When it’s brunch, there are always your gold standards when it comes to booze. You have your Mimosas (hold the OJ for mine, thanks) and your Bloody Marys. How about when it’s time to expand our horizons though? You want something like your traditional Mary, but a little fancy, a little uptown, something with a bit more funky flair. You, my friend, are in luck, that’s why we’re here to help you! Introducing the Uptown Bloody Mary!

Sometimes, you start with a great concept and work from there. This time, it was “We want to make something slightly artisanal, but not too poncy.”

As lately Alice and I have been on a bit of a breakfast kick (I’m still not fully behind this whole brunch thing, but at least you’re justified a cocktail in the morning at ‘brunch’ while drinking at breakfast is, apparently, frowned upon), I wanted to play with that — and what better one to look for a funky little twist on than the Bloody Mary?

Alrighty, artisanal Bloody Mary — to start with, we switched out the tomato juice (which is just too gauche) for tomato water, which is fancy pants tomato juice. The process for that is quite simple: you take some tomatoes, remove their skins if you wanna (cut an X in the bottom, boil for a 30 seconds, toss into cold water and remove the skins — we didn’t, pure laziness), quarter, blend, strain through the finest thing you have. Typically, that’ll be cheesecloth, which might take you eight hours so leave it in the fridge. We went fine metal, as it’s what we had on hand.

Then it was onto the spice. Horseradish is quite nice, especially when you grate it fresh, but we needed some peño action here. As it worked famously well in the Peño Blast, we made some peño simple syrup (and added in some whole peppercorns to round out that pepper flavor). That’s super easy, boil 50/50 water and sugar with jalapeño slices. Cool that, strain out the sliced peños and you have spicy simple syrup and candied peppers. I envy you.

Finally, we needed a quality artisanal vodka that would go with all of our fancy pants flavors going on and what ho, our friends over at Hangar 1 hooked us up with their artisanally-crafted vodka. That was very nice of them indeed!

With these upgraded ingredients, along with the standards of lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce and (our own twist) olive brine, the Uptown Bloody Mary Blast was ready.

I mentioned we were also riffing on a Dirty Martini right? That’s where the olive brine comes in to the party. It totally works.

Now, onto the Uptown Bloody Mary!

 

July 24th, 2015 | by morgan