Booze In Your Food: Cooking With Champagne

In honor of Tax Day, please enjoy this article, the final installment in our three-part series, following Hundred Dollar Bills: Not Just for Lighting Cigars Anymore and Windex vs. Komodo Dragon Tears: Which One Gets Your Monocle Cleaner?

Maybe this is crazy. After all, it did basically start with a dare: I said I was cooking with booze, Laura said “yeah, but can you do champagne?” and the gauntlet was dropped. But is there really anything wrong about cooking with champagne? Plenty of recipes call for white wine, and champagne (or cava, or any of the other sparkling white wines from California, Italy, Australia, etc.) doesn’t have to be much more expensive than its bubble-free kin.

Maybe it’s Jay-Z’s fault, maybe it’s convention reinforced by countless New Years Eves, or maybe it’s the inherent ritual of breaking the foil, twisting off the cage and popping the cork, but something about champagne makes it seem like an indulgence permanently reserved for special occasions, like it would be socially transgressive to even think of doing any cooking with it. And that is exactly why it’s so much fun to up-end an entire bottle into a pot on the stove. So tonight I present a single meal, with three recipes: champagne risotto, pears poached in champagne, and a French 75 cocktail. One with a little booze, one with a lot of booze, one to drink while you’re cooking the first two.

Now, heh, about that first recipe… funny story…

… Here at FoodJunta we obviously love our risotto and have written about it time (mushroom) and time (asparagus) and time (radicchio) and time again (lemon). Oh, and the day before yesterday (leek and chard)… how awkward. But endlessly variable risotto keeps popping up for obvious reasons: it’s delicious, it seems exotic and complicated (What-borio rice?!), and it’s actually very simple. So if I’m covering well-trodden ground I apologize, and feel free to consult Claire’s excellent risotto-primer for more thorough advice on technique, but there’s just something uniquely satisfying about adding champagne in this recipe. Oh, and mine has a garnish. As they say in Italian, “Boo-ya.”

I’m sorry friends, that must be the cocktail talking, which reminds me that I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you start the risotto, here’s a beverage to keep your left hand busy while your right stirs the rice. According to legend the French 75 was invented by hard-drinking American fighter pilots who were moonlighting in the French airforce during World War I, and who just could not get drunk enough, dammit, on the local champagne. They named their solution after a famous French 75 millimeter field gun. Both, in the words of famous 1920s bartender Harry Craddock, hit with remarkable precision.

French 75

1 sugar cube, or 1 teaspoon superfine sugar

1 shot (1 ½ oz.) dry gin

1 Tbsp lemon juice

6 oz chilled champagne

Ice

Twist of lemon peel

• Mash sugar cube and lemon juice at bottom of a Collins glass.
• Add gin.
• Add ice.
• Top with champagne and add twist of lemon.

Far from being a waste of good champagne, the citrus and the herbal astringency of gin complement dry, fizzing champagne incredibly well. Now you should be sufficiently well armed to tackle the risotto. The following recipe comes from the Food Network. Oh well, there goes my blog cred, but I swear it’s delicious…

While champagne seems like an unusual thing to cook with, there is a long tradition of it in France and as a result there are dozens more recipes to be found out there. Back me up here, Alice B. Toklas: Toklas is probably best known as Gertrude Stein’s partner and literary alter ego, and for accidentally introducing pot brownies to the American public, but her 1955 article on cooking with champagne shows that it is a pretty versatile ingredient. So add your kitchen, along with French restaurants and World Series locker rooms, to the list of places where a bottle of champagne is welcome. I’m not saying it isn’t for special occasions anymore. I’m just saying that maybe now you can have more special occasions.

Champagne Risotto

Serves 2

4 thin slices prosciutto

3 Cups chicken broth

12 asparagus spears

2 Tbsp butter

1 shallot, chopped fine

¾ Cup Arborio rice

¾ Cup Champagne

¼ cup grated Parmesan

¼ tsp salt

½ ground black pepper

• Preheat oven to 450 F.
• Lay proscuitto slices on a baking sheet and cook for 6 or 7 minutes. Take the prosciutto out when it is just starting to brown and get crisp, and set it aside. As it cools it will get crispier, and eventually you’ll crumble it up to use as a garnish that truly is The Champagne of Baco Bits©. Alternatively, feel free forget about the proscuitto and leave it in there for, oh, say 10, 15 minutes? If you’re nervous about never having made risotto before, nothing lowers expectations like having your guest catch you pulling a charred hell-scape of smoking pork out of the oven. Worked for me. Completely intentional too. But please make sure you have some back-up ham; the garnish is delicious.

• Boil chicken stock, add asparagus and cook for 2 minutes. Then remove asparagus with slotted spoon, cut into ½” pieces, move the stock to simmer on a back burner, and let’s get this risotto started.
• In another pot, sauté shallot over medium heat in 1 Tbsp butter until translucent (about 3 minutes).
• Add rice and stir for a few minutes to coat grains with butter.
• Add Champagne and simmer for 3 to 4 minutes.
• Add ½ cup chicken broth. Simmer for 2 or 3 minutes. Repeat. And repeat, and repeat, ad infinitum. Or at least, like, ad twentyminutem… keep adding ½ cup amounts of stock, letting it absorb, and adding more, until the rice is creamy. And taste the risotto; this is something so basic, but which I so often forget to do. Is the rice tender? Does it taste like risotto? Hey, congrats!
• Stir in asparagus, Parmesan, salt, pepper and 1 tablespoon butter.
• Serve, topped with crumbled prosciutto. If you haven’t burned it all.

Now I’ve saved dessert for last here not because The Man says that’s when you eat dessert but because, unfortunately, it was the least successful part of this meal. That said, I think this is a really promising recipe. It just so happens that I botched the pears: I’m a fan of Asian pears, see, which are crisper and sweeter than your average pear, and, in addition to those virtues, also happen to be (A) in season now and (B) for sale at my local farmer’s market. Naturally I decided to give them a try. While my fusion cuisine dreams weren’t exactly crushed (the poaching liquid was delicious and would have made anything taste good), the pears themselves were blandly sweet and a little disappointing. I would advise sticking with a good, old fashioned pear-flavored European pear. Incidentally, the more traditional way to poach pears is with red wine, cloves and cinnamon for a richer, spicier flavor. This Boston Globe recipe is a good example, but before I go back to red I think I will be trying again with champagne and Bartlett pears. See below:

Pears Poached in Champagne

Adapted from epicurious.com.

Serves 2

1 bottle champagne

1 cup sugar

¼ lemon’s worth of zest

½ vanilla bean, split in half lengthwise

2 large firm Bartlett pears, peeled

• Pour entire bottle of champagne into pot. Make sure the pot isn’t too wide; you want the champagne to come up high enough to just about cover the pears
• Stir in sugar, then add all other ingredients.
• Simmer until pears are tender. This could be anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes; cooking time varies a lot depending on pear size. Since you may very well be serving the pears in halves or quarters, there’s no shame in cutting into the pear to test if it’s cooked through.
• Let pears cool, sitting in their liquid before serving. Apparently you can even make this in advance and store in your fridge for up to a week.
• Serve in a bowl with poaching liquid poured over pears.

A waste of good champagne, you say? Fine, don’t use good champagne. Problem solved! Honestly the quality of the booze does not matter for the risotto, as long as it’s not too sweet, but you will want something drinkable to poach your pears with.