Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

If you like to sip on Campari cocktails during the long, leisurely meals of the holiday season, this recipe’s for you. That’s right, a Campari-like aperitif made with cranberries.Transforming sweet and tart cranberries into a bitters is pretty straightforward, although it did require a fair amount of testing to get the flavor, color, and texture just right.Using vodka as the base alcohol made sense because it has a neutral flavor and, once diluted with the cranberries, the mixture hits the right ABV. The ratio of ingredients I settled on also hit an acceptable brix (the amount of dissolved sugars in the solution); the Cran-pari clocks in between 22 and 26 brix. However, since cranberries have a fair amount of pectin, the solution would gel at room temperature. To prevent that, I added Pectinex, an enzyme that breaks down pectin, which keeps the cranberry-infused vodka fluid even when cool.To preserve the color of the cranberries and keep the enzyme in Pectinex active, I used a relatively low-temperature sous vide bath to infuse the vodka. The low temperature also has the benefit of preserving as many aromatic flavor compounds as possible from the orange pith and botanicals—a mix of gentian root, dried rhubarb, Angelica root, wormwood, and ginseng—I infuse into the mixture to give it a Campari-like complexity.About that pith: Orange is one of the defining flavors of Campari, but when I infused orange zest into the mixture, the aromatic oils it contains overpowered the other flavors. By using just the pith, I got just the right amount of bitterness and orange flavor. Don’t toss the zest, though; save it for garnishing your <a href="https://www.chefsteps.com/activities/cran-pari-negroni-sbagliato">Cran-pari Negroni Sbagliato</a>!

Cran-pari (Cranberry Aperitif)