Latest / Into The Barchive / Nocino: Green Walnuts, Folklore & Fall Cocktails
Transcript
- 45 audio only: Into the bark hive where the past comes alive Forgotten drinks will revive we thrive Sip the tails, let them drive Welcome to the Bark Hive Hello, Barkhapists, and welcome to Into the Barkhive. The podcast where we dive deep into the stories, people, and cocktails that have shaped the way we drunk. I'm Tim Wright, mixologist, your above average curious drinker, and your tipsy tour guide through Boo's history. And I'm Dr. Blake Jones, historian, mixologist, and certified specialist of spirits, here to pour out the stories behind what's in your glass. And today we're talking about a special liqueur. What is that? Nochino. It looks like it was brewed in a witch's cauldron. It tastes like autumn in a bottle. And it has a backstory involving midsummer rituals, green walnuts, Saint John the Baptist, and a little bit of good old fashioned folk magic. Man, and if you have never had Nochino before, let's start with the obvious. What is it? Nochino is a dark, bittersweet. Walnut liqueur traditionally made by macerating green, unripe walnuts in alcohol, usually with sugar and sometimes spices such as cinnamon and cloves. Okay, so this isn't just some kind of walnut-flavored vodka then. Not exactly, and that and that distinction is important. No chino gets most of its character from the green walnut. The fruit before the familiar hard shell and mature nut have developed. At this stage, the walnut is soft enough to cut through, and the green husk contains tannins, oil, and other compounds that contribute bitterness, spice, astringency, and that unmistakable dark walnut character. This explains why Nochino can taste. like walnuts without tasting like that familiar dry walnut kind of snack that we're used to. Yeah, think less bowl of mixed nuts and more black walnut, baking spice, dark caramel, herbs, wood, and bitter chocolate. And I guess based off the producer, we can get other notes like coffee, I don't know, nutmegs, vanilla, citrus pills, I mean cinnamon, sometimes something medicinal. And and that's Part of what makes Nochino so interesting behind the bar. It occupies this wonderful space between a liqueur and an amaro. It brings sweetness, but it also brings bitterness and structure. And today we're going to put that to work into two different cocktails. First, we're going to be making it wanted old-fashioned. And then we're going to take the Alexander template somewhere considerably nuttier with a rum walnut Alexander. So grab yourself a bottle of Nochino, a mixing glass, and a wannut or two, and let's get into the Barclay. Our first cocktail is the walnut old fashioned. We're going to start off by putting two ounces of a nice whiskey or bourbon into our stirring glass. Our next ingredient is the star of the show today, and that's our Noccino. Half ounce of Nochino. Just because we want to add a little bit of sweetness to this, we're gonna go with a quarter ounce of Jimarura syrup. And what plays well with this specific version of the nochino is orange. So we're gonna go with four dashes of orange bitters, Japanese dashers, so it's gonna eight. Add ice to our stirring glass? In stir. this cocktail actually comes from a bartender named Johnny Sweat, I think it's the pronunciation of the last name, S-W-E-T. and we modified this version because it actually didn't originally call for the Demerera sugar or demorero syrup in it. It was just straight three-quarters of an ounce of the Nochino. but when we were playing around for a cocktail class, we decided that it needed a little bit more sugar for the palate of our clientele. We made a slight modification. Again, cocktails have templates and they can be played with. After but after we stir for our thirty to forty five seconds, you know, enough for our cocktail to get chilled. Go ahead, put ice in our glass. grabbing ourselves a nice clear rock and we'll strain. this cocktail calls for a garnish of a little orange. Spread some oils across the top. Give it a little rub. Drop it in. And also, since we are getting towards that Halloween time, a little sweetness. Let's give ourselves a cherry. Put as little or as much as that cherry juice is into your cocktail as well. And here we have our walnut, old fashioned. For our second drink, we're gonna make something a little more decadent. A rum walnut Alexander. So we're gonna start with two ounces of a dark rum. I would encourage you to find maybe one that is from Guyana or a a Demerara style rum. It's gonna have some like burnt brown sugar notes that I think pair. beautifully with the nochino. So two ounces of my dark rum. It's a denizen batted dart that has a lot of guy on it in it. Then we're gonna use one ounce of our nochino this walnut liqueur. This one's a European one Nuxalpina from Austria made in the traditional way. And now for the decadence part one ounce Of heavy whipping cream. Add that to our shaking tone. And then one ounce or excuse me, a half ounce of demarira syrup. And