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Cocktails for Carnivores: Drinks Infused with Meat

4 minute read
Joel Stein

In this meat-happy era, when diners serve bacon doughnuts and every menu item comes with an option of adding chicken, one cannot expect to consume alcohol without killing an animal. Fat-washed cocktails, as drinks with meat-infused liquor are called, are popping up at lots of swanky bars. Sirio Ristorante at Las Vegas’ new Aria hotel, for example, makes a $14 vodka drink called Bring Home the Bacon, which contains beef bouillon and is garnished with a deep-fried bacon-wrapped olive. And a prosciutto-stuffed olive. And a cream-cheese-and-bacon-stuffed olive. If that sounds over the top, consider the hit YouTube video in which two Los Angeles women wince while drinking a McNuggetini, which combines a chocolate shake, vanilla vodka and a bit of barbecue sauce — and has a whole McNugget perched on the rim.

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It’s easy to come up with ghastly combinations, but creating a meat drink that actually tastes good seems like a tough thing to pull off. So I asked Tony Abou-Ganim, who wrote the new book The Modern Mixologist: Contemporary Classic Cocktails, to invent a meat cocktail with me. He had already created the Big Eye Bloody Bull, an elk-bouillon-based homage to one of the first meat drinks, 1985’s San Francisco — birthed Bloody Bull (vodka, beef bouillon and lemon juice), which itself was based on the Bull Shot (vodka and beef bouillon) from Detroit’s Caucus Club. But I wanted something that was totally new — and didn’t sound so gross.

(See 10 recipes for meat-based cocktails.)

We met at 9 a.m, the perfect time to consume both meat and alcohol. The night before, Abou-Ganim had rendered some pancetta, let it cool, diced it and dropped it into some Old Potrero Rye. When I asked why he chose pancetta, he told me that a cocktail should let its base spirit shine and that the meat would bring out the smokiness of the whiskey. “Also,” he said, “bacon makes everything taste better.”

We threw out the meat, which had been stripped of its flavor, and took a sip of the infused rye. It was a bit salty at first and left a slightly fatty mouthfeel that made the smokiness linger even longer. But overall, it tasted like fire.

(Watch Joel Stein drink meat-infused booze.)

My first idea was to mix the rye with pepper, since the flavors reminded me of spaghetti carbonara. Abou-Ganim smiled at me as if I were an idiot. Making a cocktail, he explained, is a lot like cooking or winemaking: you need balance, particularly when it comes to sweetness and acidity. He figured pineapple was a classic pairing with pig, as was maple syrup. Orange, he thought, would also work, since it softens whiskey. I was very pro-softening.

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We made two cocktails. In the first, Abou-Ganim muddled 15 mint leaves and five slices of pineapple, added 1 oz. (30 mL) of simple syrup and 1.5 oz. (45 mL) of our infused rye and poured it over crushed ice in a short glass. It was surprisingly good: sweet and salty and refreshing and dark at the same time. Since it was a variation on a drink called a smash, I named it the Swine Smash.

Our second attempt was a sour, which combined Cointreau (a neutral-tasting orange liqueur), lemon juice, maple syrup, egg whites and our rye, shaken over ice and served in a martini glass. The drink was way too sour. But when I poured in a lot more maple syrup and a little seltzer, it tasted much better. Not as good as the first one, and definitely not as meaty, but good enough for me to name it: Breakfast Fizz. I’m not entirely sure when and where someone will wake up and crave a meat-infused drink, but I have a feeling the time is coming, and I’ll be ready.

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