Is the Lava Flow Hawaii's Most Misunderstood Drink?

Today we travel to the Four Seasons on Maui, maybe, to experience a Lava Flow. And I think we may have cracked the code here and created what might be the best Lava Flow recipe. It's rich, it's creamy, it's coconutty, and it's plenty rummy. It's still a frozen blended resort style cocktail, but it's balanced and better, to me at least. Now the Lava Flow is seemingly a simple but often misunderstood cocktail. Most people think it's just a pina colada with some strawberry syrup, but there is no official recipe anywhere really. No definitive origin story, at least probably not. And when you dig through the recipes that exist, you'll find many examples of it being a pina colada with strawberry syrup. But there are other versions that contain banana, as well as vanilla ice cream. And those appear to be more accurate than the others. And back in 1993, journalist and author Rick Carroll shared what he found to be the origin of the Lava Flow that was created by bartenders at the Four Seasons on Maui, which I'm told is a famous hotel. Now when Carroll described the drink, he said that it looks like red hot lava, it tastes like a strawberry ice cream float, and is so agreeable that I had two before the sun went down. And if there's a smoother, tastier cocktail with strawberries and ice cream and rum, I have yet to find it. He also shared that it was one of the Four Seasons' most requested drinks, according to bartender Barbara Carson. The Lava Flow was created by a team of bartenders with the goal to create a new tropical cocktail that captures the essence of Hawaii in a glass, and they did it, according to Carroll at least. The drink will set you back $6.50, or about $15.28 in today's prices. Four Seasons still has the Lava Flow on the menu at their pool bar, and their version does contain banana. The article written by Rick Carroll is not available anywhere except for one place, an old post from Mr. Kevin Crossman at UltimateMaiTai.com. He's been sitting on this treasure now for years. Also, as far as the resort menus go, I was pretty impressed with the current offerings of Four Seasons. A real Mai Tai, a Mai Tai category on the menu, an Ube Kalata, and most interesting to me was that Miami Vice with gin, vermouth, and Campari. Someone find me that recipe, please and thank you. Now for my version of the Lava Flow, you'll need a strawberry syrup, cream syrup, pineapple juice, banana liqueur, light rum, and a coconut rum. Additionally, we're going to need some ice and about half of a frozen banana, which you can cut up into pieces or not. It's up to you and your blender. Now the strawberry syrup is simple. I just took some fresh strawberries and added sugar. I want this syrup to be close to or equal to a one-to-one simple syrup, which is one part sugar to water. That's also 50 bricks, but we can't just do equal parts here of strawberry to sugar since strawberries already have sugar. I know my strawberries are about 10 bricks, that's 10% sugar by weight, so when I'm figuring out how much sugar to add, I just multiply my strawberries in weight by 0.9. Now remember, my strawberries were already 10-ish bricks, so I only need 90% of the sugar I would need compared to making a syrup, which is sugar and water. While I'm using a vacuum bag, you can use a zip top bag and it will work just fine. Maybe keep it in a big bowl though in case it springs a leak. I like the vacuum bag because I can speed up the process using my hands to macerate the fruit without ripping the bag. After a day in the fridge, I pass it through a fine mesh strainer and as you can see, I'm doing this on a scale and the reason I'm weighing it again is I want to add some citric acid to make it pop. I want that final syrup to be about 1% acid, so whatever the weight is, I just use 1% of that in citric acid. Now I'm going to bottle it and I'm using these crew supply bottles with the removable base. If you're interested in those, I have a link in the description for you to save some money. Now this strawberry syrup will be tart and some of you might not like it. It works well in cocktails, but maybe not for kids if you're putting it on vanilla ice cream, even though that probably would taste great. So if you don't like tart, just skip that step with the citric acid and I don't know how long this is going to last you and it's just a PSA that most people that tell you how long something like this lasts on the internet have no idea what they're talking about. I don't either. It'll be good until it's not good. Now we need to make that cream syrup and the recipe for this is from the Tropical Standard book and is the cream syrup that was used at existing conditions, the Dave Arnold and Don Lee bar in New York. In a blender, add 250 grams of heavy cream and slowly pour in 250 grams of sugar. Finally, I'm going to add in 15 milliliters of a citric acid solution. The recipe as well as the recipe for the strawberry syrup are all in the episode description with all the details that you need. Now this stuff is truly incredible and not only can you use it to make the cocktail today, but you can make the bird of paradise from the Tropical Standard book or the white flag from existing conditions, both of which are great drinks. The white flag is like a fancy tasty mudslide and I have videos on that. I'll leave them in the episode description. So two excellent drinks you can use with this cream syrup and I like adding acid to blended drinks sometimes, but I don't think we need to do it every single drink. And while this drink does not contain