This month’s Mixology Monday sees me without ready access to a bar to mix a drink.  On well, I’m going to go ahead and post something anyway.  The theme this month is New Orleans cocktails, so I thought I could post a couple of tips related to making drinks containing egg white, with particular reference to that venerable old New Orleans drink – the Ramos Gin Fizz.

I had made it something of a mission to get a decent Ramos Gin Fizz while in New Orleans for Tales of the Cocktail.  What I really wanted was a Ramos Gin Fizz made by Chris McMillan (check out a video of him mixing one here).  Before leaving for New Orleans I rang the bar he now works at (in the Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel) and was told by that the great man would be behind the bar on the Friday and Saturday during Tales of the Cocktail from 4pm onwards.  I dropped past the hotel late on Friday afternoon.  The bar was deserted.  There was no queue out onto the street for Ramos Gin Fizzes.  The lobby was not filled with a couple of dozen drinks bloggers, passing a shaker or two around as they shook a couple of fizzes up.  I had lucked out!  Then I got a little closer and realized Chris McMillan was nowhere to be seen.  On asking if he was around I found he was not going to be back at work until the 25th.  Alas it was not to be.

Although the Chris McMillan Ramos Gin Fizz never happened, after the session on New Orleans Drinks I got the chance to ask Chris where I would get a Ramos Gin Fizz in New Orleans given that he wasn’t working his own bar that week.  He told me not to even try at his own bar unless he was there – which made me feel better about slinking out on the poor young guy tending bar there.  Chris suggested The Swizzle Stick Bar at Cafe Adelaide.  I graciously thanked Mr. McMillan before thrusting him out of my way and rushing to Cafe Adelaide.

Once again, it was not to be.  On a better day Chris McMillan’s suggestion may have been a good one.  I should have done well given that I believe my drink was mixed up by Lu Brow – the ‘bar chef’ at Cafe Adelaide.  Unfortunately I have little  good to say about the Ramos Gin Fizz I drank at Cafe Adelaide.  OK, I guess the ingredients and proportions were about right.  Unfortunately the execution was abysmal.  I shake a Daiquiri longer than Lu Brow shook this Ramos Gin Fizz.  I wasn’t expecting the bar to lower its shutters for quarter of an hour while everybody in the room took turns shaking my drink.  Indeed I was half expecting to be tossed out into the street for daring to ask for a Ramos Gin Fizz.  However, given that the place was as near empty as I saw it during Tales of the Cocktail, a shake lasting longer than 15 seconds would have been nice.  The drink tasted OK, but it was rather diluted (the crushed ice they seem to favor for all drinks in The Swizzle Stick Bar is not always the way to go), and texturally it was way off.  That said, at least I was able to go into a bar and order a Ramos Gin Fizz without throwing the barstaff into a fit of confusion.  You couldn’t do that in most places.

The Swizzle Stick Bar Ramos Gin Fizz was a sorry contrast to the exceptionally frothy Pisco Sour I enjoyed in The Alembic in San Francisco.  The Alembic pisco sour was probably the stand out drink from my U.S. trip.  The difference between the two drinks was the level of care taken with the execution.

So where am I going with all this?

I thought for this Mixology Monday I would throw a couple of Ramos Gin Fizz making tips out there.  I have not tried the third of these myself, since it is something I learned from a bartender/blogger while attending Tales.  I’ve now forgotten who told me this, so give a shout if you happen to be reading.  I haven’t tried the fourth either, but professional bartenders seem to like it.

Tip number 1 – Dry shake the mixture before adding any ice.  This shouldn’t need to be said, but many people skip this essential step.

Tip number 2 -Add the coil from your Hawthorne Strainer to the shaker while dry shaking (removing it when you add the ice).  The coil will act like a whisk and aerate the egg faster than if you shook without the coil in there.  So far as I know this technique is not traditional.  I have never seen it in a recipe.  However, my experiments have found it to work well.  The pisco sour at The Alembic was made this way.  The Alembic was the first bar where I have seen a dry shake done this way.  Congratulations to the Alembic for taking that extra little bit of trouble.

Tip number 3 – Add the sugar after your dry shake.  The theory behind this is that sugar acts as a stabilizer for existing foam, but actually inhibits foam formation.  I have not experimented with this yet.  However, I was surprised a few weeks back when a batch of pisco sours I made up turned out to have an exceptionally good foam.  Being a batch drink I got a little confused with the proportions and undersweetened to begin with, adjusting the sweetness later.  Perhaps the batch of drinks turned out well because I added about half of the sugar at the end.  While a Ramos Gin Fizz is not a Pisco Sour, I think you want both drinks to be as foamy as possible.  Therefore I suggest trying this technique.

