Traditional Eggnog Recipe

Series Summary

The holiday season in the United States is filled with family, free enterprise and, most importantly, food. Between traditional Christmas dinners and endless holiday parties, it's nearly impossible to endure the season without partaking in one of many culinary classics. The holiday ham, the fruit cake, the figgy pudding, the wassail, and let's not forget the eggnog - these delightful dishes are as iconic to the Christmas season as the Christmas tree, the wrapped gift and the fat, bearded jolly man himself, Santa Claus. But with all the bustle surrounding Christmas, we sometimes forget to savor the flavors of the season.

In this free how-to video clip series, our expert re-introduces us to some of the star recipes of classic holiday cuisine. He demonstrates to us how to cook a holiday ham, how to bake variations of the traditional fruit cake and figgy pudding, and how to prepare the perfect eggnog and wassail (listed ingredients included). Impress your guests this year with traditional Christmas cooking made from scratch!

Video Transcript

"Egg Nog Ingredients 4 fresh eggs, separated into yolks/whites ½ cup sugar (divided into 2 equal parts) ½ cup white rum 1 ½ cups milk (whole or 2%) 1 cup heavy whipping cream (divided into 2 equal parts) Ground nutmeg (to sprinkle on servings) *Serves 8 All right. Today we are going to show you guys how to make some eggnog for the Christmas season. To start with I’ve separated 4 eggs, 4 large eggs actually so I have 4 yolks and 4 whites, and what I am going to start with is I’ve got 1 ¼ cup of sugar here, and I am going to mix this by hand into the egg yolks until we achieve all one color. So I’m going to go ahead and dump that in, and I’ve got a wire whisk, and we will just gently break those egg yolks and get all that sugar incorporated in so that it is all nice and pretty and all one color. I’ve got my 4 egg whites here in our trusty kitchen aid. So what we are going to do is pour the egg whites in here, and we are going to crank this a little bit high, medium high actually, and what we are going to do is bring these to a stiff white peak. Now that we’ve got the 4 egg whites to a nice stiff peak, you can see in there, they are a build up upon themselves, and we pull out the wire whisk, and they are holding their form real nice. Now what I want to do is I’m going to keep this on a low speed, and we are going to fold in 1 ¼ cup of sugar. I say fold in, but I am really just going to kind of sprinkle it in there. I don’t want to dump it in, but I just want to kind of gently incorporate it into the stiffened egg whites. Just an even steady stream. Just keep everything looking nice and pearly in there, and get it a real nice even distribution. All right, now we are going to drizzle in the egg yolks and the sugar that we mixed by hand. I’m just going to get a little stream, and as you can see it’s a really nice fluffy consistency in the sense that it’s got a lot of air whisked into it, and it’s still holding that stiff peak stage essentially. So we will speed it up here just a little to get all of the egg white from the middle out. That’s exactly the consistency and the color we are looking for before we proceed on to the rest of the recipe. So now we are going to go ahead and start to throw in the liquid ingredients for our eggnog. I’ve got some milk here and some heavy whipping cream. I’ve divided the mixture of heavy whipping cream in half. One-half I am going to actually whip by hand and thicken with the air as we whip air into it, and we will fold that in at the very end. For now, we are just going to incorporate the milk, the heavy cream. I’ve got some white rum here, and then I also have some whiskey as well. So, this is the real deal as far as eggnog. Just drizzle in some white rum first. I’m just going to do small amounts at the time; just a drizzle because I don’t want to shock our mixer too hard by throwing in everything all at once. However much rum or whiskey or whatever liquor combination you want to use; Malibu would be a good choice too. It’s a coconut flavored rum. Whatever amounts of alcohol you want to use at your discretion, do so. Just be sure not to make it flammable in the sense that you won’t be able to taste all the other great dairy products that you have within the drink itself. All right, we are back with the eggnog, and we have all our liquid components mixed in, and I’ve taken the last amount of the heavy whipping cream, and I manually used the wire whip of the heaving whipping cream, and I manually used the wire whip and thickened it up and added some air to it, some volume. So all we are going to do is take this and kind of fold it into the mixture. I’m going to do just a little bit at a time and this is part of the appeal to eggnog anyways. You’ve got this light fluffy liquid mixer, so you are actually adding a real velvety volume to it with the last remaining bit of heavy whipping cream here. I’m just using a flat spatula to do this. So it is very pastry-like in that sense. The ingredients that I’ve poured in were cool, and my mixing bowl is actually a little bit cool, but traditional eggnog and the alcohol version like we’ve done here is really served at room temperature. So we realize that some folks may be a little bit skeptical with regards to the raw egg products that are inside of the eggnog mix, and the fact that it is served room temperature. You are more than welcome to just bring this to a gentle warm heat over a longer period of time, just in a saucepan would be fine. But just make sure it’s a gentle steam that comes off of there because otherwise all these things are separate if the heat becomes too hot. Again, if you are going to do this room temperature, the amount of alcohol that you put in essentially kind of cures and cooks the eggs because the alcohol that we use is such a high alcohol by volume, which is rum and or whiskey or a mixture of the two, then it kind of takes care of that problem for you. All right, so we are ready for service on the eggnog, and traditionally it is served out of china cups like this one. So we are just going to stir this gently one last time to incorporate our whipped heavy whipping cream. Get all one nice color there. We are just going to ladle this into our cup, and for a final touch, we’ve got some ground nutmeg here. We don’t want to go too heavy on that. Just enough to give it a little bit of color and little bit of flavor. Now we are ready for yuletide festivities. "