I usually dust off this blog around the holidays, so I can participate in Holidailies. This year I thought I'd get an early start. Why? Because now is the perfect time to mix up your eggnog and age it for several weeks before Christmas and New Years.
I first experienced real eggnog (homemade, with booze) when my brother-in-law joined the family. He makes a vodka-based concoction, mixed up in big gallon-sized batches. He has to, because this stuff is way better than the weirdly yellow and thickened stuff you find in the grocery store.
At some point, I stumbled across the idea of making boozy aged eggnog, I think through this Ruhlman article. The first few years, I stuck solidly to the Chow.com best eggnog recipe (except never bothering to add whipped cream or egg whites when serving). Nowadays, I put my own spin on things. Here's my version:
Aged Eggnog
12 egg yolks (from a source you trust)
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark rum
3/4 cup brandy
1 liter bourbon whiskey (Jim Beam will do fine)
Milk (dairy or non-dairy), cream or half and half to serve.
Whisk together the egg yolks and sugar until well-integrated. Add the rum and brandy and whisk some more until the sugar is dissolved. Add the whiskey and stir some more. Using a funnel, decant the mixture into glass bottles. The empty Jim Beam bottle will work dandy; you'll need one additional bottle around the same size. Store in the fridge for 3 weeks or more, shaking each bottle periodically.
To serve, mix the nog base with your preferred milk/cream in about a 1:1 ratio (you can play with this to taste). The original recipe calls for about 4:1 milk to cream in the nog, so I usually use whole milk and a splash of cream. Coconut milk (canned, no funky ingredients) also works surprisingly well and is very decadent.
The past few years I've experimented with replacing some of the sugar with maple syrup. The maple flavor is awesome with the bourbon! This year I used 1/2 cup maple syrup and 1/3 cup sugar.
This recipe leaves you with lots of leftover egg whites. I freeze them (2-3 to a container) to use in our shepherd's pie recipe. Brother-in-law often makes a Schaum Torte, a light egg white-based cake served with fruit.
If you make aged eggnog the Chow.com way, you're faced with finding room in your fridge for about 3 quarts of nog during the aging process. By leaving the milk/cream out during the aging, you still get the wondrous melding of egg & booze, but more compactly. Enjoy!
