While cocktails have long featured fruits and jucies, bartenders are now digging deeper – into the vegetable patch. Here's how peppers, carrots, and other flavors are redefining the cocktail experience with fresh, earthy dimensions.
Juicy, heavy concoctions, usually in the style of classic tiki drinks or classics like the Swimming Pool, Sex on the Beach or Hurricane, have often been the gateway to cocktails for many connoisseurs. Fruity, colorful, opulent, accessible and, because of their high alcohol content, occasionally insidioius, they have often been the first step into a new world of enjoyment. Of course, this tends to leave an impression, and no matter how your tastes have developed over the years, such Caribbean-style juice bombs can make you relapse into nostalgia.
Notably absent in this cosmos, however, are vegetables. Veggies in cocktails? Although the thought of this may initially surprise quite a few, the idea is far from new: One of the most famous cocktails of all time would be unthinkable without tomato juice and celery: the Bloody Mary.
A certain Fernand Pete Petiot is said to have developed the beloved mixture of vodka, tomato juice, salt, pepper and Worcestershire sauce at Harry's New York Bar in Paris in the 1920s, shortly after canned tomato juice became available in Europe. However, after Petiot moved to the King Cole Room of the St. Regis Hotel in New York a few years later, the drink was renamed Red Snapper, as the hotel owner did not like the original name. The basic ingredient vodka, which was rather difficult to obtain in the USA at the time, was replaced by gin.
But regardless of which base spirit you choose and whether you prefer a Red Snapper or a Bloody Mary, the two icons undeniably opened the door to the world of vegetables in drinks and can be regarded as the an ancestors of all vegetable cocktails that have come since. Its success speaks for itself, as hardly any other drink has since been developed with as many ingredients and variations as the Bloody Mary. The best example is probably the Absolut Peppar, which was first concocted in the late 1980s. The recipe for the drink has always been extremely versatile, with ingredients like Tabasco, Sriracha, horseradish, wasabi, capers, curry, and garlic all making an appearance.
In addition to tomato juice, which – according to studies – actually tastes better at an altitude of 10,000 meters than on ground level, it takes a little experimentation to use vegetable juices effectively. But if you can pull it off, the results are amazing. Ingredients like radish juice, for instance, which has both bite an intense aroma, harmonizes very well with gin's juniper notes. Add some sugar syrup and lime, and you've got a great twist on the classicc gin and sour that is both unique and refreshing. Legendary bartenders like Salvatore Calabrese, who created the Yellow Lamborghini (frosted vodka, Galliano, bitters and fresh yellow bell peppers) for the eponymous carmaker back in 2014, have also recognized the potential of vegetable juices. In addition to paprika, which can be increasingly found in drinks today, red beets are particularly popular.
It can be juiced both raw and cooked, and it has high sugar content, which means that heat can both intensify sweetness and reduces earthiness, which not everyone likes. It is also a perfect match for fruity spirits like raspberry or blackberry schnaps, cachaça, pisco, or mezcal. But you can also create fabulous concoctions with carrots, cucumbers and even peas and zucchinis. And juice is merely one of the tools that vegetables can grant a bartender. Add zucchini sautéed in salt and butter and mashed in the shaker to give your drink a pleasant umami note. Bell peppers are an excellent base for earthy-sweet syrups – which can be squeezed even without a juicer or centrifuge. It just goes to show that it isn't hard to enter a whole new world of flavor – you just have to go for it. Here are three amazing drinks recipes for your perusal!
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