Lockdown recipe diary #4: Picolino
This story starts, as so many do, with three people at an airport.
In truth, the story starts a few months before that morning in June 2018. We’d agreed some budget with Hendrick’s gin to do at least one event outside of the UK and that ended up being a quick stop at Bar Convent Brooklyn followed by a head-to-head bar takeover against a team of German bartenders at Williams & Graham and Occidental in Denver to mark World Cucumber Day.
Obviously, if you’re putting together a menu with a bunch of gin drinks on it, you’ll want to do a martini of some description and, if that menu is for World Cucumber Day, it makes sense that you do some kind of a cucumber martini.
Reader, I shall not disappoint you.
(In this regard, anyway.)
Picolino
50 ml / 1.66 oz Hendrick’s gin
20 ml / 0.66 oz cucumber honey vermouth
10 ml / 0.33 oz yellow Chartreuse
1 dash Peychaud’s bitters
Pour everything into a mixing glass and fill it with cubed ice.
Stir for 15-20 seconds, and strain the contents into a chilled Nick & Nora glass.
Garnish with a cucumber ribbon on a cocktail stick.
Cucumber honey vermouth
1 litre Noilly Prat dry vermouth
1 cucumber
50 g honey
2.5 g powdered citric acid
Peel the cucumber. Cut the skin into strips and dice the flesh.
Place the cucumber skin and diced cucumber flesh in a large air tight container and add the vermouth.
Leave for infuse for two hours.
Strain out solids and add the honey and citric acid, and stir until both are fully dissolved.
Transfer into a clean bottle and keep refrigerated when not in use.
If you’ve ever spent any amount of time with bartenders, you’ll know that keeping them in line only marginally easier than herding actual cats so I’d like to record my thanks to our amazing hosts from Hendrick’s and William Grant & Sons - particularly Sasha Filimonov, Ally Martin, Sebastian Derbomez and Coco Prochorowski - and to the crew at Occidental and Williams & Graham who are total bosses.