lime, lemon, or acid, just pineapple, we get a small bump in acidity from our strawberry syrup and then from our cream syrup. Also, kind of keeping true to that original Lava Flow or what we think is the original Lava Flow, instead of using ice cream, we're using a cream syrup. So kind of the same thing. So that will put you on a track that's just like the one made in Four Seasons, kind of. So instead of airfare to Maui and an average room rate of $1,500 a night, we can experience the Four Seasons from our own home and what is most likely a much better version of the Lava Flow than you will find on any island. So let's go ahead and make this. I'm going to start with two ounces of pineapple juice, one ounce of our cream syrup, just a quarter ounce of a banana liqueur, one ounce of a coconut rum, one ounce of a light rum, half of a frozen banana, 110 grams of nugget or crushed ice, that equals about a heaping cup of ice. Oh, and I forgot that I want to add in some xanthan gum, just one quarter of a teaspoon. This is optional, but we'll keep that drink emulsified for longer. I'll take my glass and add about one ounce of our strawberry syrup, then the rest of my drink. Now at the top, I'll add a little bit more of the strawberry syrup, just about a half an ounce, and this amount is all preference for how sweet you want your drink to be and how much strawberry you want in there. I'll garnish with a slice of pineapple and an orchid, and oh yeah, since this is a Lava Flow, and Lava Flows are supposed to be hot, I will add in half an ounce of a 151 rum, and I am using Pamilton. So there you go, my version of the Lava Flow. All right, let's try it. Cheers. So from my point of view, the thing that makes this drink difficult to like dial and nail down to get it where you want it to be, is you have a syrup in here that's not incorporated. So in that case, the rest of the drink is a little bit drier than it would be if you were just making, I think, a standard pina colada. It's a little less sugar, so then as you drink just the creamy portion of this, the creamy portion of rum, it's not that sweet. But when you mix in little bits of strawberry syrup, you get a more sweet balanced drink. It still leans towards sweet, which most of these drinks do, a blended frozen resort style drink, but then that little float of 151 at the top is like the exact opposite of the sweet sugary syrup on the bottom. So as you drink and as you move your straw around in the glass, you kind of get a different experience at your drink. I have these vivid memories of being a kid, either in the late 80s or early 90s, and having my first smoothie, making my first smoothies at home, which were just strawberries and bananas and ice, maybe also sugar. This was before the smoothie craze, right? And that's what this takes me back to. Strawberry, banana, creaminess there, too. I would use milk in those smoothies. They were not healthy smoothies, obviously, adding sugar to them, but that banana here with the strawberries and the creaminess, that has to now, in my opinion at least, be the makings of a lava flow. That's what makes the lava flow different and unique from a pina colada or a Miami Vice or those combination of ingredients. So when I'm saying at the top of this video that we don't have definitive proof that this is from the Four Seasons, the only proof that we do have is that it's from the Four Seasons, though. So there is a good argument to be made that it is this drink that should contain cream and banana and strawberry and rum, and instead of using a cream of coconut here, getting the sweetness from that cream syrup and then getting some coconut flavor. Not a lot, but some coconut flavor from a coconut rum. If you have a different coconut rum that you love, use that. If you want to use Malibu, you can. You just need to readjust everything else, because Malibu is a lot sweeter than the rum that I used. But overall, bringing your coconut through a less sweet or unsweetened way means you can bring in the sweetness in other ways, like the strawberry and the banana, and in this case, the cream syrup as well. Speaking of smoothies, I remember when I figured out a long time ago how a frozen banana, the wonders of a frozen banana in a blended thing, obviously it brings banana flavor, but using half a frozen banana, even a whole frozen banana, and reducing the ice means you get less dilution, but also the banana just gives that creaminess that you get. So instead of using ice cream here, we're using the banana, providing banana flavor. And a nice thick creaminess to the drink as well. Obviously I'm not impartial to this one because I came up with this recipe, but I think it is delicious, and it hits all the things I want in a frozen drink without being too sweet, but still sweet and strong enough, and you can swap the rums for whatever you want. You can use cream of coconut instead of the cream syrup. If you want to save yourself some time, it's going to taste different, but your sugar level will be pretty much the same. You can use a store-bought strawberry syrup as well if you don't want to make your own, but I will tell you the one thing that I make that's fresh, that is just leaps and bounds better than any other thing, is a simple strawberry syrup. It's hard to beat fresh strawberries with sugar. It is, I think it's like one of my favorite syrups of all time. So if you enjoyed this video, please give it a like below, consider subscribing to the channel, and if you want to support this channel more, go check out my Patreon page. Otherwise, I'll see you in the next one.