Easy Cocktail Garnishes & Techniques | Lesson 07

Today, let's cover some easy cocktail garnishes. You know, for the cocktails. Brought to you by AwesomeDrinks.com. Check out Learn.AwesomeDrinks.com to learn more about cocktails. Welcome to Common Man Cocktails. I'm Derek Shulman. This series is all about kickstarting your way into a craft cocktail journeyman role. Into a home bartender role. Into becoming a professional bartender, if that's what you choose to do. While we're typically catering to the home bartender, hey, if you can get a job in the field, and then you can send me some tips, maybe subscribe to my Patreon, that'd be just grand. But until then, mash the like button and subscribe to this channel. Now let's talk about some garnishes. So I want to break down a couple different garnishes. These are all pretty simple, standard stuff that you should see on everything from pre-prohibition cocktails up to cocktails that you see being served today. So what I want to cover first is a citrus twist. Then we're going to go through a citrus zest. Fruit flags. Spanking your herbs, or your herbs. Sugar and salt rimming. Bitters and foams. And we'll talk a little bit about olives, cherries, and some cocktail ingredients. Let's do this. There's a few ways to do a twist. You can use a channel knife. They're the ones that have the little cut in them, and some other types of knives sometimes come with a channel knife option where you just channel it like this, and it makes a long zest that you can twirl and do crazy stuff with. I'm going to avoid using the channel knives because it's kind of just, you do it, and it works. But what if you don't have a channel knife? You can do this with a regular knife. So what you're going to do is you're just going to bite into that sucker and just start cutting along the center. You don't want to get too much into the flesh, but you also don't want to go too light or you're going to lose your cool zest. It's going to come out shorter than you want. And it's not going to be perfectly around the whole time. Just take your time with it. You'll get better as you go. So what we're going to do is we're going to carve out the edges, and we're just going to trim it down. And the reason we're going to do this is to make it look awesome. You don't want it to look bad. Now, you can make your twist as thick as you really think you can handle. I like mine a little bit thinner. But what you're left with is a nice line. You twist it with your hands. You can use glass straws like we sell at Awesome Drake's, plastic straws. These are a little bit tougher because they can crunch in, but it's usually not too bad. Swizzle sticks, which is kind of one of the things that these things are made for. So you can run it along the swizzle stick so that it makes a tight little swirl. When you start to twist it tight, it's going to express some oils. So I like to do that over the glass to get any of the oils into the drink because why waste them? And there you have your basic citrus twist. So what we're going to do next is a zest. This is like a twist, and you can actually substitute one for the other in a lot of drinks. The twist just looks fancy. Now what we're going to do is we're going to zest into our glass. Now imagine this was a full cocktail. It's kind of boring in this current state. The goal really is to get the least amount of pith as you can, but if you get some, that's fine. There you go. You don't have to trim too much in this specific case because with this zest, what we're going to do is we're going to express the oils into the drink. And there's a couple ways to do that. First, you can warm it with your fingers. So as you keep your fingers on it, it helps to get the skin a little warm. If it's cold, it's going to be a little tighter. The oil isn't going to express out as well. But there's a better trick to this. What you can do is you can flame it. And the way you do that is you warm it up, and then you either throw the match out or you spray the zest over the fire. As the oils are landing in the drink and going through the flame, they ignite. It looks cool. Neat parlor trick. They say it caramelizes the citrus and makes it a little sweeter or whatever. I don't know if you could buy that. I'd love to see somebody make a cocktail and not express the oils over flame. And somebody that does and have anybody be able to tell you the difference. I'm going to give you a little pro tip before you light it on fire. There's a wax coating if you're not buying organic fruit. That wax coating is best if it's been taken off. And I take it off of all my fruit, typically, especially if I'm going to do any kind of garnish tricks. Even with twists it works. But what you do is you boil some water, take it off the burner, throw your fruit in there for like 15 seconds, and you're going to see the wax melting off and start floating and making like a slick on top of your water. That's how you know it's working. Take your fruit out after a few seconds, rub them down with some paper towels to get off any last minute wax that just didn't want to come off. That way the oils are right near the surface and there's nothing in the way. So