My freezer at home hovers around −10.5°F (−23.5°C), a fantastic temperature for most of my freezer tricks. I have another freezer that stays between −4°F (−20°C) and 0°F (−18°C) at its coldest setting, barely adequate for the recipes you’ll read below. A couple degrees make a big difference when freezing mixtures of alcohol, sugar, and water. You should determine how cold your freezer is. To find out, simply put a bottle of straight booze greater than 40 percent alcohol by volume in your freezer and let it sit there overnight. It won’t freeze. Measure the temperature of the liquid with a digital thermometer. Voilà: your average freezer temperature. If your freezer is too warm, 0°F (−18°C), you probably have it set too high. Turn it down. Colder is better. Your ice cream and frozen foods will thank you. I have read a number of sources recommending that you keep your freezer temperature on the warm side to conserve energy.
Apparently the authors haven’t done their research on the pernicious effects of temperatures above 0°F (−18°C) on the longevity and quality of frozen foodstuffs.
Keeping your freezer warm is penny wise, pound foolish.
SLUSHY SLUSH
In the traditional cocktail section I describe how to make blended drinks with ice—
they are liquids with some ice crystals in them. Here we will make slushies. If you want to replicate a 7-Eleven–style frozen treat, freeze your entire cocktail batch ahead of time in a reusable container (I use plastic quart containers or Ziploc bags, depending on the recipe), minus hyper-perishable ingredients such as lime juice but including dilution water, and blend it to serve. Blenders don’t usually do a good job with single drinks, so you’ll want to make at least two at a time. The trick here is to get the dilution right. You want to get the finished alcohol by volume below 15.5 percent. Go for 14 percent, lower than most shaken drinks. You need to get the alcohol by volume down so that your freezer can do its job and freeze the mixture. Sugar reduces the freezing point of drinks as well, so don’t let it get above 9 grams per 100 milliliters. For a drink recipe based on a 2-ounce (60-ml) pour of 40 percent alcohol- by-volume liquor, you’ll need to add about 3½ ounces (105 ml) of water-based ingredients with no more than the equivalent of ¾ ounce (22.5 ml) of simple syrup (about 14 grams of sugar).
LEGIT SLURPEE
It takes a long time to freeze these drinks properly, so make your batch the night before you want to serve it. When you wake up in the morning, look at the cocktail. If it doesn’t look like it is freezing nicely, your freezer is probably −4°F (−20°C) or higher—not cold enough. Don’t despair. You will just need to adjust the technique a bit. Three to six hours before you plan to blend the drinks, add the lime juice. Once the mix is diluted a bit more, it should freeze properly.
The slushy procedure can be applied to many, many drinks. Here’s a simple daiquiri to get you started:
Frozen Daiquiri
MAKES TWO 53⁄5-OUNCE (169-ML) DRINKS AT 14.2% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 8.4 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.93% ACID
INGREDIENTS
4 ounces (120 ml) white rum (40% alcohol by volume), preferably clean- tasting and cheap, such as Flor de Caña
4 ounces (120 ml) filtered water 11⁄2 ounces (45 ml) simple syrup 4 drops saline or 2 pinches of salt
13⁄4 ounces (52.5 ml) freshly strained lime juice PROCEDURE
The day before you plan to make the drinks, combine the rum, water, simple syrup, and saline or salt. Pour the mixture into a wide-mouth plastic container or Ziploc bag and freeze. At drink time, put the daiquiri mix directly from the freezer into a blender, add the lime juice, blend to a slush, and serve. College students: you’re welcome. And pace yourselves.
This is the correct texture for a blended drink when it comes out of your freezer.
Frozen daiquiri.
EBONY AND IVORY
Two drinks—one dark, one light—served side by side, living together in perfect harmony. Either drink is also good enough to stand on its own merits as a solo act.
Both drinks are fundamentally frozen vermouth. Ebony is a mixture of Carpano sweet vermouth (if you can’t find Carpano, substitute another fine and sweet vermouth) with a bit of vodka to tone down the sweetness, plus a hint of lemon juice (you won’t need much lemon; vermouths are wine-based and contain acidity already).
