June Drink of the Month: Room Service

Down in my basement bar, I have a little mini-fridge/freezer combo. Usually I keep it stocked with the essentials - simply syrup, citrus fruit, etc. This morning, however, I noticed a theme: the whole bottom shelf is filled with RED. There are a couple of reasons for this. It is cherry season in nearby southwest Michigan, so of course I had to make a new batch of brandied cherries (OK, two batches - we got an industrial cherry pitter as a wedding present, and it is AWESOME). I also just found what I think are the very last blood oranges of the season, so I made another batch of Charred Rosemary & Blood Orange Shrub. And I made some homemade grenadine, because store bought stuff sucks. That's four mason jars full or red liquid on its own, but I also have another jar full of strawberry simple syrup, kept on hand just for this month's featured cocktail:

We made a pitcher full to celebrate
my dad's birthday. Perfectly
acceptable serving method, as long
as your little sister knows just how
much gin is in the drink and doesn't
try to pound half the pitcher
thinking it is a lightweight
champagne drink.

While Ann and I were traveling in Arizona in in April, we stopped through Scottsdale and visited their mall (its huge and quite luxurious). Across the street was a little spot we decided to try for lunch called Culinary Dropouts (how can you resist a name like that?). They had an excellent little cocktail menu, and Ann ended up picking a sparkling drink that they called "Room Service." The menu told me that it was a combination of Prosecco, Plymouth Gin, lemon juice, and strawberry simple syrup. Ann loved the drink, so we asked the waiter for the recipe for us to try at home. Sometimes restaurants will be incredibly accommodating and will happily hand out recipes for home bar guys like me. However, Culinary Dropouts was a little more secretive. All the waiter would tell me was that the drink used gin and strawberry syrup in equal proportions. Armed with this knowledge, Ann and I entered the Bar Lab (TM) and started tasting possible recipes (a really arduous task, I know).

Any time you are replicating someone else's recipe, your own taste ends up playing a factor, so I will readily admit that we might not have gotten the recipe exactly correct. The one I will publish here is made to Ann's standards. She loves sweeter drinks and can often do without lemon in her drinks. If I were to make this to my specs, I would probably bump up the lemon juice in the recipe by 1/4 to 1/2 ounce. Keep that in mind if you are playing along at home - always adjust these recipes to your taste!

To make our version of the Room Service cocktail, combine the following ingredients in a Boston shaker:

2 ounces Plymouth Gin

2 ounces strawberry simple syrup*

1/4 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice (again, if this was for me, I would use at least 1/2 ounce)

Shake over ice and strain into a coupe glass. Top with 2-3 ounces chilled Prosecco and garnish with a frozen strawberry slice.

The remains of the strawberries used
for our syrup. Still quite good with
a champagne pour-ove!

*The process to make strawberry simple syrup is quite simple. Warm 1 cup distilled water and slowly add 1 cup granulated sugar, as normal. Once the syrup has combined, add 1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen (pitted) strawberries (fresh are better, but frozen work just fine here) to the syrup and brind toa quick boil. Reduce to simmer for 3-4 minutes and then allow the liquid to come to room temperature. Double strain the syrup through a fine mesh strainer and cheese cloth and bottle for up to 3 weeks.

I hope you enjoy your Room Service cocktail!

  

April Drink of the Month: The Assembly Ball Cocktail

The blood orange is distinguished from the typical orange by its crimson flesh, somewhat smaller average size, and tougher skin. The blood-colored fruit is the result of the antioxidant pigment Chrysanthemin (thanks Wikipedia). The flavor is unique - you still get the citrus notes of a regular orange, but there are additional raspberry-like notes that give the blood orange depth of flavor. I love blood oranges in cocktails - substituting them for Navel or Valencia oranges in the Blood and Sand cocktail gives the cocktail a new twist. I've also made a few batches of Blood Orangecello and blood orange infused vodka, which I've used in the Buongiorno in lieu of gin. However, this month, I've found my new favorite application for blood oranges. 

