Drink
They Blinded me with Science: A report from Tales of the Cocktail
By Christine Sismondo
High school is a pretty hazy memory for me, I’ll admit. But I seem to recall there being a poster which I idly looked at while waiting in the guidance counsellor’s office. It had a picture of a girl with a bike on it and text something along these lines:
Dropping Science? Then kiss these 72 careers goodbye: Engineering, Aviation, Environmental Researcher?
And so on and so on.
I scanned the list, right before I dropped science. None of those options seemed like much of a loss. And, while I wouldn’t swear to this in a court of law, I really don’t think bartending was on that list. That would have given me pause for thought. Quite possibly, it would have sent me slinking back to Mr. McNamara’s chemistry class.
Turns out, it should have been there though, at least judging by what went on at New Orleans’ Tales of the Cocktail this year.
For the uninitiated, Tales of the Cocktail, in its sixth year, has grown from a small one-day seminar celebrating the cocktails birthed in New Orleans into one of the most important liquor-industry events in the world. (Some say the most important.) And this year it was bigger than ever - with 1,200 industry professionals assembled. This year they also blinded me with science.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I’m a little stuck in the past, I suppose. I’m stuck on vinyl and a time when cocktail making was still called an "art." It’s Jim Meehan, bar manager at New York’s PDT (Please Don’t Tell) who nudges me out of my nostalgia when I submit the old chestnut of an idea that "cooking is an art; baking is science," comparing cocktails to cooking.
"But cocktails are baking," says Meehan. "I spend my time working with precise formulas and varying quantities by miniscule amounts to perfect a recipe."
Meehan isn’t alone. This year, he’s joined by people who have spent months adjusting formulas to present one seminar’s drinks.
Jamie Boudreau and Eben Freeman, for example. Boudreau is a Seattle mixologist (formerly from Vancouver); Freeman, a New York legend. Combined, we have two of America’s foremost leaders in molecular mixology.
Boudreau takes centre stage in New Orleans with some of the basics of the trade: eggs (which have really been used in proper fizzes and flips for a hundred years), foams, fat-washing and hydrocolloids.
Now, depending on your orientation, I either piqued your interest or lost you completely with those last three. We’ll cover them one at a time - and slowly.
Foams are fairly simple, actually. Brock Shepherd of Toronto’s Rice Bar in Kensington Market got me interested in them a year or so ago when he served me a first-rate cocktail topped with a citrus foam. I’ll take citrus in almost any form. His was made with simple, fresh-squeezed lime bar mix and a little soy lecithin. Shepherd then shakes it up in an iSi siphon and, with a little help from a CO2 cartridge, transforms it into a substance resembling (but not tasting like) whipped cream. It was lovely and I’ve been making drinks inspired by Shepherd ever since.
But let's get back to Boudreau who’s now on to fat-washing. Sounds bizarre, I know, but it’s essentially a standard infusion, with a twist. Normal, boring folks infuse liquor with fruit. Boudreau- Bacon. The technique is actually dead easy, he explains. Simply add the rendered fat from your morning bacon to alcohol. Next, refrigerate. Wait a day and scrape the fat off. Voila - your spirit is infused with smoky bacony goodness.
Bourbon and pork - together at last.
Boudreau points out that you can use any fat. He recommends foie gras. Freeman has used brown butter. I’m thinking a gin-orange-duck confit, personally.
On to hydrocolloids. This is a little more complicated but, to boil it down, all they’re really doing is working to make alcohol into sherbets (which is tough since alcohol doesn’t freeze at conventional freezer temperatures) and also into "caviar" - little bubbles of alcohol in fish egg-form.
Both of these tricks can be tried at home with additives like agar agar and xanthan gum, or, for those who want to go full-bore, sodium alginate can be added to a liquid. To make "caviar" from there, squeeze small blobs of the liquid via a squeeze bottle, turkey baster or syringe into a calcium chloride bath.
The problem with all of these techniques is that they take a lot of time and experimentation to get down. Too much sodium alginate, for example, tastes awful and produces a bizarre texture. Too little and the balls won’t hold.
Want to play around with liquids with acidity? Well, that’s another chemical altogether. As you chart your progress on an Excel sheet trying to determine the perfect proportion of agar agar to various liquors with differing alcohol per volume, you begin to realize that the scientific method is, in fact, alive and well behind the bar. Hypothesis. Experimentation. Observation. And then back to the drawing board.
The really wonderful thing about Boudreau’s casual and straightforward explanations, though, is that he manages to demystify some of the more complicated sounding aspects. Don’t have sodium alginate and calcium chloride handy? He’ll show you a simpler way to do most of the things he does with basic ingredients you’re likely to find in your pantry.