I like this drink a lot. Even though it’s very cold, the flavor of the vermouth shines through purely without being cloying.
Ivory is based on Dolin Blanc, a sweet white vermouth. It’s also lightened with a touch of vodka, but it’s acidified with lime. It is much brighter and more refreshing than you expect a vermouth drink to be.
Vermouth oxidizes quickly and badly once diluted, so these drinks must be frozen in Ziploc bags with all the air removed and not in a large container where they can be exposed to a lot of air. Pour the mixes into bags and seal the bags 90 percent of the way across the top. Lay the bags down and push all the air out of them, then pinch the final portion of the bag lock shut.
EBONY AND IVORY
Ebony
MAKES TWO 44⁄5-OUNCE (145.5-ML) DRINKS AT 14.4% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 8.4 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.74% ACID
INGREDIENTS
5 ounces (150 ml) Carpano vermouth (16% alcohol by volume, roughly 16 g sugar/100 ml, roughly 0.6% acidity)
11⁄2 ounces (45 ml) vodka (40% alcohol by volume) 21⁄2 ounces (75 ml) filtered water
4 drops saline solution or 2 pinches of salt
Flat 3⁄4 ounce (21 ml) freshly strained lemon juice PROCEDURE
The day before you plan to make the drinks, combine the vermouth, vodka, water, and saline or salt. Pour the mixture into a Ziploc bag, exclude all air from the bag, and
freeze. At drink time, put the mix directly from the freezer into a blender, add the lemon juice, blend to a slush, and serve by itself or with Ivory.
Removing air from the Ziploc. Air is bad because it will oxidize your diluted vermouth.
Ivory
MAKES TWO 43⁄5-OUNCE (138-ML) DRINKS AT 13.9% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 7.9 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.81% ACID
INGREDIENTS
51⁄2 ounces (165 ml) Dolin Blanc vermouth (16% alcohol by volume, roughly 13 g/100 ml sugar, roughly 0.6% acid)
1 ounce (30 ml) vodka (40% alcohol by volume) 2 ounces (60 ml) filtered water
4 drops saline solution or 2 pinches of salt Flat 3⁄4 ounce (21 ml) freshly strained lime juice PROCEDURE
The day before you plan to make the drinks combine the vermouth, vodka, water, and saline or salt. Pour the mixture into a Ziploc bag, exclude all air from the bag, and freeze. At drink time, put the mix directly from the freezer into a blender, add the lime juice, blend to a slush, and serve by itself or with Ebony.
THE JUICE SHAKE
Here is another low-tech trick you can perform with your home freezer: the juice shake. When someone asks me to develop a recipe that people can make at home without fancy equipment, this is one of my go-to techniques.
It is difficult to make balanced cocktails with most juices—they just aren’t concentrated enough. After you’ve added enough juice to get the flavor right, you can’t afford to dilute the drink further with ice. Apple juice, grapefruit juice, strawberry juice, and watermelon juice contain too much water to be useful in a cocktail chilled with ice. The simple chilling solution: make juice ice cubes and shake away.
At first blush, the juice shake couldn’t be much easier. Get a bunch of ice-cube trays, jigger your juice into the trays, and freeze. When it comes time to make the drink, jigger your alcohol and any other mixers into a cocktail shaker, add juice cubes, and shake. There is one wrinkle.
When you shake with regular ice, it doesn’t really matter how much ice you add.
Shaking will melt roughly the same amount of water no matter how much ice you use (refer back to the Traditional Cocktails section, here, if you forget why this is true).
Juice shakes don’t work this way. Juice ice is a combination of sugars, acids, flavors, and water. As you shake, the first part of the juice cubes to melt is richer in sugar, acid, and flavor than the stuff that melts later, so adding too many juice cubes throws off the balance of the drink.
The juice shake gets your tins extremely cold.