I finally got around to browsing through Bitters & Shrub Syrup Cocktails, a birthday present from my little sister. There were plenty of great recipes in this little book, but my favorite so far was the recipe for the Blood Orange and Charred Rosemary Shrub. Shrubs, as you may recall, are "drinking vinegar" that are made by combining a variety of vinegar with fruit, aromatics, and sugar. For this application, we combine the peel and fruit of four blood oranges (make sure to scrape the inside of the peel with a pairing knife or something similar to remove as much of the white pith as possible) with Demerara sugar, charred rosemary, and yuzu vinegar. Most of these ingredients were easy to find, but the only place I could find yuzu vinegar was at online specialty shops (I went to every single Asian market in South Bend, as well as Whole Foods Fresh Thyme Market - no luck). Since this was my first go-round with yuzu, I decided against forking out $20 plus shipping for a small bottle of vinegar and used the internet recommended substitute - rice wine vinegar with a little lime juice added to the mix. Here is the recipe for the shrub, as I made it:

Combine the peels and fruit of 4 blood oranges in a mason jar. Add the needles of 2-3 stalks of rosemary that have been lightly charred by holding them above a flame (match, etc - no stalks, only needles!). Add 1 cup of Demerara sugar and stir to combine. Screw on the lid of your canning jar and let sit overnight. The next morning, through the magical process of maceration, the sugar will have drawn out the juices of the fruit and oils from the peels in order to create a sweet syrup. Add 1 cup of rice wine vinegar and 1/2 oz of fresh squeezed lime juice, and let the mixture sit in the refrigerator for 12 hours. Strain the mixture through a double layer of cheesecloth, pressing on the cloth to extract as much juice from the fruit as possible. This shrub will keep for ~2 months.

Warren Bobrow, who wrote the recipe for this (and other) shrubs, came up with a wonderful drink that features this shrub. He named it the "Assembly Ball Cocktail" after a high-society event first held in Philadelphia in 1748. Bourbon provides a backbone for the sweet and sour shrub, while the addition of grapefruit bitters help balance out the sugar. Here is the recipe - but make sure to act quickly! Blood orange season ends in May, so grab some fruit for shrub-making while you still can!

In a cocktail shaker, combine:

2 oz quality bourbon (I liked wheated bourbons for this cocktail, like Larceny or Maker's Mark)
0.5 oz rhum agricole (which adds a little hogo, but any good white rum will do in a pinch)
2 oz of our Blood Orange and Charred Rosemary shrub (above)

Shake over ice and pour into a coupe glass. Add a splash of soda water and 2-3 dashes of grapefruit bitters (we used homemade grapefruit tincture). Garnish with a rosemary sprig and serve!

We hope you enjoy your Assembly Ball Cocktail!

March Drink of the Month: What the Dickens? Cocktail

Not a lot of writing to go with this month's cocktail. I've spent the past two weekend clearing out years worth of brush from our back yard, having now rented two roll-off yard waste dumpsters and filling both of them. However, I didn't want another month to go by without a drink for my three devoted readers, so I offer for you this drink from the folks at Imbibe online, which I have been making for friends and family all month.

Fresh Thyme market opened up this month in South Bend, billing themselves as an "indoor farmers market." They have great produce deals, and I've been able to find fresh pineapple on sale for the past few weeks. There are plenty of great tiki drinks that you can make with fresh pineapple juice, but last month I found a recipe for the "What the Dickens?" cocktail from the folks at the Corner Office bar in Denver. It has plenty of tiki notes (lime, pineapple, rum) but compliments these flavors with cognac, an unexpected ingredient. If you can find fresh pineapple, by all means, use it in this drink! It is 100% superior to canned pineapple juice. Pineapple can be an intimidating ingredient to use, just because it takes a couple of minutes to clean and prep a pineapple for juicing, but it is worth it! Here is my pro tip: while you can use a juicer to extract pineapple juice from the fruit, it often leaves you with frothy juice (or at least my juicer does). For a quicker, cleaner method of extracting pineapple juice, simply cut up pineapple into chunks and place them in a citrus press (above). You get much clearer juice without all that by-product, and it's quick! As a bonus, you don't have to juice the whole fruit in order to make it seem worth your while to clean out the industrial juicer. You can just juice a few chunks and save the rest for eating, garnishing, or juicing at a later date.

Here is the recipe for the "What the Dickens?" Cocktail:

In a cocktail shaker, combine:

1 oz rum (I used Flor De Cana 7 year - I liked aged rum better to accent the flavor notes of the cognac)
0.5 oz Cognac (at least VS, or why bother? VSOP is better)
0.75 oz simple syrup
0.5 oz lime juice (fresh squeezed of course)
1.5 oz pineapple juice (see above)
3 dash Peychaud's bitters
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake over ice and strain into a Collins glass filled with crushed ice.

