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).
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| 8 hours later |
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| 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.
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