Now this here is some Falernum. Doing it well, doing it beautifully. Via @Dabreb

Source: PlantWell
The Healing And Nutritional Properties Of Ginger

Today is Mixology Monday, and this month’s theme is “Inverted”, which could mean a lot of things. I intend to take it as turning a concept on its head, as you will see if you hang with me. Since it is Tiki Month on this blog, and other places as well, I’m going to keep with the Tiki theme and invert a Tiki element.

Part of the fun, but also a big part of the pain in the ass of Tiki are the myriad of exotic ingredients you need to make or track down. These syrups, juices, etc. take varying amounts of work to make or obtain, but they all have limited shelf lives and most have very little application to cocktails other than Tiki. If you keep enough of them on hand to make a decent range of Tiki drinks, you practically have to make nothing but, just to keep from throwing away a criminal amount of the stuff. This is both expensive and depressing.

This is the biggest reason for Tiki Month. I love Tiki drinks, but not enough to crowd out all the others in the larger world of craft cocktails. So I indulge myself in one month a year where I assemble all those fruits and home-made or difficult to obtain liquids, and chase away the cold. The whole idea of Tiki Month itself is a bit of an inversion, but not the focus here.

This post is about a particularly useful but problematic essential Tiki ingredient, ginger simple syrup. Ginger simple is awesome because of the exotic but gentle burn it can lend to a drink. It plays well with a very wide range of juices, spirits, and even other spices. Further, it is an exception to my rule above about Tiki syrups not being much use in more mainstream cocktails.

The list of decidedly non-faux-polynesian drinks that can be happily modified or improved by the mere substitution of your ginger syrup for plain simple is distinguished and too long to so much as scratch here. I’ll just name one: Rum Old-Fashioned.

Of the critical Tiki syrups, ginger simple is the only one I’ve tried making reasonably often when it is not Tiki Month.

And it is a pain in the ass.

The problem with ginger simple is that it lasts for a much shorter time than other similar infused syrups. The ginger flavor just packs up and leaves in a depressingly short time, leaving you with plain old simple syrup with an almost unidentifiable, imperceptible heat. Without a party or two, even during Tiki Month, the diminuative 12 oz bottles of ginger simple that I make don’t stay potent to the bottom.

I’ve done some research on extending ginger simple syrup’s life. A good thread at Tiki Central on a modified Mai Tai moves to an in-depth discussion of making ginger syrup last. The two prong approach they kind of settle on is to treat your raw ginger very roughly (Vitamix sounds like “Jack the Ripper” to fresh produce), and making your ginger syrup so strong it bites. I find this solution unsatisfying for several reasons. I don’t like brute force solutions. I imagine that this may introduce other chemicals into the syrup from the ginger than those you’d get in the traditional steeping method. Just starting with a stronger ginger content to delay the point where it fades to unrecognizability does not address the problem of the syrup weakening from one session to the next. And I’d spend longer cleaning my BlendTec carafe of all the fibrous remains than I would drinking the drinks I made with the ginger. I’m lazy. Sue me.

Another approach can be found at a blog with the mind-shatteringly awesome name of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Cocktails. It is more focused on creating a ginger beer base than a cocktail syrup. The approach here is to add a bit of lemon juice to the ginger puree, altering the PH. This allegedly helps stabilize the flavor essences of the ginger, making them less likely to volatilize. But now you have lemon juice in your ginger syrup, along with a lot of sugar. It could work in some applications, but a recipe calling for generic ginger simple may find this version problematic.

After wrestling this with some time before this Tiki Month, I’ve decided to give up invert the problem; stand it on its head, if you will. I harkened back to the words of the mighty philosopher Mick Jagger, who once spake, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you just might find, you get what you need.“

Hipster kiddies, you probably don’t get that joke, but trust us old farts, it’s friggin’ hilarious!

Well, at least it makes sense.

What I wanted was ginger simple syrup that would be stable in flavor long enough to use most of it. But what I, and other cocktailians, needis a way to get ginger into a cocktail, in reliable amounts, easily. Not the same thing.

I hit on the solution while browsing the herbal remedy section of one of our nearby organic/locavore/gluten-free supermarkets. (When you reach a certain age, your body starts telling you to stop dismissing herbal remedies as the poppycock you always thought, and give them a chance.) Here on the shelf was a bottle of high-quality, food-grade ginger extract.

A simple syrup base is the normal way that bartenders and mixers have been prepping certain flavors so they dissolve easily in cold liquids for decades. Sugar is common in drinks anyway, and preserves and retains lots of flavors well. Just not ginger.
The scales fell from my eyes as I saw that I did not actually need to do this with a single, special-purpose ingredient. I picked up a bottle. And you don’t need a nearby organic/locavore/gluten-free supermarket to do the same. Amazon has you covered.

