I have been particularly enjoying Daiquiris and Tommy’s Margaritas and so got thinking about an idea I saw for drinks that use a sweetener made from the same base ingredient as the spirit.
This idea was from Richard Godwin in his Spirits Newsletter which brilliantly covers cocktails far better than I do here.
He was mentioning how he finds a Tommy’s Margarita better than the classic as it is a “Natural Sour” in that the sweetener comes from the same base ingredient as the spirit. It is also, I think, a far better drink as it is simpler and less expensive to make so you can enjoy more of them…
Another very common for is the rum based sour, as sugar syrup is such a common sweetener. What is interesting is that there are many cocktails that could be said to be a rum sour, but all distinct. For instance, the Daiquiri, Ti Punch, and Caipirinha all fit the idea of what a rum sour is.
Godwin did also mention that he tried a natural sour with a grape base, using a sweet wine as the sweetener and brandy as the spirit. I thought why not do similar but take a bit of inspiration from the Romans who, without refined sugar, often used concentrated grape juice as a sweetener.
Before getting into the details of the grape syrup, let’s think about the idea of Natural Sours in more depth to give context to why the syrup is important. The idea is that the flavour of a sweetener made from the base ingredient will nicely match that of the spirit.
For some things, say tequila, it is quite clear. The vegetal depth that makes tequila so moreish is also present in good agave syrup. Similarly, a syrup made from an aromatic grape, say Muscat, will have similar characteristics to the aromatic notes of Pisco.
Yet for some drinks it will not be so clear. Using normal table sugar in a Daiquiri might work as both start with sugarcane yet the sugar will not bring much other than sweetness and I sincerely doubt the difference between fructose and sucrose will be that noticeable. And anyway, as fructose is sweeter things like agave tend to be used in smaller quantities and so remove that as a possible taste differential.
So, in the case for rum, more focus is needed. In many ways using large spirit categories is flawed anyway as a Demerara rum and a French Rhum Agricole are made of very different ingredients, although they all ultimately come from sugarcane.
In that case, I would not suggest going as far as using molasses with the demerara rum and reducing fresh sugar cane juice for the Rhum, but I would suggest thinking about the style of rum and how the base ingredient is used. And so, would use a brown sugar (ideally demerara) with the rum and then lean towards white cane sugar for the Rhum.
In general playing with the sweetener to find one that compliments the spirit will always help with a sour. In particular any spirit that takes considerable flavour from its base ingredient will work nicely with a sweetener made from the same base. With spirits that are more divorced from their base ingredient it will be harder to balance the flavours. For instance I do not think a slightly grainy sweetener would go with gin, even though most gin is made from neutral spirit distilled from fermented grains.
For those more complex spirits I might be more included to tweak the sweetener to one of the other indigents of the spirit, but then feel that it is straying from the idea of a natural sour.
Now back to the Roman grape syrup that so caught my attention. This syrup had a few different names, which were often used to distinguish different grades of concentration. The most common term is defrutum, but carenum and sapa are also used. These terms seem to be used differently by each Roman author I looked at so I will ignore the specific details and for ease will use defrutum as a generic term for a reduced grape syrup. This is in part as I did not reduce grape juice by mathematical ratios, but until it reached a sweetness and consistency I wanted. (About as sweet as simple syrup so easy to use in recipes that normally call for that.)
There is some suggestion that the production method for defrutum, which might have used lead pots, added to the sweetness as lead acetate could have formed. Lead acetate is also known as lead sugar and is very sweet, if rather toxic. I find the idea that it was done regularly rather unlikely as I do not see large scale production of something using expensive like lead for heating or storage vessels when ceramics were cheaper.
In researching this and deciding it didn’t overly matter I did come across a rather interesting description of types of wine. Pliny describes four kinds of wine: albus (white), fulvus (tawny/amber/orange/yellow), sanguineus (blood red), and niger (black). (Naturalis Historia 14.11).
You could perhaps map the albus onto white wine, the fulvus onto orange wine, the sanguineus onto dark rosé and light reds, and the niger onto dark reds. But then it doesn’t quite fit as what about very light rosé? The term fulvus might be a bit hard to pin onto an English colour term but it clearly does not work for a light pink. Nor would sanguineus work as it is far too rich a colour. So maybe with those very pale rosés albus might work, but to my mind albus feels like it only describes wine made with very minimal skin contact so could only work for the lightest of all possible rosés.
Anyway, this is a rather unrelated tangent so I will get back to the main thread and leave consideration of Roman styles of wine for another newsletter.
As you cannot just nip out and buy defrutum, I chose to make some. For more general use you could use any form of grape syrup and then just alter the recipe to account for its concentration. It is particularly common in Eastern Mediterranean cooking. In part I chose to make it myself so I could control the concentration etc., and because I wanted to use a specific grape variety.
If you do want to make some defrutum, note that it takes a lot of grapes to make a small amount of defrutum so if possible, start with grape juice. Plus, you then don’t have to fiddle about juicing the grapes. However, I used grapes as I wanted to use aromatic Muscat grapes to compliment the Muscat grapes used in the production of my Pisco.
Note that I am not going to get into the difference between Chilean and Peruvian Pisco, and nor will I differentiate between the respective types of Pisco Sour.
My pisco sour is a very simple sour with no egg white. As a nod to both Chilean and Peruvian Pisco Sours, which use Key lime and Limon de Pica juice respectively, I have used a blend of lemon and lime juice to get that acidic citrus that normal (Persian) limes do not have, without losing the aromatic fruitiness that normal (Eureka) lemons do not have.
Having written that I realise I really ought to dedicate a newsletter to citrus, as it is all to easy to see a recipe that calls for the most specific gin but just generic lemons or limes, rather than considering the varieties.
Natural Pisco Sour:
50ml Pisco
12.5ml Lime Juice
12.5ml Lemon Juice
20ml Defrutum
Shake all with plenty of ice and fine strain into a coupe glass.
(You might see from the picture above that I forgot to fine strain…)
I was rather surprised at how delicious the drink was. I was expecting to have to tweak the recipe quite a bit to get it to really work, but I didn’t need it.
But in making it I realised that it still wasn’t maybe as perfect as it could be in terms of ingredient harmonisation. So maybe I ought to invent a different style of sour ‘The Perfect Sour’ in which all ingredients come from the same base. In this case I could try verjuice for the sour component.
However, this would be rather limiting as it would not work with many spirits. Most fruit-based drinks would work as a sour unripe version of the fruit could be used for the sour aspect, but with rum or similar I do not know what would be used. Yet, this is taking concepts rather far and until someone fancies giving me a job designing a bar’s cocktail menu to fit perfect concepts, I will leave it as just a fantasy of conceptually perfect drinks.
In some other experimentation I tried making a natural malt whisky sour by making a sweeter from malted barley. This was interesting, but not ultimately successful. Also, I doubt most of you have some pale malt sitting so will not go into detail of how I made a syrup from concentrated wort. I
To make a sour from it, I followed the classic ratios using a blended Scotch, lemon juice and my rather murky malt syrup. The resulting drink was clearly a sour, but didn’t quite do it for me. Before passing judgement, I must say that whisky sours are one of my least favourite sour. But even considering that, it was rather too malt dominant and it felt as if that flavour was fighting the whisky rather than acting in concert.
If I try this again, I will most likely start with bought malt extract (the sort used in homebrewing) and will consider using a whisky that has a stronger malty flavour. I am also rather tempted to try something similar with bourbon and corn syrup. However, as bourbon isn’t made with pure corn, it poses a question about what sweetener should be used with it.