Dave Arnold is not a typical bartender. As head of Manhattan bar Booker and Dax (and before that a kind of culinary engineer for molecular gastronomy outpost wd~50), Arnold perfects his boozy recipes with equipment out of a science lab. And now you can too—if you read his new book, Liquid Intelligence, which calls for various emulsifying chemicals, high-end blenders, maybe a dewar of liquid nitrogen, and possibly a rotary evaporator. Wait, do you really need all that stuff to make great cocktails? Of course not. As Arnold tells it, science can help you up your barkeeping game with nothing but a good shaker. (Critical hint: Shake cocktails with one big ice cube for a velvety texture and a few small ones for dilution.)
WIRED: The book is really technical—were you aiming at booze nerds or normal drinkers?
You don’t have to have worked in a bar for a bunch of years to get what I’m doing. If you want to do nitrous infusion and carbonation, the tech is all spelled out. But the parts of the book that don’t require any tech are, ironically, the most science-heavy. So it’s enlightening even if you never plan on getting a centrifuge.
A lot of what you do is apply the scientific method to drinks.
When I was teaching at the French Culinary Institute I learned that young cooks can rely too much on their intellect when they don’t have the palate and hands to back it up. You need both, and they can help each other. That’s why I include some rudimentary experiments, because I actually want you to make drinks.
Thai Basil Daiquiri
7 large Thai basil leaves
2 ounces clean white rum
¾ ounce freshly strained lime juice
¾ ounce (short) simple syrup
2 drops saline solution (or a pinch of salt)
Nitro-muddle the Thai basil: Pour a little liquid nitrogen into a stainless steel shaker with the leaves, and use a muddler to grind them into a frozen dust. Then add rum and stir. Add lime juice, simple syrup, and saline solution or salt. Check to make sure the mix isn’t freezing cold—if it is, the ice won’t dilute the drink. Shake with ice and pour through a tea strainer into a chilled coupe glass.
RECIPE EXCERPTED FROM LIQUID INTELLIGENCE, COPYRIGHT © 2014 BY DAVE ARNOLD, TO BE PUBLISHED BY W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. IN NOVEMBER
What’s your favorite technique?
A lot of my bartenders think the greatest thing I did was correcting orange juice. Just by adding a little acid, it becomes interchangeable in recipes that traditionally use acidic lemon or lime. I hope people at home do the blender muddling because I think it’s a good technique. I hope people make slushies.
I thought you were going to say carbonation.
Well yeah, I do love bubbles a lot.
Do you worry that people will see these techniques as mere shtick?
Back when the first crop of restaurants in the US started using molecular gastronomy techniques, a lot of people saw it as hucksterism. Maybe I’ll go a little crazier than is warranted to get a result, but it’s not for marketing or P. T. Barnum reasons. What I care about is the product. Classic drinks are delicious, but you can’t make a Thai basil daiquiri using old-school techniques. Muddling Thai basil in your tin is just not going to produce the same result as muddling it with liquid nitrogen.
