Elevate Your Cocktail Game With This Unusual Technique
Creating, perfecting, and eventually appreciating all different kinds of cocktails is an intense and complicated journey. From the simplest old fashioned to the most complex and colorful drink you've ever seen served at your local cocktail lounge that takes the bartender 2 hours to make, glows in the dark, drives you home, and fights cancer, the processes for all cocktails are always fascinating to watch and definitely worth learning.
Enter fat washing, a new and innovative way to get weirded out at the bar. It sounds intense, but really it's just a method to get all the best flavors, aromas, and more from fat products into your drink, per Cocktails and Bars. Popularly used fats are things like bacon, coconut oil, butter, and even things like duck fat, foie gras, olive oil, and blue cheese, which make for not just a unique flavor profile but also can add a smoother, silky finish to your drinks.
What is happening when you fat wash your drink?
It may sound like a technique reserved for only the most elite and snobby mixologists, but fat washing is quite simple and requires no special tools. According to Cocktail Safe, all you need to do is to heat your fat into a liquified state and pour it into a vessel with your chosen spirit. You don't need that much fat product to infuse the flavor, so make sure not to use a lot. Then shake it hard.
Put your concoction into the freezer so that the fats in the drink freeze and rise to the surface. Then all you have to do is separate the fat from the alcohol, and you've got yourself an infused drink. To make sure that the drink is pure and there are no knobs of grease floating around your bacon-infused bourbon, you could also strain it a few times to ensure maximum purity while retaining that all-important bacon flavor.