Synaesthesia: The Dragon Stumbles

I'm not going to say that my submission this week was "coherent." But if you say that it wasn't tasty, well, you're asking for a jigger in the eye. Anyway, here were the stray thoughts that I tried to pull together.

1. Maraschino Cherries. Of course, I wasn't able to buy decent Maraschino cherries, and in fact wasn't able to buy any Maraschino liqueur period. I was able to buy cherries, and other cherry-related paraphernalia (yes, it really has that "r"). I started from this recipe, and improvised a bit. Recipe below.
2. Egg cocktails. I was going to go with this for purely thematic reasons, then ran into this delightful treatise on egg cocktails.
3. I was in Chicago the week before, and made a trip to Binny's. So I had new toys. Of course, I lacked the foresight to get Maraschino liqueur.

Let's start with the cherries, since they turned out really nicely.

Maraschin-faux Cherries

Put these in a pan, boil, reduce heat

• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1.5 oz lemon juice
• 1/3 cup water
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 nutmeg (seed? knuckle?), grated (my addition)

Then add 2lbs of cherries (pitted), and simmer for 5 minutes. Turn off the heat, then immediately add

• 1 oz Orgeat
• 1/2 oz Vanilla extract (my addition)
• 6 oz Walnut infusion (substitute for Maraschino)
• 1 oz Kirschwasser (also subbing for Maraschino)

Oh, did I not mention the walnut infusion? Crush walnuts, steep in vodka for several days, the result is nutty. Isn't Maraschino liqueur supposed to be nutty? There you go. Anyway, once everything cools, put it in a jar and leave it for a couple days.

Is it a couple of days later? Then you're ready to make a...

Bun in the Oven (Original)

• 1/2 egg white
• Juice from two slices of lemon (helps the egg foam)
• 1 oz Rittenhouse 100 proof Rye (new toy!)
• 1 dash blood orange bitters (new toy!)

It's an egg cocktail, so it's time to shake. A lot. If that 1/2 egg white sounds awkward... make two. But you're not done! Add...

• 4 dashes Angostura bitters
• 1/2 oz Becherovka (still delicious!)
• 1/4 oz Creme de Violette (new toy!)
• 3 tsp Stuff from the cherry jar
• 1 Marashin-faux Cherry

Then give 'er a stir. Why the two-step run around? Well, when I mixed everything together before shaking, it seemed like all of the delicate flavors got lost. I assume there's some magic involving the proteins in the eggs that binds and dulls. Or something. Stirring them in seemed to have tastier results, while maintaining the foamy texture.

Admittedly, there are more ingredients here than the resulting flavor profile would suggest. If your cocktail sense tells you which ingredient could be removed, feel free to let me know!

Anyway, it's an egg cocktail! And basically flesh-tone! With a surprise at the bottom! Thus the name. And it's appropriate because, yes, there's a Little Dragon on the way.

Synesthesia: It means the inappropriate mixing of sensory modalities

I was all busy-like this month, and two of my drink ideas just didn't pan out. We ended up just drinking the ingredients for those drinks, which was pretty good. Opinion was split on the drink I did submit to synesthesia night. The competition was constructed thusly: Present a drink, with accompaniment to a piece of music that somehow enhances the experience, informs the drink, or something else like that. This is what I did, and it is named after the song by Portishead:

The Rip

1 oz. freezer-cold vodka (I used Yuri Dolgoruki Kristal)

1 Tbsp. cucumber soaking with two cucumber slices (cucumber slices soaked a couple hours in a mixture of half-and-half vodka and dry vermouth)

1/2 Tbsp. Shoju (I used sweet potato Shoju)

Sweet Vermouth, Hidden Dragon

Sweet vermouth is taken for granted. Much-maligned, even. It turns out this is because WE ARE ALL PHILISTINES. On a total side bar, when I was little I got Philistines and Palestinians confused embarrassingly often. But now I know. "Philistines" is the thing that I was BEFORE SWEET VERMOUTH NIGHT. I will tell you why. Because Mr. Dances with Gin, at the demand of his lovely girlfriend from our European Bureau made vermouth and tonic with a number of different kinds of sweet vermouth. They are amazingly complex, unique things. He can talk about it more, if he likes, but I must say that I was stunned, and honored to be fighting such a worthy opponent. Since then I have empirically combined tonic with a number of different things, including Punt-e-mes vermouth, cinzano, all my amari (Lucano, Melletti, Luxardo Abano, Ramazzotti, Montenegro, and Fernet Branca), and have been discovering dimensions to these things I had never even guessed at.

Nevertheless, I fought. For honor.

