Cider on the stove.
Whole spices, low heat, and one temperature you must not go past. The recipe is the easy part and almost everybody gets the temperature wrong, which is why most mulled cider tastes faintly of cough medicine.
- How long
- Five minutes of work. An hour of waiting.
- You need
- Cider · Cinnamon sticks · Cloves · Star anise · An orange · A pan
- Messy
- No.
Step 1. Put everything in a pan, cold.
Two litres of apple cider, which is half a gallon. Three cinnamon sticks, eight whole cloves, two star anise, and three strips of orange peel taken off with a vegetable peeler. Everything starts cold and comes up together.
Step 2. Take the peel and leave the white.
The orange oil lives in the colored skin. The white layer underneath it is pith, and pith is bitter. A peeler held at a shallow angle takes the first and leaves the second. If your strips look white on the back, scrape them.
Step 3. Whole spices only. Never ground.
Ground spice does not dissolve. It goes cloudy, it sinks, it turns up in the bottom of the last cup as grit, and it gives up its harsh notes far faster than its aromatic ones. Whole sticks and whole buds, every time.
Step 4. Bring it to about 80 C and hold it there.
That is 175 F, and it looks like this: steam coming off the surface, the occasional lazy bubble at the edge of the pan, and no rolling boil at any point. On most stoves it is the lowest setting that still does something.
This is the whole page. Everything that makes mulled cider smell like Christmas is a volatile aromatic, which is a fancy way of saying it leaves as a gas the moment the liquid boils. Boil the pan and you send the good part into the ceiling and are left with the tannin from the spices and the peel, which is the bitter part.
Step 5. Wait longer than you think.
Twenty minutes is drinkable. An hour is right. Two hours on the lowest setting is better still and this is the rare recipe that improves while you ignore it. Taste at twenty minutes and again at an hour and you will hear the difference.
Step 6. Sweeten last, if at all.
Ciders vary enormously. Taste it at the end and add a tablespoon of brown sugar only if it needs it. Sugar added at the start hides how sharp the cider actually was and you will add it again out of habit next year.
Step 7. Anything alcoholic goes in off the heat.
Ethanol boils at 78 C. You have been holding the pan at 80. So a splash of dark rum or bourbon added to the pan on the stove is being actively boiled away while you stir it.
Take the pan off, wait a minute, then add it. Or better, pour it into the adults' cups and ladle the cider on top, so one pan serves the whole room and the children get the same drink.
What to do with the pan afterwards.
Leave the spices in it and put the lid on. It reheats the next day and it is better the next day, up to about three days in the fridge, at which point the cloves start taking over. The same spices will do a second pan if the first one was only an hour.
If the house needs to smell like this and nobody is thirsty, put a mug of water with one cinnamon stick, two cloves and a strip of peel in it on the lowest heat you have. Same effect on the hallway, no washing up, and it costs about eleven cents.
That is the end of this one
The word for what you just did is mulling.
Heating a drink with whole spice and citrus while deliberately keeping it below boiling. The heat is there to pull the aromatic oils out of the spice. It is not there to cook anything, and the moment it boils it starts undoing the work.
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