Sunday, August 30, 2015

Dry ice piña colada

I have a guilty pleasure. I know one isn't supposed to like frozen drinks as a "serious" mixologist, but the piña colada is special. It must be the copious amount of saturated fat.I've been through a number of recipes, but the one that has stuck is from [food.com1]: (http://www.food.com/recipe/island-pina-colada-166948) (dark rum, light rum, whipping cream, pineapple juice, coco lopez, angostura bitters). I use Bacardi light rum and Zaya for the "dark" rum, and crushed pineapple instead of pineapple juice. That works really well.But how to make it better? Get rid of the ice, of course. I got a 3 pound bag of dry ice from the grocery store and started playing.Now, here's the slightly dangerous part. You don't want to swallow a piece of dry ice. It'll burn you.I took a big chunk of the dry ice (with a glove, dummy), stuck it in a gallon Ziploc bag and hammered on it with a rubber mallet until all the pieces were essentially dust. I made the standard recipe and put a whole lot of the dry ice dust in the blender and just blended.Due to all the fog coming off, you can't really tell what's going on. I ended up accidentally making alcoholic ice cream. Pretty good, but not what I was aiming for; I used too much dry ice. After some experimentation I determined a good spot to aim for was 15 degrees F (that's -9° C).The result was a super-creamy, super strong, carbonated piña colada. Of course it was stronger, because there's no water to dilute it.The next batch I increased the coco lopez to 2 oz from 1.5 and the pineapple juice from 3 to 4 oz. It was far more balanced.Yum.Anybody else done weird stuff with dry ice?

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