With the juice shake, you need to add exactly the right number of juice cubes to achieve the flavor you want. Next you’ll practice a technique I call “shaking to completion”: shake the drink until the juice cubes have completely disintegrated. You will hear the cubes break up in the shaker, and you’ll know you are done when the drink sounds slushy and the tins are preposterously cold. While this process is more
taxing than a typical shake, it isn’t as difficult as you might think, because frozen juice is much softer than frozen water.
I use the juice shake to make shaken-sour-style drinks (think daiquiris, whiskey sours, margaritas). Most often these drinks taste best with a final alcohol level of 15.5 to 20 percent, a sugar content of 6.5 to 9 percent and a total acidity of 0.84 to 0.88 percent. Depending on the recipe you are making and the kind of juice you have, you may not want all your dilution to come from juice. The drink might taste too juicy. If so, just add some regular ice as well. As long as you don’t add too much regular ice, the exact amount you use isn’t important, because the juice ice will melt while you are shaking long before the regular ice will. An ounce give or take is no problem.
You can approximate the juice shake with a blender, using frozen fruit instead of frozen fruit juice. The blender technique is supersimple, and I have to admit that these drinks often taste good, but the pectin and other solids in the fruits lend a smoothielike texture that I find unsatisfying. Don’t let me stop you from blending whole frozen fruit, though it does pain me a little bit. You’ll need to add a bit more frozen fruit than you would juice, because of the solids—and you’ll also need to add a bit of ice to loosen the texture and make the drinks more . . . drinkable.
The juice shake makes drinks colder than shaking with plain ice does. Everyone likes them, and anyone can make them. Here are some suggestions.
Approximating the juice shake with frozen fruit in a blender
Strawberry Bandito
Tequila and strawberries is unimaginative, I hear you say? Well, it is delicious.
Strawberries can vary greatly in sweetness and acidity. You will have to adjust the ratios below if your berries (or the juice, if you are buying it premade) are different from mine. If you desire a slushier drink, keep your tequila in the freezer prior to shaking. I make mine with jalapeño-infused tequila, but regular blanco tequila tastes good as well.
MAKES ONE 43⁄5-OUNCE (140-ML) DRINK AT 17.1% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 9.0 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.96% ACID
INGREDIENTS
2 ounces (60 ml) strawberry juice (8 g/100 ml sugar, 1.5% acid) (or you can use 21⁄2 ounces [75 grams] frozen strawberries and 15 grams ice, but you didn’t hear it from me)
2 ounces (60 ml) Jalapeño Tequila, here (40% alcohol by volume)
1⁄4 ounce (7.5 ml) freshly strained lime juice Short 1⁄2 ounce (12.5 ml) simple syrup
2 drops saline solution or a pinch of salt PROCEDURE
Several hours before you want to make the drinks, measure two 1-ounce (30-ml) pours of strawberry juice into individual ice-cube trays for every drink you’ll make, and freeze. This drink has a lot of unfrozen ingredients, so for a colder drink, refrigerate your tequila, lime juice, and simple syrup before making. At drink time, combine the tequila, lime juice, simple syrup, and saline solution or salt in a mixing tin, add 2 strawberry ice cubes, and shake until the ice cubes are fully melted and there are no large particles left. Strain using a hawthorn strainer into a chilled coupe glass. Enjoy.
Strawberry juice cubes
STRAWBERRY BANDITO
Shaken Drake
This drink is a mix of unclarified grapefruit juice and kümmel, the German version of caraway liqueur. Kümmel is sweeter than its better-known Scandinavian cousin, aquavit, but not too sweet. Grapefruit and caraway were born to be together. A bar spoon of maple syrup rounds out the bitterness of the grapefruit. Even though all three ingredients contain sugar, the result does not taste overly sweet. The bitterness of grapefruit requires more than the average amount of salt in this cocktail. If you like salt-rimmed glasses, they work here. If you cannot find kümmel, substitute aquavit and up the maple syrup slightly.
