Text 28950, 97 rader
Skriven 2012-08-30 23:22:00 av JIM WELLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Cocktail acid trip 1
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"Cocktails take an acid trip"

At first I expected to read about bizarre cocktails with wierd
ingredients invented by chemically enhanced mixologists, but it
turns out she is just talking about good old fashioned flavoured
vinegars and shrubs.

The Globe and Mail

by ALEXANDRA GILL

Rice-wine vinegar may be an essential ingredient in Japanese
cucumber salad. But can you imagine wrapping your lips around this
type of tart in a martini? Pucker up. Vinegar is the latest sour
squeeze on the cocktail scene.

"I love sunomono salad so much, I just want to drink the bowl after
I eat it," says Katie McDonald, a bartender at Veneto Tapa Lounge in
Victoria. Realizing it probably isn't appropriate to slurp salad
dressing in most restaurants, she did what any creative mixologist
would do: She added booze, and turned a favourite dish into a tangy
aperitif.

Her sunomono cocktail - shaken with vodka, shochu (a spirit
distilled from barley), honey, sugar and rice-wine vinegar - is a
refreshing example of the newly popular acetic elixirs. Mixed with
straight vinegar, shrubs (strained fruit syrups dosed with vinegar),
reduced-shrub gastriques and acid phosphates, the sour tonics offer
a bracing alternative to the same-old-same-old lemon and lime.
Cocktail culture's sourest trend is surprisingly bright, clean, and
awfully addictive.

The new acids are catching on coast to coast. In Halifax, the
Jitterbug Artisan Soda Fountain makes fresh-fruit, herb and spice
sodas with homemade syrups and old-fashioned phosphates (a soda
fountain staple and early ingredient in Coca-Cola). Yes, the drinks
do taste of vinegar, but not enough to make you wince. When poured
sparingly, the vinegar works like any other acid to perk up the
tastebuds, harmonize other flavours and smooth alcohol's harsh
edges.

"We're just taking what we know works in the kitchen, and seeing if
it makes sense with drinks," says Ms. McDonald, who also adds a dash
of balsamic vinegar to balance her strawberry daiquiris.

Trendy though vinegars may now be, drinking them actually dates back
to at least 400 BC, when Hippocrates (the original soda jerk, and
father of modern medicine) prescribed apple-cider vinegar mixed with
water and honey to cure coughs, colds and pleurisy.

In 17th-century England, vinegar was commonly used to preserve
berries and fruits for the off-season in what were known as shrubs.
The tradition crossed the pond to colonial North America, where the
bracing sweet-and-sour syrups were mixed with water and spirits for
thirst-quenching beverages. Shrubs fell out of favour with the
advent of home refrigeration. But thanks to experimental craft
bartenders striving to rediscover and reinvent the historical tricks
of the trade, vinegar cocktails are cool again. It's kind of like
canning for hipster drinkers.

Says Shaun Layton, head bartender at Vancouver's L'Abattoir rest-
aurant. "Shrubs add another layer of flavour to spirits that are not
as simple as your usual citrus."

Indeed, Mr. Layton's peach-shrub cocktail mixed with apricot beer
and smoky mezcal tequila in a tall glass of crushed ice rimmed with
salt is intriguingly complex and remarkably thirst-quenching.

We might trace the renaissance of drinking vinegar to Portland,
Ore., where Andy Ricker's mini-empire of Pok Pok Thai restaurants
introduced shrub-style sodas and cocktails to mainstream imbibers in
2005.

The Pok Pok Som apple drinking vinegar is the strongest of the
tinctures, it really does taste like sweetened apple-cider vinegar.
That didn't stop me from going through a whole bottle in a week. It
just needs to be diluted with plenty of soda and/or gin to prevent a
puckering finish.

At Vancouver's Union Bar, I found the Thai-basil and tamarind-guava
dilutions much smoother. Served alongside bottles of lemongrass
scented soda water, the house-made drinking vinegars hit the spot on
a hot summer night.




Cheers

YK Jim


... Ignoring sour is as bad as a painter eschewing a primary color.

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