Summer requires many, manycocktails, but damn is it expensive to stock a bar cart. Enter a new concept: the one-bottle cocktail. Instead of dropping a bunch of cash on a bar cart's worth of liqueurs, bitters, and spirits, you buy one bottle of booze (just one!) and use common grocery store ingredients to turn that bottle into creative cocktails.
The idea comes from Maggie Hoffman's new book,The One-Bottle Cocktail. It has over 80 cocktail recipes, none of which contain more than one spirit. And no, it's not 100 pages of vodka lemonades.
These are complex, deeply flavored cocktails that balance sweetness, bitterness, and punch thanks almost entirely to supermarket ingredients and plenty of summer fruit. "Getting inspired walking around the grocery store is a great way" to start building a one-bottle cocktail bar, Hoffman says. Here's what she grabs when she's roaming the aisles.
1. Preserves for deep fruit flavor
Summery produce like blackberries, strawberries, and cucumber are a natural way to add sweetness to your grocery store cocktail, of course. But they won't always give you the concentrated fruit flavor and sweetness that a cocktail needs. That's where jams and preserves come in. "It might be hard to extract flavor from apricots on their own, butapricot jamis gold," Hoffman says. "It's so concentrated and deep and luscious like a liqueur, and you don't have to worry about there being such a small window for ripeness."
2. Vegetables for savoriness
"People forget that a savory element in a drink can not only keep it from getting too sweet but also add depth of flavor," Hoffman says. A great place to look is the produce aisle: arugula, fennel, celery, and tomato can be muddled and infused to mimic the bitter, sometimes vegetal flavor of some liqueurs. "You can even make a syrup from radicchio along with the peels of grapefruit. You get this bittersweet element, almost like a complex Italian liqueur."
3. Buckwheat honey for sweetness with depth
Hoffman advises looking in the baking aisle for unconventional sweeteners; there's a whole range of deeply flavored honeys and molasses-y sugars available at the grocery store these days. "Buckwheat honey has this amazing malty flavor," she says. "You can also use maple syrup, which adds much more complex flavor than simple syrup. Or use demerara sugar rather than white sugar to add a deep molasses note."
4. Tea for tannins
"Many cocktails havetanninfrom a wine base or a spirit that's been aged in a barrel. That scratchy sensation on your tongue adds an interesting textural element," says Hoffman. But tannins don't have to come from booze. One of the best sources istea. "Steep a black tea for a long time, or use agreen teathat also adds grassy flavor." White tea will add tannin but is a little sweeter and milder. One of Hoffman's recipes even calls for spicy chai.
