The durian-infused, gorgonzola-washed, Malört from hell

or, this week in a shot glass

Hi clowns!

Sorry about not posting last week. Davida and I have been busy with family things, and I’ve had sort of a gross complication with my bad eye (I’m fine, my eyelid just hates the constant drops I have to put in it).

And man, I just don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said by now. Just like many of you, I was blindsided by the presidential election results. At first I was absolutely shocked about what happened, but then as I thought back through the past few years of human history (if not longer), I guess I’m now a little less surprised and more angry, sad, and exhausted than anything else. But I’m mostly just angry. Also worried.

I promise today’s not all doom and gloom, however, because today’s edition of Food is Stupid is distractingly gnarly, and I know you all love when shit goes off the rails. In fact, this experiment has yielded one of the most intense results I’ve had so far in the history of the newsletter.

One final item before I continue — today’s would normally be on the paid reader schedule, but considering how miserable everyone’s been this week, I figured I’d make this one free for all to read. That being said, I try not to hammer this home too much, but I really do rely on your support to keep this newsletter going, so please consider supporting it with a paid subscription by using the field below.

I know that the whole paid subscription model is an arduous one, so just be aware that I hate even bringing it up. It’s just that I am pretty sure there is no single entity that would say, “Hey, Dannis, I’d love to give you a million dollars to write a newsletter where you borderline poison yourself every week, and talk about shoving food up your ass to an audience who doesn’t quite know what to make of you, but still totally gets what you’re doing.”

Anyway, yeah, at least let the thought simmer in your head for a bit. I can’t exist in this space without your support, so every bit helps.

This week, I’m revisiting an old idea I had many years back from when I was still working in a pizza restaurant.

I had the good fortune of having a great boss, Derrick, who let me experiment in the kitchen quite a bit, and one day, I managed to get ahold of an entire durian fruit. So I decided it would be a good (asshole) idea to infuse it into Chicago’s most notorious alcoholic product, Jeppson’s Malört, to see what would happen.

There are so many things wrong with this concept I don’t even know where to begin. First of all, if you’re not familiar with durian, it’s a fruit indigenous to Southeast Asia that’s notorious for having an extremely strong odor. The smell is sulfuric, almost like rotten eggs, and kind of oniony at the same time. If you’ve never had, seen, nor smelled one, I wouldn’t blame you for believing it was spoiled at first.

Then there’s the Malört, which is a liqueur we drink in Chicago that’s impossible to explain to outsiders. That’s because it has a flavor that many people liken to gasoline with burnt rubber bands in it. At first it’s sweet going down, but when its main flavor kicks in (derived from wormwood), it retains a bitterness that grows and stays in your mouth for hours. It’s a polarizing drink; some Chicagoans swear by it (Davida and I actually enjoy it), but many people hate it. When we have out of town visitors, we like to spring it on them as a prank to see the reaction that we collectively refer to as “Malörtface.”

Back when I did my initial version of this experiment, I’d scooped out some durian and put it in a deli container with some Malört and let it steep for a few days. If I remember correctly, I was so alarmed about the way it smelled through the plastic that I eventually moved it to the freezer, so as not to contaminate any other nearby ingredients.

When I first peeled that lid back, I felt as if I was sniffing one of those stinky flowers that blooms once every thousand years, the smell had gotten so concentrated. And after I tried some, I remember thinking that it tasted like used embalming fluid (or what I imagine that’d taste like), and I passed around to every one of my coworkers shouting, “Sniff this! Sniff this!”

But I figured I could top that old chestnut this week by going a bit further. Not only would I, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, infuse Malört with durian again, but I could also incorporate a new flavor. I’d employ an advanced fat-washing technique, where I’d add a sheen of fat to the drink using yet another stinky ingredient, gorgonzola cheese, because fuck everything right now.

Thanks to a tip from my good friend Ethan, I was able to score a whole frozen durian from an Asian grocery store he recommended in the city.

