Cocktail Sundays: Hondo Ohnaka's Asteroid Belt

 

The most difficult thing I've dealt with so far in cocktail exploration is cherries. Or, I should say, cherry-flavored drinks. I don't like them. They never taste quite right.

Part of this problem is with me, except that I don't think it's just me as my wife acknowledges having the same problem. The problem is that we grew up with cherry flavored... everything. Okay, not everything. But, you know, cherry-flavored medicine, cherry-flavored cough drops (okay, sure, it's sort of medicine, but it's also mostly candy), and, most of all, cherry Life Savers. All of these things have the same chemical cherry flavor, which is completely unrelated to how actual cherries taste. It took me a long time to like real cherries at all because, to me, they didn't taste like cherry oughta taste. There's a conflict between reality, expectation, and, then, what the drinks have tasted like, which weren't like reality or the built-in expectation of artificial cherry flavor.

We got some Luxardo maraschino liqueur, but... I guess it's fine on its own if you just want a taste, but the flavor isn't like cherries or artificial cherry flavoring. And I've never liked maraschino cherries, so I don't even know if that's comparable. It also hasn't worked for me in any cocktails we've added it to to boost the cherry flavor.

At this point, I'm just going to toss in here that I don't really know why I got so invested in making a cherry drink other than that it became some kind of weird challenge.

Here is what has worked: We got some Amarena Fabbri cherries, initially, because we needed the syrup for something. These cherries are amazing! And the syrup is delicious. Actually, this stuff is perfect on vanilla ice cream, not that that is what I've been using them for. They never last that long. We also got some Heering cherry liqueur, which was my last ditch effort at making a worthwhile cherry cocktail. The Heering is much better than the Luxardo, but it still didn't do the trick. I decided that cherry cocktails had defeated me.

Ah... but then I devised Hondo Ohnaka's Space Punch, which is not cherry, but, on a lark (because I wanted to add some cherries to my drink, I decided to try a cherry variation. And, wow!, am I glad I did! Not only is this drink possibly better than the space punch, but, with it, I conquered the cherry cocktail. Or, at least, a cherry cocktail, which is good enough for me.

So after probably too much explanation (but I needed to build some suspense, right?)...
Wait, does this make me like one of those cooking bloggers who writes 10,000 words before telling you that it should only take you three minutes to sauté some onions? Hint: it takes much longer than three minutes to sauté onions.

Here's the recipe:

1oz lemon juice

1oz cinnamon syrup (you can also use demerara syrup, depending on the flavor you want)

1/2oz Curacao

1/4oz Tawny port (regular port will also work and provides a deeper red color to the drink)

1/2oz Velvet Falernum

1/4oz Heering cherry liqueur

1/2oz Licor 43

1/4oz allspice liqueur

2oz rum

2 dashes Angostura bitters

3 Amarena Fabbri cherries

Add ice or however you want to chill the drink.

I've been making this with Mount Gay's Eclipse rum, but I think I also want to try it with a darker rum, maybe their Black Barrel. Once I pick up a new bottle of it.

Just to be clear, the cherries are the asteroids.

Cocktail Sundays: The Redhead

Oh, look! A new series!
First of all, you can blame any and all cocktail shenanigans, at least the shenanigans on my blog, on The Armchair Squid. If hadn't started posting his cocktail experiments on his blog, I wouldn't be posting these. In all honesty, I'm not sure if I would have gotten as into cocktails as I have. But he started posting stuff, which prompted me to mention those to my wife from time to time, which generated interest, which may have been what lead to that first book I mentioned in my Smuggler's Cove non-review review, and that book certainly lead to Cove which is what lead to my own experimentation.
Did you follow all of that?

I suppose it's not all that important other than that Squid sort of inspired this first cocktail, so I hereby dedicate it to him. Or something like that.

That I am calling it "The Redhead" is a joke. Not a joke about him but about the ingredients. If it's not fully obvious, I suppose I can explain, but I'm going to wait and see if people get it.
But let's get on with it, shall we?

A thing Squid has mentioned on his blog is how much he likes fresh-squeezed orange juice. I'm not much of a juice drinker myself, but I can understand the appeal of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Because we had oranges for some other cocktail or other we were trying out, I thought I would make an orange-themed cocktail in honor of Squid. But, um... Well, it wasn't that great.

Let me walk that back. I didn't care for it too much because it was too sweet. It was tasty but, for me, it had no bite, so that recipe isn't here. I didn't even write it down. I decided to give it some bite, instead, so let's examine what happened.

Here are the ingredients I played with, and I'll post the full recipe at the bottom.

First, orange juice is too sweet on its own, so I added some lemon juice to it to give it a bit more acidity. The two little containers in front of the alcohol are my fresh-squeezed juices.

Next, I needed to add some orange liqueur.

Yes, we now keep more than one kind of orange liqueur in our house. 
I decided to go with the Cointreau for this. The Curacao is a bit more sweet and, remember, I was going for something with some bite.

