It’s been a busy October, you know? Music is back and we are settling into this weird co-existence with COVID where stuff is coming back but we are still not sure what is what. I’ve got boards on boards, and a commission, and even a new office to visit.
But you know, I still keep getting new bottles of random little items to play with and well…who am I to say no? One of the new items I tracked down after a chat with some friends is some Fee Brothers Fee Foam. It’s a little 5 oz bottle foam replacer for presentation and egg replacing of course, which is nice when you are vegan.
There are other replacements of course. I have a penchant for playing with aquafaba, which I actually think does a pretty decent job and doesn’t add much flavor, but when you are thinking about cocktails it does add volume, and sometimes you are a little pressed to find space for a half ounce of aquafaba in a crowded cocktail. Sometimes I just don’t want to drain a can of chickpeas because I’m not using them for anything else in my kitchen at the moment. Or whatever, this is ostensibly an easy product to use.
However…it’s not so easy it seems. Maybe I’m not quite getting it right, but I’m 1 for 3 in getting a nice froth like I’d expect from this product. Tonight, for example, I won on garnish, but could not manage to make the foam do what I wanted it to.
So I got this foam…what should I do with it? Well, naturally, if we are thinking about tropical drinks, well, it’s natural to call it Seafoam. There are definitely others experimenting with this, but seriously read this drink and tell me “what the fuck is this?” Coconut rum, triple sec, coconut cream, banana liqueur? Sure, Mountain Dew? Hpnotiq? What the actual fuck?
But clearly it is an unoriginal name for a concept of making a drink with a pleasing seafoam color and you don’t want to use a questionably spelled beverage, you at least have your trusty friend blue curaçao? Is it gimmicky? Of course! But I’d rather use gimmicky French beverages I trust than a gimmicky French beverage I do not.
So I took this all a very different direction. Because I was thinking it’s time to put my passionfruit syrup back into play. I don’t make enough drinks with passionfruit and I just got a new bottle. Sometimes you don’t want a Porn Star Martini (well, you always want it, but you really need fresh passionfruit and passionfruit liqueur for that), and sometimes you aren’t ready to go all in with a Hurricane.
Once you got passionfruit, you gotta turn to your natural friend lemon of course; orgeat? Always a good choice! Initially I tried some simple as well, but it turned out to be unnecessary with the orgeat and passionfruit syrup, so I ditched it. For rum? I call on some old standards, the nice simple base of Plantation 3 Star, and the additional kick and funk of Smith & Cross (now back in stock!) and here is what I came up with, after a bit of trial and error, and a fair amount of shaking:
1 oz lemon
.5 oz passionfruit
.5 oz orgeat
.5 oz blue curaçao
1 oz Plantation 3 Star
1 oz Smith & Cross
5-6 dashes of Fee Brothers Fee Foam
Put that all in your trusty mixing tin with a few cubes and shake the hell out of it. Seriously the shaking is good for the foam. Strain that into a double rocks and top with fresh crushed ice. If you do it right you will get a nice foam layer on top to go with that lovely color. Garnish with some mint if you have it, it’s a nice aromatic/color contrast addition but it doesn’t make or break the drink
As experiments go, not a bad one. I don’t think the blue curaçao is strictly necessary so if you just had regular old curaçao you’d probably still have a pretty tasty beverage here. But if you want that color…well, this is how you end up with way too many bottles at home :)
This is Trader Jane’s, a periodic newsletter about drinks (mostly tiki) and other fun writing. Follow me on Substack for something every week or two (if we are being honest), and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more timely updates on my beverages (and for lots of other things of course!)
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