When I first volunteered to write up the Macadamia Nut Chi-Chi, I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. As it turns out, despite many hours of research and consulting some people who know a thing or two about tiki, no one really knows anything about the Chi-Chi. A light, frothy, sweet blender concoction, the Chi-Chi (or Chee Chee, as Trader Vic had it) is essentially a piña colada made with vodka. Though I have learned much about the famed and now-defunct Chi Chi club in Palm Springs, that turned out to be a dead end insofar as any written record of the Chi-Chi cocktail goes. Both Trader Vic and Donn the Beachcomber had recipes for it, but it appears that no one took the credit.

So, being that there isn’t a flashy story to spice this drink up, we turn to something useful: making pineapple juice. Being consumed with researching, I did not realize that I was completely out of pineapple juice. Fortunately I had a fresh pineapple to put into service, so if you follow along with the pictures you too can make some fresh jugo de piña at home.

First, you need to choose a pineapple.

The easiest way to do so is to grab one of the smaller green leaves at the center of the pineapple’s crown and pull. A ripe pineapple will easily yield one of the leaves, telling you that it is ready to eat.

Next, using a sharp knife trim off the pineapple crown and bottom. Pineapples have a slight dimple in the bottom, sort of like an apple. You want to trim off enough that the entire bottom of the pineapple is flush.

Now that your pineapple will stand up on its own, set it on its end and trim off the skin, cutting in long sections down the length of the fruit. (If you have supremed citrus fruit before, this is the same principle as removing the rind and pith.) Continue doing this all the way around until you have removed all the skin. You will be left with some small brown eyes embedded in the flesh—try to cut off as many of these as possible.

Next, you will trim the flesh away from the core of the pineapple in four cuts. Cut parallel to the core, which will leave you with a roughly rectangular piece of pineapple. Turn the fruit and make another cut, which will leave you with a slightly smaller rectangle on the second and third cuts. Finally, make the same cut on the last remaining piece of flesh, which will be about half the size of the first. You should now have four “filets” of pineapple and the woody core, which you can discard.

Trim the four hunks of pineapple into ½” chunks and place them in a blender with ¼ – ½ cup of water. Blend on high speed until all of the chunks are reduced to a thick puree. You may have to do this in batches to blend all the fruit, depending on how large your pineapple was.

Pour your puree into a fine mesh strainer set over a bowl and allow it to drain. If you’re so inclined, you can use a spatula to force juice through the mesh. It should take between thirty minutes and an hour for your puree to release all its juice.

Once you have a strainer full of pulp that is no longer yielding juice when you stir it, you’re ready to decant the juice and start mixing drinks!

Macadamia Nut Chi-Chi
8 oz unsweetened pineapple juice
2 oz coconut cream (Coco Lopez)
4 oz vodka
2½ oz macadamia nut liqueur

Add all ingredients to a blender; fill with ice. Blend until slushy. Serves two to four. If macadamia nuts aren’t your thing, you can simply omit the liqueur and you will have a traditional Chi-Chi.

Driving along through this or that neighborhood, you spot something on the sidewalk.  A lemonade stand.  Manned by couple of kids.  Me, I always stop.

There’s not much that’s more refreshing than a nice, tall glass of lemonade on a hot summer day.  It’s easy peasy to make, too — water, sugar and lemons.

And what’s better than lemonade?  Grown-up lemonade with booze in it!  (We’ll get back to that in a bit.)

You know how to make lemonade, right?  I would imagine that you do, but let’s assume that your mom always made it for you, and that hers was so good and so perfect that you never really got around to making any for yourself.  It really couldn’t be easier, but as with most drinks it helps to have a method. Before you start squeezing, though, here are some tips to maximize your juice output.

1. Don’t use lemons right out of the fridge.  Cold lemons yield less juice.

2. Even better than using room temperature lemons is putting your lemons in a hot water bath for several minutes.

3. Roll your lemons under the palm of your hand on the cutting board before squeezing.  This helps to liberate the juice.