The lady bagging my groceries knew exactly what she was doing, because she knew to wrap the dangerously spiky fruit in a sheet of Korean newspaper before she put it in the plastic bag. Imagine one of these falling off a tree and hitting you in the head. Bye forever!

Durian is about as uncomfortable to handle with bare hands as it looks, so I put on an oven mitt before I sawed the thing in half.

The edible part of the fruit comes in the form of these yellow fleshy pods that encase kidney bean-shaped seeds.

I know, it’s shaped like a turd. There were four inside this particular shell. But despite the fierce eggy smell that was building in the kitchen, the fruit itself was custardy, sweet, with an allium-like aftertaste, and actually very good. I wanted to eat it all, but I had an important job to do. (I saved some for Davida, who really liked her piece later.)

I manually stripped all the fruit from the seeds, and plopped the flesh into a giant glass jar.

Then I covered the scrambled egg lookin’-stuff with Malört, shook it up a bunch, and placed it in the refrigerator overnight to rest, occasionally shaking it up.

I considered going around the next day trying to convince people that I had pickled some scrambled eggs, then trick them to smell the contents of the jar, but I did not feel like getting the cops called on me.

Once I popped the lid, a riot of an odor came screaming out.

Or an insurrection, one might say. Boy, was that a strong scent, too. I’d all but forgotten what my first experiment smelled like, and considering I used way more durian this time, this version well exceeded my memories of the last one. Not only did it smell like feet, eggs, and onions, it also smelled like chemical solvent.

I didn’t want my final product to have too many particles floating around in it, so I filtered about a half cup’s worth of durian-infused Malört into a plastic pint container.

Then I broke out the gorgonzola.

I picked this one because it looked like the stinkiest of the bunch at the grocery store, and turns out my instincts were spot on. There were some major streaks of mold through this thing, and its flavor was as tangy, salty, and even more powerful than it appeared.

I’d never fat-washed anything in my life, but as far as I understand, all you have to do is let any kind of fatty product like oil (or in this case blue cheese), sit in a strong spirit at room temperature for a few hours.

Then you have to put it in the freezer to solidify the fat so you can skim or strain it out, which is what I eventually did.

By the time I’d gotten to running the liquid through a coffee filter, the Malört had gone from a slightly hazy tan color to one that was more cloudy.

And blech, did it smell unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Because not only did it smell like decomposition, it had that suspicious element of spoiled dairy to it. I’d used some fairly sizable chunks of gorgonzola for the fat-washing process, and the cheese had clearly imprinted its existence onto Chicago’s favorite drinkable lighter fluid.

The gang insisted on inspecting my handiwork as always, but also requested some hazmat protection.

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper weren’t exactly convinced that what I was about to sample wasn’t actually toxic waste, so they wanted a special barrier to enclose them in case something unspeakable happened.

Cheers to an awful week, everyone!

Okay. I’ll admit it. I didn’t toss this all back, like I would normally do with any other shot of Malört. This is one of the few times I was actually scared of what I made, so I took a cautious sip. That same cautious sip that I sampled ejected itself involuntarily out of my mouth, violently splashing back into the glass and onto the floor.

Jesus fuck. I think I accidentally created a weapon! The flavor extracted from the durian by the alcohol was one thing, but the gorgonzola was another. That’s because the cheese managed to funkify the living shit out of the booze, adding tang, salt, and an extra layer of mold to the whole disaster. I thought I was going to be sick. When Davida returned home for the night, I wouldn’t allow her to touch the stuff at all, insisting that it might actually harm her.

Anyway, I have this great idea for a new type of booze, everyone. It’s one that’s so terrible that it’ll distract all of us temporarily from all the existential dread we’re feeling right now. What’s weird is that over half the country appears to have willingly and happily enjoyed some of it already, and now they’re asking for a second shot.

This makes regular Malört taste practically like water, huh? Now that’s saying something.

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In the meantime, you all relax, have a great weekend, go play some video games, and get a Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell or something. You deserve it. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into paid subscriber inboxes next week. Hang in there, everyone.