Next is some ginger liqueur. You can see that to the left of the Eclipse in top picture. We bought the ginger liqueur for one of the first Cove cocktails we made, and you can tell it's made for mass consumption. It has no spice to it at all. After using it the first time, we cut up some fresh ginger and added it to the bottle. Now, it has some spice to it. We won't be buying ginger liqueur again but will make our own, something we have done in the past. All I can say is that you won't be able to get quite the same drink I have here because I have augmented ginger liqueur.

Ginger beer is another thing Squid has talked about on his blog, rather a lot, actually, and, honestly, I never thought I'd try it. But, then, I didn't realize it was actually a cocktail mixer. Cock and Bull is, evidently, a very popular ginger beer, and it's tasty. I like it. But... Most ginger beers, I have learned, are made to be consumed on their own as well as being used as a mixer, and that's what Cock and Bull is. Q, on the other hand, is intended just as a mixer so, guess what, it's spicier. And pricier. And I like it, too, just on its own, though I don't think I'll be buying it just to drink by itself. Cock and Bull is $1.25 for a 12oz bottle while Q is $2 for an 8oz bottle. You can see where the value is, and the difference between the two is not significant enough for me to want to buy Q on a regular basis. Not to mention that I have to go to a specialty store for Q, while Cock and Bull is available at several local grocery stores. At any rate, for this drink, I prefer the Q, but it's not essential.

Eclipse, by Mount Gay, is our general rum of choice. They make some better rums, specifically, their Black Barrel, but, for the price, we go with Eclipse. My understanding is that Bacardi is cheap shit, and we don't drink it. The picture above is the prepped drink with everything except the ginger beer in it. I wasn't going to drink it right away (I prepared the drink when I had the light to take worthwhile pictures), and ginger beer is fizzy, so I waited to add it when I was going to imbibe. It's kind of pretty, though, huh?

If you decide to make one for yourself, I'd love to know what you think of it, so let me know.
And, now, for the recipe!

The Redhead

3/4oz orange juice

1/2oz lemon juice

1/2oz ginger liqueur

3/4oz Cointreau

2oz Eclipse (or other light rum)

2oz ginger beer

How To Make a Cocktail (not-really-a-book-review book review)

My wife and I have been dabbling with cocktails for a while now. Well, a short while.
Okay, it all started in 2017 when we went on our gold country trip and stayed in Columbia. We had this pair of cocktails:

which, I'm pretty sure, was the first time I'd ever had a cocktail. Maybe I'd had a pina coloda -- I don't really remember when we started making those -- but that would have been about the extent of it.

After or trip, we started trying cocktails when we would go out to places that served cocktails. Sometimes, we even looked for places that served cocktails as part of our decision process. Of course, we don't really go out a lot, so it's not like it was something that happened very often.

So we started making the occasional cocktail at home, especially pina colodas, the family favorite (because you can leave the rum out for the kids). I learned how to make margaritas. But that's where we hit a wall, I guess, because my wife bought me a book, Be Your Own Bartender, and I learned how to make a daiquiri. A real daiquiri, not those slushy monstrosities.

We tried out other things from that book, but it was too all over the place. I'm not saying it's a bad book or anything -- it definitely served a purpose -- but it only had a very limited number of drink options for any given category and it became a hassle trying to get just the various base alcohols for the different drinks. That and we discovered that my wife really just likes rum. Rum for cocktails, not on its own. On its own, I'd much rather have whiskey, which I like straight, but I'm not going to drink rum on its own.

All of which led to my wife buying for me for our anniversary this year the book at the top of the post, Smuggler's Cove, a book all about tiki cocktails, most of which are made from rum. Nearly all, actually. Did you know that cocktails originated with rum? And, kind of, with pirates. This is why pirates beat ninjas. They fucking invented cocktails! That's free information; I don't know if it's in the book or not.

However, the book is full of all kinds of history, which I will get around to reading at some point. I just haven't had a chance yet. My attention has been on the cocktail recipes themselves, over 100 of them. My personal favorite, at least so far, is the Planter's Punch. Which is not exactly accurate, because the recipe in the book is just an example of -a- planter's punch. It was just a catchall name given to a class of drink of which there were endless variations because every plantation owner had their own specific recipe. My wife has discovered that she loves Mai Tais, which, by the way, despite its association with Hawaii, was invented right here in Oakland, California. Also, by the way, the Hawaiian version, which adds pineapple juice, is vastly inferior to the original, basic Mai Tai.

I'm actually a little upset with my book. My wife got me this nice hardcover copy of it, and it's a first edition, and I am going to wear the shit out of it. Not that I think this book will necessarily become valuable, but it ought to. It's that good.

Aside from being chock full of recipes, there is also a section about how to create your own cocktails. I've been fiddling around in there quite a bit and have devised two of my own that I find quite tasty. As I continue to experiment, I'll post my personal recipes here on the blog. However, I'm not going to share recipes from the book unless I've adapted it in some significant way.

None of the cocktails I'm making at the moment are as pretty as the ones in the picture above, but they are very good. At some point, I'll start working on presentation and figure out how to make drinks as pretty as those up top.

Anyway, if you're interested in cocktail making, especially rum and/or tiki drinks, I'd give this book a strong recommendation.

Well, this became more of an actual book review than I'd intended, but I guess that's okay. I'll have some cocktail recipes posted soon.