4. Oh, and don’t pay 79¢ each for your lemons at a major chain supermarket.  I see these prices and it makes me want to yell at someone.  If you can, find a small, local, mom-and-pop produce market or Latin or other ethnic supermarket, where the lemons will likely be a more reasonable 99¢ a pound.

Better yet, plant a lemon tree in your yard, and then they’ll be free. (My favorite price!)

Free lemons from your backyard!

I also recommend straining the fresh-squeezed juice.  You don’t want seeds, of course, and lemon pulp tends to adhere to the glassware and makes it more difficult to clean.

I like to press some lemon zest (only the yellow zest, not the white pith) with a muddler to extract the lemon oils too, which gives an extra depth of flavor.  This is an optional step if, like me, you occasionally are afflicted with laziness. A sharp vegetable peeler is ideal for removing the zest.

SIMPLE, PERFECT LEMONADE

1 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
3/4 to 1 cup rich (2:1) simple syrup, to taste
Zest of 1 lemon
3 cups water or sparkling water

Combine the juice and syrup in a pitcher.  Add the zest and press with your biggest muddler, getting as much oil out as you can.  Add the water (or a bit more) to taste, depending on how concentrated you like it.

See? Easy peasy. (But you knew that.)

Now let’s have a go at making a single serving of lemonade.  Get a nice tall glass.  Fill it with ice, preferably nice big cubes.  Add an ounce of lemon juice and 3/4 ounce of simple syrup (as above, a whole ounce if you like it sweeter).  Fill it with fizzy water and you have a lovely, summery fizzy lemonade, but … hmm.  This also sounds like … wait a minute, it’s missing something … oh yeah!  Two ounces of gin.  (London dry, Plymouth or Old Tom, like the drink’s namesake.)  Then that glass of fizzy lemonade becomes a Tom Collins.  Well, heck-ola.  Now it’s a cocktail!  (Hold that thought.)

Let’s start playing around with this basic lemonade.  I’ve been attending the Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans for many years, and perhaps the single tastiest and most refreshing beverage on the entire Fair Grounds is Strawberry Lemonade.  The weather tends to be hot and humid, and this drink is bright, sweet, tart, fruity and oh-so-wonderful.  As you’ll notice, the technique is very similar to what I described above.   I never managed to get the exact recipe from the folks who make it at Jazzfest but again, it’s pretty easy stuff and yields spectacular results.   Here’s Emeril Lagasse’s recipe (the man knows New Orleans).

STRAWBERRY LEMONADE

2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 tablespoon finely chopped lemon zest
1 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1 pint strawberries, hulled and halved
2 cups cold water or sparkling water

Bring the water and sugar to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and stir until the sugar is dissolved.  Add the zest and juice, stir the mixture and remove from heat.  Let cool, then strain into a pitcher.

Puree the strawberries in a blender then add to the pitcher with the lemon juice mixture.  Stir to combine and chill thoroughly.

To serve, add the water or sparkling water and stir well.  Pour over ice into tall glasses and garnish with a whole strawberry and a mint sprig.

Did I say that there’s not much that’s better than lemonade?  Well, one of those things would be strawberry lemonade.  Now … think about adding a shot of reposado tequila to that.  Limonada por mi Amante, anyone?  Use this as a launching point — you can use raspberries, blackberries or pretty much any fruit that tastes good with lemons (which would be almost all of them).  Also, that aforementioned Tom Collins?  Instead of building it in the Collins glass start it out in a mixing glass, throw in a few raspberries, muddle them with the gin, lemon juice and simple, then double-strain that into your ice-filled Collins glass and fill with soda.  Nice berry garnish.  Ta-daa!  Raspberry Collins.  Or any other Somethingberry Collins you care to make.  So simple, but believe me, your guests will rave about it.

Let’s take another direction — instead of adding fruit, let’s start experimenting with the syrup.  For another dimension of flavor, try making a lemongrass syrup instead of simple.  Take a cup of water and a cup of sugar (two if you want it rich), plus two sliced lemongrass stalks (center only), bruised slightly.  Bring to a simmer for 10 minutes, then let cool.  Strain and bottle — it’s helpful to add a splash of vodka as a preservative.  Make your lemonade with this as the sweetener, maybe muddling a few kaffir lime leaves or some Thai basil or cilantro, and you’ve got some nicely exotic southeast Asian flavors going too.  (The syrup also makes delicious iced tea sweetener, an idea I stole from Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, NC.)

