I thought that it might be interesting to blog the development of one of my cocktails – Spring Molecule. This rather long post will hopefully provide an insight into some of the thoughts and considerations (or lack of) that go into shaping a tasty beverage.

2005

The Spring Molecule started out life as a twist on a Moscow Mule:

Moscow Mule

Glass: Highball (Traditionally a copper mug)

Garnish: Mint Sprig

• 50ml Smirnoff Red Vodka
• 25ml Lime Juice
• 12.5ml Gomme
• Dash of Bitters
• Top up with ginger Beer

Build the drink in the glass and serve with plenty of ice.

I wanted to add some fruit to the drink for a summery twist so I consulted the chefs at my place of work (Blue Tomato Cafe) and they suggested strawberries. It seemed like a good idea since the strawberries would provide a nice colour to the drink, this could be one for the ladeez!

So I remade the Moscow Mule, but first muddled a few strawberries in the base of the glass. With the mashed fruit now part of the drink it meant that I had more texture and body in the glass, but equally there were lumps in there too that easily clogged up the straw. I also found that I had to adjust the sweetness according to the ripeness of the fruit, strawberries can often be very acidic, usually I would counter this by dropping the quantity of lime in there, rather than upping the sugar.

2006

I had made a Strawberry Mule, cool. But not really that cool – I was hardly covering new territory. So I went back to the chefs and asked them what else I could incorporate in to the drink that works well with strawberries and of course the ginger spice provided by the ginger beer. They suggested a number of things including cream, mint and other berries, but nothing really caught my attention.

2007

So the drink went on the back burner for a little while and during that time I entered the South West Cocktail Competition. I won the competition in the final round by making up a drink on the spot which had to fit a set criteria – In short the pitch was to make a drink that would be served to a nun who had just fled a convent, then turned up at your bar asking for her first ever alcoholic drink… weird, I know.

Anyway, I decided to piece together a drink that represented the seven deadly sins. Each ingredient matched one of the sins and I explained them as I went. It seemed like a cool idea to give a nun a taste of all that is sinful in the world! So I started putting my Strawberry Mule recipe together, strawberries were red for lust, vodka represented Russian pride, the sugar was gluttony, and so on. Then I got around to the envy, and grabbed a handful of basil, just because it was green. The basil got muddled with the strawberries and I said a little prayer in my head, hoping that the drink would turn out well.

Well it did, and from that moment on the Strawberry Mule was known as the Strawberry & Basil Mule. The drink was quite cool in that every sip gave the drinker a different flavour depending on where the basil or strawberries sat in the glass. Sometime you might get a huge peppery basil hit and other times it would be a mellow strawberry flavour.

During my time at Fifteen, the SBM spent all of the Summer months (whilst strawberries were in season) on the cocktail list. We adapted the recipe slightly, by muddling the fruit and herbs in the glass part of a boston shaker, shaking the drink and then straining all of the bits out. This retained the body of the liquid, but kept the gunk out of the glass. It was a nuisance of a drink to make, mainly because the basil blocked the plug hole, but also because it was so popular that they were ordered very often. I also started using Luscombe Organic Ginger Beer in it, which is by far and away the best ginger beer I have ever tasted, this added an even more natural flavour and a touch more spice. I also started serving the drink in a nice long sling glass, it was sexy enough to spend a long time on the Fifteen website.

I left Fifteen a year ago and it’s still on the cocktail menu.

2008

Developing drinks without a bar to play on is not easy and it’s fair to say that I have mixed very few original creations over the last 12 months. More recently however, I have started to play around with Molecular Mixology, this has opened up a few new paths, which are easily accomplishable even in the home kitchen.

Over the next few weeks I will be spending a few evenings in Sketch, a well renowned London cocktail bar. In my Smirnoff Black ambassador role I’ll be demonstrating how to mix classic vodka cocktails and also showing off a few advanced drinks. When working on the presentation one of my first thoughts was to incorporate the SBM into the set. The only problem being that it’s a little too advanced for your average drinker to tackle, but too simple a drink to really wow a crowd. So I set about developing it.

2009

The most important thing here was to tread lightly, the balance of fruit, herb, alcohol, spice was a reliable formula, it needed very little tweaking in the flavour department. Adding additional flavours was also not really an option either, simple is often better and the competition between basil, strawberry, ginger, citrus and vodka was busy enough already.

My attention was then drawn to the serve.

