Happy Purim! There is a Jewish tradition to get drunk on the holiday of Purim, to honor the topsy-turvy nature of the holiday and to blot out the name of the villain Haman. It’s not my favorite tradition as an autistic fellow with not-so-mild noise sensitivity. But what I do enjoy is the traditional Ashkenazi hooch of shlivovitz – a very strong plum brandy that is known as slivovica or sljivovica across Eastern Europe. I usually buy mine, but it turns out my friend Max Segal – a Russian Jewish foodie and intellectual extraordinaire based in Montréal – knows how to make it. And he very generously provided the recipe for you, the readers.
Anyway, I’ll let Max take it from here. Remember to be careful when distilling, and drink responsibly!
Ingredients:
1) 10-13 kg of plum
2) 200-500 g of sugar
This process is best broken down into 5 chronologically and technically separated steps:
- The raw materials
Sit down with your plums and begin parsing through the fruit. Slivovica requires the plums to be as sweet as possible, if even overripened, but absolutely not rotten or moldy. You should, under no circumstances, wash your plums, as you may eliminate critical elements for your spirit contained in the plum’s integumentary system. If needed, you can you a dry paper towel to wipe off excess dirt or debris.
Cut your plums in two, taking out the pit. Food process the plums until it is reduced to a fine mush.
- Preparing the ferment
Try the mush! This is how the tradition calls for, so you might as well indulge the practice. The mush should be comparatively sweet; if not, add sugar to the mush and food process again. Repeat as many times as needed. This step is more labor intensive than it might appear, so be mentally prepared. Writer’s note: I personally find that adding sugar even if already sweet helps the wort become heavier, so I typically add 200 grams of sugar from the start. This is not very traditional, but it is my twist.
Take the resulting mass and leave it in an unclosed container covered with a porous fabric or paper towel in a damp, warm place for 24-48 hours. The mush will foam and hiss, but rest assured, this is totally normal.
Into a separate vessel, drain (typically using a strainer/doing this in many go’s is the key to a successful draining) the mush of the liquid (this is called wort in the community) and add about 20-40% of the wort’s volume of water to the wort. This will determine how prevalent the taste of sweet plum will be in your resulting slivovica. Mix the water and wort very thoroughly. Atop the bottleneck or opening of where you have your wort-water mixture, affix a latex glove with a small pinprick on the “nail” part of the middle finger. We are essentially making plum wine first, that we will then distill into slivovica.
- Fermentation
Leave your wort-water mixture in a dark, damp and warm place (ideally between 66 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit). This is the tricky part. The mixture will ferment for anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months. One must attend to it very closely to understand when the ideal condition of the “plum wine” has been attained. If your wort-water mixture is actively bubbling, sweet, and translucent, it is still fermenting. Once it begins to leave residue at the bottom, tastes rather bitter, and has stopped bubbling, the fermentation has stopped. This is what we are aiming for.
- Distillation
Drain (using the same tip in step #2) the “plum wine” of its residue into an intermediate vessel. It is essential not to leave any residue in the “wine,” or else it will be burned in the distillation process and leave a nasty mark on the flavor of the spirit.
Pour your wine into a pot still/vat (I highly do not recommend the low-cost “reverse distillation” technique many people use, but see the star-denoted part to see how to use one. For the record, you can buy a sturdy, cheap pot still on eBay for around 80 bucks.). Distill the mixture in one “dry” go (the first 15% of distilled product should be discarded, as it is toxic), then do two runs “separating by parts”, and adding the missing volume with water (should be 10% and 20%, respectively). Check to see that you are not below 30% alcohol in the distilled liquids. Once you are, your slivovica is ready.
*Pour the wine a pot and float a small bowl. Cover the pot edges with wet paper towel. Put the cover on upside-down and put ice on the resulting dip. On a small fire, run the wine, and you will find that condensation will accumulate in the bowl. Pour out the first bowl, as it contains unsavory chemicals. Pour each full bowl into a bottle, then, being done with the “wine”, repeat the process until the whole bottle has been distilled one or two more times. Replace the missing liquid with water.
- Let it breathe
If possible, in lieu of the famous oak barrel aging, let your slivovica age for 72-96 hours in a cold and dry place, in a hermetically sealed container.