A pair of What the Dickens? cocktails on my new bar top

I hope you enjoy your What the Dickens? cocktail!

February Drink of the Month - The Sazerac

It will be an early Easter this year (the earliest possible date for Easter is March 22nd, so we are pretty close! But Easter will not occur on March 22nd next until 2285, so not worries there. The latest possible date is April 25, which will next occur in 2038 - get ready!). An early Easter means an early Fat Tuesday, which means that it is time to drink Sazerac cocktails in honor of everything New Orleans. Last time I wrote a New Orleans post, we all drank Hurricanes together. And while those are wonderful drinks (and they are the go-to celebration beverage for me and Ann - but only from the Chicory Cafe), the Sazerac is a wonderful tribute to New Orleans culture, and a much less fruity drink (added bonus)! It is also, as of 2008, the official cocktail of the City of New Orleans, so we should probably feature it here at some point!

Photo from Liquor.com

The Sazerac actually takes its name from a brand of Cognac. A Mr. Taylor was the sole importer of the Sazerac-du-Forge et Fils cognac. He also owned a bar where the cognac was sold to the masses. Eventually the bar changed owners and the name changed to the "Sazerac Coffee House." Patrons would wander in searching for "Sazerac" cocktails, and thus the drink was born. The drink was essentially an improved brandy cocktail - the improvement in this case being a rinse of absinthe or herbsaint, and tradition demands that the bitters used in the cocktail were the venerable Peychaud bitters. Over time, the base of the drink moved from brandy to rye whiskey, which brings us to the drink we know today.

Purists will tell you that the modern Peychaud's bitters, manufactured in Frankfort, Kentucky at the Buffalo Trace distillery by the Sazerac distilling company, are not a perfect match for the Peychaud's of old, and so many recipes for Sazeracs today will call for a mixture of Angostura and Peychaud's bitters. If you can find higher-proof rye, this is also preferable. Many recipes will call for a sugar cube to be crushed (as with an old fashioned) for the beverage, and most demand an absinthe rinse of the glass before you build your cocktail. The recipe I have tweaked over time below honors some of these tradition, while modifying others. You can certainly bow to tradition if you would like, but I would encourage you try my method below - it saves time, saves absinthe, and adds flavor (in my humble opinion)!

In a mixing glass, combine the following:

An atomizer full of absinthe

2 1/2 oz Rye Whiskey (I like Whistle Pig and Rittenhouse. I also had a great bottle of 3 year-old Willett single-barrel that made wonderful Sazeracs)

1/3 oz simple syrup*

2-3 dashes Peychaud's bitters

1 dashes Angostura bitters 

Stir with ice and strain into a rocks glass. Using an atomizer (sometime called a martini mister - pictured), spray one pump of absinthe over the liquid. Serve with a lemon twist for a garnish.**

*As you can see, I'm a fan of simple syrup over crushed sugar cubes. Yes, it does add a bit of water to the drink, but having pre-made syrup ensures the sugar is entirely dissolved. No one wants a crust of undissolved sugar at the bottom of their glass.

My bitters shelf

**This is where I break the most from tradition. I find that a true absinthe rinse will lend many of the same flavor profiles as using an atomizer, but it wastes far more absinthe. Using the atomizer helps express the anise flavor better, and it hits the nose on your first several sips, which adds to the bouquet. Atomizers are cheap - I keep one with my bitters collection for absinthe, and another for vermouth.

I hope you enjoy your Sazerac cocktail!

   

January Drink of the Month - The Holy Toledo

Tapastrie's Dining Room

Well, the holidays sure went fast, didn't they? To my three loyal readers (you know who you are), I apologize for missing out on a month of blogging. Holiday travel (and helping Ann move in to our new home) made bar blogging a chore last month. But I am excited to share with you this month's new drink! I was inspired this month after visiting a new tapas restaurant that recently opened downtown (that's right, South Bend has tapas. We are pretty much the cultural capital of the world now). The new joint is named Tapastrie (wow, that's a bad pun) and is operated by the same folks who own and operate my favorite Irish bar (Fiddler's Heart). They serve awesome Mediterranean-inspired food (I had merguez - or spicy lamb sausage - for the first time, and wow!) and have a huge wine selection, complete with a fun sampling machine. But they also have a small cocktail menu, including some original offerings. While I would never order their Pisco Sour again (watery and not very sour), they did have one offering that piqued my interest: the "Holy Toledo."

