Tag: Drinks

In Praise of the Martini and its Essential Ingredient

Beefeater Gin, Noilly Pratt Dry Vermouth, Fee Brothers Orange Bitters, three crisp queen olives, icy cold: My ideal Martini.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A man goes into a bar, orders a Beefeater martini up, with olives. The bartender puts a little skewer holding three olives into a cocktail glass, loads the shaker with ice and grabs the gin. He pours the gin into the shaker, stirs it and strains it into the glass. Then he dumps the shaker and presents the drink to the customer.

The customer says, “I didn’t see you put in the vermouth.”

Bartender replies, “Oh, we don’t use vermouth. No one likes it.”

Some bars don’t even keep vermouth anymore, and yet when you order a martini the bartender will serve you a glass of cold, diluted gin and charge you $12 just the same.

I say this is not a martini and this is not right.

The first time this happened I looked around the bar and into the adjoining restaurant. There were a lot of youngish people happily drinking drinks for youngish people, a lot of which had “-tini” at the end of their names. You know them: appletini, chocolatetini, flirtini, peartini, lycheetini. They seem to be named after the glass, which is elegant.

“A martini has vermouth in it,” I said.

“Not here,” the bartender replied.

This was an important moment for me, because I think it was the first time I ever felt like an old coot, one of those guys who will let the train of progress run over him before he will give up his grip on the glorious past.

I don’t care, and I don’t go to that bar anymore.

I think a martini has to have some vermouth in it, and I don’t care if you drink it with gin or its abominable vodka variant. A real martini has vermouth, and orange bitters, because a cocktail has to have three ingredients or else it isn’t a cocktail. It’s just a drink. You’ll hardly ever find a bar that will use the bitters, which add a slight but welcome citrusy sensation.

So, my favorite Martini is about five parts Beefeater Gin, one part Noilly Pratt Dry Vermouth and a dash of Fee Brothers Orange Bitters, stirred in a shaker and strained into a frozen cocktail glass.I find that four ounces, after ice dilution of about 20 percent, is a good amount because I’m likely to finish it while it’s still pretty cold. 

Better to have a second cold one than drink it warm, or drink a big one too fast. Even a short one has the alcohol of about three beers, so it’s well to be careful. If you know you’re going to have a second, dump the other half into a short glass and put it in the freezer until you’re ready.

And speaking of cold, try to keep your vermouth in the refrigerator. It’s wine, and it’ll oxidize if you leave it on the shelf. But it’ll be good to go for a month or two if you keep it cold.

Half an ounce of vermouth to 2 1/2 ounces of gin is a little too much for you? Start with a quarter-ounce; it’ll be extra-extra-dry, but still a martini and you’ll still get a little of the essential taste that made the cocktail the classic it is. You can work your way up, if you like.

Of course, life’s too short to allow someone you don’t know to tell you what or how to drink, so Rule 1 is to do what makes you happy. Not everyone’s standard needs to be the same.

But this is mine, and I’m sticking with it.

Do you like yours with a different gin or vermouth? Let me know in the comments!

Syrup, The Cowboy Way

There is the right way, the wrong way, and sometimes the cowboy way — a shortcut that one uses for expedience or necessity.

I like to have simple syrup in the refrigerator for cold drinks, and especially for Old Fashioneds and mint juleps. But making it the right way tries my patience.

I know that to make either drink properly you’re supposed to muddle the sugar with the flavoring — bitters for the Old Fashioned, mint for the julep — but the sugar never dissolves completely. Or maybe I just don’t have the patience to do it right, it could be that, too.

Either way, I use syrup. A teaspoon of syrup into the Bourbon and bitters and your Old Fashioned just needs ice and garnish.

And I even make the syrup wrong, probably, but it works perfectly, I like it and it’s easy and so I’m going to tell you how to make it in case you don’t already know.

The way you’re supposed to make simple syrup is to heat the sugar in the water until it dissolves. Then you have to wait for it to cool and then you can put it in your container and into the fridge.

I don’t have the patience for this.

I just throw two parts sugar — I like raw, but you can use white — and one part water into the blender and let ‘er rip at the highest speed. Let it go for a good minute and then check to make sure everything’s dissolved. If it needs another 30 seconds in the blender, go ahead.

Then you pour it into a squeeze bottle or whatever you’re going to use, and you’re done.  I always use two parts sugar to one of water, because I like the viscosity that even a little of it gives to a drink. But one-to-one is fine, too, if that’s how you like it.

And if you don’t have a blender, you can even make syrup by putting your sugar and water into a covered container and shaking it really hard for two minutes, letting it sit for a minute, and then shaking it again for 30 seconds. This is too much trouble for me, but I’ve done it.

The blender trick also works for mint syrup, but here especially any purists who might come across this post will scoff, and I will scoff with them — it’s not the Right Way.

Still, it works and it tastes really good.

You just take a fistful of mint leaves, throw them in the blender with your two parts sugar and one part water and let it rip for a minute or two, maybe less in a Vitamix, until it looks like you couldn’t strain anything out of it in even the finest cheesecloth. Put it in your squeeze bottle or whatever and you have mint syrup.

It looks like cloudy green sludge, I warn you. But it tastes great — fresh mint and sugar. It keeps for a long time in the refrigerator and it’s good in tea, too.

I realize that aside from the proportions of  two parts sugar to one part water, which makes a product that’s twice as concentrated as true simple syrup, I haven’t told you how much mint to use. The answer is that I haven’t found that it matters too much. I’ve used maybe a cup of leaves to two cups of sugar, and twice that much, and they were both sweet and minty.

So try it, and even if you live in Bucharest or New York City, you’ll still be making something very useful and tasty the cowboy way.