Cocktail Ingredients You've Never Heard Of

So, even if we can’t say that Fassionola is an ingredient developed by Pat O’Brien, Donn Beach, or someone else entirely, one thing I can say with confidence is that it’s probably what makes the Hurricane cocktail bright red (unlike the grenadine I mentioned a few weeks ago), and one thing that most tiki nerds agree on is that fassionola should taste like fruit punch: tangy, sweet, and almost too easy to sip when mixed properly in a drink.

Now, the recipe for Fassionola is another bone of contention among cocktail scholars. Because if you think the history is murky, wait until you try and wade into tiki blogs and all manner of other publications spouting their take on the ingredient. It certainly doesn’t help that Donn Beach employed not only red fassionola, but also green and gold variants, all with different flavor profiles. Nonetheless, I think I found the recipe that I would use if pressed into service at a tiki bar, and so to keep things simple, that’s what I’ll be sharing with you here.

The basic production steps are as follows, but for process shots and step-by-step instructions, please follow the link to the recipe on our show notes page.

First, chop all your fruit, then weigh it on a kitchen scale and add an equal amount of sugar, and stir occasionally for the first few hours. Leave the mix in the refrigerator overnight. Then, the next morning, stir some more, and after roughly 24 hours has elapsed, you can strain out the solids, leaving only the red liquid. At this point, you’ll need to add the last ingredient, which is passion fruit puree (NOT passion fruit syrup). And this ingredient is a sleeper because you’ll need to add ¼ as much puree as you have syrup, so you can’t exactly figure that out until you’ve strained your fassionola.

Matt adds the following note at the end of his recipe:

Let me be very clear: What we’re making here is a fruit salad, heavy on the berries. Nothing in the above ingredient list is cast in stone. Use whatever the heck sounds good to you. If it evokes the flavor of Kool-Aid when you’re done, you’re on track.

To me, Matt’s recipe has a bunch of things going for it, the most important of which are its ease of execution and its flexibility. Especially when dealing with an ingredient that has such a murky history, I hate when people pretend that their version is the end-all, be-all, and Matt very explicitly side-steps that, leaving us in charge of developing our own house fassionola recipes that we can customize to our hearts’’ content.

P.S. If you’re looking for an authentic tiki drink from Don The Beachcomber to enjoy that also features Fassionola, I’d recommend the Q.B. Cooler. It’s an original cocktail by Ernest Gantt, and it has a cool backstory of its own. But like so many things in the world of tiki, the Q.B. Cooler is a story for another day.

So, now that we’ve achieved a bit of resolution on the Fassionola front, let’s jump right into this bar cart foundations episode where we discuss even more cocktail ingredients you’ve never heard of.

The Search For Novelty

I’d like to begin this voyage into strange and wonderful drink ingredients by taking a second to talk about novelty. What makes us crave it? One possible answer is that humans are great at pattern recognition – and more specifically identifying when something breaks a pattern. This goes back into our evolutionary hinterlands where you can picture a group of proto-humans picking out the shapes of predators in tall grass. It makes sense, in this respect, that evolution might reward those creatures who seek out novelty in their environments by allowing them to live long enough to pass along their genes, making the search for novelty a common trait among humans today. And we know it’s literally ingrained in our genes because countless studies have been run demonstrating the preference of newborn babies for novel stimuli time and time again. It’s one of the best-documented phenomena in developmental psychology.

But somehow the search for novel flavor experiences feels different. I mean, could you make an argument that it’s our body’s way of making sure we have a diet diverse in essential vitamins and micronutrients? I guess you could. That sounds plausible to me. But that’s not exactly an ironclad explanation for why distillers are constantly experimenting with weird cask finishes on their whiskeys or why bartenders are obsessed with smoking, clarifying, fermenting, and infusing with all kinds of weird stuff.

However you choose to think about the role of novelty in your personal or culinary life, one thing is certain: when you’re stuck at home and all your favorite bars and restaurants are closed or doing takeout during a pandemic, things can get a little bland – whether it’s that same room you sit in, day-after-day, or the realization that you’ve been cycling the same 5 or 6 staple meals over and over for months now.

