some favorite cocktails: The Preview

From the cocktail I drink the most to perhaps the favorite cocktail I drink the least. You have to be in the right mood for the slightly odd Preview and it requires a delicate ratio of ingredients not to make it too sweet. (I find this is always the case with cocktails that involve Cointreau.) It shares with my martini recipe that classic proportion of main ingredient plus small amount of secondary ingredient plus accent.



I read about this in Terry Sullivan's "Mixology" column in GQ, which I liked a lot the occasional times I would find myself reading that magazine (on airplanes primarily). Sullivan claims this cocktail was a favorite of "that other guy in the Rat Pack", Peter Lawford. This link appears to be an unattributed copy of the recipe (and anecdote) as it appeared in Sullivan's column.

Two unusual things about this cocktail are that it features Cointreau without its usual citrus juice accompaniment and that it is accented with a splash of anise liqueur. What made me want to try this one out—aside from the gin, of course—is that I had enjoyed the combination of orange juice (Cointreau's underlying flavor) and anise liqueur in the embarassingly-named Monkey Gland.

When I get this one right—and I confess I often put in too much Cointreau—this is a rather exotic-tasting drink, the sweetness of triple sec countered by the anisey herbiness of the liqueur. The louching of the anise also creates a beautiful pearlescent glow, like a martini with some plutonium in it.

Here's how I make it:
about 3oz. gin
scant 1/2 oz. cointreau
a few drops of absinthe or pastis

You can lace the inside of the cocktail glass with the anise liqueur but I usually just dump it all in the cocktail shaker, shake it not-too-hard (it's nice to keep this one as clear as possible), and pour. I'll sometimes garnish it with orange peel if I have some handy. Read more!

¡No Patxaran!

Patxaran or Pacharán is a Basque liqueur that I discovered in Spain a few years ago. I had it first in Gijón or maybe in La Coruña outside the País Vasco and later tried some in Bilbao and San Sebastián, where I also bought a bottle to bring home. The ingredients are simple: it's anise liqueur infused with "endrinas" which are apparently sloe berries. There's also a bit of coffee bean and, according to this pretty detailed Wikipedia article, vanilla. It's often home-made or at least regionally produced (the bottle I brought home was made by the store where I bought it). People drink it on the rocks and it's a wonderful lazy summer afternoon drink when you want to sit in an outdoor bar watching people go by.

I made my own bottle—after a fashion—this summer and it was a passable success, though I don't know that I would serve it to a Spaniard!

It came about because Jessica had a bunch of different currants from our garden. We'd already made some jelly, some very good crème de cassis and some pretty but fairly inedible spiked red currants and were trying to think of something new. Then I remembered a bottle of Cristal aguardiente from Colombia that someone had left after a party at our house. When I finally got around to sampling it I was surprised to find that it was anise-flavored (aguardiente is usually unflavored unless otherwise labeled; not so in Colombia it turns out). I dedided to make a variation on patxaran, replacing the "endrinas" with a mixture of black and red currants and gooseberries. I steeped the currants in the aguardiente for a few weeks and also threw in a a teaspoon of coffee grounds. That turned out to be a mistake as it was a bit too much and it was really hard to filter out effectively. Next time I'll just throw in a couple of whole coffee beans.


I filtered it a few times and bottled it in the unattractive Cristal bottle (it says something about how rushed and between-other-projects this was that I didin't even remove the label). As I said, I wouldn't enter it into a competition but it turned out all right, just a little tart and with the coffee undertone a little too pronounced. Since it's not made with sloe berries I decided to call it ¡No Patxaran!

I'm sorry about not having taken photos of process but this blog can't be a high priority project, and there's a limit to my wife's tolerance of this kind of time-frittering:
[cartoon by Virgil Partch, from Bottle Fatigue] Read more!

Five Spice Bitters

I was thinking about Chinese food recently and noticed that the ingredients of the typical "five spice" powder used to flavor Chinese and other Asian cuisines have a relationship with the base spices of many bitters recipes—things like clove, cinnamon, and anise. So I've decided to attempt a batch of "five spice bitters". There are apparently various ways to interpret the five spices you use to make the mixture. I admit I only researched the internet so if anyone has more detailed information I'd be grateful. Wikipedia notes that the basic principle is to combine "sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty". I found an example of one recipe here. After comparing that recipe to the ingredients listed on the jar I have in my kitchen (as far as I can tell the same one pictured on the Wikipedia site) and reviewing the helpful assortment of vintage bitters recipes in the book Imbibe!, I settled on the following combination:

2 star anise
1 tsp roasted szechuan pepper
4 cloves
2 inch-long sticks cinnamon
1 slice fresh ginger

I put these in a jar (photo above) with one cup of Everclear (check out the label below) grain alcohol (which I bought in Connecticut but which a local merchant has told me is now legal again in NY) and it is currently steeping for a few weeks. I shake it every day.


After two weeks or so, I'll strain this and add a cup of water and maybe some burnt sugar for coloring (this is a typical step for adding color to bitters though I haven't tried it on my batches of orange bitters) and we'll see how it turns out. The wild card is the szechuan pepper: I have no idea if this will make the bitters spicy hot or not.
I'll report back in a few months after I've had a chance to experiment with it a bit. Read more!