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The Aberdeen Hi-flier
100g basil vodka
50g club soda
15g simple syrup
Juice of a quarter of a lemon
pinch of salt
top with mint foam
garnish with candied fennel (the plant, not seeds), watermelon, cucumber, and (optionally) lemon zest
Basil Vodka
Bunch of basil
500mL vodka
2 N20 Chargers
Mint foam
500mL mint-water
2 egg whites
The cocktail’s seemingly odd flavour composition was created using Grant Achatz’s flavour bouncing technique + Show Spoiler [Flavour Bouncing] +
The basil vodka can be made in a traditional infusion fashion over an extended amount of time (weeks), but with technology, you can be lazy as hell and do it in 5 minutes. Cookingissues.com introduced an unusual infusion technique a while ago that’s amazingly simple. You just place a bunch of the herb into a whipped cream maker with the liquor, double charge it and wait, shaking occasionally. The gas is purged and the liquor strained out to get a nice flavoured liquor.
There’s a bunch of methods of making foams, but our chosen technique is one of the simplest. The concentrated mint/water ‘tea’ (needs to be heavily reduced to have any flavour) is mixed with two raw egg whites and whisked to form a stiff foam. If we had the time to redesign the cocktail before our publication deadline, we’d probably have switched to a lime or ginger foam actually, as the mint is such a subtle flavour that the foaming makes it almost imperceptible.
The candied fennel is pretty simple but can make a massive mess. Fennel and simple syrup are just placed in a frying pan on a medium heat. After a while, the simple syrup will become a caramel at which point the fennel can be allowed to cool. This is a bit different from traditional candying, but it works in this context. A trick I use to clean a pan with leftover caramel stuck to it is to just add a bunch of water and heat it up to boiling to dissolve the leftovers.
Once all ingredients are prepared, the basil vodka, salt, club soda, and lemon juice liquor are stirred over ice (shaking dilutes the drink and will kill all your carbonation) and poured into a chilled glass with the garnish of watermelon, cucumber, fennel, and lemon zest. A little atypically, the garnish is removed from the spike and dropped into the beverage prior to drinking since it adds some critical components of the cocktail's flavour balance.
