Passion Fruit Cocktails I: Classical Recipes
I picked up a big bag of passion fruit and did some experimenting with passion fruit juice cocktails. I started with some ‘classical’ recipes from the early 20th Century. I have not personally checked the origins of these drinks, but I am guessing the first three are from the 1920s pr 1930s.
The Avenue
1 oz passion fruit juice*
1 oz calvados
1 oz bourbon
1 dash orange flower water (about ¼ tsp of a fairly mild Middle Eastern one – but could have added a lot less)
1 dash grenadine (about 1/4 tsp but could have added more)
Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass
‘Perfumey’ seems the best word to describe this delightful drink. There are amazing smells from the passion fruit and the orange flower water. I find the bourbon and calvados blend into an interesting base, with the bourbon giving some simple sweetness in the background and the calvados a spirituous fruitiness that provides a nice foundation for the passion fruit. The taste is still fairly challenging though. It smells like heaven, but the taste gives you a jolt – a pleasant one of course.
Freshly squeezed passion fruit juice, while full of amazing flavors and scents, is slightly astringent. Therefore you can afford to be generous with the grenadine. The grenadine will also give a little body to counteract the slightly thin and grainy quality of the passion fruit juice. Be careful not to add so much that you lose the passion fruit color though!
The Jinx
1 oz passion fruit juice (recipe specifically said sweetened so I added a dash of Monin passion fruit syrup to the juice)
1 oz gin
1 oz calvados
1 dash Angostura bitters
Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass
This drink resembles The Avenue above, with the substitution of gin for the bourbon and bitters for the orange flower water. The gin is a tasty swap. It is not necessarily better, but it is definitely good. I am not sure on the bitters though. I wonder if orange bitters would work better, or even peach. Angostura seems to distract a little from the delicate passion fruit. But maybe I just added too much.
Comparing different drinks made with common products is a very interesting exercise. My first impression of this drink was that some of the taste that I had mistaken for orange flower water in the previous drink was actually the passion fruit. Passion fruit really is that aromatic. No wonder the Chinese word for passion fruit literally means “hundred fragrance fruit” (???).
I think I may prefer this drink to the above. It may be less aromatic, but it seems a touch more robust.
The Melody
1 ½ oz gin
¾ oz passion fruit juice
¾ oz Lillet
1 tsp Cointreau
1 tsp calvados
Here the calvados becomes a mere accent and the Lillet softens the drink up and helps everything blend together. The passion fruit juice might need a touch of sweetening, but this is a smooth drink, smooth to a fault if anything. The passion fruit takes center stage, with the other flavors just providing little touches of color.
The above three drinks were all decent. The Melody was nice but perhaps a touch one dimensional. I rather liked the Jinx.
The last drink I tried was a bit of an oddball and I am including it more for the sake of completeness than as a recommendation.
Sardi’s Delight
1 ½ oz gin
¼ oz lemon juice
¼ oz passion fruit juice (in fact I just added about a ½ oz of pulp)
¼ oz grenadine
¼ oz pastis
1 dash Angostura Bitters
Shake over ice and double strain into a cocktail glass.
Like a lot of drinks with a decent dose of pastis this tasted of. . . pastis. There was something interesting in the passion fruit and pastis combination, but for the sake of balance the pastis needed to be toned way down. I think passion fruit and pastis would be better companions in a Tiki drink style concoction that contains a decent slug of passion fruit juice and a dash or two of pastis. Maybe something like a Monkey Gland, made with passion fruit instead of or as well as orange could also be interesting?
* I extracted juice from the fruit by cutting them open, then putting the pulp in a tea strainer resting over a container and pressing with a muddler. You will need to give the juice a few minutes to drip through the strainer, and it is difficult to get a good extraction (the pulp tends to slide away from the muddler rather than give up its juice), but each fruit should comfortably yield up to 1/2 oz of juice. With a better method of extracting the juice you could probably get a little more.