Saint Elizabeth's
Allspice Dram

I have not yet had a chance to revisit the bar and pick the bartender's brain for the recipe, but the menu lists the ingredients of the Holy Toledo as such: brandy, allspice dram, apricot, cardamom bitters. Brandy is my absolute favorite cocktail base, so  I ordered one up - and it was lovely! There were wonderful warming spice notes that blended well with the brandy to make an excellent winter drink! Ann even liked it, since it "tasted like Christmas" (which is always a win for her). Since I still had my Rothman and Winter Orchard Apricot liqueur out from November, I decided that it would be a good idea to try this one at home. I went out and purchased some Saint Elizabeth Allspice Dram (note: you can make this on your own fairly easily, but I wanted to try to make the drink for myself before investing the time and effort into making my own dram - if you would like a DIY recipe, there is a great one here) . This was the key ingredient, the one that makes the drink smell "of Christmas." While I was fresh out of cardamom bitters, I substituted regular old Peychaud's bitters and didn't miss much. Here is the recipe I was able to tinker together:

In a mixing glass, combine the following:
1.5-2 oz brandy (VS or better)*
0.25 oz Saint Elizabeth Allspice Dram
0.5 oz Rothman and Winter Orchard Apricot
2 dashes Peychaud's Bitters

Shake over ice for at least 15 seconds. This is a drink that benefits from dilution, especially if you are using lesser brandy. Pour into a rocks glass half-filled with crushed ice and serve. Garnish with a brandied cherry if desired.

*I liked my drink heavier on the brandy side, but do this to taste. Less brandy means the other flavors shine through more.

I hope you enjoy your Holy Toledo!

November Drink of the Month - The Beachbum

November seems like a weird time to feature a tiki drink as my drink of the month (especially right now, with 6 inches of snow on the ground), but just last week I was still enjoying tropical climate down near Cancun, Mexico, so I hope you'll forgive me for being in the tiki mood. Two things led to our drink today: 1) I picked up some good Nicaraguan rum from the local grocery store while I was on my honeymoon, so it seemed only fair that I build something tropical. 2) Ann and I also had excellent shrimp tacos al pastor, so I decided to recreate those this week, which necessitated that I buy a whole pineapple. Rum plus pineapple always means tiki, and this month I was drawn to a recipe from the excellent PDT Cocktail Book named "the Beachbum." The drink is named in honor of Jeff "Beachbum" Berry, the man who is responsible for the modern revival of tiki culture, and it does everything you want out of a tiki cocktail - it has multiple types of rum, multiple fresh juices, and a couple of extra ingredients to add complexity (want an intro to tiki? I found this article helpful!)

Speaking of Jeff Berry and tiki bars, Ann and I had the good fortune of visiting Three Dots and a Dash in Chicago last weekend while in town to celebrate a friend's wedding. If I wasn't already inspired to make tiki drinks before this weekend, that trip would have surely done the trick. The bar is tucked back down an alley near some other excellent Chicago restaurants off Clark Street, and the underground bar is guarded by an impressive collection of blue-lit skulls as you enter. Ann was a little sketched out as we entered, but once you are inside, the Hawaiian-shirt clad bartenders and festively garnished drinks quickly put you at ease. The bartenders are artists (I sat and watched one work for 15 minutes - they took so much care in all of their drinks, and the fellow I watched spent 5 minutes garnishing the collection of cocktails he was mixing up - so much fun!), and the drinks were excellent. In true tiki fashion, there is a different, dedicated mug for each beverage, as well as copious fresh flowers, fruit, and swizzle sticks. I'm already planning my next trip (and shopping for tiki mugs - just don't tell Ann, since she thinks we have too many different types of bar glasses already).

While I currently lack the necessary tiki mugs to make an authentic cocktail on the level of Three Dots and a Dash, you can still make the Beachbum cocktail at home and serve it in a boring glass, just like I did. The recipe is below:

In a mixing glass, combine:
1 oz Amber (aged) rum
1 oz silver (unaged) rum*
1 oz fresh pineapple juice (if you don't want to break out your commercial juicer, a handheld citrus squeezer works well here if you don't mind a little mess)
0.75 oz fresh lime juice
0.5 oz Rothman & Winter Orchard Apricot**
0.5 oz Orgeat

Add a heaping scoop of crushed ice and shake for 10 seconds. Strain into a class filled with crush ice, garnish with your favorite tiki accompaniments - pineapple leaf, cherry/orange flag, fineapple skewer, hibiscus flower, etc.