Now I just use plain simple syrup, the ready availability of which in my bar is exceeded only by that of gin, and about 6 drops of pure ginger extract per teaspoon called for in a recipe. Further, when I’m making up my own drinks, the amount of ginger I can deliver to the drink is divorced from the amount of sugar I add. I get the same ginger heat, with added reliability and flexibility. The ginger essences in the extract are contained in a small, well-sealed bottle, and stabilized with alcohol, not sugar. The bottle will last a good long time on the shelf next to my bitters.

I save space in my fridge, time and mess in my kitchen, grumpiness from my wife over said mess in the kitchen, and waste in my bar. All for a little cheat on the Traditional Method. It is Tiki Month, and if it teaches you nothing else, it teaches you that there is good stuff to be learned from that Glorious Lack of Authenticity!

And hey! This post is part of Tiki Month 2013 here at the Pegu Blog! Be sure to look around for LOTS more Tiki stuff all February!

Dagreb posts an improved version of his falernum recipe. You can’t have Tiki Month without falernum, and this is a pretty straightforward, doable recipe if you want to make your own.

Each year I try to find something new to add to my annual post on producing the best possible Thanksgiving turkey dinner by deep frying said bird whole. The procedure for cooking your bird to perfection without killing yourself by fire or bacteriological warfare is down below the fold. But first, I want to address a secondary idea for those of you who won’t be frying your bird. After all, this process is not for everyone. As I note below, if you live in the city proper, this bird is not for you. A whole bird is more than many people need, as well. And you simply must not drink before or while frying a turkey.

… which alone is enough to put many of you off the whole idea!

So for those of you are not in a position to fry your bird, and who don’t mind just having white meat…

Admit it! Only your cousin Bob even pretends to prefer like the dark stuff.

…I have an alternative method of cooking your turkey that gives you perfect white meat, far better than anything you’ll get from a traditional oven, and almost as good as frying. Use a sous vide water bath oven.

It looks kinda like an automatic bread maker, only vastly more versatile.

I won’t go into a full discussion of how to cook via sous vide here. There are better resources than me, and I still want all of you, who can, to fry your bird safely. But if you don’t know what it is, you buy a special counter-top appliance which can maintain exact temperatures in a water bath. You’ll need an oven like the one above from Sous Vide Supreme. They come in two sizes, Regular, and Demi. They are not cheap, but you’ll use the snot out of yours year-round, because you’ve never cooked better steaks, fish, omelets, or especially turkey in your kitchen any other way.

You vacuum-seal an unprocessed turkey breast, along with butter and whatever seasonings you wish, and place the pouch (or pouches, if you need more meat) in the sous vide oven, with the water at the exact temperature you want the final internal temperature of your meat to be. For this, you need a vacuum sealer and the right sized pouches. We own a FoodSaver, but any such device will do the trick. Just make sure you have a good seal.

Cooking time is just about whatever is convenient for you. Depending on the size of cut, and how frozen it is (no need ever to defrost with sous vide), it will take a minimum of 90 minutes to 2.5 hours. But you don’t need to worry about being there to take it out when it is done. Because the water is the temperature of the final doneness, it will never overcook the food. Leave it in an extra two hours if the game goes into triple overtime, or the McGillicuddys drop by to say hello. When you are almost ready to serve the dinner, take out the pouch, cut it open, and either flash broil it, drop it into a rocket hot cast iron skillet, or just brown it to perfection with one of these. Guess which one I love doing?

That’s it. Serve right away. No need to worry about carry over, where the meat will cook an extra 5-10 degrees after you take it out. Nor do you need to let it rest before carving. The meat has cooked in every drop of its original juices, and is at the perfect temperature.

It is far better white meat than you will ever get from an oven-roasted whole bird. It’s easier. It’s more bullet-proof. And did I mention it tastes much better? The only downsides are: no dark meat, no carcass for stock, fewer leftovers, and you won’t have this scene at the dinner table.

But for lots of us, any or all of those aren’t really a drawback.

Anyway, on to the main event. Enjoy your Thanksgiving and don’t kill yourself!
(more…)

Here is a source for “lost” Tiki ingredient: Fassionola. All three original flavors, available by the bottle. We went back and forth about this stuff this last Tiki Month.

One last bite of Tiki. Jjoe Garcia reminds us that with all these drinks, we should eat a little something, too.

Well, Mixology Monday LXIV is in the books. I happily hijacked it this time around in search of more content for of my annual Tiki blog-a-palooza, and boy did the internet deliver. There were 35 blog posts, with five more contributions over on the eGullet forums as well. I asked for more than just drinks, and got some molecular mixology, some food, some garnish, vessels, and some good old Tiki memories. But mostly, as it should be, I got drinks. There were classics, riffs on classics, and originals. As for contributors, the usual suspects were in, as well as a raft of new and up and coming bloggers. A few old silverbacks even reared up on their hind legs and let their Tiki roar.