This is why we’re seeing a surge of new home gardeners, bakers, and mixological experiments taking the internet by storm these days. Because flavor has that special ability to transport you in memory or imagination to places that are much more interesting than your kitchen. Personally, you’re never gonna see me jump out of a plane or bungee jump off a bridge. Those aren’t the kinds of thrills I seek. But if there was an equivalently risky behavior that described crazy things you pass over your taste buds, I’d consider myself quite the daredevil.

So if, like me, your palate has been experiencing a bit of wanderlust during this pandemic, I hope you’ll get excited about some of these unusual cocktail ingredients, many of which you may have never heard of.

Pog Juice

The first ingredient I’d like to feature actually came across my radar while researching fassionola. It’s called POG juice, and if you’re wondering if it has any connection to the 90s game fad that involved slamming towers of decorative little discs, the answer is…actually, YES!

The name POG is actually an acronym that stands for Passionfruit, Orange, Guava, and it was developed in the early ‘70s by a company called Haleakala Dairy in Maui, Hawaii. Like fassionola, POG juice is a sweet and tangy blend of fruits that can be used to add depth to many contemporary tiki drinks. And I say contemporary here because I’m not aware of any occurrences of it as a unified ingredient in any classic tiki cocktails. Doesn’t mean these juices didn’t all coincide…but if they did, they were used as individual agents rather than as a fruity super group.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s an awesome ‘90s documentary on the milkcap game that POG juice inspired.

Analog Fassionola Recipe

This recipe for red fassionola comes to us courtesy of past guest Matt Pietrek, author of the book Minimalist Tiki, which is currently nominated for a Tales of the Cocktail Spirited Award for best new cocktail book. He calls this his “Analog” Fassionola recipe because it takes the regular stovetop work of creating a simple syrup completely out of the equation, instead leveraging the inherent hydrophilic properties of sugar to draw juices straight out of fruit.

I’ll read the important parts of the recipe for you here on the air, but if you’re really into tiki drinks, you really need to visit Matt’s blog, cocktailwonk.com and follow him on Instagram @cocktailwonk and @rumwonk.

To make Matt Pietrek’s analog fassionola, you’ll need the following ingredients:

• 1 cup strawberries, moderately chopped

• 1 cup blueberries, moderately chopped

• 1 cup freshly cut pineapple, moderately chopped

• Optional: Lemon peel

• Optional: Mango, raspberries, or whatever else you damn well please

• As much sugar by weight as you have fruit

Ambergris

Next up on our list of weird and wonderful cocktail ingredients you’ve never heard of is Ambergris, which is the coagulated, excreted, sun-and-sea hardened cholesterol of the sperm whale. In some book about a whale, Herman Melville describes it as follows:

Now this ambergris is a very curious substance, and so important as an article of commerce, that in 1791 a certain Nantucket-born Captain Coffin was examined at the bar of the English House of Commons on that subject. For at that time, and indeed until a comparatively late day, the precise origin of ambergris remained, like amber itself, a problem to the learned. Though the word ambergris is but the French compound for grey amber, yet the two substances are quite distinct. For amber, though at times found on the sea-coast, is also dug up in some far inland soils, whereas ambergris is never found except upon the sea. Besides, amber is a hard, transparent, brittle, odorless substance, used for mouth-pieces to pipes, for beads and ornaments; but ambergris is soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum. The Turks use it in cooking, and also carry it to Mecca, for the same purpose that frankincense is carried to St. Peter’s in Rome. Some wine merchants drop a few grains into claret, to flavor it.

Who would think, then, that such fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale! Yet so it is. By some, ambergris is supposed to be the cause, and by others the effect, of the dyspepsia in the whale. How to cure such a dyspepsia it were hard to say, unless by administering three or four boat loads of Brandreth’s pills, and then running out of harm’s way, as laborers do in blasting rocks.

To be honest, this was, like, my favorite part of Moby Dick, which is as much a discourse on the state of the whaling industry at the height of its prominence as it is a revenge tale where a bunch of guys die at sea.

Now, here’s the next thing you need to know about Ambergris: it’s illegal to possess in the United States.

Now here’s the next, next thing you need to know about Ambergris: it’s actually recognized by the FDA as a GRAS (or “generally recognized as safe”) food additive.

So why does the FDA permit ambergris as a food additive, and yet people aren’t even allowed to possess it? Well, unfortunately, it is also possible to harvest Ambergris directly from a sperm whale, which is – like – waaaay illegal. There’s actually a description of this in Moby Dick, but the whale in question is found already dead, so it’s icky in the gross way, but not as much icky in the unethical way.

