Lockdown recipe diary #4: Picolino

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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.)

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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.

Newsdesk: summer is coming

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It's summer! It must be, all the clues are there. There was sunlight this afternoon - proper sunlight with warmth and everything! The other big clue?

MxMo: Guilty Pleasures

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Mixology Monday is monthly celebration of all things cocktailian, hosted by a different member of the global drink-blogging community. This month, Stevi at Two at the Most (thanks for hosting!) invited us to share our Guilty Pleasures. The thing is, I'd already shared one of my shameful favourites in public... I remember the first cocktail competition I ever entered. It was a round of the late, great Spiritual Scotland series that ran for a couple of summers in Edinburgh a few years back. Each round would have a brand sponsor who would bring a number of products with them to provide the basis for a mystery bag comp. Competitors would face off in pair, with each pair drawing a card that told them their base ingredient (from the sponsor's selection, of course) and each bartender drawing a second card that contained a list of ingredients, two of which had to be used in the drink. You'd then be given five minutes or so to come up with your drink, and then you'd present it to the judges and the massed ranks of the Capital's bar staff head-to-head against the other guy in your pairing.

My base ingredient was to be Louis Royer Cognac. I think it was the XO, but honestly I forget. All things considered, the grade of Cognac I used turned out to be almost entirely irrelevant. Why? Because of the secondary ingredients I drew, I picked Cointreau (fair enough) and Mango Sorbet.

A bit of background may be necessary. I used to work in a cinema, and spent a decent amount of time on the Haagen-Dazs stand. One of the things we offered were milkshakes but if someone selected a sorbet, we'd suggest making it with lemonade instead of milk.

I assume my thought-process went a little something like this: sorbet/lemonade shakes are awesome. Cognac, too, is awesome. What, therefore, could be more awesome than a sorbet/lemonade shake with Cognc in it?

The answer was, as it turns out, every other drink in the competition. My drink was one of the more popular drinks made that afternoon, it just scored horrendously poorly on every criteria a competition drink is marked on. There was no driving idea behind the drink. It tasted good, but the base ingredient was lost, and my justification for choosing ingredients was based on how well they'd go with mango sorbet, not the sponsor's Cognac.

As another Mixology Monday rolls around, I'd love to recreate the King Louis Spider, but I'm all out of mango sorbet. Instead, I'm going to raise a rum-and-coke float to that summer's day back in 2006 when Edinburgh's cocktail scene learned that a brandy and mango sorbet shake wasn't ever going to win a comp, but damn if it didn't taste good.

King Louis Spyder

37.5ml Louis Royer VS (really, no need for the good stuff)
25ml Cointreau
1 scoop mango sorbet
75ml dash lemonade

Shake Cognac, Cointreau and sorbet vigorously without ice. Add lemonade to the shaker and stir until all lumps have dissolved - a stick-style milkshake blender works really well here. Serve in a goblet with the biggest orange zest twist you can find.

Rum & Coke Float

In a large glass (a pint glass is ideal) add:
A large measure of rum (I'm enjoying Havana Club Especial tonight)
A large scoop of Vanilla ice cream; and top up with Coke. Add spoon and enjoy.