We try some of his and Freeman’s concoctions too, of course. There’s a Ramos Marshmallow being passed around. I’m going to have to admit here, though, that I’d much rather drink a proper Ramos Gin Fizz.
I’m sure it’s just because I dropped that chemistry class but there’s a part of me that will just never warm to some of this molecular mixology stuff (with the exception of citrus foam, of course). Sure, it’s real neat-o and has spectacular shock value but, frankly, won’t somebody just get me a good, stiff drink? In regular liquid form?
Now, believe it or not, the science did not end there. Other seminars included "The Scented Trail: Techniques on How to Develop Aroma in Your Cocktails", "Making Your Own Spirits: A Look into Modern Nano-Distilling", "Making your own Cocktail Ingredients" and "Cracking the Egg: The Challenges and Potential of Eggs in Cocktails".
We can only imagine the scientific debate which would rage between the health board and mixologists should we try cooking up cocktails, en masse, with raw eggs in Toronto. Not to mention if I tried a little home nano-distillation. As it stands, my neighbours call the cops on me when I get the absinthe out for my pals on a cool summer evening. I’m afraid to think of what would happen if I had moonshine.
Were I to attempt it though, I would surely seek the advice of fellow Canadian, Darcy O’Neil, a chemist from Sarnia, who wowed the crowds with his pocketful of PROP (more on that in a second) at this year’s Tales.
O’Neil led the seminar, "Sensory Perception: What Your Taste Buds are Telling You" and explained the science of tasting to a packed room. At the end, everybody got to try a PROP strip and determine whether or not they were tasters, supertasters, or, as Gremolata editor Malcolm Jolley likes to put it, "retarded tasters." The PROP strip is a piece of chemical-soaked paper you put on your tongue. If you don’t taste anything, count yourself among the roughly quarter of the population whose tastebuds are retarded. Another quarter will be disgusted by an awful bitter taste; the remaining half or so will find the taste merely unpleasant.
I was pretty sure I was going to be in the retarded group, since I drink black coffee, enjoy Cynar and Campari and have a deep and passionate love for nearly all the bitter green vegetables. But as a handful of people go into near convulsions at the bitterness on their tongues, I realize I’m nothing special. Not a non-taster, not a super-taster. At no point, did I feel the need to plunge my tongue into the nearest toilet to remove the taste. I’m just a regular taster.
But why this obsessive need to identify myself as something other than a regular taster? It’s just science, after all, I was born with a certain number of taste buds and I’ll die with them (well, most of them, anyway). I guess it’s always hard coming to grips with the cold hard truth that we’re not so special and unique as our parents and kindergarten teachers led us to believe.
In the end, we lumpen proletariat tasters should comfort ourselves with the thought that it’s good to be normal. As O’Neil points out, being a super-taster or a non-taster puts you out of whack with the rest of the populace. You’re liable to make drinks too bitter or too sour for other people’s tastes.
It’s at this point that culture makes a comeback. Somebody in the audience asks the question I’ve been dying to (if I could only get that bitter taste out of my mouth), namely: "What about culture?"
O’Neil immediately concedes that culture plays a major role, along with a host of other factors like social mores and mood. He is making, in fact, a far less deterministic case for our tastebuds than I have heard in the past. This, I suppose, is a good thing, since it answers some nagging questions I’ve had, like: "If it’s all so pre-determined, how come some regions (America, for one) are full of people with sweeter palates?" Or: "How come some countries (like America, for one) have such high sugar consumption?"
On the other hand, though, all these mitigating social factors are giving me doubts. If science isn’t giving us all our cocktail answers, then why is it dominating this conference and, indeed, the entire cocktail field at present? Why the obsession with science? Why is everyone here dressed like Bill Nye the science guy?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I mean, a little more understanding of the basics can’t hurt. In fact, it’s sure to help. But in the rush to adopt the science of the cocktail, let’s not forget that the science of wine is at least partially responsible for the destruction of terroir. And science in food is at least partially responsible for having destroyed, well, taste.
You see, I read my Mary Shelley in school. And speaking of reading, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that cocktails are also about stories. Like the ones about how Hemingway drank that (and this, and that, and just about everything else) and what Dylan Thomas was drinking right before he died and whether or not the Margarita was really invented for Rita Hayworth. Because that stuff is worthwhile, too.
So, my advice to all the budding bartenders languishing away in high school wondering whether or not to drop science is this: Play it safe. Stick with the chemistry class as long as you possibly can. But don’t neglect the arts, either. A really well-rounded cocktail person has both.
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