Naked Onion

A few happy accidents resulted along the kyphi road. One was that I had hidden a small packet of brie in the aromatics' refrigerator along with the loosely wrapped kyphi in the days after the galbanum was added. A few days later I removed the brie to serve and discovered, to my delight, that the brie was completely infused with the scent of galbanum! I told a friend about the experience and she said, "You enfleuraged your cheese. That's an enfleurage." So the experience got me thinking about other food items that I could accidentally-on-purpose enfleurage, and then another accident occurred. My daughter placed a bag of yogurt covered raisins in the aromatics' refrigerator, again, to hide them, and they had picked up the remnants of scent left from the kyphi, which by this time was removed from the refrigerator and left out in a cabinet to dry.

Basically, it's the naked onion theory ~ you leave an unwrapped, partially peeled or cut in pieces onion in a refrigerator, and other fatty foods begin to pick up the onion scent -- butter, cheeses, other foods not properly covered (leftover soup, etc.) -- until they smell and taste like onion.

The yogurt covered raisins seemed the best choice for flavoring through osmosis as I could find, since I love them, and so do most of the people here, which is the primary reason they were stored in the aromatics' refrigerator in the first place. I bought a huge bag of yogurt covered raisins, split them into four parts, placed them in covered containers along with a bit of paper towel saturated in different aromatics -- orange blossom absolute, white rose attar, and rose de mai. The fourth was container was left un-enfleuraged as a comparison batch. After 24 hours I tested the rose de mai yogurt raisins and was very happy to note they smelled divinely of rose and had a slight rosy flavor. It's now been a week and I plan to test them again soon to determine when the right time to quit the enfleurage for future naked onion experiments.

This technique in scenting/flavoring fatty foods uses very little raw materials as far as aromatics go -- I used only two or three drops of undiluted rose de mai, orange blossom, and white rose attar to 8 ounces of yogurt raisins.