IT WOULD be lovely to have access to chromatography,” Spike Marchant tells me wistfully. As a science journalist, it’s the kind of remark I expect to hear from the people I interview. But Marchant isn’t a scientist, he’s a bartender.
A very special breed of bartender, mind you. What , and others have done for food, Marchant and his colleagues are aiming to do for booze. “We’re not scientists but we use the ideas of scientists,” says Tony Conigliaro, the creative force behind , a cosy cocktail bar in north London where I have come to learn about, and taste, the future of cocktails.
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Their quest is a logical extension of the molecular gastronomy movement. Over the past couple of decades, leading chefs and pioneering scientists such as Hervé This have been thinking differently about food and cooking. Just because certain dishes have always been made in a certain way, does that make it the right way? Can science explain, or even improve on, culinary tradition? Thus was born a revolution of mouth-watering tastes and techniques.
That way of thinking is now being applied to mixology, the art of making cocktails. “People are thinking about cocktails in a more experimental and exploratory way,” says food and science writer . “It’s about tools and ingredients that have not been used in cocktail-making before.” Not surprisingly, the term “molecular mixology” is bandied about, though mixologists themselves don’t seem to like it.
I am led upstairs to Conigliaro’s laboratory – a cramped, low-ceilinged cross between a kitchen and a chemistry lab, stuffed with shiny bits of kit. The first thing he shows me is a temperature-controlled water bath. It would not look out of place on a lab bench, but is actually a piece of kitchen equipment designed for a technique called sous-vide (French for “under vacuum”). In sous-vide cooking, food is sealed in a vacuum bag and gently cooked for hours or even days at low temperatures, typically 70 °C or less. Chefs say it preserves the delicate flavour molecules that are lost at higher temperatures or through typical extended cooking.
Conigliaro uses his to make rhubarb-infused gin. “I discovered that if you cook the fruit in alcohol under vacuum at precisely 52 °C, you get a cleaner, brighter, more accurate flavour,” he says. “It’s also much better than marination. If you just dunk the rhubarb in, the fruit falls apart.” Conigliaro has used this technique to infuse clean flavours into all kinds of spirits – raspberries into tequila, rose petals into vodka, blackcurrants into gin.
As I’m quickly discovering, molecular mixologists are obsessed with flavour. “Cocktails are simpler than food; they’re essentially all flavour,” says McGee. That explains the heavy use of another of molecular gastronomy’s magic ingredients: food-grade essences.
These super-concentrated extracts can be used in minute quantities to add unexpected flavours to drinks. Conigliaro tells me that he is experimenting with the champagne cocktail (usually made by pouring bubbly over a sugar cube soaked in bitters) by ditching the bitters and pipetting a few microlitres of an essence onto the cube instead. The aroma is delivered straight to your taste buds inside the bubbles.
Food-grade essences can add very strange flavours indeed. Conigliaro pulls a small brown glass bottle from the shelf and opens it for me, releasing a beautiful, intense smell of leather. He uses this, along with essence of tobacco, in a version of the Old Fashioned (sugar cube, bitters, bourbon, splash of soda water, orange slice, lemon twist, two maraschino cherries). The idea is to create the aura of a gentlemen’s club.
Among the techniques at Conigliaro’s disposal, vacuums loom large. He tells me about one of his latest creations, the Somerset sour (apple brandy, lemon juice, sugar, egg white, cider), inspired by the smells of early autumn. The cocktail includes a little treat: a miniature bobbing apple, made by melon-balling a particularly crisp variety, the pink lady. Conigliaro gives me one to eat; it is crunchy and intensely appley but also tastes of something that I can’t put my finger on. “It’s hay,” he finally tells me.
“Mixologists are full of surprises. My drink includes a miniature bobbing apple that tastes of hay”
The apple balls have been infused with essence of freshly mown hay using a technique called reverse vacuuming. Conigliaro shows me how it’s done. First he puts apple balls and a few drops of the essence into a vacuum chamber and gradually withdraws the air. This sucks the juice out of the apple to mingle with the essence. Then he releases the vacuum, forcing the hay-flavoured apple juice back in. The technique is invaluable for adding unexpected flavours. “We’ve made pineapples taste of ginger, apples taste of pineapple, cherries taste of orange,” says Marchant.
The finished Somerset sour also contains a surprise that Conigliaro calls a hay egg. This borrows from a technique invented by Adrià, and deployed at his legendary El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia. To make a hay egg, you freeze a small sphere of highly flavoured liquid then dip it in gelatin. As the gelatin sets, the liquid melts, creating a delicate package of flavour that explodes the moment it hits your mouth. This technique is also at the heart of Conigliaro’s most technically complex cocktail creation to date, his take on the prairie oyster.
