I’ve recognized Dave Arnold for the higher a part of the final 15 years. Even earlier than we have been formally colleagues—I used to be the bar director for Momofuku whereas he was helming Booker and Dax, a high-concept cocktail bar nestled behind Momofuku Ssam Bar—we all the time shared an affinity for waxing nerdily about cocktails: the place to seek out naturally carbonated spring water in upstate New York or easy methods to correctly retailer shaking ice. In spite of everything this time, it by no means will get previous.
“OK.” Dave takes a barely perceptible pause earlier than launching into the backstory of the Sagittarius B2, one in all his cocktails at New York’s Bar Contra. “So there’s a fuel cloud within the heart of the Milky Method galaxy [called Sagittarius B2] and in that fuel cloud was found—through radio telescopic strategies—advanced molecules with aroma. One in every of them is ethyl formate, one of many important aroma compounds in each raspberries and rum.” With out pausing for a breath, he continues: “Straight away I used to be like, ‘Dang, Sagittarius B2, we’ve acquired a raspberries and rum drink arising.’ After which it will get even higher as a result of it’s additionally acquired a type of cyanide. Whereas that looks as if a unfavorable, for me, I used to be like, ‘Oh, that’s an enormous optimistic, as a result of bitter almonds are cyanide-adjacent.’”
Though it may be a bit reductive, I have a tendency to explain novel cocktails when it comes to their genealogical lineage to earlier, extra basic cocktails. On this framework, the Sagittarius B2—a mixture of rum, raspberry and orgeat (a syrup comprised of almonds)—may finest be understood because the cosmic love little one of a strawberry Daiquiri and a Mai Tai.
For the bottom spirit, Dave initially needed to make use of clairin, a sugarcane distillate native to Haiti, however its intrinsic grassiness was a bit too overpowering. As a substitute, he went with the extra subdued Chairman’s Reserve rum from St. Lucia. Dialing within the different elements, in typical Dave Arnold style, was a lot much less simple. “First I made it with common orgeat and lime-acid raspberry,” he says, referring to clarified raspberry juice that’s been acid-adjusted with citric, malic and succinic acids to reflect the acidity of lime. “And I used to be like, nah, not raspberry sufficient.”
To make the raspberry taste pop much more, he determined to enhance the orgeat with, effectively, extra raspberries, this time within the type of jam. The orgeat begins like some other, by soaking almonds in a single day. However fine-tuning the recipe necessitated sourcing almonds from an unlikely supply: Dealer Joe’s. Apparently the Bazzini model, which is often utilized in business kitchens, simply didn’t present the correct taste for this particular utility. Then Dave strained the almonds and mixed them with the aforementioned raspberry jam and scorching water, earlier than passing the combination via a 150-micron fabric through a five-ton hydraulic press.
Lastly, he augmented the syrup with salt, almond extract, gum arabic, xanthan gum (to maintain the combination in suspension) and Methocel F50, a food-grade thickening and binding agent (for correct foam technology).
Making conventional DIY orgeat just isn’t for the faint of coronary heart within the first place, and including raspberries to the combination solely magnified the problem of straining the nut solids from the usable liquid. “It’s an enormous ache within the ass,” Dave says. To grasp that this assertion just isn’t remotely hyperbolic, think about this: On a latest Saturday night, I encountered Dave casually posted up on the bar holding a handwritten matrix of Margarita recipes made with 4 totally different orange liqueurs, every with various Brix ranges, decided by a modified least squares regression algorithm. When an individual who does this for enjoyable says one thing is a big ache within the ass, imagine them.
After the elements have been dialed in, there’s the matter of truly making the Sagittarius B2 when a visitor orders it. Theo Ouya, Bar Contra’s bar supervisor, discovered the orgeat too thick to measure out in a jigger, noting that it could decelerate service to unacceptable ranges. The group tried to unravel this by combining the lime-acid raspberry and the raspberry orgeat right into a single cheater bottle, however the drink’s texture wasn’t popping out as optimally as when the 2 elements have been combined à la minute. The answer got here within the type of a kitchen scale.
In my expertise, a kitchen scale has not often been the answer for effectivity. It’s sometimes slower than jiggering and measuring is irreversible—for those who by chance overshoot your mark on any ingredient, it’s important to toss the drink and begin over. “It’s a horrible concept, more often than not,” agrees Dave. However this utility proves the worth: Jiggering entails two pours, one from the bottle to the jigger and one other from the jigger to the shaker. Utilizing a scale halves the variety of pours, and within the case of pouring a thick, goopy substance, that may yield vital time financial savings.
If ever there have been a drink that exemplifies the Dave Arnold method to cocktails—balancing ambition and creativity towards bodily constraints, and calling on an elaborate software package to deliver these constraints to heel—Sagittarius B2 is it. As Dave summarizes: “So yeah, it’s all of the issues.”
