The Gimlet has always been an enigma to me. How could such a drink have evolved from a time of classic, great drinks and still be remembered today? One effectively takes gin, the finest of the base spirits, and adds juice from concentrate, flavourings and sodium metabisulphite to it. Oh, and colouring. And that is exactly how it tastes as far as I am concerned. No-one drinks gin and orange squash, or vodka and Vimto (apart from Charlotte Church I am told, not sure whether it was in jest), so why would anyone want a Gimlet?
For many years now, I have played around making homemade ingredients for drinks in my bars and I have slowly come to the realisation that, unless distillation is required, homemade ingredients are always superior to what you can buy commercially.
The reasons for this are numerous. Firstly, cordial and liqueur manufacturers are businesses at the end of the day, and they need to make money, and so some corners will always be cut, whether this is the addition of flavourings or the used of less fruit etc.
Also, when making just enough for your bar, you will need to add no preservatives, or hardly any, where commercial producers have to make products with shelf lives of years.
And lastly, even the most conscientious of producers cannot inspect every piece of fruit or peel that goes into their product. If you are making 1 bottle at a time, then the conscientious bartender can.
In this series of pieces, I will go through some of the ideas from my 8 or so years of experimenting. In this first piece I will be covering Lime Cordial, Grenadine, Passionfruit Syrup, and Orgeat. Each of these can be made within 30 minutes or so, and the drinks that can be made with them are indistinguishable in terms of quality.
Orgeat
Orgeat is a particularly good case of cheating by manufacturers. They pretty much all use water, sugar and flavourings. Now these flavourings are mainly almond essential oils, and so are from almonds, but making orgeat by maceration in the following way tastes far superior. I have added a little bit of hazelnut for some complexity, and the polish pure spirit to extend shelf life, and increase the intensity of flavour.
400g Blanched Almonds
100g Blanched Hazelnuts
800ml Water
700g Sugar
100ml Polish Pure Spirit
Rose Water to taste
Makes 2 bottles
Roast the nuts on an oven at 200°c for a 3 minutes to help release flavour. Remove and place in a food processor until powdered. Please do not use flaked or ground almonds. The final product is nowhere nearly as good. Also the nuts must not have the brown skin on them, as this will lead to a product with a massively reduced shelf life.
Add to a pan with the water and 100g of the sugar. Bring to the boil. Remove from the heat, and add the rest of the sugar. Stir to dissolve.
Leave for 1 hour.
When cool, pour and press though a sieve, and then through a fine muslin. Then add the neutral spirit and the rose water. Bear in mind that the spirit will need a day to integrate into the cordial. It will taste and smell very boozy at first but will be unnoticeable after a day.
This cordial should be good for 1 month or so.
Grenadine
Most commercial grenadines are little more than red coloured gomme, and many if they have ever been near a fruit are not even made with pomegranates. This recipe is the good stuff.
10 Pomegranates
700g Caster sugar
800ml Water
Makes 2 bottles
Scrape out the insides of the pomegranates and place them in a pan. Discard the skins. Add the water and 100g of the sugar and bring to the boil. Then simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from the heat and add the rest of the sugar. Then stir to dissolve. Leave to cool. Then Strain through a sieve and then through a fine muslin.
The 2 important stages here are the longer cooking time and the cooking with only part of the sugar.
• The longer cooking time is because pomegranates have a dry, slight pith-like aftertaste. This taste is exaggerated by alcohol and becomes astringent on the palate. However cooking breaks this flavour down, and it takes approx 20 minutes to do so.
• We cook with only part of the sugar because if we added all the sugar, the boiling point of the liquid would be much higher than 100°c and at this higher temperature, the sugar will begin to caramelise, and although this might be lovely in a treacle-style drink, it does not work so well in the many long summery drinks grenadine is usually used in. We need to add some sugar though, as the sugar helps to extract flavour from the pomegranates.
The grenadine should last for a month or so in the fridge. Should you want to increase the shelf life, add a teaspoon of tartaric acid to each bottle. This also has the effect of thickening the grenadine and making it far more syrupy.
As with all these cordials, simpler drinks really highlight the difference, and so try it in Bacardi cocktail. I think you will be very pleasantly surprised.
Passionfruit Syrup
Bought passionfruit syrups are made with passionfruit juice from concentrate, and all have preservatives added. This cordial of mine is the best of the recipes here, and I have yet to find a drink which does not taste infinitely superior with the homemade variety. Also if you buy passionfruit by the box, then they really are not very expensive. It costs about 50p more per bottle to make your own, and the extra cocktails you will sell because the drinks taste better will more than make up for it.
30 passionfruit
700g caster sugar
800ml water
Makes 2 bottles
Scrape out all the passionfruit and place in a jug. Discard all the skins. Place the jug to one side. Then add the sugar and water to a pan and bring to the boil. When boiling take off the heat and add the passionfruit. Leave for 1 minute, and then pour through a sieve and then a fine muslin. Then place this pan in a larger pan filled with crushed ice to chill the syrup quickly.
The important stages in this are the short infusion time and the rapid chilling afterwards. Fresh passionfruit is a sharp flavour, and cooking breaks down this acidity. By removing from the heat and then infusing for one minute, we take the edge of this acidity, but do not remove it completely and do not cook the passionfruit flavour, so it remains fresh. This is also the reason for chilling rapidly. It is the closest we can get to flash pasteurising in the bar without very expensive specialist equipment.
This Syrup lasts up to a week in the fridge, but shelf life should not be too much of a problem. We get through about 8 bottles a week at the Loft.
Lime Cordial
The biggest selling cordial on any bar, and the only one here that is cheaper to make yourself, and yet hardly anyone does. This recipe only needs 4 limes and 1 lemon to make one bottle. Just watch your knuckles when doing the zesting.
8 Limes
2 Lemons
700g Sugar
800ml water
2 tbs citric acid
Makes 2 bottles
With a grater, remove the zest of the limes and lemons. Juice the fruit, and reserve the juice.
Place the zest in a pan with the sugar and water. Bring to the boil, stirring all the time, and then remove from the heat. Cover and leave for 5 minutes. Add the juices and then chill the syrup rapidly, by placing the pan in a larger pan with crushed ice in it and stirring till cold.
The oils in the lemons and limes are heat resistant and will not be adversely affected by cooking for 5 minutes. This gives us a good amount of maceration. However the citrus juices are not at all heat resistant, hence letting the syrup cool slightly before adding them, and then the rapid chilling.
This is the one cordial here where I have added a preservative, but it needs it, and I have used far less than would be used commercially.
Just try a Gimlet with Junipero and this.....
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