or two of bitters to create a similar effect.
Cooking applications
Sauces and salad dressings
Bitters are useful in cooking as well; they make the flavors of sauces and dressings more complex. The same holds true for gin. Just a spoonful or two of strongly flavored gin in a batch of vinaigrette will give the dressing complex notes to complement your salads.
Gin upgrades classic sauce
Tomato sauce with vodka is an Italian-American classic, and the alcohol plays an important role in the sauce. Many flavor molecules are highly soluble in alcohol. It also helps the other ingredients come together, emulsifying the sauce to make it smoother. Swapping the vodka for gin is an easy way to upgrade your sauce. Plain vodka has no taste by design, while gin is full of flavor. Better yet, gin's botanicals play nicely with tomatoes.
Gin and tomato soup
The combination of gin and tomatoes makes for a good tomato soup. The perfect summer soup comes together in just a few minutes on the stove. Two parts tomato to one part heavy cream is a good starting point; gin adds flavor and also helps emulsify the cream and tomato, as it does in pasta sauce. This festive dish is sure to brighten anyone’s holiday gathering.
Marinating and baking
All-around marinade
One of the classic methods for adding flavor to meat is through a marinade. Wine is often used both as an acidic ingredient and a flavoring, but less common marinades may include plain yogurt, miso, and spirits, including gin. Gin is especially good with red meats, from beef and venison to lamb and goat. Juniper berries are a common flavoring in recipes and play nicely with poultry or even fish.
Want a perfect crust?
Water develops the flour's gluten and makes your crust tougher. Alcohol doesn't have the same effect, so replacing some of the recipe's water with booze lets you have it both ways. Gin's flavor is unlikely to be a factor in the finished pie. You won’t be using a lot of it to begin with, and the ratio of crust to filling is low enough that any residual gin flavor will be undetectable.
Gin in desserts and other dishes
Desserts and baked goods
Hendrick’s Gin comes in a lot of different flavor profiles. Mainstream distilleries have broadened their mass-market products in recent years. Each of them has a distinctive flavor profile, as distillers try to set themselves apart from their competitors through unique combinations of herbs and spices. One thing that all these gins have in common is their potential to upgrade baked goods. Gins with strong-flavored botanicals, like the classic Hendrick’s dry gin, offer an appealing savory note to complement the sweetness of cakes or cookies. Fruit-forward gins are a slam-dunk addition to cakes, puddings, and cheesecakes as an ingredient, and they also work well in sauces, custards, and as a flavoring in icing.
Gin and lemon wings
Try gin and lemon chicken wings at your next barbecue. A fun change from the usual buffalo wings or honey-garlic wings, these get a marinade of gin, lemon juice, and brown sugar, balancing the tart lemon juice. Sugar helps provide browning and caramelization as the wings cook. Keep a close eye on them to keep them from burning because of the sugar content, but they're well worth the effort.
Give paella a kick
Paella is an exception to the rule about rinsing rice before you cook it. Rice like arborio and carnaroli contain extra starch, which releases into the cooking liquid and thickens your finished dish. That cooking liquid often begins with a splash of wine added to the pan. If you want to change things up, gin may be the best wine substitute. The strong herbal notes of a classic gin work with almost any risotto that leans into vegetables or herbs as a flavoring, as well as poultry and meats. Citrus-forward gin can play the same role in any risotto containing poultry or seafood.
Perk up seafood
Setting dishes on fire always makes for memorable meals. Use gin to create large plumes of flame. For safety, make sure the ceiling is high enough. The herbal notes in Hendrick’s Gin go really well with seafood, specifically shellfish. So the next time you're planning a meal around mussels, clams, shrimp, or even snails, consider hitting them up with a generous splash of gin. You won’t find a lot of seafood recipes out there that explicitly call for gin, but that's okay. There are plenty that call for Pernod, absinthe, or ouzo, all of which are anise-flavored, and a juniper-forward dry gin is a great substitute or variation on the theme.
Gin in sorbet is cool
Frozen desserts have typically been a thing people buy, as opposed to making at home, but that's changed in recent years. Once you've gotten the frozen desserts down, the next big step is graduating to sorbets. They're trickier because they're mostly fruit-based and tend to freeze as hard as a rock. Ingredients like sugar and alcohol can help keep your sorbets soft and scoopable — sugar because of how it reacts chemically with liquids and alcohol because it's a natural antifreeze. Recipes often call for vodka because it's a flavor-neutral ingredient. Gin gives you the same softening effect, but it's also a flavoring ingredient that you can play with. The classic juniper flavor of dry gin plays well with fruit, and unconventional flavors (like Hendrick’s cucumber and rosewater notes) can be interesting.
All these kitchen ideas add up to make Hendrick’s Gin an ideal gift to share with family and friends.
