“If you want to know what the almond component of the original mai tai tasted like, that’s where you start,” Berry says of the Trader Vic’s orgeat; it’s noticeably dense and rich and almond-forward. “It does what it needs to do, which is to make the mai tai not just a rum margarita.”
At Berry’s New Orleans tiki bar, Latitude 29, the orgeat is decidedly not made in-house. “I don’t know why anybody bothers to make orgeat,” Berry says, “it’s a huge pain in the ass!” For all of Latitude 29’s orgeat needs, Berry relies on Adam Kolesar, the one-person operation behind Orgeat Works, a Brooklyn-based supplier of handmade orgeat, as well as syrups based on ingredients like macadamia nut and sesame seed. Orgeat Works sells a traditional, Vic’s-esque orgeat made with blanched almonds, which Kolesar says is more marzipan-like, and a toasted almond orgeat, which has a much more natural almond profile.
Kolesar’s approach is to do days-long macerations of almonds in syrup, and clarify the product for a less cloudy solution. “My manufacturing process certainly has evolved,” says Kolesar, who started Orgeat Works in the mid-2000s, “but the one thing that is constant is time…The whole key to deriving flavor from whatever nut you’re using is: give it time.” Sugar’s propensity to draw out flavors must be left to do its work.
That brings us back to the almond milk hack. Mentions of this workaround have appeared online on tiki message boards and home-cooking blogs since at least as far back as the early 2000s. The cocktails-focused YouTube channels Make and Drink and Steve the Bartender have explored the subject, producing their own recipes and even taste-testing them against commercial brands. Jamie Boudreau of the celebrated Seattle cocktail bar Canon is a notable pro adoptee. But how could a time-saving workaround perform well, I wondered, when time is a crucial piece in the puzzle of a great orgeat? I decided to try the approach myself, using store-bought almond milk as the liquid base on which to build a syrup that’s lightly flavored with orange flower water and rose water.
What I found in my testing is that saving time indeed sacrifices depth, but you can still come away with a pleasing orgeat that works unquestionably better than other shortcuts such as subbing in amaretto or almond extract. As Kolesar put it, “I don’t think the product really compares. But it gets you in the neighborhood.”
To amp up the almond milk orgeat’s richness without being too heavy-handed with sugar, I found that a split of white and dark sugars, in a 1:1 ratio with the almond milk, worked well. Adding a touch of almond extract led to a fuller almond flavor, and fortifying the syrup with dry orange curaçao helped to enunciate the orgeat’s orange dimension.
In a big, crowded tiki drink, almond milk orgeat may not show through with the same prominence as one made with well-extracted almonds. (If you prefer the almond notes of your tiki drinks to be subtle, this could be a good thing.) But that’s not the only way in which to judge—and use—easy orgeat. There are countless other drinks in the cocktail canon that call for the almond syrup. The Army & Navy, a delicate gin sour that first appears in print in David Embury’s 1948 cocktail book, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, is an ideal candidate for this easy version. The simplicity of this drink, composed of just gin, lemon, orgeat, and bitters, is its advantage, because each element has its space to occupy. The flavors don’t come across crowded or muddled. Unadorned gin sours are often too nakedly acidic for me, whereas the orgeat in an Army & Navy tames the lemon and complements the botanicals of the gin. (A traditional London Dry is nice to use here.) It’s a much more even-tempered cocktail than, say, the gin gimlet, and the easy orgeat does everything you need it to do.
High-quality commercial orgeats like those from Orgeat Works, Liber & Co., and Small Hand Foods need not lose sleep over an easy orgeat insurgency. But when you don’t have hours (let alone days) to devote to a DIY orgeat, starting with almond milk will get you where you want to be. In minutes you’ll have cocktail in hand, and no crushed nuts to clean up afterward.
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