Art of Drink Has a Great Homemade Cream of Coconut Recipe and Ive Tried Both Coco Lopez
T hither are two types of people in this world: those who admit to liking piña colada, and pretentious idiots. Even the great mixologist Tony Conigliaro names it as his guilty pleasure – as if this totally tropical taste were something to exist ashamed of. Victoria Moore hits the nail on the head in her volume How to Drink: "At some point around the 1980s … piña colada stopped being a drink and became an excruciating razzmatazz of an result guaranteed to arrive at your tabular array similar a carnival float, in an obscenely big drinking glass, decked with thrillingly garish paraphernalia such equally a fuchsia paper parasol or vi." While I'm not averse to the odd parasol, or indeed a flamingo-shaped stirrer, she has a signal.
'Twas not ever thus. Invented in a luxury hotel bar in Puerto Rico in the 1950s for wealthy tourists looking for a taste of the Caribbean, I imagine early customers were more Don Draper than Shirley Valentine – indeed, Hollywood fable Joan Crawford plainly claimed the Caribe Hilton's creation was "better than slapping Bette Davis in the face". With such groovy ingredients, it shouldn't be hard to restore the drink's faded glamour. After all, there is zippo inherently naff nigh pineapple, coconut or rum – and the jury is withal out on those parasols.
Rum
That said, Conigliaro's recipe falls at the first hurdle in using cachaça instead of rum, which disqualifies it from the classic colada race. Fellow bartender Dale DeGroff says the trick to making a great piña colada is to use both light and night rum, Moore goes for the golden kind, telling readers to use "a richer, more anile rum if you like the sunny flavour to evidence through", or "a white rum if you adopt the coconut and pineapple to dominate" – which is exactly what Larousse Cocktails, Food52 and Jason Wilson of the Washington Post opt for. Richard Godwin, meanwhile, gives 2 piña colada recipes in his new book The Spirits, ane using light rum and 1 using a mixture of dark and kokosnoot rum ("the proper stuff, like Koko Kanu, not Malibu").
Merely as I'm wondering how many different rums it'southward decent for one adult female to accept in her drove, I spot that he has helpfully included instructions on how to make your ain coconut rum by fatty-washing light rum with coconut oil, which provides surprisingly easy and constructive, though it's a subtlety that would be lost in the classic recipe using coconut milk rather than coconut h2o. In any case, it seems a shame to utilize a mild-flavoured light rum – information technology has no chance against kokosnoot and pineapple – but the dark one in DeGroff's recipe feels too heavy for a drink that is crying out to exist sipped on a sunlounger, so I'k going to utilise golden rum.
Fruit
Pineapple is non-negotiable (unless you're a bohemian, similar Conigliaro, simply equally we've established, he's already been disqualified anyway). Moore reckons "it'due south not essential to employ fresh fruit to make a decent piña colada, though it certainly adds to the drama if yous do" and then I try her recipe with tinned pineapple rings, and relieve the fresh stuff for Wilson's recipe. The others all use pineapple juice instead, which, to my surprise, I prefer. I find the tinned pineapple rings as well sweet and the fresh fruit distractingly acidic … and both rather gristly. (Wilson says that, despite the name, which means "strained pineapple", it's easier to keep the drink from separating if yous don't bother, but his would be better served with a spoon than a harbinger.) Fresh pineapple juice neatly avoids this problem, and seems to striking the spot flavour-wise, also. Food52 adds a spritz of lime juice and DeGroff adds Angostura bitters, which makes their piña coladas particularly refreshing, though you may non need either depending on the pineapple juice y'all use.
Coconut
The original piña colada calls for a Puerto Rican production known as Coco López cream of kokosnoot, not to be confused with coconut cream, as I discover when I track it down online for Food52 and DeGroff's recipes – this stuff is so heavily sweetened, it's more like a liquid Compensation bar than anything you might put in a Thai curry. Moore, Larousse and Godwin's first version all use coconut milk, and Wilson and Godwin's second an "elegant, cream-free version of the gaudy abomination for self-antisocial, lactose-intolerant cocktail pseuds", kokosnoot h2o, which the former claims gives the drink "a much lighter and more complex flavor". DeGroff adds double cream, too, which makes his version deliciously rich – a nice matter to social club as a dessert, perchance, simply a fleck also heavy for drinking on the beach. The cream of coconut is unpleasantly gloopy, while the coconut water is besides subtle – it works in Godwin's 2nd version, considering it'due south a much shorter potable, merely I can inappreciably taste it in Wilson'south drink. Coconut milk seems the manner to go.
Sweetener and others
That said, without the foam of coconut, the drink does crave some sweetening if information technology is to mirror the flavour of the original – Wilson's version is disappointingly sparse in flavour in comparison with Godwin's one with sugar syrup.
Ice
Moore perspicaciously observes that the thickness of the drink is crucial, describing crushed ice as the ideal, though without a sufficiently powerful blender, she suggests serving the drink in an ice-packed glass instead. My blender, despite bold claims of an ice part, is somewhat incompetent at breaking the stuff upwards, but I find a few stress-relieving whacks of a rolling pin works wonders (on the ice, not the blender, though sometimes I am sorely tempted) – and there really is no decent substitute. Naught tastes of holiday similar a frosted glass full of dangerously alcoholic crushed ice.
Garnish
More than is more when information technology comes to the piña colada; pineapple wedges, maraschino cherries – the more than the merrier.
(per beverage)
Ice
50ml kokosnoot milk
50ml gold rum
75ml fresh pineapple juice
one-2 tbsp sugar syrup (2 parts white sugar to 1 role water)
Juice of ½ lime
Slice of pineapple, maraschino ruby, cocktail umbrella etc, to decorate
Using plenty ice to fill up your glass to two-thirds, whizz in a blender until crushed, or identify the ice in a clean tea towel and whack repeatedly with a rolling pin, rounders bat or similar, then put in a cocktail shaker.
Stir the kokosnoot milk to make sure information technology hasn't separated into water and foam, then add to the water ice along with the rum and pineapple juice. Whizz or shake until well blended, taste and add the carbohydrate syrup and lime juice as required. Pour into a cold glass.
Cut a small notch in the pineapple and cherry, if using and slot them on to the rim of the glass. Serve immediately.
The piña colada: naff or not – and even if you are a fan, is it one of those drinks that's strictly reserved for holidays? Which other retro-classics deserve rehabilitation?
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/aug/20/how-to-make-the-perfect-pina-colada
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