My classic, served as an apperitif in the cocktail pump, was the Negroni:

Negroni:

1 part gin (Plymouth, please!)

1 part sweet vermouth (Cinzano, if you don't screw around!)

1 part Campari

My non-classic was an optimized Brooklyn. How does this count as my own? Because, in the process of making Brooklyn's beyond number, I discovered that the replacement of half the dry vermouth with sweet vermouth took the drink to dreamlike levels of yum. I feel that this is how a Brooklyn is supposed to be, and somehow it has been lost to history. As such, I keep its original name, and challenge all comers to prove that this is not the perfect drink.

Brooklyn:

1 1/2 oz. bourbon (Four Roses, again)

1/2 Tbsp. dry vermouth (I used Noilly)

1/2 Tbsp. sweet vermouth (Cinzano)

1/2 Tbsp. Amer Picon (as recreated by Jamie Boudreau, and made by me)

scant 1/2 oz. Maraschino

+/- dash orange bitters, per taste

Sparkling Drinks: Like Hell!

I would like everyone to know that I am WAY THE HELL TOO HARDCORE to play along with a theme like "sparkling," my love of cosmetic sparkles not withstanding. For this competition I made Kirs. Not Kir Royales, no sir. Kirs. But I served them in my sparkly new 1950s cocktail pump! It's like a pretty soap dispenser for booze!

Kir:

1 bottle Chardonnay (I used Artesa, from my wine club)

1/3 cup Creme de Cassis

Of course, I made another WEAK-ASS drink, too. It was surprisingly good. I want a name for it, but it's pretty much a cross between a champagne cocktail and a bellini, and those names don't really mix. For reasons known to those present, I may just call it Soo's Bane.

Drink, otherwise unspecified:

1 sugar cube

3 dashed Fee Brothers peach bitters

3 dashes Peychauds bitters

put in champagne flute, top up with good prosecco (I used Sommariva)

The South Will Rise Again

Being me, and thus afraid of The South, I had a hard time with this one. I had just made a growler full of creme de fraise from strawberries from the farmers' market, and wanted to incorporate that, since southern food is inextricably linked with ridiculously good and diverse seasonal agriculture. I couldn't escape the whole southern gothic thing, though, since a lot of my experience in the south involves poisonous snakes, poisonous bugs, alligators, New Orleans, Kevin Spacey, and being scared. I decided to combine my creme de fraise, which tastes more like fresh strawberries than the actual berries do, with the dark, vibrant, difficult to pin down flavors of green Chartreuse. It turned out pretty good, and I wanted to name it after it's inspiration Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade (I was also reading a book about poisonous plants, and this seemed fitting), but some twit had already published an awful sounding drink involving vodka and three kinds of fruit juice he called the Belladonna, so I named it,

Atropa

1 oz. Creme de Fraise (see below, or buy in France)

1 tsp. green Chartreuse

chill in fridge or freezer, do not add ice.

Creme de fraise

2 lbs fresh strawberries, coarsely chopped.

1 bottle very neutral vodka (svedka or three olives are good and cheap-ish)

combine these things in a big jug and leave them sit, with occasional shaking for 2-3 weeks. Strain out the strawberries (throw them away, they are AWFUL, now), and add about 1/2 cup of sugar. Dissolve and taste. You may want to add more sugar, but I recommend minimizing it.

In this competition we introduced the now-cannonical form of the competition which was to make one made-up cocktail and also one classic. For my classic I made Cocktail a la Louisiane. Let me tell you: That thing is too sweet to drink. I modified the cannonical recipe for yankee tastes.

Cocktail a la Louisiane 2: The war of northern aggression

1 oz. rye whiskey

1/2 oz. Benedictine

1/2 oz. sweet vermouth

3 dashes absinthe

3 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Sage Battle Fragrant Transcendence

The first of the Cocktail Kumite series was held in a tall building on a sweltering summer night, and was held in honor of the typically poultry-associate herb, sage. It turns out that the taste we associate with sage is really only a small part of the flavor profile of the sage plant. The rest of that flavor profile pretty much tastes like garbage. How is this possible? Well, I think that in cooking it is 1) rare to use sage, 2) typical to use it in a context where only its aroma is important (roasting chickens with sage sprigs surrounding and inside, for instance), and 3) when the whole thing is to be tasted, only very young delicate plants are used. These notes of "rubbish" turned out to make this challenge harder than I thought it would be. Not only was it necessary to showcase the rangy, wild, delicate aroma of sage, but it was necessary to suppress the hell out of the godawful plant it happens to be embedded in. The way I did this (I believe the others did this as well), was to muddle it just a bit. Enough to release some aroma, but not enough to (mojito style, or caipirinha style) get wholesale plant destruction. The next step was deciding how best to showcase the aroma. I associate sage with two distinct cuisines and cultures: Italian (no need to specify further...) and the arid American west. Fortunately, I didn't feel too tied to these in detail, but tried to stick with their, ahem, terroir. The first drink was thus a nearly full-sweet, herbal, complex cocktail modeled after the Roman Holiday, which a cocktail I had tried at The Violet Hour, in Chicago. I called it "Il Brutto" after the bad guy in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, because it is unctuous and cruel.

