Kitchen Notebook: Cocktail Syrups
It hit 90° in Berlin today so I am officially only drinking water, cold brew, and pink sparkling boozy drinks for the foreseeable future. We also gave ourselves the gift of a freezer after 14 months living without (it wasn’t that bad!), allowing me at long last to start shaking and swirling fun (and mostly good) cocktails on a whim.Cocktails are a very clean playground to mess with the flavors you love, and syrups are the easiest way to bring those flavors into a glass. Convenient, now that so many flavors are hitting their stride. Using vodka and a neutral soda water, you can make a refreshing, light summer beverage combining two or three of whatever’s in season or in your produce drawer into a syrup. It’s a low-stakes, low-mess sandbox that just requires a few hours of forethought to let the syrup cool.
To guide you to a fun and fresh syrup combo, I recommend staying in touch with what’s coming in and out of your farmer’s market, and also getting a kitchen resource like The Flavor Bible to skim what flavors go with others. The Flavor Bible is my most dog-eared and gifted kitchen book, filled with a few hundred pages of great combos indexed by ingredient based on a survey of some of America’s top chefs. You know how tomato-mozz, mozz-basil, or tomato-basil are all great, but tomato-basil-mozz together is an altogether spiritual combination? The Flavor Bible helps you find other such combos and helps you reduce waste by finding clever combinations for whatever’s nearing the end of its life in your fridge.
The formula is pretty simple –– equal parts (by volume) sugar and water, simmered with your add-ins, then strained and stuck in the fridge for a few weeks. I tend to do a slightly less sweet version with a 4:3 ratio of water to sugar, but you can pull this lever as you wish –– it’s good to think of the end result here, like are there other sources of sweetness, or other big flavors to contend with?
The method is also quite straight forward. If you’re using a hardy add-in like peppercorns or ginger, add it all in at once. For more delicate ingredients that don’t need much extraction like mint, add after the other ingredients have simmered and let it sit with the other ingredients while it cools.
I’m sitting here and thinking –– lemongrass and coconut get along great, how can we hook them up in a cocktail glass? Blend a can of coconut milk with a lemongrass syrup, lime juice, white rum, and ice?
There are a zillion directions this can go, but here are a few syrups I’ve mixed with success:
Rhubarb + Pink Peppercorn: next-level gin and tonics, or mixed conventional whiskey sour ratios with tequila (2 oz tequila, .75 ounce syrup, .75 ounce citrus juice, 1 egg white shaken vigorously with ice)
Ginger + Mint + Brown Sugar: combine with dark rum and a splash of soda
Hibiscus + Grapefruit Shrub: mix with mezcal and tons of lime juice for a bracingly tart, smoky cocktail
Rhubarb-Pink Peppercorn
2 stalks medium rhubarb, chopped thin into ½ cm / ¼ inch pieces
20 g / ¼ cup pink peppercorns
320 g / 1.5 cups white sugar
470 mL / 2 cups water
Pinch of salt
Whisk sugar and water together over heat until sugar is incorporated. Add ingredients and simmer, stirring every few minutes, for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and let cool for an hour or two. Then strain and place in fridge.
Optional: add a big splash of apple cider vinegar to round out the flavor (recommended if you’re using this for non-alcoholic preparations with sparkling water)
Ginger-Mint Brown Sugar
150 g / 1 piece ginger (size of child’s hand)
Bunch of mint
320 g / 1.5 brown sugar
470 mL / 2 cups water
Pinch of salt
Whisk sugar and water together over heat until sugar is incorporated. Add ginger and simmer, stirring every few minutes, for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, add mint, cover and let cool for an hour or two. Then strain and place in fridge.
Hibiscus-Grapefruit Shrub
100g / 1 cup (estimating here, just use a bag) dried hibiscus flowers
320 g / 1.5 white sugar
470 mL / 2 cups water
Juice and zest of 2 grapefruit
30 mL / 2 tablespoons white vinegar
Pinch of salt
Simmer sugar, water, and hibiscus. Let cool. Add grapefruit juice and taste –– is it already bracingly tart? If so, maybe ease up on the vinegar, keeping in mind we’ll add lime later as well.