Hangover ahead
The traditional prairie oyster (raw egg, yolk unbroken, plus tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce and salt) was created as a hangover cure. Conigliaro’s features vodka and an El Bulli-style egg of tomato juice. This is first clarified by mixing it with gelatin, freezing it and thawing it again (the gelatin traps the pigments but lets the flavour molecules leach out), then dyed yellow. The tomato-flavoured “yolk” is floated in a cocktail of vodka, spices, celery salt and Tabasco, topped with a Worcestershire sauce foam and served in an oyster shell. “It’s designed to be slurped,” he says. “The yolk pops in your mouth, but instead of egg you get a surprising burst of tomato.”
I’m getting used to the idea of surprises. That is a big part of what mixologists do: take expectation and turn it on its head. “We update and modify old recipes,” says Conigliaro. “We like to do classic drinks, but push them to see where they’re going.”
That brings us to another classic: the dry martini (55 millilitres gin, 15 millilitres dry vermouth, garnished with a green olive or a lemon twist). This is a palette-cleansing pre-dinner drink that works because the dryness of the gin stimulates the production of saliva.
“I wanted to create the driest possible martini,” says Conigliaro. Molecular gastronomists knew that plant compounds called tannins – found in tea, red wine and unripe fruits – have a natural mouth-drying effect, because they react with proteins in your saliva and reduce its lubrication qualities. “I wanted to use that,” Conigliaro says.
The answer he settled on was grape seeds, which are extremely high in tannins. Using another piece of vacuum-based equipment called a rotary evaporator – typically used to gently remove volatile solvents from a sample by heating them under a partial vacuum – he extracted 25 millilitres of almost pure tannins from a kilogram of macerated grape seeds.
With such a mouth-puckering elixir, 25 millilitres goes a long way. To make superdry martinis, Conigliaro pipettes 150 microlitres of this “dry essence” into a bottle of vermouth. When mixed into a martini, it has a strange effect on the mouth. “It’s a very drying effect, but not so dry that it’s offensive,” says Conigliaro. Anything but: the tannins cause you to salivate more, and the more saliva you produce, the sharper your sense of taste. “We’ve turned the dry Martini on its head. Normally the more gin you add, the dryer the drink; now you add more vermouth.”
A Somerset sour washed down with a superdry martini feels like a decent afternoon’s work, but we’re not done yet. Conigliaro pulls a bottle from behind the bar and pours me another drink. It looks like a shot of whisky, but it tastes sweeter and more mellow. This is a manhattan (whisky, sweet vermouth, bitters), that has been laid down to age for four-and-a-half years. Conigliaro says he got the idea after reading how time and oxidation can improve wines.
Finally, I try an almond Ramos, based on the classic Ramos gin fizz (gin, lemon juice, lime juice, egg white, sugar, cream, orange-flower water and soda water) but updated with another new technique: carbonation. The drink usually includes soda water for the fizz, but this also dilutes the drink. So Conigliaro skips the soda and carbonates the cocktail directly in a soda fountain.
Swaying slightly, I ask Conigliaro what he’s working on next. He tells me about a drink he once created called the Silver Phantom, named after the Rolls-Royce car. It was a dry martini with colloidal silver suspended in the drink, served on a coaster infused with leather essence to evoke the interior of a vintage car. “I’m interested in metallic flavours and minerality,” he says. “We all know what these taste like, from tasting blood and mineral water. Juniper berries are quite metallic. I’d like to create a cocktail out of these metallic flavours. An alchemic cocktail.”
Already transformed, I make my excuses.
The big chill
One quintessential molecular gastronomy ingredient that is missing from Tony Conigliaro’s London lab is liquid nitrogen, famously used by Heston Blumenthal to make ice cream. Other pioneering mixologists have started to use it, however, notably Eben Freeman from New York City’s . A couple of years ago he created what he calls the “mojito of the future” using a liquid nitrogen technique called spherulation.
Freeman’s take on the classic mojito (white rum, sugar, lime, sparkling water and fresh mint) includes all the usual flavours, but presented in a very different way.
First he blanches the mint and purées it to create mint water, to which he adds gelatin. He then squirts this mixture into liquid nitrogen to create frozen spherules of mint; he creates lime-juice spherules in a similar way. Next he adds xanthan gum to rum, sugar and water and carbonates it to create a thin gel with bubbles of carbon dioxide suspended within it. The concoction is finished off with the spherules of mint and lime floating eerily in the drink.
Liquid nitrogen is also being used to chill glasses so the ice in the cocktail stays frozen for longer. “With cocktails, you’re always fighting dilution,” says food-science writer Harold McGee.