again, it's not just about the sweetness, it's about the texture that the sugar provides. That while there's some sugar in the Nochino, it's not as pronounced as a syrup. So that demarira syrup is adding texture, not just sweetness. Now we will add some ice to our large tin. And then we'll shake the cocktail 10 to 15 seconds. Alright, we'll pop the seal on our shaker tin. And then we're gonna grab a chilled coop from the freezer. Because of the volume here, you're talking four and a half ounces of liquid, maybe a slightly larger coop. And then we're gonna double strain. Because this is a cream-based drink. I want to keep out all those ice shards that might further dilute the texture of the drink or just not make it as creamy along the way. And for the garnish, we're going to go with some freshly grated nutmeg to go along the top to emphasize those spice characteristics. And there you have a rum walnut Alexander. Cheers. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. Blake, before we get into these cocktails, let's dive deeper into what is Noccino? Well, the simplest way to understand Noccino is a traditional Italian walnut liqueur made from green walnuts. And while Noccino is particularly associated with Emilia Romagna. Walnut liqueurs exist elsewhere in Europe too, like the one we use today. This Nuxalpina came from Austria. So you have related traditions and Alpine regions of Europe, France, and other parts of Italy. Okay, so Italian, then France, and this one's Austria. So again, it's more of a European base of some sort. From so we're dealing with this broader European. ingredient. Yes. And one of the things that I find most interesting about these traditional liqueurs is that they're often less about a single canonical recipe and more about a set of techniques and traditions that families and communities adapt over generations. For instance, the Ordane del Nacino Modenese. Okay. Excuse my awful Italian pronunciations. That's an association dedicated to the preservation of traditional Nochino making. They give a traditional recipe calling for green walnuts, high-proof neutral alcohol, sugar, and optional amounts of cinnamon and cloves. Their traditional method calls for 33 to 35 walnuts. And they're very deliberate about it because they want to keep an odd number. Okay, so. 33 to 35 is a very serious commitment. What's this? Well, let me rephrase that. 33 or 35. Not 34. Okay. So it has to be one or the other. It has to be the odd number. Yes. Gotcha. And so the process of making Nochino isn't exactly fast. You harvest the walnuts while they're still green and soft. Quarter them and macerate them with the alcohol, then you filter the mixture and allow it to mature. And this tradition recommends at least a year of maturation for the finished liqueur to fully develop its character. Which then brings us, I guess, to this one of the most important dates of the the calendar for Nochino is the Nochino calendar is June 24th. Yes, the feast of St. John the Baptist. Traditionally, green walnuts for Nochino are gathered around the night of June twenty-third into June twenty fourth or around the feast itself, and there's a very practical reason for that timing. I'm guessing the walnuts are ready. Exactly. Okay. The green walnut is in a very particular stage of development. That outer husk is still soft, the shell hasn't hardened, and the entire fruit can be Cut up and infuse. So what looks like a mystical calendar date with religious connotations is also remarkably practical agricultural knowledge. So naturally humans weren't just content with saying, hey, the walnuts are ready. No, we need magic. that makes a better story, right? Yeah, and the Knight of St. John the Baptist has long been surrounded by folklore in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. It's closely associated with midsummer, the summer solstice, fire, water, herbs, and the boundary between the ordinary and supernatural worlds, and Nochino is a part of that tradition. And this is where the story gets wonderfully strange. Yeah, in some versions of this tradition, women would climb the walnut trees barefoot to gather the walnuts before dawn. Barefoot. Barefoot. In the dark? In the dark. Up a wanna tree. Yes. Which sounds a little more like more I guess it sounds less like a recipe and more like a scene from some kind of folk mystic movie. Yeah, I mean it certainly has that atmosphere. The dew of the night of St. John's the Baptist's feast was also believed to possess special powers. In some traditions, the walnuts were associated with the dew from that night and with the supernatural potency of midsummer. There were rules and superstitions about how you would collect the walnuts. The Monige tradition preserves the idea of that odd number of walnuts, 33 or 35, but not 34, right? While older folklore sometimes prescribe avoiding metal tools while harvesting or cutting the walnuts. So then there's witches. There has to be. absolutely. The walnut tree itself has a long association with folklore