Gin & Tonic

Most people can relate to the challenges of balancing work life, social life, personal projects, and love life; especially when you add a hint of house chores and garnish it with a healthy diet and exercise. I generally do a good job of being on top of these things, minus the healthy diet and exercise part; I’m one of those scrawny guys that could sit on a couch all day eating potato chips and never gain a pound. That said, if I were a trapeze artist, I would have spent most of the past two months in the safety net with how awful my balance has been.

Angie and I wanted to take advantage of the snowy tundra of Iowa and re-create the Two Turtle Doves from our Big, Beautiful Book. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get the liquor we needed, and our dear friends with connections out of state couldn’t even pull the strings in our favor. Anxious to get some sort of ball rolling, Angie, my sister, and I took a day trip to Dubuque. There, we found a few items for the list of cocktails we were hoping to pull off in the next couple months, and some Five Guys Burgers and Holy Crap that’s a lot of Fries. While we were able to check off a lot of items on our laundry list, we weren’t able to find the items we needed to complete a whole recipe with the exception of Junipero Gin. So, with the winter season soon making its exit, we decided to change  trajectory and resolved ourselves to find a cool straw online. Enter: Gin & Tonic.

It wasn’t long before we found a straw that satisfied our vision. We were getting pretty excited for this round because it involves three techniques we’ve never used before. 1) Utilizing calcium lactate and sodium alginate for a process called reverse spherification. Simply put, we have to create our own, homemade boba bubbles. 2) Carbonating our own cocktail. 3) Using citric acid. I was thrilled for the process on this one.

We had been debating on which carbonation system we should use for this project. The Aviary Cocktail Book recommends two systems: one is Fizzini (basically, a knockoff SodaStream), and the other is Perlini. We used to have a SodaStream, but we were acutely aware that SodaStream did not handle carbonating anything but water (with some additional flavorings) very well. If the Fizzini was anything like this, we knew we would get mediocre results. On the other end, we’ve seen the Perlini in action at Hodge’s Bend in St. Paul and we loved the idea of purchasing one. When we saw the price tag for a home kit, though, we knew it wouldn’t be a very budget savvy option.

That’s when Angie saw a post on Instagram that ended up leading to an awesome connection.

She reached out to the gentleman who runs this Instagram account, who is coincidentally also making cocktails out of the Aviary Cocktail Book. To keep a long story and wonderful conversation short, Robert had confirmed our hesitation in using a carbonation system like SodaStream or Fizzini and recommended that we use a soda siphon instead. Having newfound information, we found a very affordable soda siphon to continue our journey with.

The excitement of making headway on the Gin & Tonic was quickly restrained by Valentine’s week, at least for me. Anyone in the restaurant industry, particularly fine dining, knows that it’s always a storm of crazy. This year Valentine’s day was particularly busy and challenging for one major reason: it landed on a Thursday. That means we were booked Thursday, and anyone who couldn’t get in on V-day itself booked us up for Friday and Saturday. This was absolutely great for the restaurant, but it meant I gave up sleep, lunch, and sanity for about two weeks. As a result, Angie had to take the reigns as my time became consumed by the restaurant. She valiantly charged forth on her own quest like an RPG player for exp. & loot while I temporarily left the party and afk’ed at the local guild.

Before Angie followed the direct instructions of our Big, Beautiful Book, she tried a few experiments from a  molecular mixology kit that had been gifted to us. She tried spherification, reverse spherification, and frozen reverse spherification. Unfortunately, all three of her experiments were a complete bust. There are a number of possible reasons, but for the sake of brevity, it just wasn’t working out.

With the rush of Valentine’s day finally over, I jumped back on my tightrope, hoping to rebalance myself. To my absolute shock, somehow it was already March. Now, instead of a busy work life, I had to concentrate on my family life. My older sister, mom, aunt, one little sister, grandma, and dad all have birthdays in March. If you were wondering, yes, when I was little I thought I was adopted due to my lonely July birthday. Child logic 10/10.

Getting back into the swing of life, Angie and I had converted from excited to desperate to get another post done. On my days off I caught up our house chores, physical recovery, and our cocktail project. We ordered more calcium lactate and sodium alginate, a masticating juicer, a soda siphon, distilled water, and citric acid. It was time to make this thing happen. Spring break was coming up and we were going to leave town to visit our families for about five days, and we wanted to accomplish this project before that day. I tested my juicer and made some yummy juice, then I got the cucumbers and prepared for battle.

Juicing the cucumbers was easy. You mix the cucumber juice with some, what Allen Hemberger fondly refers to as, “Sciency White Powders.” The process of freezing it all into tiny balls using the ice mold we had available was time consuming, being that we only had one mold to work with.

Fast forward one week and we had our frozen cucumber balls ready for science. Prepping the alginate bath required just a little more attention. We have a single serving blender so I had to split the recipe into thirds to finish the full bath. I made everything we needed in the morning so that we could make the cocktail in the evening after I got off work. It was Friday night, I had work for the next two days, and we were leaving for Spring break on Sunday morning. The pressure was on.

