OK, so I got a fun little gizmo the other day, the Nostalgia Electrics Martini Shaker.

Dude!
You cannot be serious!

What’s the matter with you?

A gizmo to shake your cocktails? Really?
You are so totally going to ruin your cred with your cocktail blogging colleagues!

Ha!, Barracuda Breath, you are wrong for two reasons:

• First, who says I have cocktailian cred to begin with? I’m the eccentric guy who alternates between writing semi-sage advice and posting pics of spokesmodels wearing nothing but body-paint and wings, all in between rants on how you have to drink Pegus.
• Second, I have a very specific application for this gadget, and it is actually a serious one.

A while back, I wrote about my trip to that Great American Speakeasy, the Velvet Tango Room. While there, I had my first ever Ramos Gin Fizz. I am hooked.
But if you have ever tried to make one, you will have discovered that the real difficulty with making this drink is the common lack of ten, strong-armed, swarthy types sitting around waiting to take turns shaking your drink long enough to make it foam properly.

What’s so hard?
Just use that spiffy little blender you got sitting there!

Now who wants to squander my cred? A blender for a Ramos Gin Fizz? Not on your life. I have some standards!
I’ve been working hard at finding the best proportions for an RGF, but I just can’t afford the Tennis Elbow that I feel coming on from repeated experimentation.
Behold the solution!

OK, seriously. This little machine is not built by Mercedes-Benz. But a Mercedes cocktail shaker would cost $394.99 (plus tax, tag, and underbody coating to protect it from lime juice spillage). At this writing, a Nostalgia Electrics Martini Shaker goes for forty-two bucks on Amazon. They call it retro-style, and build it with am actually rather handsome 50′s look, but I can assure you they didn’t have gizmos like this back them. Which is too bad, I cannot begin to contemplate how popular this device would have been in the Atomic Cocktail era of push-button cars.
The pieces, especially the door, flex in exactly the way an appliance should not. If you don’t keep the little suction cups clean and wet, it will go walkabout while shaking your Ramos Gin Fizz. And I don’t have any idea how long this 100% plastic device will last before it wears out. But after some use, it appears to be sturdier than it feels, and it will shake your drink as long as it takes. It shakes straight up and down, which is not ideal, but it gets the job done. (The banging you hear on the video came from me turning the knob an eighth of an inch too far. It is actually much quieter in normal operation.) Until it wears out, I can effectively experiment with Ramos Gin Fizzes, and not have to hire Denise Austin to yell at me to work through the burn.
Now, I just need to find a really good RGF recipe for a shaker, as opposed to a blender.
Here is the one I’m working with now:

This makes a good drink, especially when you let the shaking machine do the work for a good long while. But it is not in the same league with the cocktail nirvana I got at the VTR. Anyone want to let me know how to tweak the recipe?

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