MAKES ONE 43⁄5-OUNCE (139-ML) DRINK AT 15.6% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 10.2 G/100 ML SUGAR, 1.03% ACID
INGREDIENTS
2 ounces (60 ml) freshly squeezed and strained grapefruit juice (10.4 g/100 ml sugar, 2.4% acid)
11⁄2 ounces (45 ml) Helbing Kümmel liqueur (35% alcohol by volume)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) vodka (40% alcohol by volume)
1 bar spoon (4 ml) grade B maple syrup (87.5 g/100 ml sugar) 5 drops saline solution or a generous pinch of salt
PROCEDURE
Several hours before you want to make the drinks, measure two 1-ounce (30-ml) pours of strained grapefruit juice into individual ice-cube trays for every drink you’ll make, and freeze. At drink time, combine the kümmel, vodka, maple syrup, and saline
solution or salt in a mixing tin, add 2 grapefruit-juice ice cubes, and shake like the devil until the ice cubes turn to slush and there are no large particles left (30 seconds at least). Your tins will get very cold. Strain using a hawthorn strainer into a chilled coupe glass.
Shaken Drake with grapefruit-juice cubes in the foreground.
Scotch and Coconut
My friend chef Nils Noren loves the combination of coconut water and Scotch. I stole his combination for this unusual shaken drink. I use Ardbeg 10 in this recipe, because I
want the smokiness of a peaty Islay Scotch to go with the coconut water. Coconut water on its own is a bit musky and needs some fruit flavors to round it out, so I add Cointreau, which brings both sweetness and the flavor of orange without adding acidity. I rarely like fruit acids with Scotch. Even so, I found this drink needed just a skosh of acid, so I added a small amount of lemon juice. After the drink is made, it receives a twist of orange peel—the oils bring brightness without extra acidity—and a star anise pod. While I normally hate inedible things floating in my drinks, the aroma of star anise marries so well with coconut water that I make an exception here.
Your choice of coconut water is important, because most of the stuff on the market is pretty bad. Try to get one that hasn’t been pasteurized at high heat. Ideally, make your own. Coconut water for drinking does not come from the hard brown coconuts normally found in the supermarket. Go to an Asian greengrocer and seek out immature coconuts sold specifically for their water. They are usually beige or white and pithy on the outside, having had a portion of their thick husk cut away before sale.
Knock two holes in the top of the coconut—one for pouring and one to let in air—and pour out the coconut water. Strain it before use to get out the bits of husk.
MAKES ONE 47⁄10-OUNCE (142-ML) DRINK AT 18.6% ALCOHOL BY VOLUME, 5.9 G/100 ML SUGAR, 0.32% ACID
INGREDIENTS
21⁄2 ounces (75 ml) fresh coconut water (6.0 g/100 ml sugar)
11⁄2 ounces (45 ml) Ardbeg 10-year Scotch (46% alcohol by volume)
1⁄2 ounce (15 ml) Cointreau (40% alcohol by volume 25 g/100 ml sugar)
1⁄4 ounce (7.5 ml) freshly strained lemon juice 2 drops saline solution or a pinch of salt 1 star anise pod
1 orange twist PROCEDURE
Several hours before you want to make the drinks, measure two 1¼-ounce (37.5-ml) pours of strained fresh coconut water into individual ice-cube trays for every drink you’ll make, and freeze. At drink time, combine the Scotch, Cointreau, lemon juice, and saline solution or salt in a mixing tin, add 2 coconut water ice cubes, and shake until the ice cubes turn to slush and there are no large particles left. Your tins will get very cold. Strain with a hawthorn strainer into a chilled coupe glass. Express the orange twist over the top of the drink, then wipe the rim of the glass with the orange side of the peel before discarding it. Float the star anise pod on top.
MAKING THE SCOTCH AND COCONUT: 1) Punch two holes in a juice coconut, one for draining and one for air. 2) Drain and strain the coconut water. 3) Pour the coconut water into ice-cube trays and freeze.
4) The finished drink ready for its garnish.