Mai Tai

Haley has grown fond recently of calling my kitchen habits "my experiments". She is not entirely incorrect: I've started binging through Kevin Kos's excellent channel on cocktails and following along with some of the prep work. The irony of this being that we're actually cutting back our drinking pretty heavily — it is cutting season, after all — so there's more time spent preparing the ingredients than enjoying them.

Anyhoo. Kevin Kos suggested homemade orgeat, and orgeat is one of the few things that I haven't found a bottle of that I'm particularly satisfied by, and it seemed pretty easy with a handful of niche but non-perishable ingredients (gum arabic, xanthan gum, et cetera), so I figured I should make some orgeat.

And then I had a bottle of orgeat, and some lime juice that we need to use before we go out of town for a week, and a Mai Tai sort of just fell into my lap. I was not actually sure what the recipe for a Mai Tai is, and the internet (as is often the case with tiki drinks) disagreed vehemently with itself. I adapted my recipe from Liquor.com's, going with:

  • 1.5 oz amber rum
  • 1 oz dark rum
  • 0.75 oz orgeat
  • 0.75 oz lime juice
  • 0.75 oz curaçao

Typing that out really makes you realize how much of a punch it packs, I suppose. The thing tastes dangerous; I was tempted to make a version of it subbing orgeat with simple just to taste the difference but I don't think I could handle a second Mai Tai. (Once Haley gets back, we'll do a taste test.)

Anyway, I love Mai Tais. I don't love them as much as I think I love the Hurricane lineage of tiki drinks — there is something pure about the emphasis on bright juices that appeals to me more — but I'm excited to batch these for a coming cookout.

7/28/2022
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