Without further ado, here we go!

I’m going to lead with Rowley’s Whiskey Forge, because his post on Jellied Mai Tais made me call my wife to tell her to pick up Knox gelatin right that moment. I wonder what Don and Vic would have thought of molecular mixology. My suspicion is that they both would have secretly hated it, but would both also have become masters of it, each claiming they invented it.

There was a strong international contingent this time around, as probing the appeal of Tiki transcends all boundaries. We all love our pagan Polynesian citrus-rum-spice-everything-else goodness.

Danish blogger Andrea writes three blogs, a food blog and a cocktail blog in Danish, and Gin Hound in English. It is there that she forgoes her love of gin to craft the herbal school original offering, Weeping Ukulele.

Louis-Florian Tatsuhito is a Franco-japanese musician and sound artist who is documenting his cocktail explorations at Le Trou d’Argent. He offers us a passionfruit treat that certainly fills the faux-Polynesian bill, but also couldn’t be more, um, French/Japanese if he tried: 膣 : Vagina.

Polish cocktail blogger, Tarasco Bar first rolls out the classic Blue Hawaiian, then fiddles with the color (and flavor) balance to produce a tarter and more even-sounding version, the Red Hawaiian. He blogs in Polish, but always provides an English translation that is annoyingly better written than lots of English language blogs of all sorts.

Speaking of “furriners” who write English better than they have any right to, my Tiki idol Tiare, of A Mountain of Crushed Ice, brings us two drinks. The the first is a Beachbum Berry drink, the Tiki Revival. It is presented in the flat-out awesome Tiki mug you see above. She follows it up with the muskily delicious sounding coffee-based original she calls the Tiki Torch.

François Monti, of the french-language blog Bottoms Up, discusses the Molokai Mule, one of the better examples of later, juice-heavy Tiki recipes. (A Google translation, with some charm all its own can be read here.)

My good buddy Tony Harion of Mixing Bar in Brazil begins with a discussion of Brazil’s belated warming to the Tiki phenomenon. He then focuses on the greatest of Tiki drinks, the Mai Tai (sorry, Zombie guys), while engaging in some magnificent Rule 2. He then does what all Tiki-philes eventually do, and riffs on said Mai Tai, offering up the Uai Tai, a Mai Tai with some Cachaça. You can also read his post in the original Portuguese.

Next up, we have three Canadian posts. Here is where I would on principle make some joke about how they are really Americans and not foreign at all, but the Canadians have heard it all already, most Americans don’t realize that it’s a joke, and other international types think we are both weird anyway. So here we go.

Bitter monger Janice Mansfield of House Spirits (the company and the blog) had her own festival similar to Tiki Month in January. She pledged to drink Fernet Branca every day. This worked out so well that she has carried the spirit into Mixology Monday. She takes some of her acquired Fernet wisdom and produces The Misfits, an herbal-school Tiki original that I’m sure Don the Beachcomber would have appreciated.

Mackenzie Wheeler of The Spirit of Imbibing produced the delicious looking and sounding Terror on the High Seas. This one uses one of the more delicious but pain-in-the-ass ingredients for home mixology, Port.

My buddy Dagreb of Nihil Utopia is on the wagon or something. (Is there anything sadder than a booze-blogger taking the Cure?) The upside for us is that after a round of his own Rule 2, he offers up some Tiki tots for the Designated Driver or those who need to extend their stay a bit before driving home. Pictured above is the Jamaique Fleur Café, and he follows that with the Falooklyn, a… I dunno what it is. Read about it.

Back to America The United States (Happy, Canadians?), homeland of Tiki (and cocktails over all, for that matter). Specifically, we head to South Florida, where something must be in the water, or maybe the rum, because both entrants from that region work on the same Tiki icon: The hollowed out pineapple drinking vessel. {Flips a coin}

Joe Garcia of Basic Civilization does the Chief Lapu Lapu as his offering. He intros it with an amusing take on the history behind the name (Spoiler: Magellan dies), and natters on upon his usual hobby horse of buying everything on eBay. (Gimme a break, Joe. I’m Episcopalian. There are fewer of us every day, but somebody’s gotta pay retail.) After that he goes step by step in making both the vessel and the drink.

The Atomic Grog blog’s Hurricane Hayward also namechecks the cranky old Polynesian chief who told Magellan to “get off my lawn” as intro to his hollowed out pineapple. Both use the same tool, but Hurricane uses the top as a lid, then offers us to other classic recipes for pineapple potation: The Pineapple Paradise and the Pineapple Surprise.