*It is really important that you use two different types of rum here. I used aged Hatian Rhum Barbancort (which is a rhum agricole, made from fresh squeezed sugarcane juice instead of molasses) to get some of the "funk" or "hogo" that you find with good rums and Nicaraugan Flor De Cana Extra Seco 4 year for my silver rum. Getting the flavors from two different rums is the hallmark of a good tiki drink

**You can find all sorts of different apricot liqueurs if you look hard enough, but I really like the Rothman & Winter. They also make the Creme de Violet that I use for my Aviations, so I trust the brand.

Enjoy your Beachbum!

October Drink of the Month - The Johnny Utah

DVR is a wonderful thing! Before my recent cable purchase, the last time I had recorded live television was in middle school, using a blank tape and my parents' VCR. Being able to do so digitally and from my phone (if need be) is excellent. My DVR has allowed me to discover Alton Brown's excellent Good Eats program, and it is from this source of inspiration that our drink for this month arises. For those unfamiliar with the program, Brown usually focuses on a specific dish or ingredient and shows multiple uses for the ingredient or "better" ways to cook the dish. While watching the episode "Celeryman" earlier this month, I was inspired by Brown's recipe for Celery Soda (here). It seemed like such a unique concoction, and I simply had to find some drink that would make this (weird) beverage pop.

Celery soda you say? Why on earth would someone make soda out of celery? My first memory of celery soda comes from Marx Bagel Shops in Cincinnati. Occasionally when we visited this excellent kosher deli, we were allowed to get Dr. Brown's soda as a treat. Dr. Brown's makes wonderful black cherry and cream sodas, but they are also one of the few remaining companies to make celery soda (Dr. Brown's markets theirs as "Cel-Ray"). Celery soda was originally sold as a medicinal tonic (in the 1860s, celery was considered a "super food"), but continued on in Jewish delis around the world as a perfect pairing for pastrami sandwiches (as it goes excellently with salty foods). In the 1930's, celery soda was so popular with the New York Jewish community that some people even referred to it as "Jewish champagne" (thanks Wikipedia).  Since I knew celery soda was a real thing that people chose to drink on occasion, I was confident that there had to be a palatable drink out there somewhere featuring this weird flavor. I just had to find it!

It turns out there were plenty of recipes for home made celery soda, and some of these folks even had suggestions for cocktails. But I wasn't about to go to the effort to make my own celery soda before I had tried one of these cocktails first - the pay-off needed to be worth the effort! I scoured every single grocery store in South Bend looking for Dr. Brown's. Even the usually excellent Bamber's International Market (which had a whole wall of craft sodas) failed to turn up Cel-Ray. I finally broke down and bought a combo pack from Amazon with Cel-Ray and Cream Soda (yum), as all my efforts to find it locally went for naught. As it turns out, it probably would have been easier to make my own, even if celery seed is a little hard to find (try a Whole Foods if you have one nearby).

Once I had acquired my own 6 pack of Cel-Ray, it was time to whip up a "Johnny Utah," the most intriguing recipe I found online. It comes from Polite Provisions in San Diego, by way of Imbibe Magazine (their recipe is here). It is essentially a fizz-forward margarita that substitutes hints of herbs, pepper, and bitter celery spice instead of sweeter curacao. The recipe I used calls for celery seed syrup, but had a note that you could substitute Cel-Ray soda instead. I tried to follow the recipe exactly, but the lime and salt flavors overwhelmed my celery soda. That wouldn't do, as my whole reason for making this cocktail was to feature the celery! Try the recipe below for my twist on the recipe, a cocktail that prominently features the vegetal, savory flavor of celery, paired with 100% agave tequila and kosher salt:

In a mixing glass, combine 2 oz of 100% agave blanco tequila with 3/4 oz fresh squeezed lime juice. Shake over ice for 10 seconds and strain into a lowball/rocks glass filled with ice.
Top with 2 1/2 oz of Cel-Ray soda and add a pinch of kosher salt.
Garnish with a lime wheel and serve.

This is a great way to introduce unsuspecting friends to celery soda - let them try and guess the mystery ingredient in their savory margarita! You can also make your own celery soda instead of Cel-Ray (using Alton Brown's recipe liked above or another one). You can guarantee that is what I will do as soon as I'm out of Dr. Brown's - I'm not repeating all of that fruitless driving around again!

I hope you enjoy your modified Johnny Utah!