April (Its Still April!) Drink of the Month: Stronger Bones and Teeth

When I buy fruit juice for my children (not that I ever do that, pediatrician friends who are reading - only water and milk for my kids!), there are about 500 different "healthy" or "organic" options, and at least half of them come in low sugar options. Gross. When I was a kid, we drank weird mishmashes of fruits put into a cocktail, made from concentrate, and definitely boosted with sugar. Why did we do this? For stronger bones and teeth of course! The Fred Flintstone chalky vitamins couldn't do it alone, we needed Pineapple-Orange-Banana cocktail in our lives! And it probably started out life as a paper can in the freezer, because that's how things went in the late 80s and early 90s.

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, so when I read an article on making oleo saccharum (sugar syrup made from macerating peels to extract essential oils and whatnot) out of spent banana peels (a helpful hack, since my kids go through what feels like a dozen bananas a day), my mind went straight to POB(Last parenthetical in this overly long sentence: Had I been from Hawaii, I would have grown up with the vastly superior POG, where G = guava. The lids from the POG drinks became the kids sensation POG collectable game, but unfortunately POG doesn't help me repurpose spent banana peels).

8 hours later

Fresh banana peel

Lets pretend I didn't just write a run on sentence with three overly long parentheticals, and go straight to describing what banana peel oleo saccharum tastes like. The verdict? Definitely notes of banana, but also pretty vanilla forward and slightly earthy. There is enough banana to add flavor notes, but the added vanilla really plays well with dark rum. So that's where I took the drink. Our cocktail club decided to do breakfast forward cocktails last month, and I presented Stronger Bones and Teeth as my contribution. No one was appetized to see the leftover banana peels post-maceration, but everyone was pleasantly surprised by the result. Its not my favorite drink ever, but there are lots of fun little technique nods in the drink, so I'm adding it to the collection, run on sentences and all. (Note: This is the second drink in a row I've given faint praise by declaring: "Everyone thought it was going to taste nasty and then they were happy when it didn't." Apparently this is my new genre, sorry!).

Ingredients: 1.5 oz dark rum (Goslings preferred), 0.5 oz silver rum, 0.75 oz banana oleo saccharum, 0.5 oz moderately acid adjusted orange juice*, 0.25 oz pineapple juice, orange peel to garnish.

*I used 3 to 4 g of citric acid per 100 ml of orange juice. To adjust to lemon acidity, you would add just over 5 g of citric acid, and lime acidity is 3.2 g. So somewhere in between is the sweet spot for me.

 

Preparation: To make the banana oleo: Add equal parts by weight banana peel and sugar in a non-reactive container (4 banana peels is roughly 200g). Allow to sit 6-12 hours, stirring or shaking occasionally. Strain and bottle for up to 2 weeks.

Combine all ingredients in a Boston shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a coupe glass and garnish with an orange wheel. Don't try to add bruleed banana coins - they didn't add much. Definitely don't add bruleed banana chips - that was gross.

March (It's April 23rd, sorry) Drink of the Month: Nui Nuance

 I should probably read less, because sometimes reading gets me in trouble - especially if I'm reading about food and drinks. I read an article about tacos al pastor, and suddenly I'm trying to source ancho chiles and achiote powder. Or I read about re-purposing banana peels by turning them into simple syrup, and then I have a fridge full of banana sludge (more on that next week). Over Christmas, I read an article about savory cocktail ingredients, specifically using garum as a seasoning agent in cocktails. Garums are essentially ancient fish sauces (they can be made from lots of different matter however, including beef or mushrooms) that are made by fermenting proteins in their own enzymes (sometimes with koji added).

I understand if throwing fermented anchovy guts into a cocktail sounds gross, but the people in the article swore by the process (LINK). That was intriguing enough to get me started searching for recipes. I read through a few, and I found that most of the creators made their way to garums through the Noma Guide to Fermentation. With my curiosity sparked, I spent the better part of my Christmas break reading the 300+ page reference library of a book, learning about techniques I'd never have the time or space to master. It was a fun learning experience, but I ended up just buying some high quality colatura di alici (Italian fish sauce) instead of dropping $400 trying to make a home fermentation rig with buckets of meat slop. Maybe not the best overall use of my time, but at least I didn't add a greenhouse rig to the garage to harvest barley spores for fermenting.

Failed Batters

With my fancy fish sauce in hand, it was time to try my own drink boosted with an umami bomb. The Pearl Diver was the most recommended cocktail - basically a cold version of the hot buttered rum. I mixed up some hot buttered rum batter and then dosed portions of the batter with various umami sources - miso paste, colatura di alici, and oyster sauce. Unfortunately, none of these batters wanted to stay in suspension well, and the resulting pearl divers turned out too greasy (although I did pick up some cool pearl diver glasses to use for the occasion). Luckily, the Pearl Diver has a cousin, the Nui Nui, that contains virtually all the same ingredients, minus the butter. Cocktail Club spent the next hour playing with fish sauce in Nui Nui builds to get our proportions just right. Too much fish juice and the cocktail smelled like an old aquarium. But get it just right, and the umami helped the vanilla, cinnamon, and allspice really sing.

But was this just Stockholm syndrome? Had we invested too many hours into making garums work and trick ourselves into thinking that they added anything? Happily, I can report that I made another batch of Nui Nuis at our last club, when we had a few extra visitors. Despite being completely grossed out at the thought of adding fish sauce to a drink, our guests both preferred the garum dosed version, and finished their whole drinks happily. Add the gut sauce, you won't regret it!

Ingredients: 2 oz rum (I used a blend of .75 oz aged Jamaican pot still rum, .75 oz Haitian column still rum, and .5 oz Charanda blanco), 1 oz orange juice, .75 oz cinnamon syrup*, .75 oz lime juice, .25 oz allspice dram, .25 oz vanilla syrup**, less than one half barspoon of fish sauce (between 1/8 and 1/16 oz), tiki bitters.

Preparation: To make the Cinnamon Syrup - add two cinnamon sticks, roughly broken (not pulverized) to .75 cup of sugar and an equal amount of water (by weight). Allow to simmer on stove until sugar is completely dissolved, then remove from heat and allow to steep for 30 minutes until cool. Strain and bottle.

To make the Vanilla Syrup: Add two tsp of vanilla paste to .75 cup of sugar and an equal amount of water (by weight). Allow to simmer on stove until sugar is completely dissolved, then remove from heat and allow to steep for 30 minutes until cool. Fine Strain with mesh and cheesecloth and bottle.

Combine all ingredients except the bitters  in a Boston shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a Pearl Diver glass filled with crushed ice, and add bitters to top. Garnish with a lit cinnamon stick or (if the fish scent is too strong) a bouquet of mint.