Kentucky Derby 2022: More than a Mint Julep

Kentucky Classic

You can’t think of the Kentucky Derby without thinking of the mint julep. Another fun fact: In 1938, the facilitators of the Kentucky Derby realized people were taking home decorated water glasses from the day’s event. The following year in 1939, the mint julep was sold in Julep Cups, becoming the first ever collector cups.

As much as we’d like to own every type of kitchen gadget and cup that’s ever existed, we sadly don’t, and special mint julep cups are part of that. We’ll have to remedy that for next year, but in the meantime, we had to settle for regular glasses.

The recipes we found were all pretty similar, and all pretty easy to make. If you’ve got bourbon, sugar, ice and mint, you’re good to go! Fresh mint leaves are key ingredient (thanks farmer’s market!). We made one round with granulated sugar, and another with simple syrup, and we found we liked the simple syrup drink much better. We also didn’t have crushed ice, so made our own, by, well, just crushing the ice.

How’d they turn out? Matt summed it up best, “shit be strong, bruh”.

We enjoy a good whiskey, but in our opinion, the drink was fine at best and not something that we’d go out of way to have. Matt loves bourbon but even he wasn’t a huge fan, but hey, they’ll get you happy for horses, especially when you drink a couple of them.

Benedictine

With all that bourbon, we needed some snacks. We’ll start with the benedictine, which was superrrr simple to make. Toss your ingredients into a food processor, and boom you’ve got benedictine. Fresh ingredients definitely made it more vibrant and tasty. It can be used either as a dip with vegetables or crackers, but we opted to put ours on bread and make finger sandwiches with it.

(Speaking of fingers, make sure you keep your actual fingers away from the blades on the grater. Matt got a little “too” into grating the cucumber. If you unfortunately follow his footsteps, we highly recommend keeping any blood out of the benedictine, and promptly asking your girlfriend for a bandaid.)

What the Heck is Burgoo?

Now that the grating incident was under control, we moved onto the burgoo. As New Englanders this was totally new us, but apparently is very popular in Kentucky. It’s a dish that traditionally is made of the week’s leftover ingredients, tossed into a stew. Some of the articles we read mentioned that a lot of Kentucky recipes include making it with “exotic game” like possum and raccoon. We didn’t get that traditional.

Instead we used packaged ham, beef stew meat, pulled chicken, and added frozen okra, mixed frozen veggies, and V8 for broth. It was definitely the first time we used V8 for a soup, or well, any recipe for that matter. We made the pulled chicken in our instant pot to speed up the process, and added liquid smoke to give it a smokey flavor…with mediocre results. The burgoo was, in our opinion, fine. It wasn’t a bad dish, it just wasn’t very exciting. And personally, after a few mint juleps, stew isn’t exactly my food of choice. Our favorite snack of the day was easily the burgoo.

Derby Pie

You can’t have a Kentucky Derby party without Derby Pie! Or if you’re like us, you’ve probably had many Kentucky Derby parties without Derby Pie, because you had no idea it was a thing. Derby Pie is made of crushed pecans, chocolate chips, pie crust, and since it’s the Kentucky Derby, more bourbon.

Derby Pie can be made as a single individual pie, but since snacks were a big part of our theme, we opted to make individual derby pies instead. This was pretty easy. I used frozen pie crusts, and used a cookie cutter to make about 2.5 inch circles and place them in a mini muffin pie pan. I crushed some pecans, added mini chocolate chip cookies.