Mixing a cocktail is no minor undertaking for a new breed of bartenders — it’s a matter of science.
In kitchens and bars across North America, bartenders, or ”molecular mixologists,” are tinkering with liquid nitrogen, syringes and sodium chloride to make drinks while shunning powdered mixes and commercially flavoured alcohol.
”It’s about bringing bartending back to what it used to be, where you created everything yourself,” said Brock Shepherd, a Toronto mixologist.
Molecular mixologists follow in the footsteps of molecular gastronomy, a type of cooking pioneered by French scientist Herve This, where instruments and techniques from the lab are brought into the kitchen.
It also relies heavily on tools and techniques that have been used in the kitchen for decades.
”Mixologists have a good strong bond to the kitchen, which is super important,” said Yvan Lemoine, a New York mixologist who trained as a pastry chef.
Lemoine equates the work and care of this type of bartending to that of a high-end restaurant.
”A good kitchen will not buy cookies for their ice cream plate, they will make the cookies,” he said.
At Shepherd’s small restaurant, Rice Bar, in Toronto, cloudy jars, beakers, jugs and bottles line the back wall.
One holds square chunks of dehydrated pineapple in a brownish, yellow liquid — Soju (a Korean alcohol) infused with pineapple.
A mason jar holds a rust-colored liquid — bitters infused with anise, gentian root, cloves, dried orange peel.
Another bottle features floating white bits, which retreat after a gentle shaking and give way to a reddish chunk. That, Shepherd smiles, is his bacon-infused vodka.
But when does the cocktail stop becoming a drink and start becoming an appetizer or dessert?
Under the headline ”Edible Cocktails/AKA Boozy dessert” on his new menu, Shepherd has remade the traditional slushy tequila-based margarita into a sweet ending to a meal.
He forms an egg by surrounding orange vanilla tequila with a lime sorbet then encasing it in a shell of white chocolate.
Mixologists use things like calcium chloride to create a microfilm around drops of juice, liquid nitrogen to freeze liquids quickly and syringes to inject alcohol into the centre of, say, Shepherd’s Margarita Egg.
Ice cubes, for example, can be made with fruit juice that suspends an alcohol bubble so as the ice melts, the bubbles refresh your drink, said Brian Van Flandern, a New York-based bartender who runs a cocktail consulting firm.
But trying to elevate bartending to the same status as the kitchen is difficult.
”Even though the bar generates the most money for the restaurant, they normally have the fewest staff,” said Lemoine. ”When you actually take a step in this direction, you will lose money. It’s a lot cheaper to buy a soda than make your own.” – Reuters