We prepared the first round of boba spheres and, filled with concern from the previous failures, watched as the little balls of frozen cucumber juice sank into the bath. After about 15 seconds, we started to use a slotted spoon to check if the ball had melted and remained a bubble. I could feel the excitement building in my chest as we realized that the spheres held shape! However, they had weird, stringy tails that made them resemble tiny cucumber tadpoles. We were able to salvage most of them, and our spheres got better the more we made. It was extremely time consuming to make these bubbles and maintain their circular form. Looking back at the book, we noticed a comment that says, “This drink has never actually appeared on our menu: the labor involved in producing the number of spheres necessary for a full night of service is prohibitively high for us.” Needless to say, we agree with the findings found in our personal sciencing and fully concur with the results in this case-study. If you don’t believe us, try it yourself! At least it’s easier than proving thousands of scientists wrong about global…. Nevermind.

With our bubbles made, we were ready to begin batching our cocktail when we realized we had forgotten to buy Green Chartreuse and measure our citric acid. Whoops. Our scale at home is a standard, cheap, home-use scale, and so it can’t weigh in small enough increments to accurately measure the citric acid we needed. We decided to put the project away for the moment. Trudging forward, we journeyed to the restaurant to use the restaurant-grade scale and buy a bottle of Green Chartreuse. By the time we made it home, it was getting late and we decided to store the bubbles in a container for the next day.

It was Saturday night, I got home very late, and we were down to the wire to finish our Gin & Tonic. Using Robert’s carbonation method, we ran a few trial runs by carbonating water. I goofed my first two attempts to make carbonated water and realized I left an important rubber piece out of the siphon, which resulted in burning two CO2 canisters in a row. Whoops again. The third try worked like a charm.

Once we had figured out how to use the soda siphon, we prepped a double batch of the recipe in our soda siphon, chilled our glass, and retrieved the jar of bubbles from the fridge. We were intrigued with how cool the bubbles looked; cucumber sediment had settled to the bottom of each of the bubbles, so they were half-clear and half deep-green. It was super cool.

At 4am Saturday night/Sunday morning, the moment of truth was upon us, I slowly poured our Gin & Tonic over the bubbles as Angie snapped shots. The carbonation level was fantastic, absolutely perfect, and we popped our cool new straw into the glass. The cocktail looked cloudier than pictured in the book, but we were feeling accomplished. I was getting excited to try it, impatiently waiting for Angie to find some good shots. At last, we completed our cocktail and took a sip. This is when the project went sour. Literally.

First, the bubbles wouldn’t fit through the straw. Then the real problem became apparent…. When we realized Angie “Angie’d” again, she exclaimed “Mother Pucker!” It was then that she explained what had happened. Rewind to when we went to the restaurant to measure the citric acid since our home scale couldn’t do the job. Apparently, our restaurant scale didn’t measure in grams, and so Angie made some conversions. This is the part when she told me that she was not to be trusted with math. It turns out, her individually portioned packets of citric acid contain about 10 times as much citric acid as the amount needed for our recipe… This Gin & Tonic was a citric kick in the face.

Depicted above is the amount of citric acid Angie measured on the left for the initial attempt vs the amount of citric acid we actually needed on the right. After some laughter and poking of fun, I was still very proud of us for the progress we made. Unfortunately, we didn’t want to make our post until we actually made the Gin & Tonic properly. With it getting so late, and us planning a long drive to our families in the morning, we decided to pack up and call it a night. Besides, we already used up all of our bubbles and didn’t have a good scale to measure the citric acid again. By the time our heads hit the pillow, it was coming up on 5am. We were toast.

As soon as we made it back into town, we jumped right back into the Gin & Tonic. While we were away from home, we decided to order a small, special scale specifically designed for tiny measurements.  Once it arrived, we re-measured the citric acid. The difference in size was laughable.

We had used up all of the bubbles in our first attempt. In order to make attempt number 2, we restarted the process… Our second batch of cucumber spheres were perfect. Almost no tails, and we produced them much more quickly. The key to getting better, more circular spheres is to consistently agitate the sodium alginate bath. If you have a hard time remembering this, just think the following: Sodium agitate. You’re welcome.

We prepared our cocktail batch again for our do-over, minus about 12 grams of citric acid per serving. Photo ready, we poured and voilà! We completed our 8th Aviary cocktail, the Gin & Tonic. This round didn’t kick us in the face. Both of us love gin, but neither of us really care for tonic. This gin & tonic is beautifully balanced, and is easily the best gin & tonic I’ve had yet, but still has that odd, metallic flavor that I get from the Tonic water. Not my cup of cocktail, but certainly not bad.

Spring made its grand entrance early this year, and we knew we missed our chance to make the Two Turtle Doves. That will go on the docket for next winter. Luckily, we have managed to acquire everything we need to tackle 3 more cocktails, so be ready for a busy April on the Aviary Cocktail Project!