Il Brutto:

1 oz. bourbon (I used Four Roses Small Batch)

1 oz. Amaro Lucano

1 oz. Amaro Melletti (notable tastes of honey and saffron)

1 squeeze lemon

3 muddled sage leaves

My second cocktail I wanted to be austere and unyielding. I wanted it to speak of ancient gods, unavenged blood, the savagery of nature, and an ability to level unsuspecting hipsters. There is only one base liquor that even comes close to this: unaged mezcal. In a fit of God-knows-what, I added some PX sherry, and it was almost there. The rubbishy finish of the sage still came through, despite the fascinating layers of grapes, smoke, agave, and desert herb that were there. Here is what worked in the end. This is, along with the Blue Hook, the drink I'm proudest of.

Tenochtitlyn:

1 oz. mezcal (I used Los Danzantes mezcal minero)

1/2 Tbsp. PX sherry

3 muddled sage leaves

1/2 tsp. Amer Picon (As reinvented by Jamie Boudreau: you have to make your own)

Oh yeah, and since I mentioned it, the Blue Hook. Sourcing these ingredients is HARD.

Blue Hook:

1 oz. Old Potrero 18th century style rye whiskey

1/2 oz. Manguin Liqueur de Lavande

1/2 oz. Punt-e-Mes

All of these drinks are best on the rocks.

The Story So Far: Stumbling Dragon

Although I consider myself a junior mixmaster, I've had a few successes over the past few months. These are my favorites:

Sage Battle: I tried to make a sage julep here. It wasn't particularly sagey, but it turns out that bourbon is delicious. I'd like to revisit sage in the future, but I found it to be tricky the first time around.

The South Will Rise Again: The idea with this drink was to capture the platonic ideal of "swamp," without actually tasting like swamp water.

Swamp Thing (Original)

• 3/4 oz Bourbon
• 3/4 oz Green Chartreuse
• Top off with club soda

Sparkling: My favorite this time was a traditional cocktail – Wikipedia claims that it was first invented in 1861. I think that choosing the right beer makes all the difference, although I suppose it would be more correct to say that it makes 50% of the difference. The recipe calls for stout, but since the stout is going to be mixed, I think that choosing one that is a bit more reserved is a good idea. I went with New Holland's "Dragon's Milk," which is technically not a stout, but is dark, malty, and a bit creamy. I prefer something a bit more bitter for drinking straight, but it worked well here.

Black Velvet (Traditional)

• 1 part Dragon's Milk
• 1 part champagne

Some recipes suggest that you should float the champagne on the stout. I think it's much tastier, and more attractive, to mix them.

Sweet Vermouth: I wound up putting together a variation on the Americano. Although this sounded pretty tasty by itself, I didn't have any Campari on hand, and wanted to try something a little different. I think the result is quite palatable.

Ceco (Original)

• 3 parts sweet vermouth
• 2 parts Becherovka
• dash orange bitters
• splash of club soda

If you're not familiar with it, Becherovka is a Czech bitters (thus "Ceco"). Actually, I would describe it as a clove liqueur, but the important thing is that it is tasty, and now not too hard to find in the USA. It's not nearly so aggressive as Campari, so the resulting drink is a bit smoother than an Americano. The orange bitters were suggested by my fellow mixmasters, and greatly improve the drink. No, clove+orange=tasty should not be a surprise. Both of the main ingredients are pretty sweet, so the club soda helps round things out.

What is Cocktail Kumite?

Earlier this summer, our long-running cocktail hour took a dangerous turn. Boasts were made, glares were exchanged, and an otherwise genial venue turned into a fighting arena.

Combat. Cocktail combat. Cocktail kumite!

We have settled on a simple format:

1. A theme is chosen.

2. Each mixmaster prepares a traditional cocktail in accord with that theme.

3. Each mixmaster presents a newly conceived cocktail, also in accord with that theme.

We haven't figured out how to determine a winner. Indeed, since every event involves six or more cocktails, it's fair to say that everyone is a winner. We've learned a few things along the way, and decided to share them here.