and witchcraft in parts of Europe. Stories connected witches or supernatural beings with walnut trees, particularly around the night of St. John. I guess We're jumping from June back to now fall, which then kind of makes Notino a pretty spectacular Halloween adjacent drink. It really does. and funnily enough, in 2020 I taught an online course on witchcraft and heresy in medieval Europe. Okay. So you know, some of that is coming from that background. But you know, as a historian, we have to separate Folklore from documented history. And while we can confidently say that Nochino has a long-standing association with the feasts of St. John and traditional green walnut harvesting, some of these more elaborate stories about witches and magical dew and ancient pagan origins belong to the realm of folklore and later interpretation. Rather than something we can document as a single unbroken ancient recipe. Which honestly makes this more an interesting liqueur, right? Yeah, because the history of a drink isn't just the ingredients, it's also the stories people tell about those ingredients. Now let's talk about what actually happens inside this jar then, because you've got these incredibly green bitter walnuts when they first start the harvest. And if eventually you end up with this Lat liqueur. Yeah. So the process is essentially an an an infusion or maceration. You take the green walnuts, cut them into pieces, and place them into high-proof alcohol. like this Nux Alpina, it says that it is placed into grape brandy for this producer, not just like a neutral green spirit. Okay. Sugar is commonly involved in neutrino production. certain recipes may include spices like cinnamon and clove. And then the alcohol extracts compounds from the walnuts, including the tannins and the aromatic compounds. And over time that liquid becomes deeply colored and intensely flavored. So unlike something like whiskey, where you're fermenting and distilling a a raw material and then Aging it, that spirit. I'm I'm guessing Notino is fundamentally about extraction then. Right. And there's one reason the quality of the raw walnut matters so much. You're trying to capture the walnut at a very specific moment in time. Okay. Which is kind of beautiful when you think about it then, because a finished bottle is literally a preserving a particular moment in that growing season, then. Exactly. I mean the The tradition essentially says this is when the walnut is ready. Capture it now. And then you wait. The traditional recipe recommends filtering no earlier than around December and allowing the nochino to mature for a minimum of 12 months. so in making a traditional nochino, you're not planning to have this thing immediately. Like you're not planning on harvesting on June the 24th. having it by like early July. No, not at all. You're planning well far ahead. You said December. Yeah, way ahead. So which means Ochina makes so much sense now to kind of be an autumn drink or even now a winter drink if you're going that far because you begin it in the brightest part of the year and eventually it's now coming into this dark leaves chaining changing kind of autumnal winter season. Yeah and I mean there is a seasonal poetry to it. And that's why Nochino is often served as a digestive. After a meal, it's rich, it's bittersweet, it's warming and concentrated. Okay, so this is where our cocktails come into this because that bitterness makes Nochino incredibly useful in cocktail in cocktails as an ingredient. Absolutely. Okay. Now Noccino isn't something that's just preserved in an Italian grandmother's pantry anymore. It's found in many, many modern cocktails. And that's partly because the contemporary cocktail movement became increasingly interested in traditional liqueurs, bitters, amari, and regional spirits. And Nochino sits right at the intersection of those things. It has a long culinary tradition, but it also behaves beautifully around the bar. And modern bartenders discovered it can do things that are incredible incredibly useful in cocktails too. It can provide this sweetness, it can provide this bitterness, it can provide spice, body, I mean, and obviously it provides, I mean, the walnut flavor. Yeah, and it also works surprisingly well with a range of base spirits. Of course, whiskey and no chino are a natural combination. Brandy makes sense and rum works beautifully. And then going to our cocktails now, the wanted old fashioned is a beautiful example of how you could take a traditional liqueur and drop into one of the more found a foundational cocktails. And it pops, it sings, it becomes beautiful. Yeah. This particular recipe I mentioned, John Sweat, and I think that the Johnny Sweat, S W E T, I think that's pronunciation, came from a New York bar, right? Yeah, the Skylark. Okay. And so this recipe was published in an Im Vibe magazine in 2015. And instead of treating the walnut liqueur as like a little accent like if you were using like walnut bitters. We're letting that walnut become the sweetening element of