Guys, I’ll indulge myself in a little flashback to Tiki Month 2010, when I posted this about Ohio bartender Zak Renzetti-Voit’s turning the whole pineapple drinking vessel thing on its head… literally.

The eGullet crowd came up with a ton of cocktails to try, and a delicious-looking Tiki shrimp dish as well. The thread where they all went up over there is here, or if internet forums scare you, I digested them in a separate post right here on the Pegu Blog. Thanks to Frog Princesse, Zachary, Dan Perrigan, Katie Loeb, Kerry Beal, and another foreign entrant, Australian contributor Haresfur, who used the International Date Line to enter late and still be on time.

Very new blog The Mix Lab makes it into its first Mixology Monday with two of the richest-sounding cocktails of this MxMo. The first is an Improved Rum Fizz that shows egg whites can be Tiki too. The second is a coffee-infused number by the name of Starbuck. (To the lawyers of a certain barista mega-employer, I bear no responsibility for this name, I only report!) The garnish on this one is particularly cool and Tiki.

The next group of posts are all what I feel like calling “Donnish Drinks”. I haven’t made many of them, so I’m not sure, but they have the feel of the Beachcomber’s style of Tiki.

Rowen of San Francisco’s Fogged in Lounge offers the original Rongorongo, a spicy, dark, rummy concoction, as well as a look at his impressive collection of Moai Tiki mugs.

First time MxMo participant Tri2Cook wanders off the eGullet reservation to blog the original Crackin’ Jenny’s Teacup. The drink is also suitable for International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Read his post to see why.

Colonel Tiki is one of my original Tiki Muses, the Board of Tiki Idols, and also one of those silverback cocktail bloggers I alluded to at the start of all this. He presents the Rio Tonga, an amazing amalgamation of spices, cachaça, bitters, and just enough fruit. The dim, mysterious photo above is typical, by the by, of all the Colonel’s pix. I think they capture the Tiki vibe perfectly.

Chicago Craft (and occasionally Tiki) bar, The Whistler gives us the fabulously garnished Free Rider. Given that it combines Lemon Hart 151, Benedictine, and Fernet Branca, I think that delicate orchid in the garnish is damn near false advertising!

Portland Oregon’s leading (only?) Libertarian, Jacob Grier of Liquidity Preference trots out a drink to salve the savage heart of his 49ers lovin’ boss, calling it the Bitter End. Another Fernet Branca run at Tiki, the only thing about this drink that bothers me is that Jacob has access to better paper umbrellas than I do.

Wordsmithing Pantagruel’s Ed features Chartreuse in his creation. A riff off the Improved Chartreuse Swizzle, the Gilligan’s Ginger Swizzle is a frosty, frosty glass of high-octane Tiki funk. Ed also includes two other Tiki-fitting creations he’s produced during his recent blog hiatus, the Tornadiki and the Einbahnstraße.

Speaking of elusive silverbacks of the Cocktailosphere, Rumdood himself (who is not a Tiki blogger) appears from the mist to give us an update and improvement on an earlier creation of his, the Absinthe-Minded Professor. With a full ounce of absinthe, some maraschino, some Smitty, and more, this learned instructor seems not to be trifled with. Quick, go read Matt’s post before he slips back into the obscuring jungle.

Paul Willenberg of, um, Portland (he’s the only guy in town without a blog) brings this wowser: The Kahlua Pork Old-fashioned. This one is worth a read, let me say. I do have one question, Paul. Do the pig ears lend flavor to the falernum, or are they there to collagen up the texture?

I’ll finish the Donnish Drinks section with my own post on the Missionary’s Downfall. I’m pretty sure this one belongs in this section because Don created it. With mint, rum, honey, and fruit brandy, this light concoction has a big, mysterious flavor. Since it’s written by me, I’m sure you’ll read every magnificent word….

Zach the Venture Mixologist just got back from Hawaii itself, America’s Polynesian frontier. He brought with him that most elusive of Tiki ingredients, a bottle of Okolehao, the unique spirit of Maui. He uses it to lend some of the dreaded authenticity to his Polynesian pop, the Shaka.

At Shake, Strain, and Sip, Scott Diaz does an Almost Tiki Month in a Post, with four fully fleshed out and beautifully photographed cocktails. It took some doing to decide on a picture to use here, but I settled on the Castaway. Surrounding it is a short history of Tiki, as well as a classic Mai Tai, Don’s Navy Grog, and a Pimm’s Plantation.

Speaking of Navy Grog, my nephew and family cocktail apprentice Duncan also comes in for his first ever cocktail blog post with a run down of his Super (punch)Bowl edition of Vic’s Navy Grog. Read this post. Duncan is one of them genuine Disney Imagineers and is learning his cocktail-fu fast. You’ll want to be able to say you read him back when.