As I mentioned in my caviar post, Molecular Mixology usually ticks one of two boxes: irreversibly combining unusual flavours -or- serving a drink in an unconventional state-of-matter. I thought back to the times when we used to serve all of the fruit and herbs in the glass, and how novel it had been to experience a different flavour every time you take a sip. It then occurred to me that perhaps the basil part of the drink could be introduced in the form of a fruit caviar, rather than just a continuous, ever-present flavour. Even with the shaker muddled version of the drink, sometimes tiny pieces of basil would make their way though, on the palate they gave a great punch of herbage that, for a second, overshadowed the strawberry and ginger. But what if upon taking every sip the drinker could determine the level of basil pungency, by eye, through sipping up caviar?

And so a new I idea was born. A drink based upon the mule that would be served in a Champagne flute. It would contain all of the essence of the SBM, but put together in a slightly different way. I got an idea from Tom Aske (London Ambassador), of creating a lava lamp effect. By making the liquid part of the drink more fizzy I could achieve a ‘peanut-in-a-pint-glass’ effect on the caviar, causing it to rise up and down the glass.

Basil Caviar

The first step was to see if it was actually possible to make basil caviar. Caviarising something that is already in liquid form is easy enough,  the highest hurdle being the successful transfer of all of the flavour into the caviar itself. But how to extract all that delicious basil pepper and sweetness into a liquid? Colour was also a concern, I didn’t want blended basil to turn brown, so steps needed to be taken to retain the natural bright green vibrancy.

Google brings up this link at the top of the the page on a ‘basil caviar’ search. The caviar certainly looks great, but the method doesn’t, in my mind, retain enough of the herbs natural freshness. I tried out the method and ended up with a liquid that was grassy, stewed and altogether a bit unpleasant. Funnily enough though, whilst returning to the fridge with my bag of basil I spotted an old jar of pesto sat in the corner. My wife is a huge pesto fan and it crossed my mind that pesto producers do a pretty good job of retaining basil freshness in their product.

Back to Google and I found plenty of recipes for making pesto, which of course consists of basil, pine nuts, olive oil, cheese and seasoning. The recipes simply call for blending all of the ingredients together into  nice paste. Obviously I didn’t want most of those ingredients present in my caviar, which left me pretty much with the basil on its own! I then remembered watching a recent episode of Grow Your Own Drugs on BBC2. The host more often than not uses vodka to draw out the medicinal components of herbs.

As I poured the vodka into the blender the irony was not lost on me – I was using vodka, the original starting point of this drink, to draw out basil flavours, to make basil caviar for my vodka cocktail!

I then sweetened (to bring out more flavour) and strained the resulting liquid and I was left with a very powerful basil flavoured, bright green liquid.

Liquid

The next step was to make the rest of the drink taste as delicious as possible. It was essential that the cocktail contained adequate fizz in order for the lava lamp effect to work, or the caviar would simply sit at the bottom of the glass. Just as importantly, I needed to balance the other flavours.

Essentially I stuck to a Strawberry Mule recipe… with a few tweaks. Instead of adding extra ginger for fizz I used half ginger, half soda, this of course watered down the flavours, but it did provide me with the required effervescence. With a slight drop in punchiness I also added 7ml balsamic vinegar, this might sound bizarre, but balsamic glaze is quite a common accompaniment to strawberries, I found that it lifted both the sweetness and acidity of the drink in addition to giving a slightly richer finish.

All that was left was to name the cocktail. The word molecule jumped into my head and it seemed to work, being a pun on ‘mule’. Then I thought about the fresh flavours and the effect that the basil had on the drink and spring seemed to work too! The Spring Molecule was born:-

Spring Molecule

Glass: Flute

Base Drink

• 50ml Smirnoff Black Vodka
• 35ml Strawberry Puree
• 7ml Balsamic Vinegar
• 15ml Lime Juice
• 10ml Gomme
• 50ml Soda
• 35ml Organic Ginger Beer

Caviar (Makes a lot!)

• 50ml Vodka
• Large handful basil
• 50ml Water
• 4g Sodium Alginate
• 6g Sodium Calcinate

First make the caviar following the guidelines here. Allow to sit in the calcium bath for at least 3mins, which should give enough time to put together the rest of the drink.

For the base drink you need to shake all of the ingredients except the soda and ginger beer with plenty of ice. Fine strain into an ice cold champagne flute. Make sure that both your soda and ginger beer are very fizzy, if your final drink is too flat the caviar will just sit at the bottom of the glass. It’s also worth mentioning that the shape of your champagne flute can have an effect on how successfully your caviar migrates. Tall and narrow seems to work best.

So there you have it. By no means a perfect cocktail, but an interesting path to what I believe to be a very good cocktail. I’m still tinkering, toying with the idea of using Champagne in place of soda, but not convinced that it will add more to the drink than it will take away.

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