Tip number 4 – You could always cheat and use one of those little battery operated blending sticks, which are small enough to fit into a cocktail shaker.  These seem popular in bars.  The Barsol Pisco brand rep thought they did a good job, as did numerous other people I spoke with.  I don’t have one but will pick one up at some stage.

The Ramos Gin Fizz recipe I use these days is below.  Some recipes leave out the lime, but I think the mix of lemon and lime is essential to the flavor.  I also like the vanilla essence, even if it may not be traditional.

2 oz gin

1/2 oz of lime juice

1/2  oz of lemon juice

1 egg white

2 oz cream

several drops of orange flower water (more if using the weak tasting middle eastern stuff)

a drop or two of vanilla essence

1 tsp sugar (add this after the dry shake)

A spash of soda water

Dry shake everything except the sugar and soda for at least a minute.  Add the sugar and give it another long shake over ice to chill and dilute a little. Strain into a fizz glass (or an undersized Collins glass) and top with soda, stirring as you do so to build a frothy head that rises above the glass and begins to run down the sides.  Watch the video above to see what I mean.  In fact why am I even bothering with a recipe here?  Just watch the video.

I did not attend the session on eggs in drinks at Tales of the Cocktail.  Does anyone who attended have more tips on getting better results out of drinks containing egg white?

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’ (百香果).

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 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.

I’ve haven’t posted anything for the last couple of Mixology Mondays. My excuse in April was being on holiday and having no access to Champagne. It seems it isn’t a popular drink in the remoter parts of Western China. I didn’t have a very good excuse in May since I was already back in New Zealand by that stage. All I can say is that I still hadn’t got around to setting up a bar in my apartment and the idea of tequila drinks didn’t inspire me enough to make me rush out and go shopping.

This month my bar is more or less functional and the theme is cream, a theme which seems very doable. Most of the drinks that spring to mind immediately are sweet affairs involving actual cream plus ‘Crème de XXX’ type liqueurs. I’m thinking things like Brandy Alexanders, Grasshoppers, and so on. Don’t laugh about the Grasshopper. A Grasshopper can be quite nice, and it is one of the few drinks I can think of where I find a touch of vodka improves things – reducing the sweetness, smoothing out the texture, and adding a little punch. My bar is still a bit short on the ‘Crème de XXX’ family though.

Instead of doing the obvious then I decided to make a cream-including drink that I’ve been meaning to make for a long time but have never been able to because of the lack of a vital ingredient. That ingredient is orange flower water (I could never find it in Shanghai), and the drink of course is the Ramos Gin Fizz. Think of a Ramos Gin Fizz as a refreshing palette cleanser after some of the sweeter offerings this Mixology Monday.

Orange flower water is easy to find in Auckland and should not be a problem in most big cities. Try trawling the specialist food stores. I only managed to find Middle Eastern stuff while out looking on Saturday. I hear the French stuff is better, but the Middle Eastern stuff will do for now.

The Ramos Gin Fizz is an invention of 19^th Century New Orleans. It isn’t the type of drink you can just expect to roll on into a bar these days and order, and I guess that makes it just my type of thing. For a little history of the drink just check out the Gumbo Pages link below. There seem to be a bunch of different recipes floating around. I slightly modified recipes from a couple of sources, as follows:

http://www.theartofdrink.com/blog/2006/07/ramos-gin-fizz-cocktail.php

http://www.gumbopages.com/food/beverages/ramos-gin-fizz.html

Both recipes had features I liked so I ended up combining the two. My recipe was:

2 oz gin (Tanqueray)

1/2 oz lemon juice

½ oz lime juice

1 teaspoon sugar

1 egg white

2 oz cream

1 dash orange flower water

soda

Technique is everything when you are building a fluffy, creamy fizz so pay attention to the next bit.

I put the egg white, orange flower water, cream and syrup in an empty shaker and shook for a half a minute or so to get the egg frothy. Now I have seen people suggest you throw a fork or miniature whisk into the shaker while doing this to help it froth up. That sounds like it would be noisy and scratch your shaker and stuff so I didn’t bother. A better suggestion would probably be to do like Darcy at the Art of Drink and froth the mix with an immersion blender. If I had had a blender handy I’d have tried that. Although more traditional recipes doesn’t call for an initial frothing, getting the froth going before you start adding ice and generally diluting things makes sense to me. In my ‘experiments’ (OK, so I accidentally left the cream out of one drink) I found the egg frothed much better without cream. So frothing the egg, flower water and syrup, then adding cream, gin and juices, could be another possibility.

