Heston Cocktail | Home Cooked Heston

CUBA LIBRÉ MOLECULAR SHOT

This was so much fun to make and not hard at all, the longest part was waiting for the rum too cool to room temperature. These are also great to impress you guests. I will attach two links to websites that I use quite regularly one being The Red Spoon Company (This is a great site for the food additives, cooking equipment and ingredients). The other site is Molēcule-R (These guys do great little kits for people who want to have a go at molecular gastronomy).

INGREDIENTS

– 300ml White Rum

– 300ml of Water

– 500ml of Distilled Water

– 400ml Of Your Favorite Cola

– 2Tbsp Caster sugar

– 1g Xanthan Gum

– 2.5g Calcium Chloride

– 2g Sodium Alginate

– 1 Pipette or Caviar Maker

– 1 Spherification or Slotted Spoon

– 1 Shot Glass (Preferably Clear)

METHOD

You are going to need three bowls or containers to start. In the first bowl place the xanthan gum and the caster sugar and mix to combine. Next add the water and the rum. Blitz with a hand blender, cover and refrigerate for 60 minutes. In the second bowl pour the cola into another bowl and add the sodium alginate. Blitz with a hand blender and set aside for three minutes. In the last bowl you want to make a calcium chloride bath and to do this is quite simple, add the distilled water and calcium chloride and stir to combine.

Now comes the fun part, grab the two bowls with the cola in it and the calcium bath. Grab your pipette or caviar maker and extract the cola mixture. Next you want to drip the cola mixture into the calcium bath. Keep dripping the more you make the better your shot will look. Once you think you have enough, stir the pearls with a spoon to loosen them up.

Presentation. Get a big scoop of the pearls with your spherification spoon or slotted spoon and tip carefully into a shot glass. Take the Rum mixture out of the fridge and into a measuring jug (it just makes it easier to pour). Pour the mixture into the shot glass and boom! You have yourself a molecular Cuba Libré shot. Enjoy 🙂

Full credit to the guys and gals over at MOLECULE-R Flavors on youtube. Below is a link to a video on how to make the shot also.

ROOIBOS COCKTAIL

This was so much fun to make. The theatrics are outstanding and the taste, well let me say its a shame that a hot infusion siphon isn’t a standard piece of equipment for the kitchen! This cocktail is can actually be purchased at the Aviary in Chicago, a link for a video on how they do it provided below. They give you the ingredients but not the amounts so the ones that I am going to supply are the ones I used in the end (After many tests to get it right of course). The results are below.

INGREDIENTS

– 3g Rooibos Tea

– 4 Pieces of Lemon Peel

– 4 Pieces of Orange Peel

– 1.6g Almond Slices

– 6 Mint Leaves (Bruised)

– 0.2g Saffron

– 0.1g Lavender

– 1.5g Lemon Verbena

– 3 Cardamon Pods

– 10 Pepper corns

– 1 Cassia Quill

– 90ml Hendricks Gin

– 30ml Luxardo Maraschino

– 60ml Simple Syrup

– 1g Citric Acid

– 500ml Water

METHOD

First you want to put all the wet ingredients including the citric acid into a vacpac bag and put into a pre-warmed SousVide at 90ºC. If you don’t have a SousVide, place the bag into a pot of water and warm to 90ºC. While that is happening gather all the dry ingredients and put into the top chamber of your siphon.

Once the wet ingredients have reach 90ºC carefully, (because they will be hot, someone may have made that mistake) pour into the bottom chamber of the siphon. Next put the top chamber on and make sure its secure then light your bunsen burner and push under to get the boiling process happening. Once all the liquid has been vacuumed up to the top chamber carefully mix for one minute so that all the flavours come out of the ingredients. Once that minute is up remove the heat and leave to cool and pour back down into the bottom chamber.