Instant Rum Pot (Rumtopf)
Rumtopf is a method of preserving summer fruits to be enjoyed in winter, known in the German speaking countries. Fresh fruits are covered with half of their weight of sugar and sufficient extra strong rum (54%).
Here is a way to produce instant rum pot fruits without waiting several month until they are soaked with rum. I tried it with small pieces of peeled apricot infused with white rum (50%), dark rum (50%) and Abricotine (Swiss apricot brandy). With Abricotine, the taste is most natural, with dark rum it is very sweet, with white rum it is rather strong, and we liked them best with a mixture of about 1/4 dark rum and 3/4 white rum.
Clamp type vacuum machines typically reduce pressure to about 0.2 bar (mine does only 0.28 bar). This may be insufficient vacuum to make fruits perfectly translucent, but the taste is the same. Chamber vacuum machines produce higher levels of vacuum (blackp reported better than 0.012 bar) . Another possibility to produce a higher vacuum is to pull on a syringe: remove plunger from a 50ml syringe, place small fruit pieces into the syringe and replace plunger, aspirate sufficient liquor to cover the fruits, expel the air, close the nozzle with a stopper, and pull strongly on the plunger. Remove stopper, return liquor to a glass, remove plunger and take the infused fruits out.
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| peeled apricot pieces with Abricotine in syringe with nozzle closed by stopper | vacuum applied by pulling strongly on the plunger |
--PedroG 00:41, 1 August 2009 (UTC)