If there is one thing my boyfriend and I have in common, it's an inner mad scientist that often spills over into our eating and drinking lives. We love a glass of good beer, anything wrapped in bacon, and will most likely never turn down a whiskey.
A fan of the project/startup funding site, Kickstarter, I stumbled on a project by a local Chicago company, Crucial Detail, titled "The Porthole". This functional piece of art was designed by Martin Kastner for high profile Chicago restaurant The Aviary and, while I am not always the biggest fan of fussy food and beverages, the simple and beautiful design of this piece had me at first click. My boyfriend and I talk frequently about infused liquor and one of our favorites is (don't gag) jalapeno infused vodka or tequila, so when I saw it on a friend's Instagram, I remembered my initial awe and hoped it would make a good Valentine's Day gift.
What exactly is it, you ask? The Porthole is an infuser: two glass panes, stainless steel, some gaskets, and a sleek design that not only provide a vessel in which to infuse, but allow you to do so beautifully. While originally concepted for cocktails, other uses include infused oils, broths, flavored water, etc.
Our first attempt was a bit of a mess. We struggled a bit with the minimalist design while attempting to "open the Porthole" and dislodged a gasket in the process. A few hours and a couple of bandaids later, we figured out how to get the gasket back in place and were back on track. {Tip: Keep the Porthole DRY, level with one foot off of the work surface, and if you dislodge a gasket, squish it back in wide side first... Aka make sure you are wearing your glasses and have plenty of light.}
As our first infusion was an orange and earl grey gin, you can only imagine the tea-y mess that was our dining room table after the weight of the oranges plopped the bottom pane out of the steel rim when we neglected to ensure one "foot" rested off the edge of the work space.... Genius. (Crucial Detail must have received a plethora of inquiries and complaints - we did see a number of them on the Facebook page - because the Porthole's "personal" site now explains how to refit the gasket and the importance of proper work space.)
For this first infusion, we sliced one orange and added loose tea from 3 earl grey tea bags, as well as one black tea for a deeper flavor, then filled the closed and sealed Porthole with gin until it hit the screen. You will want to try to arrange any fruit and loose ingredients in an aesthetically pleasing manner (or as much of one as you can manage - per our experiment - ha!).
The end result 2 1/2 hours later was a very VERY tea and orange flavored drink - you could barely taste the gin. Poured straight, we each got about one solid sized drink out of the infuser. We would recommend keeping the tea in tea bags, if you don't mind it, as some of the leaves escaped the infuser's built in filter screen (very handy).
We attempted our second infusion for a pre Second City drink for Valentine's Day.
My boyfriend loves blackberries and chose apple, lime, and blackberry to infuse more gin (why gin? the guy knows what I like!).
We sliced one half of an apple and one half of a lime, then added a handful of blackberries to the center of the infuser.
Once closed, we again filled it with gin to the screen. The end result tasted primarily of lime and, if done again, we might do a two part infusion - allowing the apples and blackberries to infuse for longer periods of time and then adding that infused liquor to the Porthole instead of plain gin/vodka.
Have any of you tried this out, or seen it at Next or the Aviary? If you have a good infusion recipe - send it my way - we are dying to keep trying them!
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