The beginning of craft can be daunting. There are thousands of recipes to learn, each with its own unique little wrinkle. So many of them run together into one big blur that it can be difficult to keep anything straight.
I often see young bartenders struggle with trying to come up with ideas “off the cuff” because they just aren’t sure how to make the different elements of their cocktail fit together. The reality is that pretty much all cocktails stem from a few mythical classics. Many times, building decent cocktails isn’t so much about memorizing thousands of recipes as it is having a very clear grasp of the mechanical elements of a few important cocktails. By understanding and mastering the concepts that define certain crucial cocktails, we can understand the builds and intended flavors of almost all cocktails. Mastering these concepts also allows us to truly branch out and push the envelope of modern craft in a meaningful way.
In the last entry, I mentioned my time in Saucier. It’ll probably come up a few zillion more times, “sauce” ain’t slang for booze for nothin’. In classic Saucier, one learns that all classic sauces are derived from a few crucial recipes called “Mother Sauces.” For example, Bechamel (milk sauce) is the base for Mornay and Cheese Sauce. Veloute (white stock sauce) is the base for Cardinal (lobster sauce) and Supreme (creamy mushroom). If the basic mother sauces are not mastered, then all sauce is lost. –-insert “game over” music-- >.<
In this episode we will cover the 6 Mother Cocktails. This chapter was a bit more than I had expected. There’s a lot of information here. To make the Mother cocktail odyssey more digestible I have broken it up into 6 “mini-sodes.” We will examine the mechanical elements of each Mother Cocktail and discover what makes them unique. Thus, instead of just blindly memorizing recipes we can actually understand the concepts that make these cocktails tick. Instead of simply knowing how to drive the car, we will learn how to build the car, and craft our dreams.
<3 J