According to a number of articles I sourced, it’s been roughly two decades since people have even received letters of warning for possessing or selling Ambergris in the US because of the three following reasons:

A.) Ambergris is most often found washed up on beaches, making its collection completely harmless to sperm whales

B.) Ambergris collected from a slain sperm whale is generally of much poorer (read: non-culinary) quality because it has not had time to cure in the salt and air of the ocean, and

C.) These two factors paired make it completely silly for anyone to go out killing sperm whales for poor quality ambergris. It’s not even a remotely lucrative venture.

So, suffice it to say: Ambergris is still illegal to possess here in the U.S. for highly symbolic reasons, but it’s one of those laws that you’re just not going to see enforced, which means a bunch of aspiring bartenders have been using it for over a decade to gussy up their cocktail menus.

Regarding the taste of ambergris, many people in the perfume world use it as a musky fixative – in other words, a thing that keep the stank on your skin longer. After all it is a type of fat, and fats are good for that sort of thing. But when it’s properly aged, battered for years by waves on the high seas, many describe its incredibly potent bouquet as a sophisticated brininess – almost like umami for your nose.

Our favorite 18th century gastronome, Jean-Enthelme Brillat-Savarin, author of The Physiology of Taste, was fond of Ambergris in his hot chocolate, and King Charles II of England enjoyed it as a seasoning for eggs. In fact, it’s rumored that ambergris was used to conceal the odor of whomever chose to poison the king’s breakfast one fateful morning.

In cocktail applications, you’ll see people use it in tincture form, which is a great way to extract flavor from fats. But you’ll also find it grated (in VERY SMALL amounts) into large format punches. In fact, the one and only time I’ve had Ambergris in a cocktail is when David Wondrich crashed a cognac presentation by Maison Ferrand during Tales of the Cocktail 2016. He helped the cocktail apprentices whip up the punch, and it was pretty tasty, if my memory serves me correctly.

The last thing I’ll note here is that there seems to be some sort of tradition of using Ambergris in a beverage called Negus Punch. There’s an article by past podcast guest Derek Brown from 2011, which I’ll link to in the show notes, outlining his process for this drink. So if you’re looking for a place to start with your next lump of ambergris, that might just be the place to start.

Lambanog

This next duo of cocktail ingredients comes to us courtesy of a recent Facebook post by DC bar owner JoJo Valenzuela, who runs The Game and Tiki on 18th. He’s one of my favorite people in the DC hospitality scene, and he’s a huge champion of Filipino flavors, which often represent a fusion of Southeast Asian and Spanish cuisine.

Hailing from that archipelago, two cocktail ingredients you’ve probably never heard of before are Lambanog and Pandan, the latter of which JoJo recently featured in an article on Liquor.com. We’ll give you that cocktail recipe in just a few minutes.

Lambanog, however, is the national spirit of the Philippines, and the history of this beverage goes roughly as follow:

• When the Spanish arrived to colonize the Philippines in the 16th century, they found that the natives were drinking a palm wine called tubâ made from fermented coconut or nipa palm sap.

• There is some uncertainty about whether Filipinos were distilling before the Spanish arrived, but there are records of both primitive wooden stills made with barrels and wooden troughs, as well as more sophisticated metal contraptions that sprang up later on.

• Within a century or so of the Spanish arrival, there were hundreds of distilleries operating both legally and illegally to make Lambanog, which would be considered a “palm brandy” or “palm wine eau de vie” using today’s classification terms.

Now, there’s an interesting question here about what we know and what we don’t know about how distilling technology spread across the world:

Is the Filipino-style still a low-tech version of the Alembic still that came to the Spanish by way of the Arabs, who invented it? Or is the Filipino-style still something that cropped up on its own through contact with other pre-Columbian distilling cultures? Interestingly, this is also a major subject of debate in the Mezcal community, where you’ll find a good number of Filipino-style stills that date back to the time of Spanish colonization, or perhaps earlier.

I bring this up because I just can’t find any good scholarship on the subject, and my main concern is being able to give credit to cultures that were distilling before contact with European colonial powers. A definitive answer here won’t change the importance of Lambanog or Mezcal in their respective cultures, but it would help us understand just a little bit more clearly how information and technology spread around the world or arose independently in a number of places around the same time.