The Hardest Working Man in the Cocktailosphere™, Fred Yarm the Cocktail Virgin leads off the group of what I’ll of course call the “Vic-like drinks”. That said, his drink is Don’s Beach Planter, by the Beachcomber, not the Trader. I may be way off since I haven’t made this one yet, but this Zombie variant just looks more like one of Vic’s sour/sweet citrusy efforts than most stuff Don ran off.

DJ Hawaiianshirt splices the Main Brace over at Spirited Remix. He spends four interesting paragraphs exploring the meaning of this piece of nautical jargon before claiming he’s avoided nautical jargon. The drink employs a hearty amount of red burgundy wine and is the only alcoholic Tiki drink I’ve seen this year that doesn’t use any hard spirit at all.

Jordan of Chemistry of the Cocktail goes with his Ahau’s Dram. This one also has roots as a Beachcomber original, but the changes seem to make for a more Vicish result.

Half of Scofflaw’s Den (Marshall) loves me and posts on a find from Remixed, the Ankle Breaker. I intend to try this one, maybe tonight. The other half of Scofflaw’s Den is dead to me, and I hope the Tiki Gods fill his bed with molten lava.

So, SeanMike’s made the list?
We’re on it….

Marc of A Drinker’s Peace focuses on dangerous garnishes, a hallmark of Tiki. His Flaming Boats Don’t Float is a how-to on giving your insurance agent a heart-attack. This is a helluva fun post, but Marc needs to go back and put in the proportions to actually make the drink in which to present your pyrotechnics!

Bartender-blogger Brian Thomas of Bottle of Swan posts on his neighbor’s dog, Tiki. Wait… what? Oh, he gets around to a drink too. First, he carves a gorgeous Tiki mug out of a young coconut, which he then eats instead of drinking out of, before finally giving us the Monkey Business.

The final Viclike cocktail comes from Mixology Monday Supreme High King, Paul Clarke of the Cocktail Chronicles. He declares he has now become as lazy as Beachbum Berry lies about being, and so went looking for the ultimate Tiki drink for the mixer who has no Tiki setup at hand and no time to assemble it. The result is the simple and elegant Trade Wind Cocktail, which demonstrates that the right name can take certain classic-style concoctions and turn them into a ticket to the Polynesia that never was.

Now, after my comments earlier on Mai Tai supremacy, you Zombie-philes get your turn.

Dennis of Rock & Rye gives us a short history of the grandpappy drink of the entire Tiki movement, then offers Ted Haigh’s version of the iconic Zombie, and ruminates on the why of so many Zombie variations, since even the bartenders who first made them didn’t know what the recipe was!

Ian Lauer of Tempered Spirits rounds out the drink offerings this Mixology Monday with more history on the George Romero of Tiki, Don the Beachcomber. He then gives us three versions of the Zombie, all claimed by Don. Finally, he gives more places to look for other variations, and touches on some good music selections for when you drink them all. (But not in the same seating. Only 2 per customer!)

Pittsburgh columnist Hal Klein, who blogs also at This Man’s Kitchen, heads us home with Tiki Memories of great faux Polynesian haunts of his halcyon days of youth like the Tonga Room and the Tiki Ti. These are the places that bridged the end of the Golden Age with today’s revival.

The last word of all goes to The Old Town Alchemy Company. Jon missed the deadline for a full post, but prompts us all to watch this Public Service Announcement about the effects of Zombie consumption from British comedian Bill Connolly. I shamelessly steal the video to embed here so that you will be sure to watch it and be forewarned!

That’s it folks! Thanks for joining us and see you all soon. If MxMo has gotten you in the Tiki mood, please stick around here for the rest of this and every February, when this old joint goes from classic cocktails to all Tiki, all the time.

And one last thing: Paul Clarke Wants You! … for MxMo host. Paul’s schedule has been hectic lately, and as several posters this month have mentioned, a few months have been Mixology Monday-less of late. If you are an established blogger who’d enjoy a tremendous amount of extra work but lots of luscious content, contact Paul through the Mixology Monday home site and inquire about offering your services. This is my third time hosting MxMo, and it is Not Just a Job, It’s an Adventure!

Aloha, everyone!

I view the world of internet forums as a sort of parallel universe to the Blogosphere. Both are filled with a sea of information and opinion. Blogs often are more informationally compact or lush in their presentation, while the forums tend to meander a bit, be a little harder to search, but much more rich in the informed back and forth department. Both are useful and entertaining.

Every so often these parallel worlds meet, usually with better results than in Star Trek. One forum that has participated well in Mixology Monday in the past is the eGullet message board. eGullet is sorta the epicenter of food wonkery, and you can find some great stuff on cocktails there too.

