I recently tried to make a cocktail using rice pudding and created about the most horrible drink I could ever imagine. The reason for it being so bad wasn’t because of the rice pudding, but because I wasn’t paying attention to what the drink needed. You can fine tune your cocktail simply by understanding your own tastes which are split up into many different categories.
The five basic tastes your tongue recognizes:
Sweet: These are your sugars, honey, and sweeters that make those drinks taste so damn good. Most common use is to sweeten alcohol to make it more approachable as well as to counteract excessive sour.
Sour: If while making your drink and your lips pucker like you just bit into a lime, it’s too sour, add a sweetener.
Salty: Another easy one to taste, but I think harder to counter act. I usually dilute with some filler like water or juice depending on the drink.
Bitter: A lot of times this is the taste we are going for! Another easy taste to notice and diluting along with sweetening will help curve the bitterness.
Umami: This is a taste not so much noticed in cocktails because all the foods high in it, for the most part, are very rarely used behind the bar. Examples are a lot of seafoods like tuna and prawns, also beef and chicken. Vegetables like shitake mushrooms and cabbage. Umami is a taste given by glutamate, a type of amino acid, and ribonucleotides.
Other sensations you might encounter:
Spicy: Spicy is one of my favorites, I love hot foods and drinks. There is a limit though and again a common fix when experimenting with your drink is to dilute.
Astringent: For example pomegranates, also can be certain apples and pears. A taste example is hard to describe so hopefully I can get away with saying it is very tannin heavy tasting. Astringency and bitterness are kind of like taste cousins although another characteristic of astringency is an almost dry mouth feeling.
Thickness: How thick is your drink. Do you want people to feel like its syrup or a very light watery liquid? If your drink is too thick, add a watery substance. If your drink is to light, add a thickener such as sugar, gelatin, or blend with ice.
Aroma: More important than most bartenders think, how does it smell before going down? A lot of food and drinks in this world have an off smell but a great taste, (watch Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman on the travel channel) in a cocktail though you want a great smell. One of these posts we’ll go into adding fragrance to a cocktail and bringing out the drinks natural smells as much as possible.
Texture: This is more for food, similar to thickness as far as drinks go.
Temperature: Have you ever had a room temperature martini? Most drinks are hot or cold, pretty easy.
Color: Also an element that is overlooked by some bartenders. If you receive a great drink but it looks like dirty toilet water how would that make you feel?
Shape: For cocktails this would be glassware, pay attention to what the cocktail will work with and be presented in for the best fit.
Sound: Not so much for cocktails then for food but I do have a post coming up once I perfect it that is a noisy cocktail. Think rice crispy treats and milk, very similar… stay tuned.
Filed under: Techniques