History is all echoes and reverberations. And if you want to really grasp an historical subject, it pays to track these sounds to their source whenever possible.

Today, Lambanog plays a similar role that vodka might in Filipino drinking culture. You can get the traditional, unflavored stuff, or you can opt for one of the newer flavored variants on the market for mixing with various sodas, etc. It does find its way to the US, but remains one of the least-known spirits on the American market – which means that there’s lots of room to explore this really interesting traditional category.

Pandan

Now getting back to Pandan. This is a leafy, palm-like plant native to Southeast Asia that’s used in a whole boatload of culinary applications, where it’s employed alternately as an herb, a green food coloring, a garnish, or even an air freshener. Sometimes, the leaves will be woven into baskets for the purpose of steaming rice in order to impart a bready, nutty, slightly rich flavor to the dish.

You don’t really want to eat pandan – but it does make for a striking, aromatic garnish, and you can also infuse the leaves into a spirit for a really striking color and flavor experience. The recipe for JoJo Valenzuela’s pandan-infused daiquiri riff, called the Don Quixote, is as follows:

• 1 1/2 ounces Don Q Cristal rum

• 1 ounce mango-pandan syrup (which is a pandan-infused simple syrup with some mango puree blended in)

• 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice

• 1/2 ounce Appleton Estate 12 Year rum

You combine all these ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Give em a good, hard shake, and then strain into a rocks glass over crushed ice and garnish with a dehydrated lime wheel.

Personally, I’m stoked to try both Lambanog and Pandan sometime soon, so I hope you’ll join me in keeping our collective eyes open for places that serve or sell these quintessential Filipinoo ingredients.

Acid Phosphate

Next up, we’ve got another duo of ingredients, but unlike everything we’ve been talking about so far, these are a little less natural and have a bit of a spotty past. They are acid phosphate and aromatic spirit of ammonia.

Both these ingredients – which kinda sound like they belong in a chemistry textbook – hail back to a time when soda fountains (and the jerks who tended them) were wildly popular. Let’s call this time period roughly the first half of the 20th century, where pharmacies were often found on the main streets of small town America. The soda fountains that drew thirsty patrons to these establishments – possibly while waiting for an order from the druggist – offered sweet and tangy concoctions of all sorts, from plain old sparkling water, to egg creams, to root beer floats
.

One trend in the 1800s that sort of paved the way for soda fountains is the popularity of sparkling water as a health tonic. Even before the soda shop became a mainstay of American culture, the wealthy elite were huge fans of drinking flavored fizzy waters to alleviate their headaches, or other little maladies. But, as technology continued to evolve, soda fountains became much easier to install and maintain in public venues.

This represents another thread in the intertwined history of booze and medicine. These soda fountains resided in pharmacies partially because druggists already had the tools and knowledge to create concentrates and carbonate them. But if you give a pharmacist a soda rig, it turns out, he’s really likely to start throwing things like booze, cocaine, or opium in your soda. And around the turn of the 20th century, all these things were still considered medicinal in their own ways.

Another movement that was taking off around this time, of course, was the temperance movement, which is a bit too complex to get into here, but the general thrust of it is that alcohol was considered bad for families, so if, as a politician or public figure, you claimed to be pro-family, well, to the temperance movement and the anti-saloon league, that meant you kinda had to be anti-booze. This is why soda shops were able to continue thriving during Prohibition because even though pharmacies were putting some really questionable stuff into some of their concoctions, it wasn’t alcohol, so it was pretty okay.

As the decades marched on past the roaring twenties, into the Great Depression, then World War II, and beyond, the ingredients used in fountain drinks got less dangerous and a little more desserty. But one tangy category of drink that remained somewhat popular was the phosphate or “acid phosphate.”

In a similar way that you’ll see fancy bartenders today making acid adjusted orange juice or crystal clear daiquiris using a blend of citric and malic acid, phosphate soda drinks were carbonated long drinks, often flavored with fruit syrups, with the addition of a little tincture that contained food-safe phosphoric acid supplemented with calcium, magnesium, and potassium.

According to cocktail writer Wayne Curtis:

Acid phosphate does two bewitching things to a drink: The acid gives it sourness without making it taste like anything in particular. And the salts enhance existing flavors, much as they do with food. The various elements of the drink (sweet, sour, bitter, sharp) are each discernible, but none is overwhelming. Adding a teaspoon or so of acid phosphate makes a cocktail seem slightly off center, and makes your tongue tingle.