This month, there has been some great responses this time around, and I’m reprinting them here. (More came in before the end of the day, so this post has been updated.)

FrogPrincesse answers my call for all sorts of things Tiki with both a cocktail and a Tiki dish!

Our friends, whose parents have passion fruit vines in their yard, kindly donated some fresh passion fruit pulp last weekend. This became my inspiration for the challenge.

I started by making a passion fruit syrup. I mixed the pulp with simple syrup (1 part each), heated the mixture gently, and strained through a fine sieve.

For the cocktail, I went with the Hart of Darkness from Beachbum Berry Remixed. I found that it highlighted the fresh passion fruit flavor quite well, and the spice from the Lemon Hart 151 gave it a nice kick.

HART OF DARKNESS

• 0.5 oz lime juice
• 0.5 oz homemade passion fruit syrup
• 0.25 oz lemon juice
• 0.5 oz honey mix (1:1 honey/water)
• 0.75 oz soda water
• 1.5 oz Lemon Hart 151-proof Demerara rum
• 1 cup crushed ice

Blended

We needed a little pupu with our powerful cocktail. I wanted to use more of the passion fruit pulp so I marinated some shrimp in it together with vinegar, minced ginger, brown sugar, and fresh mint. After about an hour, it was time to grill the shrimp.

Mint-Passion Grilled Prawns (adapted from Sam Choy’s Polynesian Kitchen)
1/4 cup fresh passion fruit pulp
1/2 tablespoon red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon minced ginger
1/2 tablespoon brown sugar
1/2 tablespoon minced fresh mint
1/2 pound shrimp (15 count)

Combine everything in a bowl. Marinate for 1 hour.
Skewer shrimp on bamboo skewers and grill until they are pink and cooked through (about 7-8 minutes), basting occasionally with the marinade.

Zachary has made the same journey many of us have with regards to Tiki.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with all things Tiki (mainly because there was a long period of time when I thought that Tiki drinks were all dozens of ingredients, most of which were bizarre neon colored syrups). Since getting Beachbum Berry Remixed, I have seen the light.

I wanted to take a minimalist tack with this challenge, so I present this, which is archived here.

WHITE TAI

• 1 oz. La Favorite Blanc (for aroma)
• 1 oz. Flor de Cana White (for dryness)
• 1/2 oz lime juice
• 1/2 oz orgeat
• 1/4 oz Cointreau
• 6 drops Pernod Absinthe (just enough to louche slightly in the drink)

Shake, strain, up. If you’d like a fancy orchid garnish, that’s great, but please… no fruit salad to detract from the drink’s whiteness.

Dan Perrigan gives us an original:

I don’t know if this name has been used before, but for a Pisco-based tiki drink it was a name that was begging to be used:

BAHAMA LLAMA

• 1 1/2 oz Macchu Pisco
• 1/2 oz El Dorado 15
• 1/2 oz Mezcal Vida
• 1 oz Coco Lopez
• 1/2 oz Fresh Lime

Shake well with ice. Pour unstrained into a Tiki mug. Garnish with 8 drops of Orange Flower Water.

And Katie Loeb also goes with one of her own creations:

Here’s one I did a little while back for a dinner honoring one of our local chefs. The name comes from the fact that all the flavorings grow in the subtropical temperate zone.

SUBTROPICAL FIZZ

• 1.5 oz. Mango vodka
• .5 oz. Laird’s 7.5 year old apple brandy
• .75 oz. fresh lime juice
• .5 oz. housemade orgeat
• .25 oz. St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram
• dash Orange bitters
• 1.5 oz. club soda
• Garnish: Grating of fresh nutmeg, small lime wheel.

Shake and strain over fresh ice in a Collins glass. Top with club soda and stir. Garnish with grated nutmeg and a lime wheel tucked into the glass.

Kerry Beal jazzes with some damn high-end Tiki-style ingredients:

KITCHEN SINK ON A TIKI THEME – threw together ingredients that seemed Tiki appropriate.

1 oz Havana Club Anejo
1 oz Mount Gay Extra Old
1/2 oz Cointreau
1 1/2 oz orgeat
1 oz orange
1 oz lime
barspoon homemade grenadine
2 dashes angostura bitters

A bit sweet – room for adjustment – but altogether quite enjoyable.

And Australian member Haresfur just leaps through the closing blast doors of the deadline. Welcome to the world of orgeat addiction!

Counting on the International Date Line working for me.

