50 Holiday Gift Ideas Dessert Beers Destination Las Vegas

PLUS: 50 HOLIDAY GIFT IDEAS DESSERT BEERS DESTINATION LAS VEGAS AMERICAN SINGLE MALT WHISKEY SCOTCH WITH NICK OFFERMAN quench Embracing Canelazo, a drink that’s good for whatever ails you. Take Care After months of ads for health drinks and functional wellness tonics, I think my Facebook feed is worried about me. Sip our detox tea for clean energy. Knock back a turmeric shot to !ght the debilitating in"ammation that I apparently su$er. Even with free shipping, snake oil is snake oil. But I’m but plays a similar jazzy tune. “At the last dinner, people tempted. Who wouldn’t want a tasty potion to do away came back for three rounds,” he says with a laugh. “#ey’d with their in!rmities? “What’s this for?” I’d ask my mom of say, ‘Oh my god, you just sent me back home.’ ” the brandy-based Hot Toddy she brought me when I was At the Queens restaurant Casa del Chef, every meal sick in bed. “Everything,” she’d say with a smirk. begins with a shot of Canelazo on the house. #e chef “What’s this for?” is a Alfonso Zhicay simmers question we should ask of all water, passion fruit pulp, kinds of drinks, a reminder cinnamon sticks, and anise that they’re channels for seeds with sugar to make a moods and stories, not just tangy spiced infusion, then "avors. Take a Margarita to adds lime juice and doses excite you. A Corpse Reviver each glass with a measure to revitalize you. A cup of of Zhumir, Ecuador’s most Canelazo to make you whole. popular aguardiente. At once Canelazo is the hot toddy cozy and stimulating, it’s an of the Andes, an aromatic ideal aperitif. and deceptively forceful drink Translated as “!rewater,” made with cinnamon, citrus and sometimes called guaro, and a neutral sugarcane spirit a slang term for booze, called aguardiente. Depending aguardiente is distilled from on who’s making it, the recipe sugarcane juice and re!ned may include other warm until relatively "avorless, spices as well as the tawny though it retains a whisper twang of panela and local of cane’s grassy, vanilla bite. fruits. It tastes like a spice Colombian distillers spice mill housed in the tropics, but their versions with anise wherever your home is, a sip of for a kind of moonshiney Canelazo can take you there. pastis; in both countries, the “It’s my way to retain the spirit is bottled around 30 culture and share a childhood percent ABV. I can’t say I’m a memory,” says chef Humberto fan of drinking aguardiente Guallpa, whose Taste of Origin straight, but it !ts the Williams Clay pop-ups in New York City and Canelazo formula better than across the U.S. explore his anything else. Cumbé, a new native Ecuadorian cuisine Colombian brand, may be the through a global lens. High A glass of Canelazo at Casa del Chef in Queens, New York. smoothest of the lot, thanks in the mountainous part in part to a rest in white oak of Cañar Province, where casks that mellow the guaro’s Guallpa spent much of his childhood on his grandmother’s heat. Zhicay suggests you could substitute with Brazilian farm, the setting sun ushers in frigid air. cachaça or rhum agricole, though “you wouldn’t be During the harvest season, Guallpa’s grandmother making Canelazo anymore.” brewed deep pots of Canelazo for the workers in the Zhicay also grew up in rural Ecuador, sneaking sips of !elds, a liquid gesture of gratitude for a hard day’s work Canelazo when workers came in from the !elds. “Before that chased away the chill “and opened your appetite,” you worry about the food,” he says, “making Canelazo is the he adds. He continues the tradition at his Taste of Origin !rst thing. You must have it to welcome your guests, and dinners, steeping cinnamon, star anise, raw sugar, orange you must drink it as the right beginning for your appetite.” juice, and lemon peel with a purée of tomate de arbol, an So what’s Canelazo for? Everything that matters. Ecuadorian fruit that’s sweeter and tangier than tomato By Max Falkowitz 98 imbibemagazine.com ~ november/december 2019.

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