Cocktails, the libationary art!

#Notes

The impatience problem (and the fix)

The Gift of Strawberries recipe wants a day to steep before you can even begin curdling the milk. I didn’t have a day. I had an iSi siphon. Dave Arnold wrote about rapid infusions in his book, Liquid Intelligence, where you pressurise the spirit in an iSi whipper and the thing you want to infuse. This process takes minutes, not days. A small detour that I suspect still lands in the same neighbourhood. The result was a deep ruby spirit with a clear, honest strawberry note. 

The filter problem (and the fix)

I’ve made a fair few milk punches. Cheesecloth and I have history. Mostly bad. It siphons whey onto the bench and leaves me mopping at midnight. Lately I’ve been clarifying with milk or coconut milk powder and running the lot through a coffee filter; it’s tidy and, after ten minutes, you usually see that first ribbon of crystal-clear liquid.

This recipe calls for a nut-milk bag. I tried. Twice. Still cloudy. I couldn't see this process taking any shorter than a few days, so I took the stubborn remainder and fed it through a coffee filter. That did the trick. For me, it was flow first, clarity second: the nut-milk bag wouldn’t move; the paper cone did.

Syrup choices (and lessons)

The spec wants a rich strawberry syrup built on cane sugar at 1.5:1. I went with plain white granulated sugar because there was a mountain of it in my pantry. I can live with a tiny loss of complexity at this ratio. I measured a cup of sugar and this is where I lost the run of myself and added "a lot" of sliced strawberries. Now I have an ocean of syrup. Use your head where I didn’t: scale the fruit to what you actually need. (If you follow the original method, it’s a quick simmer, strain, bottle.) 

There’s a small reward for the over-eager: the strawberry "refuse" from the syrup is basically jam. Sweet jams aren't my thing, but it would be happy on a warm scone with a dollop of cream.

Strawberry tops, tarragon, and the dust

The garnish asks for strawberry-top dust with tarragon. "Tops" is a vague word, and could mean the leafy tops or the white top of the fruit. I dehydrated the lot and found the green leaves flavourless, so I left them out and leaned on the tarragon and white tops. The herb matters here. It cuts the sweet with a cool anise line and frames the drink. In future I would even go a little more tarragon than dried strawberries.

My scaled batch (to 350 ml tequila)

I scaled things down. I live in one of those countries where alcohol is aggressively taxed, and a whole bottle of tequila is a risky investment. Also my fridge is already overflowing with past cocktail experiments.

These are my working numbers:

• Strawberry-infused tequila: 350 ml
• Blanc vermouth (I used Dolin): 175 ml
• Italicus bergamot liqueur: 117 ml
• Rich strawberry syrup: 117 ml
• Lime juice: 175 ml
• Whole milk (for clarification): 350 ml

Taste

Natural strawberry, not candy. The tequila’s edges round off; that raw agave rasp drops away which has been my experience in other tequila milk punches. It reads as a clean, modern milk punch—fruity, structured, not sticky or overly sweet. Clear in the bottle, becomes cloudy after you shake it to serve. The white balance is off on my phone camera, and in reality it is much redder than it appears here.

What I’d change next time

I bent the road with the siphon and the filters. It worked, and the drink is good. Bar-order good. But I’d like to run it by the book once: a full 24-hour room-temp infusion and a patient strain to see if the strawberry reads any different. I’d also scale the syrup like an adult, because now I have enough to sweeten a small harbour.

Credits & source

• The gift of strawberries by Tone Arasa: https://punchdrink.com/recipes/gift-of-strawberries/

• Dave Arnold's Liquid Intelligence: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20707970-liquid-intelligence