Today, many savvy bartenders use acid phosphate in a similar manner to what Curtis describes – as that little pinch of acid and salt that brightens a flavor profile and accents the other notes in the drink. The first time I had one was probably around 2013 or 2014 at a brunch spot in DC called “Founding Farmers,” and I gotta say, it was a refreshing way to extend that old brunch time tradition, the hangover cure.

Aromatic Spirit Of Ammonia

Speaking of hangovers, don’t forget about aromatic spirit of ammonia, our other chemical cocktail ingredient of note. According to an article on ArtOfDrink.com, it’s a 10% solution of ammonium hydroxide, mixed with water, alcohol and the essential oils of lemon, nutmeg and lavender.

Back in the 1800s, aromatic spirit of ammonia was used as OG smelling salts to prevent fainting or revive someone who has already fainted. In fact, they’re still available today at many pharmacies right alongside the heavily ammoniated smelling salts found in first aid kits. This compound was also said to have anxiety reducing properties, which may be explained away by the placebo effect. But one thing is for darn sure: ammonia is a base, which means it neutralizes acidity, so if there’s one thing I could actually see this substance being useful for, it would be dyspepsia.

Although aromatic spirit of ammonia isn’t nearly as popular behind the bar as acid phosphate, it does have its signature drink: the ammonia coke. By adding just 2 or 3 milliliters to a standard glass of coke, you’ll notice a marked drop in acidity from the cola, as well as some pleasant “top notes” from the lemon oil, lavender, and spices.

This is one additive I’d like to see used more behind the bar because I really dig the way it acts as both a flavored tincture and a pH modifier. Rarely are you going to come across ingredients that pull double duty so effortlessly, which is, I think, a really solid reason for folks to start experimenting.

The Sourtoe Cocktail Club

Rounding out this little romp through often-overlooked and esoteric cocktail ingredients, we’ve got a real stinker: the preserved medial and distal phalanges of the human hallux, which is another way of describing a pickled human toe.

As you might expect, pickled toes aren’t super popular in the craft cocktail world. It’s not like you can just order one as the garnish for your next Gibson or Dirty Martini. But one particular pickled human toe was the inspiration for a Canadian group called the Sourtoe Cocktail club.

For more about this obscure ingredient, I need to quote directly from an article from CBC Canada, which reads:

The Sourtoe Cocktail is practically a rite of passage for visitors to Dawson City, Yukon. It’s a simple drink (a shot of whiskey, usually Yukon Jack) with an unusual accompaniment: a mummified human toe.

How did the Sourtoe cocktail come to be? It all started during prohibition, with a nasty case of frostbite.

In the 1920s, the rum-running Linken brothers — Louie and Otto — got caught in a blizzard. Louie put his foot through a patch of ice and soaked his foot. When the brothers got back to their cabin, Louie’s right foot was frozen solid.

To prevent gangrene, Otto used his axe to chop off Louie’s toe. He placed the toe in a jar of alcohol to commemorate the event.

In 1973, legend has it that Captain Dick Stevenson found the jar (and the toe) in a remote cabin.

He came up with the idea of the Sourtoe Cocktail Club — an exclusive club, with one membership requirement.

In order to gain admittance to the club, potential members must drink the legendary sourtoe cocktail. There’s just one rule: “You can drink it fast. You can drink it slow. But your lips must touch that gnarly toe.

Now, if you didn’t think this story could get any weirder – of course, you’re wrong. Because in 2013, a…wait for it…New Orleanian named Joshua Clark came in and SWALLOWED the mummified toe of Louie Linken.

This put him on the shit list of toe master Terry Lee, and although they have been able to continue the tradition with a “backup toe” since that fateful day, the damage was done. Clark immediately paid the $500 fine for swallowing the toe, but was subsequently banned from the Downtown Hotel where the tradition continues to take place.

There’s a really fun 20 minute documentary about this whole situation on YouTube – which we’ll embed on the show notes page – where Joshua returns to Dawson City, Yukon in an effort to make amends with the toe master. It’s actually a really great little watch, especially if you have a drink in-hand, so I won’t spoil it for you in case you’d like to see for yourself how this story concludes.