what you're going to do first is you're going to warm it up because it is a little cold. This is going to burn fast. So we're then going to express it into the drink. Some people will use a Bic lighter in order to do this trick. The problem with that is there's some conversation around butane getting sprayed into your drink from the oils as they are passing through the ignited butane. What you can do is you take this and you either, depending on the recipe, discard it or you put it in the drink like so. And now it will just float inside your drink. Now what some bartenders will do, take this, now that it has all those oils, they're still raining out, you get those oils right front and center. I can feel them. Now what you can do is you can rub it along the edge of your glass like so. And what that's going to do is give that aroma and a little bit of that little orange zesty bite when you take that sip. Take it a step even further and some folks will rub it along the bottom of the stem. And that way when you get your drink, you're taking a sip, it's just citrus explosion all over the place. You can't get away from it. It's just always present. You're like, this is delicious. What did they do? What was the magic elixir behind this that gave me such a sensation? Just don't go overboard because you don't want it to get all sticky and weird. Next is the fruit flag. In order to make a good fruit flag, you're going to need some sort of pick. I like the bamboo garnish picks for a couple reasons. One, because they're fancy and neat looking. Two, because I sell them. And three, because they work. So what you're going to do in a case of a fruit flag is you're going to wrap a cherry around an orange peel. You could do it with a lemon or a lime, I would guess, but I usually see it typically with an orange. So what you're going to do is you're going to take your cherry and put it in the center and drive your pick right through it. This is where bar spoons come in handy because that's why they have a spoon on the end. So you bring it through one side of your citrus, drive your cherry down, lift this side, stick the other side into your citrus, and you've got a flag. It's a little bit messy to do. And the flag typically works best in a lowball drink, kind of floating right on the top so that the customer can do what they want with it. You can either pull it out and let it drop into your drink. They can put the entire thing into the drink like that and let it kind of soak. The maraschino cherries that you use make a big difference in this case. Now, if this was a bourbon drink, I would probably go with the Jack Rudy bourbon cherries, which we also sell at Awesome Drinks. They're going to be a little bit thicker and they're full of an oaky vanilla bourbon flavor to them, which pairs perfectly with any whiskey cocktail. Next, let's quickly talk about slapping your herbs. When you're working with the more delicate mints, it could be a basil or a mint, sometimes you could just hit it on your hand like this to wake it up a little bit. But what I like to do, because I'm just into the big bright flare and the awesomeness that you can get out of an herb, put it in your hand and slap it. What that's going to do is just wake it up and it creates this huge, in this case, basil. If it's mint, you get a big bloom of mint. Now you take that mint, you throw it in your tiki cocktail, which usually doesn't have a lot of aroma by itself besides just rum and maybe some pineapple and they're ugly looking. You can jam that mint in there and you get that huge mint explosion. Now when you stick a straw on top of that, as you're taking that sip, all those aromas go right to their senses. Pro tip, if you're going to be doing a lot of tiki cocktails or cocktails that utilize mints and stuff like that, even with your basils, get a little glass of water or a tall Collins and stick your sprigs in that so they can suck up that water that's sitting there. That way they stay full and bloom. If you don't do that and you leave them on the table while you're making drinks, you go back and they're all kind of lazy and wilted. It doesn't take very long. But if you just put them in some water, they suck that right up and it keeps them nice and full. Slapping an herb basically breaks a lot of the cell walls and it kind of cuts the veins a little bit with just that rupture. And that is what gives you that oils that just blow out all over the place. Let's talk about sugar and salt rims for your garnishes. So what you're going to do is you're going to stick it with something. In the case of sugar, you can use your citrus or you can use simple syrup. When you're working with salts, typically you're using the citrus that probably goes into the drink. So if I was to make a margarita, I would take some of this citrus that I'm using, in this case a lime, and I would use it to coat the glass so I have something to stick it to. Now, the reason most people get upset is because if you just stick this in there and rim the whole thing and you get inside and outside, you're going to have salt sticking to both sides, right? It's actually better if you just salt the outside and not the