In any case, after getting some froth going I added the juices and gin, gave a quick stir to stop curdling, packed the shaker with ice, and began a long shake. I remember hearing somewhere that when making a Ramos Fizz you should shake for 20 seconds or so, tap the shaker on the counter, twist the shaker 90 degrees, shake, tap, and twist again, and so on until you have completed a full circle. Something like that anyway. I think this is supposed to help build a nice fluffy drink that pours easily out of the shaker. Who knows how well this really works? This whole routine could simply be a way to encourage people to shake the drink long enough to build a good head. I don’t see it can do much harm though, so I’m going to do it this way until I can be bothered making two drinks, one with and one without the ‘turn’, and seeing if there is any difference between them. After shaking I poured a little soda (1-2 oz) into a Collins glass (an undersized one is best since this drink has no ice), strained the drink in, and gave a gentle stir. Darcy at the Art of Drink suggests adding the drink to a soda filled glass rather than vice versa, and I think this make sense if you want a nice head. The final step is to drink the thing.

I found the drink unusual and very refreshing. It poured with a nice foamy texture and tasted almost too innocent to be a cocktail. Give this one to the neighborhood children and observe the fun! The texture is probably something I could improve on with practice, but I was still pleased with my first attempt. I don’t think there is too much to it provided you take a little care. The taste was perhaps a little too sour and with only the faintest hint of orange. Comparing the Gumbo Pages and The Art of Drink recipes, the Gumbo pages is much the sourer of the two, with less sugar and an extra ½ oz of citrus juice. I might try increasing the sugar and reducing the juice a little in future. When making this drink you will also need to play around with the quantity of orange flower water depending on its potency. With my brand (Al-Rabih from Lebanon) I figure a generous half teaspoon is called for. Finally, although the drink is called a ‘fizz’ I can’t see it turning out especially fizzy unless you dilute it with lot of soda water – surely a bad idea. I am thinking the fizz in the name indicates just enough gentle carbonation to cut the heaviness of the cream and egg white. The only way I can see of achieving more fizz than this would be if you used some kind of super carbonated soda water. Does such a thing even exist? It would be interesting to know though just how carbonated this drink it supposed to be. I have seen recipes that suggest shaking with soda water, but I would have thought you lose carbonation this way.

A friend in LA was chatting with me online as I was making the drink, waxing lyrical about Hendricks, and he distracted me enough that I finished my drink without photographing it. Never mind, his talk of Hendricks gave me the idea of making a rose flower water flavored variation of the Ramos Gin Fizz, so I decided I’d photograph that instead.

Incidentally my friend told me that he learned bartending at a school run by a guy who used to be Frank Sinatra’s bartender. The story goes that Frank Sinatra would drink Ramos Gin Fizzes on Sundays instead of his usual Jack Daniels. I guess that made the Ramos Gin Fizz an appropriate choice for my Sunday evening drink.

For the rose water flavored variation I repeated the above recipe but using Hendricks as the gin (as everyone must know Hendricks is flavored subtly with rose petals) and substituting rose water for the orange flower water. I guess this variation can be called a Rose Fizz – at least until someone comes up with a witty double entendre involving roses, dairy products, fizzy gin and cucumbers.

The rose water was from a company called English Provender and seemed stronger than the orange flower water I had just used. I only added a scant 1/4 teaspoon.

The Rose Fizz worked out well. I figure this would make a nice substitution if you like the Ramos Gin Fizz but fancy a change. I decided substituting grenadine for all or some of the sugar syrup would give the drink an attractive rosy hue so I tried making it this way on Monday morning. Hey, I had no work to do and I figured I needed to rush and make the thing before Mixology Monday began in the US. Of course after going online to post this thing I realized I was a week early. Never mind. The grenadine version tasted and looked good. I used 1 ½ teaspoons of grenadine plus 1 ½ teaspoons of simple syrup. Everything else was the same as in the recipe above.

Right now I’m also considering an almondy gin fizz with orgeat as the sweetener and a big splash of orange flower water – to stand up to the almond taste. Hmm. . . I’m not going to make this one straight away but will try it sometime.