I suspect you see where we’re going with this.  By taking a basic lemonade recipe, varying it by adding booze and/or fruit and/or flavored sugar syrups, you have a range of cocktail before you that’s limited only by your imagination, and what’s in season.

Here’s one I really like — sophisticated, herbal, floral, yummy.

LAVENDER LEMONADE

1-1/2 ounces Plymouth gin.
1 ounce lavender syrup (see below).
1 to 1-1/2 ounces lemon juice (to taste, as to your tartness preference).
Sparkling water.

In a tall Collins glass filled with ice cubes, build first three ingredients, add fizzy water and stir.  Garnish with a sprig of fresh lavender if you have it, a lemon slice if you don’t.

To make the lavender syrup bring 1 cup water, 1 cup sugar and the zest of one lemon to a boil, then lower to a simmer and stir to dissolve sugar.  Remove from heat, then add 1/2 cup lavender blossoms.  Let steep overnight, then strain and bottle.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that this is basically a Tom Collins, but with a flavored syrup instead of muddled fruit.  Try a syrup with basil, lemon verbena, thyme … go to the herb section of your local farmer’s market and go nuts.

Now let’s do something unusual with the basic lemonade recipe.  I came across this a while back and although I don’t make it as often as I’d like (due to my aforementioned lazy bastardness), it is filled with deliciousness and in its way reminds me of the beloved sno-balls I grew up with in New Orleans, thanks to a Secret Ingredient.

In Brazil they take a different approach toward making lemonade, whizzing together not only juice but skin and even pith.  (Plus, there’s that Secret Ingredient.)  Brazilian lemons are also quite a lot like limes, so for this recipe we’ll be using the largest limes we can find.  I usually have an easy time finding them in local Latin or other ethnic markets or supermarkets; otherwise use one-and-a-half to two smaller limes for one big one.

BRAZILIAN LEMONADE

4 large or 6-8 small limes
1 cup simple syrup
5 cups cold water
3 ounces sweetened condensed milk (i.e., The Secret Ingredient)

Unless you have a really huge blender, you’ll need do this first step in two batches as described.

Wash the limes well.  Trim the ends off the limes, then cut into eighths.

Place half of the limes, simple syrup and water into the blender and give it five one-second pulses. Pour into a large fine-mesh strainer over a pitcher and strain the mixture, stirring and pressing with a wooden spoon to squeeze all the liquid out of the resulting pulp.  (Discard the pulp.)  Repeat wtih the other half.

Add the sweetened condensed milk, and serve in tall glasses over ice.

Now … add a jigger of good cachaça or white rum to that.  Oba!

You can also make your lemonades into more complex cocktails by adding more ingredients, such as liqueurs or bitters.  Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, who is a not-so-mild-mannered graphic designer for movies when he’s not in his not-so-secret identity as our planet’s pre-eminent cocktail archaeologist, has created a number of superb cocktails in his day.  One of these was in honor of the author Daniel Handler, specifically in his guise as Lemony Snicket, creator of the series of children’s books A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Doc was the graphic designer on the film version of the first couple of books, and created the Lemony Snicket Cocktail using gin, lemon juice, limoncello and yellow Chartreuse.  While cogitating over my lemonade article, I thought this powerful but tasty cocktail might make a nice lemonade-based tall drink too.

THE FIZZY SNICKET, or THE SNICKETY FIZZ
(unfortunately adapted by Chuck from Ted’s original)

1-1/2 ounces Beefeater gin.
1 ounce fresh lemon juice.
1/2 ounce limoncello.
1/2 ounce yellow Chartreuse.
1/4 ounce simple syrup (optional, if you like it sweeter).
Sparkling water.

Build in a Collins glass over ice, adding the soda last.  Give it a brief stir and garnish with a shrunken head, or a lemon slice if the former is not handy.

