|| Milk Washed Enchaned Sour | Cherry, Orange & Chocolate | Herbs ||
I recently did my first milk wash. It was a bit of a coincidence. I was working on this other idea and decided kind of last minute to try milk washing, because I was missing something, and also people kept asking when I was gonna make a milk wash.
It all started at my improvised holiday cocktail “bar” at the cabin we were renting. I asked “do cherry and orange work together?” and some people said “not really”. But to their surprise just adding some cherry syrup to triple sec was actually a nice shot!
Now, I’d also been thinking of creating a cherry cocktail. Because I’m not a fan of Cherry Heering, and by extension also not of Singapore Slings, but I love Maraschino. Then I encountered the Charleston Cocktail and its genius combination of Kirsch and Maraschino to make the cherry flavour really pop. I think this is another example of a principle I hypothesised in my Blossom: you can really reinforce the breadth and depth of a particular flavour without going overboard by adding extra variations of that flavour or closely adjacent flavours.
So my first step was to create a “house cherry mix”, which is equal parts Cherry Heering, Maraschino and Kirsch. I encourage you to add any other cherry flavoured ingredients you have, according to this theory that should be even better! I reckon the ratios don’t really matter too much.
For the orange component, I’m going to follow the same principles, by using orange juice, a triple sec and orange bitters. I will combine this in the recipe (see below) directly, since I’m not putting juice in a house mix for shelf-stability-reasons.
What else goes well with cherry? Chocolate of course, but also Italian herbs like sage and thyme (I’m convinced there’s a cobbler recipe hiding in here as well). I’ve taken to a very ad-hoc infusing “technique” lately, where I simply put my dried herbs in a tea egg or tea bag, and let it sit in 50 ml of spirit for about 5-10 minutes. It’s quite effective, I can taste-test it while it’s infusing and it’s fast enough for home purposes. Probably less economical in terms of herb-to-volume ratio, but at least I don’t end up with a dozen half-full bottles of infusions sitting around.
As mentioned, my first attempts were promising but not quite there yet, even after fiddling with the ratios a bit. For the milk wash I decided to keep the base spirits out of it, so I could more easily play with the ratios (or swap them out!) and with the infusion.
From the first sip, it was clear that the milk wash was the way to go. However, the drink had no staying power, it would feel a little thin after a while (even though I served it neat). The solution, it turned out, was to add a drop of saline, a teaspoon of simple syrup (extra mouthfeel), and a teaspoon of pimento dram! The pimento was not my idea, but my test subject’s, who suggested clove, and an excellent idea it was!
I have to admit I’ve only done 1 batch of this, so I have not tested which ingredients could actually be left out. But I’m not sure I care because it’s a really good drink! Please do let me know if you test it out without the vermouth (I know, I haven’t mentioned it yet, but everything is better with vermouth and I figured Antica Formula’s spices would tie everything together) or without the orange bitters for example.
Here’s the recipe for cherry-orange-chocolate milk wash (“the milky way” for short):
- 50 ml House Cherry Mix
- 50 ml Grand Marnier
- 50 ml Dark Creme de Cacao
- 50 ml Sweet Vermouth
- 75 ml lemon juice
- 75 ml orange juice
- 5 ds orange bitters
Note that you could add the simple syrup and pimento dram to this as well, instead of adding it later to the mixing glass (it would be about 20 ml of each).
To do the milk washing, I started with about 110 ml of full milk (3.5% fat) and 110 ml cream (20% fat). This is not a particularly informed ratio or anything. I just eyeballed it based on some of the stuff I saw on the internet. The internet told me to use something above 3.5% fat (otherwise it won’t curdle) and to use about 1:4 to 1:3 milk-to-cocktail-mix. It also told me to pour the drink into the milk and not the other way around. Dunno why, but when the internet tells you to do something, you do it.
After combining, I gave it a brief stir, let it sit in the fridge for about an hour (I’m pretty sure this can be less), and used the filtering technique recommended by Truffles on the Rocks: large fine-mesh strainer, coffee filter and then cheese cloth on top and also re-filter the first bit of cloudy liquid. This yielded slightly less than the original cocktail-mix-without-milk volume (maybe I should’ve squeezed the curdles more).
So what about the base spirit? Actually, I tried 2 things and both worked really well, and I’m very confident other bases will work too. The basic formula is to take roughly 1 tsp of dried herbs for every 50 ml spirit and then let the herbs steep in the spirit for about 5-10 minutes in a tea-bag or tea-egg
Infused spirit 1:
- 2:1 mix of white rum and bourbon (I used Plantation 3 star and Wild Turkey 101)
- 2:1 mix of dried sage and dried thyme
Infused spirit 2:
- 2:1 mix of white rhum agricole and aged rhum agricole (I used Clement Canne Blue and Rhum JM VSOP)
- Dried sage
Then the final act is to add to following to your mixing glass:
- 40 ml infused spirit X
- 60 ml “the milky way” mix
- 1 tsp pimento dram
- 1 tsp simple syrup
- 2 drp saline solution (20%)
Add ice, stir and strain into a Nick & Nora glass. Optionally garnish with an orange twist.
You’ll have noticed you can batch this quite well. Milk washes are supposed to keep very long in the fridge, and you can batch your infusions as well or course. I will keep these two components separately so I can mix and match what I feel like at the moment. I suppose the pimento dram and simple ought to be in the milk wash mix in my next batch, since I won’t be playing with that ratio I think.
What is this drink called? We’re finally back to astronomical names. Since this is a milk wash, obviously it requires a reference to the Milky Way. Since there is not much space to play with this term, I prefer “Galaxy” or “Galactic”, whose root is from the Greek word for milk. Hence it is that “the Galaxy” (note the capital letter) usually refers to The Milky Way, which is the galaxy in which our Solar System is located, and other milky ways outside of our own are almost always called “galaxies” (without the capital letter).
I picked a more or less random part of the anatomy of galaxies, namely the Galactic Plane. This sounds like a vehicle that can go to a lot of places (appropriate for this drink!) but in fact it’s the imaginary geometric plane in which a galaxy rotates around its axis. Thus only disk-shaped galaxies have a galactic plane. As galaxies get older, the coherent rotation in the disk gets disrupted (through mergers with other galaxies for example) and they become what is called “elliptical galaxies”, which are sort of shaped like a squat cigar and the stars no longer circle in the same direction.