Hej, Friends of Cocktails. You might remember a little experiment we set up a few months ago to figure out if you can make a delicious cocktail using ingredients bought at IKEA. It turns out that you can, and I made an Old Fashioned twist with a beer syrup, garnished with chocolate cups filled with orange marmalade foam. But to top that one, I’ll show you how to make two cocktails today: Red & Yellow. These will be carbonated and bottled, and you’ll need gin, vodka, tequila & optionally mezcal for the base spirits, alongside a few hard-to-pronounce IKEA ingredients, of course.
As a quick side-note, we are not not sponsored by IKEA, so this episode is fully funded by the Cocktail Time Patrons. Thank you all for supporting our work, there will always be a cocktail waiting for you here, if you ever swing by. Now let’s dive in! We have to assemble some cocktails, starting with clarifying some smoothies.
Clarified FRUKTSTUND Smoothie
• 100g FRUKTSTUND mango, pineapple and apple pre-blended smoothie mix
• 100g FRUKTSTUND strawberry, lemongrass, blueberry, and apple pre-blended smoothie mix
• 400g hot water
• 1.2g Pectinex
To a blender add the chunks for the mango, pineapple and apple smoothie, with 200g of hot water and blend until smooth. Then add 0.6g of pectinex, which will help us break down cell walls in the fruit, making it easier to clarify the juice just like with the Cocktail Time Caipirinha. Once you feel the spinning blades heating up the mixture, take it off the blender and let this sit for about 1 hour and filter with a coffee filter after you see layers forming. The first few drops coming through won’t be as clear as when the fruit pureé starts to form an additional filter layer, so move the filter to another container and simply re-filter that 1st part. Now repeat the process for the strawberry, lemongrass, blueberry, and apple smoothie with the remaining 200g of hot water and 0.6g of pectinex.
Give it time and once everything is filtered you’re left with flavored juice and a bunch of flavor-packed pureé. It would be a shame to waste it, so we’ll make Fruit Leather.
Fruit Leather
• 33g fruit pureé
• 11g white sugar
Don’t worry if you have more than 33g of pureé per smoothie, just weigh out the amount and add a ⅓ of its weight in sugar. Place the mixture in low heat and stir until all the sugar dissolves, and then you can drop each of the fruit leathers directly in a dehydrator at 55 °C (130 °F) for at least 8 hours. As Red filtered a bit slower before, you might want to cook it off a bit or it will dehydrate for too long. Now, this is optional, but to give the Red Fruit Leather a more vibrant color I added about half a teaspoon of beetroot powder.
This is a great zero-waste garnish but also a delicious snack that I’ve made before with raspberry and pineapple, and you just need to cut the fruit leather into your desired shape - I’ll do circles. Now it’s time to infuse some spirits.
EGENTID Tea Infusion
• 135mL (4.5oz) Citadelle gin
• 1 Lemon & Pine EGENTID tea bag
• 75mL (2.5oz) Avion Tequila
• 30mL (1oz) Absolut ELYX Vodka
• 15mL (0.5oz) Vida Mezcal
• 1 Bergamot & Oak EGENTID tea bag
If you’re not a fan of smoky mezcal just use tequila, but as Dave Arnold points out in Liquid Intelligence, carbonizing tequila can make it stand out too much, so either use something more subtle, like Espolon, or you’ll need to add some vodka. Now it’s time to add the tea - Green tea with Lemon & Pine flavor for the gin and black tea with Bergamot & Oak flavor for the tequila, vodka and mezcal mix. So place the teabags in warm water for about 1 minute to hydrate (making sure the tea doesn’t soak up too much of our spirits) and then infuse the spirits and let it pull out all of the wonderful flavors.
After about 10 minutes take out the bags and squeeze out what’s left in there. If the tea bags still soaked up any of the liquids we’ll add gin or vodka, respectively, to get the original amount of spirits. Now that we have all of our ingredients, all we have to do is assemble these IKEA cocktails (as the DRYCK syrups already have acids in them, they can work as cordials).
Yellow IKEA Cocktail
• 135mL (4.5oz) Lemon & Pine tea infused Citadelle gin
• 220mL (7.5oz) Yellow Clarified Smoothie
• 45mL (1.5oz) DRYCK Elderflower syrup
• 4 drops 20% saline solution
• Strawberry, lemongrass, blueberry and apple Fruit Leather
• 1 CO2 cartridge
Red IKEA Cocktail
• 120mL (4.5oz) Bergamot & Oak tea infused tequila-vodka-mezcal mix
• 220mL (7.5oz) Red Clarified Smoothie
• 60mL (2oz) DRYCK Rhubarb syrup
• 4 drops 20% saline solution
• Mango, pineapple and apple Fruit Leather
• 1 CO2 cartridge
We’ll make these side-by-side, so add the ingredients for each cocktail in separate mixing glasses, stir to mix and place them in the fridge to chill - Tip: carbonation will always work better with cold liquids. Then pour each of the cocktails into a soda siphon and charge them with a single CO2 cartridge. I’m using a 500mL iSi Gourmet Whip that fits just enough liquid for my cocktails to go into two 200ml bottles, with each bottle being enough for 2 cocktails. You can of course scale up if you have a bigger soda siphon.
Shake the iSi Gourmet Whip well, release the pressure and the cocktail is ready to be served, or in our case, bottled. This makes a great gift but can also be a fun way to make drinks in advance for something like a self-service cocktail party - or it might be sold at an IKEA near you in the future, who knows! I used the same bottle capper here as when I made the homemade Coca Cola, but find below the link for a more modern and compact version. The last step is to serve and garnish with the fruit leather. I added the fruit leather garnish on opposite cocktails, to provide contrast, both for the visuals and the taste, but feel free to add them however you like!
Now, after this long process I think it’s time to let the flavors out of the bottles. Gul, or Yellow Cocktail is packed with tropical flavors with mango being in the forefront. The gin is nicely complemented by subtle pine flavors, with floral and lemon notes of the cordial and tea which give the cocktail an extra layer. Röd, or Red Cocktail on the other hand has a wonderful mix of smoky and strawberry aromas, with rhubarb and bergamot notes joining on the palate and complementing the smoky berry flavors.
With the first IKEA cocktailI realized that they aren’t as global with food products as they are with bookcases, but these 2 cocktails are a perfect showcase that you can swap basically all ingredients and still end up with a delicious cocktail in your hand. Two in this case. And don’t sleep on fruit leather, these garnishes are delicious. I honestly loved both drinks, but if I had to pick a favorite it would be the red one (sorry, team yellow). Skål!
To make it easier for you to try these recipes you can grab the bottles from my collection at CURIADA.
Get the bottle capper for your own Red and Yellow Cocktails: https://geni.us/N76A
By buying through the affiliate links you’re also helping out the Cocktail Time channel with a small commission (at no additional cost to you). Cheers!