(By the way, to make Ted’s original Lemony Snicket cocktail, up the gin to 2-1/2 ounces, lower the lemon juice to 1/2 ounce and omit the simple and fizzy water.  Garnish with a curly lemon twist.)

I think by now you’ve got a good idea where you can go with this, which is almost anywhere.  Before we finish I’ll toss out one more lemonade (actually, technically a limeade) that I came up with a few years ago, with two slightly different versions.

SCHMILSSON

2 ounces white rum or cachaça.
1 ounce fresh lime juice.
3/4 ounce rich Demerara syrup.
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters.
3 ounces coconut water.

Build in a Collins glass over ice and stir.

Or, if you don’t have coconut water handy …

NILSSON FIZZ

2 ounces white rum or cachaça.
1 ounce fresh lime juice.
1 ounce coconut syrup.
2-3 dashes Angostura bitters.
Sparkling water.

Build first four ingredients in a Collins glass over ice, top with fizzy water and stir.

If only they made sparkling coconut water.  I’m tempted by put some into my soda siphon and charge it up and see how that works, using the first recipe, and then we’d have just one Nilsson Fizz.  Both of these drinks are named for that great singer and songwriter who put de lime in de coconut and drank ‘em both up.  (It relieve de bellyache.)

Enjoy!  And have a bitchin’ summer!

One of the great joys of cocktail mixing and drinking is deciding to give a moldy oldie that you’ve never tried a runabout, and discovering (yet again) that Granddad and the Boys knew what the heck they were doing. To paraphrase the favorite smack talk of oldsters everywhere, for all the creative achievements of today’s bartenders, I think the old guys may have forgotten as much or more about cocktails than we know now.
Witness the subject of this little excursion, the Rickey. If you are a Baby Boomer or older, you’ve probably heard of a Rickey. And if you are a Baby Boomer or younger, you’ve probably never had one. First off, the Rickey is actually an entire class of drinks, rather than a specific one, just like the Sour, or the Julep… or the Cocktail for that matter. And like most of the base classes, it is dead bone simple on the face of it.
The one disappointing aspect of the Rickey, to my own taste, is that its origin is shrouded in neither mystery nor controversy. It’s pretty well documented, which is no fun at all. Esquire’s cocktail historian does manage to make the story itself entertaining. He details who Colonel Rickey was, and how cocktails made him an influential lobbyist. This is how the Rickey itself came to be:

Anyway, one day in the 1890s, a bartender at Shoemaker’s handed the colonel a little something he was working on — perhaps the one drink known to mixology that can cut through the Precambrian swamp that is the capital in summer. We don’t know the bartender’s name. The colonel went into the lime-importing business. Washington.

My only problem with this story is the last word. It should read, America. For this to be a Washington story, the colonel would have established a domestic lime plantation, then gotten his congressbuddies to pass massive import tariffs on foreign limes. Washington.
Sadly, we still wouldn’t know the bartender’s name.
To make a base Rickey, you take some liquor, some lime juice, and some sparkling water, and serve it in a tall glass over the rocks. Tradition would indicate you leave the squeezed lime half in the glass as garnish. The ratios between ingredients are fungible, of course, but a good rule of thumb to work with is

• 1 part lime juice
• 3 parts liquor
• 8 parts soda water

That’s really all you need for the blueprint, and you can run off to experiment right now. But there are lots of choices to make within this framework, lots of ways to stray outside of it, and lots of my under-edited, purple prose to enjoy, so stick around.
Your first choice to make is what spirit to employ. The two great classics are gin and whiskey. Either bourbon or rye is likely the booze used in the first Rickey served, but gin is perhaps the most famous star. I’ve tried both in recent days, and while I adore the gin version, a Bourbon Rickey made with Bulleit is a heckuva way to take the edge off of a hot, angry, frustrating day. Other common liquors to Rickey-fy are rum and applejack.
Lots of people think you should sweeten a Rickey with a half part of simple syrup or even some grenadine or orgeat (depending on the spirit used). I think sweetening is unnecessary in this drink, even for more timid drinkers, and it removes a little of the bracing refreshment that makes the Rickey such a great summer drink.
If you do want a little sweeter drink, take the advice of David Embury, in his The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, and modify the liquor to a liqueur.

