|| Sour | Peanut, Asian Spices ||
This drink still makes me smile. It’s a little ridiculous but every time I drink it, it surprises me again by how well it works even though your head is telling you it shouldn’t be allowed.
I was cooking an Indonesian inspired dish, a gado gado wrap based on peanut sauce, eggs, veggies and tempe. I make the peanut sauce (I call it sate sauce, but wikipedia tells me sate sauce and gado gado sauce are different without explaining how!) myself using various asian spices and marinating the tempe, and while I was doing that I figured I’d make myself a nice cocktail. Probably something like a Final Ward, I don’t quite remember, but I had this bottle of rye whiskey open and the smells of the rye and the cooking just meshed really really well. That’s when I knew I had to try and put this all in a single drink.
Step 1 was clearly to make a peanut butter rye. Half the internet has already done this so no big deal. I used a bottle of Jack Daniels rye (my first time, so I didn’t want to use something expensive) and a pot of 100% pure peanut peanut butter. Good results although I was surprised the yield was only half of the original liquid!
To include the spices I decided to do a syrup. I basically looked at all the asian spices I had lying around and made a guess at the ratios. I really like cumin so I went heavy on that.
- 0.5 tsp (~1 gr) 5 spices mix (contains cinnamon, star anise, pepper, fennel and clove)
- 1 tsp (~1 gr) coriander seed powder
- 0.5 tsp (~0.5 gr) ginger powder
- Few pinches (~0.1 gr) nutmeg powder
- 1 heaping tsp (~1.8 gr) of cumin powder
I briefly toast the spices in a dry pan and then add 100 grams of water. I heat it up for a while and when it gets close to boiling I turn the heat off and let it steep for 30 mins. Filtering this through a coffee filter, then add 200 grams of sugar and dissolve. This yielded about 150 ml of syrup.
I think it’s a versatile syrup (more about that in another post) but a little odd. The gado gado cocktail needs to also work together with an asian meal which means in my opinion it needs to be a sour template. It’s already weird enough so no need to make it much more complicated, but I figured it would probably need one balancing ingredient.
I have noticed before that the Paper Plane family of drinks works well with various styles of food, so I surmised that a bitter liqueur was the way to go. Amer Picon seemed appropriate as it’s both spicy and warm. Hence, to put the gado gado dish in a drink I settled on this recipe:
- 40 ml Peanut Butter Rye Whiskey
- 15 ml Asian Spices Syrup
- 15 ml Amer Picon
- 20 ml lemon juice
Shake & Strain. Some people prefer to dial up the spices. No need for a garnish although something like a kefir lime leaf or star anise is a nice addition.
This is one of my favorite creations. It smells great but you immediately wonder who ever allowed these smells to go in a drink. Then you take a sip and I’ve had a number of people laugh out loud at the pleasant surprise!
I haven’t found any clever name for this drink, I just call it the Gado Gado Sour because that is exactly what it is. Did you know Gado Gado is one of the five national dishes of Indonesia, and that gado means that you’re eating something without rice?