Zero - non-alcoholic beverages
I forgot to blog the past couple of days, but man did we have some enjoyable beverages.
Celery serrano is the drink from the front cover, it features a special ice cube, always exciting! Juicing the celery was difficult, next time, I will cut it into small 3/4 inch pieces, because the long strands of fiber were hard to clean from the juicer. Ginger syrup is obtained with the juicer too. I used a masticating juicer and it did great. Mixed with a little sugar this ginger juice becomes so delicious. The cube is made with green bell pepper juice, so might as well keep juicing. The next thing that gets juiced is serrano peppers. Go easy, these are spicy!
It gets fizzed up. I was having doubts about the Perlini shaker, but no more. It performed like a champ! You do have to use a lot of ice, then go by the recipe to add a small batch of 1-2 cocktails in the shaker. I cheated and used some of the serrano ice cubes as my chilling ice. It worked swimmingly.
The ginger and serrano both give this a bite. It is very good, the celery is tasty but not overwhelming.
Instant Oatmeal combines a mixture of toasted oatmeal steeped in red verjus, malted soda, fake spirit seedlip 94, sweetners and bitters. I made my own chocolate bitters by roasting cocoa nibs and soaking them. The recipe calls for 3 grams which is a 1/4 teaspoon, so I figured I could produce bitter chocolate flavor myself. It did come through in the tasting. It does taste like oatmeal, which it should since I roasted about 2 cups. Overall it was judged as ok, nice and smooth.
Watermelon Ginger Tonic was awesome, re-do, very good! Like a really good watermelon soda. There is ginger syrup in it, again, delicious. After juicing all these fibrous vegetables, juicing watermelon was a cinch. Both the grape juice and turmeric were not obvious for tasters to guess. I had to order the crodino through amazon. However, on page 131 there is a recipe for bitter aperitif that could pass for a copy of crodino, just it is red…but tastes similar. Anyway, I would make the crodino next time.
Americano was right on! It is very Italian, to me it tastes just like the tiny bottles of red non-alcoholic san bitter that I get when I travel to Italy. To my friend Chris it tasted just like an Americano without the alcohol. Very nice all around.
Summer Summer might be one of my favorites. I think I am partial to kaffir lime leaf, it smells like lime but more complex, nearly like curry leaves. Plus this has lemongrass in it, which I also love. It is infused cold, overnight, and still gets so much flavor, like a cold steeped tea. Lime peel and lemon peel are added, and they provide a bitter/astringent background.
Time to make another exciting cube! Watermelon lavender ice cube. I mean, Summer, anyone?
The kaffir lemon grass tea is mixed with verjus blanc and Seedlip 108 fake spirit before getting fizzed up in the Perlini. It worked so well! We are de-doing this one for sure.
Pretzel - surprisingly smells and tastes really close to a pretzel. I find it delicious, there is complexity, hints of chocolate, from the cocoa nibs, cherry juice and the reduced malt soda. You can taste the outside crust of the bretzel, there is a sweetness redolent of the starchy inside, there is even a hint of salt. Wow, it is right on.
Pechuga, I did the simplified version with already made chicken stock. I also could not find the ice wine tea, so I use a half and half combo of smoked tea and passion fruit tea, not the same but as close as I can get. I thought that it was good but tasted a bit sweet.
Surprisingly, if you don’t tell people what’s in it, they like it.
Bramblin Man - blackberries, pomegranate juice, root beer - equals a taste close to red wine! Bingo. Pretty amazing. The root beer did come through a bit too much to be wine and it was still a little sweet. We tasted Proxies Midnight non-alcoholic wine side by side and it is very similar but less sweet. But as a cocktail the Bramblin Man can continue rambling!