…and liqueurs, perhaps, make the most palatable Rickeys of all. I have introduced dozens of people … to the Apricot Rickey, and each and every one has pronounced it one of the most delicious beverages he has ever tasted.

If you don’t know Embury’s work, 1) Go buy the book. Now. And 2) Listen to him. He knew his stuff, even if he did prefer his Rickeys sweetened a bit.
Embury’s apricot fascination aside (I don’t have any around now, or I’d report on how it works here), the most traditional liqueur for Rickey’s is sloe gin, if you can find a quality one (which I can’t).
The one immutable element of a Rickey is the lime. You can make a drink with lemon instead, but it ain’t a Rickey. Thoroughly squeezing half a modern lime will give you just about the right amount of juice, and plopping the crushed fruit in the drink makes for a garnish that’s just a bit different.
The sparkling water could be just about anything. I usually eschew club soda, in favor of my handy dandy soda siphon. But since Ol’ Spitsky is broken here at Pegu Blog Headquarters, I picked up a six-pack of Perrier to use. The only problem with this is now I’m going to have to keep Perrier on hand in the summer months. It really works well.
You could also sweeten your Rickey by using a soft drink instead of sparkling water. Whip up a Vodka Rickey using ginger beer, and you’ve stumbled onto the Moscow Mule!
As a final note, Embury also steered me to another valuable application of the Rickey. It makes a super Preggatini, sports drink, or kid’s drink. Treat your kids (either indirectly while still under construction, or in their tweens) to a Welch’s Rickey, or a grenadine one. We had a good time last night using fresh watermelon juice for the kid’s drinks. As an aside, pouring Perrier into watermelon juice produces an interesting result. You get a very stable, large bubbled head on the drink. Unfortunately, they were consumed before I could get the camera.
As I said at the outset, the Rickey is a really wonderful drink. It’s hot right now. And if it ain’t humid, it’s really hot. The Rickey can take care of that. Moreover, it’s another source of endless experimentation for the cocktail hound. You can bend it to the whims of lots of different guests with a pretty limited collection of supplies, so it’s a great application for which to set up your traveling cocktail kit.
Cheers!

Tea is important stuff. Wars have been fought over it. Though it does not enjoy the popularity in the States that it does in other nations, we still drink a fair amount of it. The seminal moment that marked the tipping point of colonial relations with the crown was the Boston Tea Party, when Americans lost faith in their government over a massive government bailout. And traditional tea consumption here never recovered. Americans now are coffee drinkers for the most part, viewing hot tea drinkers like myself as just a trifle eccentric.

But while hot tea may be unusual in the US, one way of drinking it is solidly American and rising fast in popularity: Iced Tea. I’m going to do two posts on it. This one talks about how to make iced tea, how to sweeten it, and how to serve it. The next will be a shorter one on a new class of liquor featuring sweet tea flavoring.

It is impossible to determine who really first came up with an idea so elementary as putting ice in tea, but it is abundantly clear where and when the concept of iced tea entered the public consciousness of the world.

The World’s Fair of 1904 in St. Louis was a gigantically important event in many ways, but for our purposes its most important characteristic was that it was freaking hot. Popular legend goes that a tea merchant trying to give away free samples of his tea to fairgoers was stymied by people taking one look at his steaming cups, comparing them to their steaming brows, and heading for the hills. Our enterprising merchant started putting ice in his tea and the World (already being in the neighborhood) beat a path to his door. This is likely not completely true, as many merchants apparently served iced tea at the fair. What matters is that people from all over the world got a chance to experience the restorative powers of tea poured over ice.

While bottled iced tea has been available for a long time, and there is a minor explosion of products on offer right now, most iced tea is still drunk when (hopefully) freshly brewed. It’s just much better that way, trust me.

