There’s little you’d want to do to an old
fashioned: It’s the original cocktail, made from the simplest ingredients you
can find in a home bar—whiskey, sugar, bitters—stirred in a glass with an ice
cube, topped with an orange twist, and sipped. Some would say you oughtn’t mess
with it at all.
But that hasn’t stopped us from contorting it with
absinthe or tequila, adding funky liqueurs or muddled fruit. That’s fine, if
you’re inclined to tinker and have a well-stocked liquor cabinet. But there’s a
subtler way to tweak the classic that only asks that you visit your spice
drawer, find the coriander and crushed red pepper flakes, and add them into a
simple syrup for a little extra flowery sting.
The effect is light-handed, which doesn’t come as
a surprise from Dave Arnold and the rest of the precise, culinary-minded team at
Booker & Dax. But where their M.O. is generally about high technology and
flair—cask-aged liqueurs, cocktails carbonated in the bottle, centrifuges, and
dry ice—anyone who has a bottle of whiskey can make this at home.
Makes 1 cocktail
CORIANDER SYRUP
Scant ½ cup (120ml)
water
Scant ½ cup (100g)
sugar
1 tablespoon coriander
seeds
1½ teaspoons crushed red pepper
flakes
COCKTAIL
2 ounces (¼ cup/60ml) whiskey,
preferably Yamazaki 12-year single malt or Rittenhouse 100-proof
rye
Scant ½ ounce (1 tablespoon/15ml)
coriander syrup
2 dashes Angostura
bitters
Orange twist
1 To make the coriander syrup,
combine the water, sugar, coriander seeds, and ½ teaspoon of the crushed red
pepper in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, turn off the heat, then add the remaining
teaspoon of crushed red pepper. Stir and let steep, tasting occasionally, until
the flavor of the spices in the syrup hits the back of your throat but does not
overwhelm the mixture. Strain through a double layer of cheesecloth or a
fine-mesh chinois, then let cool before using. Stored tightly sealed in the
refrigerator, the syrup will keep for 1 week. Makes about ½ cup (120ml).
2 To make the cocktail, combine
all the ingredients except the orange twist in an old fashioned glass. Add one
large chunk of ice and stir until chilled. Twist a large piece of orange zest
over the drink and drop into the glass.
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