Tiki trouble is actually having an approximation of everything needed. But Tiki opportunity is finally getting off my tail and making some orgeat. Piece of cake, really. That is if you start with blanched South Australian almonds bought from the grower. I found that the immersion blender worked well for grinding the almonds in some of the water. And a cut up pillow case worked well for straining. Nice and milky, oily. How does it taste? Tastes nice, not strongly almond, but I have no real basis for comparison to what it should be.

So last night I discovered that there wasn’t a single piece of citrus in the house. But I acquired orange lemon and lime at the end of a long work day. With ebbing energy I decided on a Fog Cutter:

2 oz Cuban white rum
1 oz cheap French brandy
1/2 oz Plymouth gin
2 oz lemon juice – a bit much for my taste
1 oz fresh Valencia orange juice
1 oz plus some orgeat
float cream Sherry

After balancing the lemon it turned out quite nice. Oh, and we split it 2 ways.

Bonus drink: Orgeat in a bourbon cocktail with Fee’s orange bitters is a nice use of orgeat even though (or perhaps because) I used cheap bourbon.

Lei Lani Volcano
Mug: Generic Ceramic Coconut
Available: Bar Supplies

When I was revving up for Tiki Month this year, I put out a call on the Tiwtter Machine for some favorite Tiki recipe’s that I had not blogged already. (For a limited time only, you can still follow me on Twitter for free at @dawinship!) One of the more promising results among the suggestions was the Lei Lani Volcano, a genuine Walt Disney World Polynesian Village Resort recipe from the 1970s.

Okay, the recipe looked promising, and I didn’t read it’s background until after I made the first round of these. I’ve blogged about drinking at Walt Disney World a couple of times before. The long and short of my experience is that while (almost) all bartenders at Disney World are pleasant and efficient, and a few bars, notably the one at the California Grill atop the Contemporary Resort, are outstandingly equipped and staffed, the world’s most successful creativity company is not known for it’s brilliance in creating original works of cocktailian art.
Further, as I’ve already documented this Tiki Month, the 1970s were not the height of Tiki mixology either….

But all that aside, the Lei Lani Volcano did come recommended by more than one person, and it does feature an ingredient I had not previously used in cocktails of any kind, Guava Nectar. More on that ingredient after the recipe.

Guava nectar isn’t exactly the most common beverage out there, and I was warned that most available bottled stuff was so goopy or over-sweetened with HFCS that it would ruin, well, anything you put it in. Fortunately, my Twitter buddy and fellow Tiki Month blogger, Joe Garcia gave me a great way to produce premium Guava Nectar cheaply and swiftly.

“Cheaply” and “swiftly” are adjectives not often associated with scratch ingredients described on the internet by foodies or cocktail geeks….

That’s very true, but why are you inserting yourself into this fairly straight-forward recipe post?

No reason, I just wanted to make that point.

Oh, that and I wanted to say that you can follow me on Twitter, too!

He’s shameless, folks. I apologize.

Anyway, Goya, the Hispanic foods giant, makes a line of frozen pure fruit pulp pureé called Fruta. Among the fruits offered in the line is Guava. It comes in 14 oz. bags and is awesome. Your regular grocery store likely does not carry Fruta, but your nearby large Mexican grocery store does. To make Guava nectar, simply place one 14 oz bag of frozen guava pulp in a saucepot with an equal volume of water (about 12 oz.). Stir as you bring it just to a low boil, then immediately remove form the heat. Let cool, and bottle. It’s delicious all by itself.

The resulting Lei Lani Volcano is… damn good! The guava lends it an immediate tropical essence that is unusual, even if you’ve been spending a month or longer immersing yourself in faux Polynesian potables. Neither is it overly sweet (the usual first complaint about Disney Drinks™). It is an excellent use of coconut rum, which provides a nice, noticeable underlayer to all the fruit, without standing out so much that you are forced to deal with its rather mediocre quality.

This is a fruity drink, and offers little for the spirits connoisseur to appreciate. But it is nicely balanced, the flavors clear and identifiable, and delicious. It’s probably good for you, too. I think that you’ll like this one if you try it.

Neither of these usual forms of sugar are terribly useful in most cocktails

I want to get this post up before Tiki Month gets too much older, because if you want to get your Tiki on, you will have to have a supply of sugar syrups. It is easy for those of us who have been inside the puzzle palace that is complex cocktails for a long time to forget how strange and terra incognita such simple items in a recipe as Simple Syrup can be. And then in Tiki and other vintage cocktails you find such ingredients listed as Rock Candy Syrup, or Gomme Syrup, often used as apparent synonyms for simple.

Simple syrup is a helluva lot simpler than it sounds to the uninitiated. You can almost never find it in stores. And in most folks, the word syrup conjures up the image of hardy Vermonters trudging through a snowy forest, hammering wooden buckets to trees to make them bleed. Truth is, if you like good drinks of any kind, and you have a kitchen, then you can likely make true simple syrup right now. And I mean right now, as in you could and should have some simple syrup for your mixing pleasure within 15 minutes at most after reading this post.