Making iced tea is very easy, but also easily messed up, if you don’t avoid some common pitfalls. I’ll walk through my preferred method and discuss what to make sure you do and do not do on each step of the way.

First up is your choice of tea itself. Do not use standard tea. Most tea bags and premium loose leaf teas are made for drinking hot, and their flavor balances will usually change when chilled. A few will work, and if you are lucky or very knowledgeable, a few will be great. For most of us, it is simplest to use tea bags blended specifically for iced tea making. My favorite brand is Luzianne, which is a blend of pekoe and orange pekoe black tea. You can get it just about everywhere, and 999 out of a thousand of you tea snobs out there who are sneering at commercial tea bags can shut up now. These guys know what they are doing when it comes to iced tea. Tetley and Lipton also make iced tea blends as well, I just prefer the Luzianne.

Another question to answer before starting is whether or not you will sweeten your tea. Your answer is yes.

What? I said, you will sweeten your tea. It’s better that way. Trust me. If you claim not to like your tea sweetened, then you haven’t had it done right. If you must have your tea unsweetened, simply ignore all references to sweetening below, and you’ll be fine. Bored, but fine.

Further, you will sweeten your tea when you make it, not when you serve it. This is the only way to properly and reliably sweeten tea. You can pour in sugar to a glass full of tea and ice and stir for half an hour, and the stuff will not fully dissolve. You will either have insufficiently sweet tea, or you will have a sludge of corporeal diabetic shock in the bottom of your glass. Please understand, the rest of America. For a hundred years, when southerners have ventured beyond the bosom of Dixie and ordered sweetea, we have usually heard this in response: Sure hon! We have sugar packets right there on the table!

It is fortunate that few folks nowadays carry horsewhips, for I assure you, visions of employing one in an educational capacity dance enticingly through the head of he or she who just ordered the tea.
If you must make unsweetened iced tea at home, keep a bottle of simple syrup at hand. It will do the job, albeit with a lot of unnecessary rigamarole. If you are in a restaurant and the only iced tea is unsweetened, may I suggest a Coke?

Thus endeth the sweetening sermon. Let’s hear no more debate, because while I do not own a horsewhip, I do have a Taser….

To begin, bring 2 1/4 cups of water just to a boil. Put 6 regular sized tea bags (or 2 family sized) in a 1 quart pyrex bowl or measuring cup. Pour the water over the bags and let sit for fifteen minutes. Do not fiddle with the bags during this time. Go read a blog post or something.

When the time is up, gently lift the bags from the water, let them drain briefly while hanging over the water, then throw them away. Do not, for the love of all that is good and holy, squeeze the bags to remove any extra liquid! We don’t need that last bit of flavor because,

1. All we need has naturally migrated out of the bags already.
2. Most of the flavors still lurking in the bags are bitter ones. Bitter is great in a Pegu or Old Fashioned, not so much in iced tea.

While the water is still warm, sweeten it. Add between 1/4 to 1/2 cup of white table sugar and stir for a few seconds to dissolve. I like to use about a third of a cup. And yes, that’s all the sugar you really need. Many recipes call for vastly more sugar, and I think this is why a lot of people get turned off to sweet tea. Resist the urge to make your tea as sweet as soft drinks. I love sugar as much as the next guy, but you want to be able to taste and appreciate the tea as well.

Once the sugar is dissolved, pour into your serving and/or storing pitcher and add 6 more cups of cold water (not ice). You are ready to serve in a tall glass with big, luxurious ice cubes.

While nothing else is needed for a great drink, there are two traditional garnishes for iced tea that each bring more than just curb appeal to the glass. The most common, largely because it is much easier to provide in commercial settings, is the wedge of lemon. It looks nice and adds a bit of zing to the drink. Many people won’t have tea without it. I’d like to expand on the other option.

With the growing season upon us, consider using fresh mint. Cut a good stalk of mint about an inch or so taller than the inside of your tea glass. Gently rumple the lower leaves to release the oils, leaving the top leaves, those that will rise above the surface, pristine in appearance. Stick the mint in the glass with the ice, then pour in your tea.

Sublime.