inside. You're going to get most of the salt sticking to the outside of the glass. You can run that along. What I've done is I've salted just the outside. And that means as you're taking a sip, you're still getting the salt as you would expect. The problem with salting the inside is when your drink is filled to the top and it sloshes a little bit against the walls, it's rinsing the salt down into the drink. Now, if you're having a margarita in a big margarita glass, where's all the salt going to fall to? Right into the center. So the drink tastes nice and fine and dandy for about three quarters of it. You take your last two sips and it's like drinking seawater. You're like, why did I ask for salt? This is like drinking from the ocean and I'm dying of thirst because I'm drinking. That doesn't work very good. That's why people die at sea, drinking seawater. I might have went overboard on the drama there, but you get the idea. Just salt the outside. It's better for you and the customers. And your friends. Now what we're going to do is talk a little bit about foam and bitters. Now, you can look through. I have an archive of other videos that talk about dry shaking. But we'll cover dry shaking probably in another video. But to create a good egg white, you're going to need to do a dry shake. But the cocktail isn't the focus of this. It's really all about the garnishes. So we're going to speed through and we're going to create an amaretto sour as defined by Jeffrey Morgenthaler, a popular bartender and personality in the cocktail industry. The recipe is going to be ounce and a half of amaretto, two thirds ounce of cask strength bourbon, one ounce of lemon juice, one teaspoon of simple syrup, and a half ounce of egg white, which I've already egg whited out right here. Side note, I suggest having a book like this to record all the recipes that you love so that you can bring it with you when you go places and you're making drinks for other people and you can whip it out and make some of these cocktails. So let's do this. Pre-squeezed one ounce of lemon juice. Also, as part of this video, I'm going to choose, I kind of changed up my selection a little bit. I'm going to use owl and whale cherry bitters, which is a new product we carry at Awesome Drinks, to create that aromatic centerpiece of this drink. Ounce and a half amaretto. So two thirds of an ounce, I don't really know. That's such a weird number. I'm just going to do what I like. Teaspoon of simple syrup. Half ounce of egg white. I'm going to dry shake it, no ice. This is always fun because there's nothing to create that seal that we talked about in course one, which is why I typically close that seal with some sort of napkin. Now you're going to give it an aggressive like 10, 15 second shake. Open it up, add our ice. Now we shake for about 10 seconds. Strain out our first garnish, which is this lovely silky egg white. Now what we can do is dash our bitters now that we have our foam. This actually works even better if you have a bitter that has the eye dropper. Then with a garnish pick or what have you, you can connect the dots, you can make little swirly patterns. Kind of looks like an espresso. If you use a thick, dark bitter, you could probably even pull off drawing a heart in it as well. And the reason I selected this bitter, even though it may not make the best looking garnish, it has a really bourbon-esque cherry flavor to it. So you're getting like, almost like a vanilla date, like oakiness and cherry flavor on top of already having De Sorona, which is going to give you that inherent cherry flavor from the almonds. It has like a cherry aroma to it. So this just brings that accent even more, making you just want to take that drink down. And lastly, I just want to touch on, these are pretty simple, cocktail olives, cocktail onions, cocktail cherries. The rule typically is one or three garnishes, like olives or cocktail cherries or onions in a drink. Gin martini, you add one or you add three. You don't add two. Two is supposedly bad luck. And the tradition says that the three stands for peace, love, and harmony. So it's kind of like, it's part of the drink. It's the tradition. Garnishes, in a lot of cases, they fall back to tradition. So stick with tradition and use the right counts. If your guest says, I really love cocktail onions, can I have a few extra? Use a separate skewer, add them in, and either put them on the side in a napkin or lean them on top of the drink, but don't sit them in the drink because that's just too much garnish. You don't want it to taste like Subway sandwiches. You want it to taste like a Gibson, which is a gin martini with cocktail onions. So in the next episode, we're going to riff off a whiskey sour. We're going to create our own house cocktail that we can brag about as being our own, but we're going to do it based off of the two-on-one ratio. Now start your journey as a home bartender. Click below to order yourself up the home bartender starter kit from Awesome Drinks or check out course one, all about bar tools, and course two, which is the one you're watching now, all about the cocktail, understanding the cocktail. We're teaching you how to drink.