the drink. Yeah notice what the Nochino's doing here. It's not merely saying this tastes like walnuts, changing the architecture of the drink. But but if you I tasted this blind, right? Like if you take this specific cocktail, tasted it blindly, it's not an immediate say, ooh, walnut liqueur, right? As I start to think about it, It tastes just like an old-fashioned that has this nice walnut accent. Yeah. It's just like sometimes it's more of like a I can't put my finger on it, but it it's a more interesting, complex old-fashioned than the traditional recipe. And that's often the best use of an unusual ingredient, not making it scream, walnut, walnut, walnut. But it deepens the drink. And now let's talk about yours, and it's considerably more indulgent. Yes. So when we're talking about the Alexander template, typically we're talking about a base spirit, creme de cacao, and cream. And the most familiar version we have today is the Brandy Alexander. Which is already basically dessert in a cocktail glass. Exactly. But what this rum walnut Alexander does is it swaps out The chocolate liqueur, the creme de cacao, and brings in walnut liqueur instead. And then that rum brings caramel, vanilla, oat, molasses, and tropical fruit. And the nochino brings walnut and bitterness. And of course, the cream ties it all together. It's almost like a walnut version of a holiday dessert, but the nochino keeps it from becoming one dimensional, right? It's it's a little bit of bitterness is important. makes it not just flatline. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I love about bitter liqueurs and dessert drinks. They keep the sweetness from becoming cloying. Okay, so if you're somebody who thinks dessert cocktails are usually too sweet, Nochino is worth experimenting with. I mean, it can bring dessert-like flavor profiles with still giving you some of that bitterness structure. Yeah, and there's something about Nochino that makes it almost perfectly suited to into the bark because it sits right at the intersection of history, agriculture, folklore, family tradition, and modern bartending. And it reminds us that Liqueur doesn't have to have a singular inventor, right? Sometimes drinks come down because come down to us because they're just putting a name on a menu. They've survived families that kept them there. Yeah, and it's a lot harder to document family traditions as recipes change, ingredients change. yeah, that's true. Families may substitute what's available, stories evolve, and sometimes that tradition survives precisely because it isn't written down. It's through the repetition. I guess that's what makes the chino very interesting because that traditional recipe can look remarkably simple the way that you explained it, but Walnuts, alcohol, sugar, maybe sometimes some spices, just depending on the family that was making it, but the resulting drink carries an enormous amount of cultural baggage, though. Yeah, and that's a recurring theme in the history of alcoholic beverages. The physical process can be simple, while the cultural meaning is incredibly complex. No chino is more than just walnut liqueur. It's a way of preserving a seasonal ingredient. It's associated with the feasts of St. John the Baptist. It's connected to midsummer night traditions. It's part of regional Italian food ways. And it's a modern cocktail ingredient that bartenders are continuing to reinterpret. Which brings us back to that idea that we talk about all the time here at Into the Barchive that cocktails aren't static. a drink can have history, but it doesn't have to stay trapped in that history. Exactly. The goal isn't always to recreate the past perfectly. Sometimes it's to understand the past well enough to do something new with it. But until then, let us know about your own experiments with Neutino. And if there are other historical liquors that you've discovered. And don't forget to Drop us a line, interact with us a little bit wherever you're listening to your podcast or on YouTube right now. Give us a thumbs up, give some interaction, help that algorithm so we can reach other future bark of this. Yeah. as always, go ahead and like and subscribe on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and then for podcasts, Spotify and Apple. Yeah, and next time on Into the Barchive. We're staying with the darker side of the cat cocktail calendar. Alright, so we're we're flirting around, Halloween being this time of year. So with Halloween coming up, we've got to celebrate with a family of drinks that sound like they were designed for a haunted bar. The Corpse Reviver cocktails. We're gonna look at the history behind the name, the different drinks that have carried it, and why the Corpse Reviver became One of the great cocktail families associated with revival after a long night. Which, depending on that night, might be a a historical description or a personal necessity. We'll let you decide. But until next time, keep exploring the past one drink at a time. As we dive deeper into the barkive.