After returning from the World Pastry Forum and working with Jim, I have had booze on the brain. Let's just add that to my list of fetishes. Combine that with my infatuation of smoked foods and the result is smoked raisins which we steeped in a bottle of sherry. The original idea was to fortify the sherry with the intense flavor of the smoked raisins and then discard the spent raisins. The result was two amazing products, the sherry and the raisins. The sherry has been decanted and re-bottled, we are still debating where we will use it. The raisins have not laid in limbo. We have made oatmeal raisin cookies, a raisin-wine relish and are now working on a sticky pudding, a miso, a vinegar and a yogurt sauce. It is always exciting when we can utilize elements and ingredients which we had previously dismissed as spent.