The simple truth of Simple Syrup is that it is nothing more than sugar and water, forced into permanent solution. Here’s the recipe:

That’s absolutely all. Don’t stir it, or you will have burnt sugar to clean off the pot. Once it is cool, put it in a squeeze bottle and store in the fridge. It will last a month or more, unless you use it first. And you will use it first, once you get a grasp on what it can do in drinks, even if you don’t particularly like sweet ones.

That’s really it. Lots of folks can just leave it at that and use this Simple Syrup in almost any cocktail recipe that calls for Simple, Rock Candy, Gomme, or any other syrup that isn’t looking to add a specific flavor, only sweet. And there is absolutely no excuse for any commercial bar attached to a kitchen to not have it.

Simple, right?

Aaaaand then it isn’t. Because Rock Candy Syrup, Heavy Syrup, and Gomme Syrup aren’t just simple syrup. And while using Simple in a recipe that calls for one of the others will probably get you a good result, you will not get the sweetness, flavor profile, or perhaps the texture that the drink is really supposed to have.

Heavy Syrup, or Heavy Simple Syrup, is really just Simple with one and a half to twice the sugar. It is just as easy to make, but I don’t bother with it, since in virtually any case, you can just use twice as much Simple as the called for amount of Heavy. Really, life is too short for that many bottles in your bar fridge. Unless you have a specific use for it….

Rock Candy Syrup is harder. Harder to make, and harder to keep. For an insanely complex discussion about how to make and keep Rock Candy Syrup, see this thread over at Tiki Central by The Gnomon. I’ll just summarize where he’s going and add a few thoughts. Rock Candy Syrup is a simple syrup with so much sugar in solution that that whole thing I said about it being permanent? Not so much.
Rock Candy Syrup has a couple of uses. First, and most common, especially if you have kids, is to dangle string or sticks into it and watch as the supersaturated sugar leaves solution and sticks to the intruder, forming rock candy. If you dangle swizzle sticks in there, you end up with an awesome way to let your guests sweeten their own drinks to taste, as in The Pogo Stick cocktail, which I featured during Tiki Month 2010.
Many older drinks also call for it, including Trader Vic’s original formulation of the Mai Tai. If you find yourself wanting to try a bunch of drinks that call for it, Tiki or otherwise, give it a whirl, otherwise just pump up the simple even more, because Rock Candy Syrup is neither simple to make, nor to store.

It takes a long time to make Rock Candy Syrup. You have to slowly add the sugar as it gets more dense in order to know when it has had enough. I also strongly recommend the Ball Jar “double boiler” method described in the post mentioned above. If you let a high-sugar content solution boil directly, things happen. Chemical things. You won’t have a sugar solution anymore, you will have candy. You do not want candy.

Yes I do!

Not for what you want Rock Candy Syrup for. It won’t crystallize again, and it won’t pour. Don’t. Let. It. boil.
Additionally, storing good Rock Candy Syrup is a pain as well. It doesn’t particularly like to stay in solution, so expect crystals everywhere, which look nice but are a pain to clean and can clog your spout. Make Rock Candy Syrup if you want sugar swizzles, or if you want a good science experiment to do with your kids. Otherwise you have my official blessing to skip it.

What Doug isn’t telling you is that he failed miserably to make Rock Candy syrup himself because he did everything he just told you not to do.

I will bring back the bird, so help me….

Shutting up now!

Gomme Syrup is another matter. This is a very old drink ingredient, and despite today’s cocktail Renascence, I still can find no commercial product available. Any simple syrup will change the texture of drink just a little, in addition to sweetening it. But Gomme Syrup will dramatically alter it, adding a rich, silky element that can almost make the drink coat the inside of your mouth like a nice sauce.
Gomme Syrup is a heavy simple syrup, enriched with gum arabic, a natural thickening agent. It isn’t readily available in food grade in most places, but Amazon has lots of it in all sorts of amounts.

Both Paul Clarke and Tiare have longer rundowns on making Gomme Syrup, but here’s the short version:
First, make a Gomme:

Now make a Heavy Simple Syrup, as I outlined above (4 parts water, 6-8 parts sugar). Just as it first comes to a boil, add in the Gomme Goop. As soon as it foams, remove from the heat. Remove the majority of the foamy scum with a spoon and let cool enough to bottle. Strain the syrup through light cheesecloth as you pour it into the bottle.

So there you have it. As you work your way through Tiki Month, choose which of these you want to have, make them up, and enjoy with me! And hang with me if you want to know about all those fruity syrups you see in Tiki recipes, I’ll have a story on them too, in short order.