This one may be my favorite pisco cocktail. Dave Wondrich wrote it up on the Esquire website drinks data base (which seemed to disappear for a while but has now moved here). The Dulchin doesn’t have its own entry there; look for it under the Hop Toad, a lime and apricot brandy drink that is also pretty good.

The thing I really like about the Dulchin is its use of eau de vie, or dry fruit brandy. Eau de vie is fantastic stuff for mixing cocktails with. There aren’t nearly enough Eau de vie cocktails out there and the good ones deserve some attention. The Dulchin gets even better by combining eau de vie with pisco. This combination just works so well, with the pisco being a sort of a eau de vie itself – certainly more like a eau de vie than a traditional grape brandy. To top things off, the Dulchin uses a particularly hard to find and under-appreciated eau de vie, a Hungarian dry apricot brandy called Barack Palinka. It is hard not to like this drink.

Barack Palinka can be hard to find. Obviously another apricot eau de vie would make a fine substitute. If you can’t find an apricot eau de vie then consider experimenting with some other eau de vie you can find. I have found that plum makes a reasonable substitute, different from yet still similar to the original apricot. Yugoslavian plum brandy, or slivovitch, is fairly easy to find. I can imagine raspberry also being good although I never tried it. I am not so sure about cherry or pear. It couldn’t hurt to give them a whirl though. Whatever you do don’t substitute a sweet apricot brandy (i.e. the reasonably ubiquitous apricot liqueur) for dry apricot brandy (i.e. apricot eau de vie). There is nothing wrong with sweet apricot brandy, but keep it out of this drink.

The recipe:

2 oz pisco

1 oz dry apricot brandy (I used Barack Palinka)

1 oz lime juice

1 tsp grenadine

2 tsp Grand Marnier

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Bracing, tons of complex fruity flavors, very dry, and not too sour. This drink is very different to most others so you really need to try it for yourself.

I think this drink is a good example of how pisco can do unique things. Here the pisco helps cut the intensity of the apricot to a more agreeable level, while simultaneously contributing its own fruity and aromatic qualities. The pisco forms the backbone of the drink while also providing the perfect stage for the apricot to shine on. If you substituted vodka for the pisco you would simply have diluted dry apricot brandy. If you substituted gin you might get an interesting result but the flavors would be likely to compete rather than cooperate. It might take a little more sweetness to make the drink work. If you substituted a dark spirit like brandy then you would mute the fresh flavors in the fruit brandy. Pisco doesn’t seem like an unusual choice in this drink; it seems like the ideal choice.

Oh, and this drink was apparently named after some U.S. industrialist who was allergic to other more common spirits and so had to find inventive ways to drink pisco.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 2:24 am and is filed under Grand Marnier, Recipes, apricot brandy (dry - Barack Palinka), eau de vie, grenadine, lime, pisco. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.