Chocolate and Cocktail Pairings

Posted by Liz Gutman, September 1, 2010 at 1:30 PM

This post is brought to you by Ghirardelli Intense Dark Chocolate.

What would this pair with? Help! I need a mixologist! [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

Your humble columnist doesn't get out that much, so when I started thinking about who to talk to about chocolate and cocktail pairings, I turned to the other food-and-drink lovers at Serious Eats. They recommended Michael Neff of Ward III in Tribeca (SENY covered the bar back in April). I asked him about mixing drinks, and the role of chocolate can play.

Your specialty is "bespoke cocktails"—what exactly does that mean? "Bespoke" means "custom." We have created a cocktail program that allows us to determine what particular flavors you crave at a particular moment and what you generally like and dislike. From this, we make a cocktail customized for you.

Will you really make a drink out of anything people come in with? What's the weirdest thing someone's brought in? We'll generally make a drink from anything, though we don't encourage people to bring in their own ingredients. The problem with bizarre requests is that someone must pay for them, whether or not they want to consume them. The list of weird requests is growing, though I will say Gerber strained peas is close to the top of the Most Bizarre category. Caffeinated beef jerky is up there as well.

How have you incorporated chocolate into drinks in the past? The website Sip, Smoke, Savor features chocolate, scotch, and cigars. We've made a few drinks at their request that feature both scotch whisky and chocolate. People sometimes request chocolate with other spirits as well.

What kinds of things do you take into account when you're crafting a drink?
Balance of acidity to sweetness. Flavors of both ingredients and spirits, and how they complement or clash. Mouthfeel. Texture. Color. Presentation. A cocktail is very much like a theatrical performance, and can be a story in its own right. For me, each has to have a beginning, middle, and end, and has to stimulate all of the senses.

I bet any of these would go well with chocolate. Or, y'know, anything. [Photograph: Flickr: sashafatcat]

Does someone need to have an exceptional palate in order to be a great mixologist, or is it more about "feel"? What constitutes an exceptional palate is very much a matter of opinion—every person is an expert regarding his or her own tastes. It's not necessary to be able to identify every botanical in a gin in order to make a good cocktail with it. We have made many, many thousands of cocktails in our careers, which necessarily influences the drinks we create now. When making Bespoke cocktails, we lean on that experience to ensure that our drinks are "valid" in their own right. The rest, which would be the customized or experimental portion, very much relies on instinct.

How do you go about pairing cocktails with food? As with cooking, you have to pair flavors and textures that complement the rest of a particular dish or meal. We use items from the kitchen (herbs, fruits, vegetables) when specifically pairing cocktails with food, and we select them the same way you would when preparing a meal itself.

How might that translate to chocolate? Chocolate itself is rich, sweet, and bitter, all of which can be elements of great cocktails. When I think of pairing cocktails with chocolate, I like to keep the cocktails very simple, allowing the lingering experience of chocolate on your palate to provide some of the elements that I might add with ingredients if I were making the cocktail to stand on its own.

Mmm...fudgy [Photograph: Robyn Lee]

What cocktail would you pair with:

• An ice cream sundae? Bourbon, neat. The astringency of the spirit will help overcome the texture of the sauces and ice cream itself. The hot sweetness of the bourbon balances the cold sweetness of the sundae nicely.
• A fudgy brownie? Pass. I'd have to experiment on this one.
• A milk-chocolate caramel? Rob Roy. Scotch plays well with chocolate.
• A crispy chocolate chip cookie? Brandy Alexander. Cookies and milk. Enough said.
• A dark chocolate truffle? A Beautiful, which is cognac and Grand Marnier.

What's your favorite chocolate treat, and what cocktail would you pair it with?
Unfortunately, my absolute favorite chocolate treat is a fudgy brownie, which may be why I took a pass on the question above. That said, I will now go out and find the fudgiest brownie I can, then commence a happy experiment to find the perfect pairing, using myself as a guinea pig. This is one of the many reasons that I have the best job in the world!

Ward III

111 Reade Street, New York NY 10013 (map)
212-240-9189

About the author: Liz Gutman co-owns the Brooklyn-based candy business Liddabit Sweets, which means she spends a lot of time around chocolate (and a lot of time eating it). She moved to New York in 2001 to go to, wait for it, acting school. But when the acting life wasn't for her, she wound up in the French Culinary Institute's pastry program while working at Roni-Sue's Chocolates in Manhattan's Lower East Side. She befriended Jen King, aka the other half of Liddabit, at FCI and founded Liddabit in May of 2009.

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