MARTINI COCKTAIL
THE INGREDIENTS
50 ml Gin,
10 ml Dry Vermouth,
Lemon twist
HOW TO MAKE A MARTINI
Chill martini glass with soda water and ice. Fill mixing glass to top with ice. Add the dry vermouth to the mixing glass, giving a small stir to coat the ice with the vermouth. Drain out glass, leaving just the coating on the ice. Add the gin to the mixing glass. Stir for 15 seconds, always making sure that the glass is full to the brim with ice .Taste, Fine, strain into chilled martini glass. Zest with lemon peel and add twist unto drink.
SOCIAL AND COCKTAIL SAYS:
Some would argue that the Martini Cocktail is the greatest cocktail of them all and certainly the most iconic. The Martini cocktail is quite a simple cocktail in theory, made with just gin & vermouth and garnished either with an olive or a lemon twist. The challenge in making a good Martini is knowing what ratio of gin and vermouth to use and this will often come down to the preference of the drinker. Legend has it that Winston Churchill was said to whisper the word “vermouth” to a freshly poured glass of gin. The Martini can be shaken or stirred although; despite the best efforts of 007, it is general advocated stirring produces the superior cocktail.
WHAT IS MARTINI MADE OF, GIN OR VODKA?
Historically, gin is the ideal choice for it. In the early 1970’s vodka took root in the alcohol market and supplanted its competitor gin and with that it became the go to drink for dirty martini. But the recipe for a perfect martini remained the same and that gin and vermouth in equal ratio. But before the coming of vodka there was gin, so let’s take a look on how gin came to be. The historical background of gin, how a plain crystal clear dry drink made it to the world stage and became one of the best cocktails, the world has ever seen.
HISTORY OF GIN
Gin is the grandchild of the alchemists’ elixir of life, and it came of age in a series of world-changing collisions. It first achieved popularity in two Protestant powers with connections around the (known) world England and Netherlands and the contours of its consumption reflected the cultural and geographical watershed separating the cold, Protestant, grain-fed north from the warm, Catholic, vinous south. In the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution gin, like tea, was a modish and exotic commodity, but by the mid-eighteenth century William Hogarth was portraying “Gin Lane” as the corrosive, subversive antithesis of “Beer Street.”Nineteenth-century writers like Dickens saw gin as the handmaiden of squalor, melodramatic poverty and the workhouse. And in the early-twentieth century it gained powerful new enemies, in the shape of the Prohibition movement: for a few turbulent years of U.S. history, “bathtub gin” was the order of the day.
But gin has always enjoyed multiple lives, and its mystique the enigma of secret recipes and the alluring tang of botanical flavorings has helped to carry its influence around the world. Eighteenth and nineteenth century traders and explorers carried gin with them to Africa, Asia and South America. As a way of making the daily dose of bitter quinine more palatable, gin and tonic became the tipple of choice for colonial soldiers, planters and bureaucrats. They and their descendents carried the habit back to the mother country, where it chimed with a new fashion for drinking mixed cocktails rather than straight shots of spirit. Shipwrights and factory hands swigged beer; Europhiles sipped wine; but the (sub)urban smart set drank gin with tonic, vermouth, bitters or a whole happy hour of mixers.
In the early twenty-first century gin has come full circle: once a drink of the rich, then a drink of the poor, it is again in vogue, having experienced a striking renaissance with the growth of small batch distilling and the revival of Thirties and Fifties couture, décor and drinks. But this dissolute tale of consumption and excess begins with the alchemical laboratories of Dark Age Europe, the precepts of Classical medicine, and the sacred rituals of pre-Christian Europe.
The development of gin is credited to Franz de le Boë (1614–1672), a professor of medicine at the University of Leyden in Holland, better known by his Latin name, Sylvius. Meant to be used only as medicine and dispensed by apothecaries, the drink soon spread to England where it was called Royal Poverty, because when beggars got high on gin, they imagined they were kings.
Some time before 1310 Arnaud de Ville-Neuve, a physician and alchemist at the University of Paris, poured wine into a glass alembic and heated it in a sand bath over a charcoal brazier. Ville-Neuve was not the first person in the world, or even in Europe, to do this: he was well aware of the long and distinguished tradition of Arabic alchemical distillation, and from his reading he must have had some inkling of the principles he was playing with. Others had already named the fluid which condensed in the neck of his alembic: some called it aqua ardens, “fiery water,” or aqua vine, “water of the grape,” but to Ville-Neuve it was aqua vita, “living water”: This name is remarkably suitable, since it is really a water of immortality. Its virtues are beginning to be recognized; it prolongs life, clears away ill-humors, revives the heart, and maintains youth.
WHAT EXACTLY IS COCKTAIL?
What exactly is a cocktail? Mixologists and consumers can quibble about the details but a cocktail is a drink composed of one or more alcoholic spirits mixed with a sweetener, fruit juice and/or bitters and served chilled in a glass appropriate for the beverage. Some cocktails are garnished with a piece of fruit. The cocktail as we know it is a rather new invention. The ingredients for making cocktails high-proof spirits and fruits from the tropics were not readily available in large quantities or at a reasonable price until after the American Revolution. The African slave trade, a surplus of sugar cane in the Caribbean and the overproduction of corn in the United States were critical factors in the creation of the cocktail. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was cheaper to ship and trade distilled spirits than to transport the raw ingredients, namely molasses and corn. North America was soon to experience an epidemic of strong drink, similar to the ‘gin epidemic’ of 1720 to 1751 that struck England when cheap gin flooded the country. But America’s culprit was ‘devil rum’ and corn whiskey called ‘John Barleycorn’. It was in this fog of excessive alcohol consumption that the cocktail was born. Cocktails are the most American of alcoholic beverages and at the same time the most international of drinks. Born in the USA after the Revolution, they quickly spilled over into all corners of the globe. Make yourself a drink, find an easy chair, sit back and enjoy this global look at the cocktail.
By the end of the nineteenth century ‘cocktail’ generally meant a mixed drink with bitters. By the time of the First World War it was more often a mixed drink served before dinner. Since Prohibition any mixed drink with or without bitters is a cocktail.
At its very essence a cocktail is a mixture of one or more alcoholic beverages, usually whisky, gin, vodka or tequila, with bitters or flavors added. It is usually served with an accent such as a lemon twist, olive, pearl onion, and a slice of orange or, in the case of a Margarita, salt on the rim of the glass. Cocktails are considered by some as a beverage to imbibe before dinner; others consider them the perfect post prandial indulgence. Regardless of what a cocktail is com posed of, or when it is consumed, it is always served chilled; in fact, the colder the better. Cabaret, a salacious magazine that reported on America’s night club scene in the 1950s, noted that cocktails in France and Italy were decadent, lacking in character and appalling because they were both weak and ‘insufficiently iced’
According to Oxford Encyclopedia of America Food and Drinks ‘Cocktails are shaken or stirred, rolled or muddled; they are dry or sweet, creamy or frozen. They are perfect or dirty; they are up or over. But one thing they are not is weak.’ Whether it is in a hotel bar in New York City, Rome, Beijing, Tokyo or Rio de Janeiro, or on a cruise ship in the Caribbean, you can depend on finding a cocktail to suit your taste that is both strong and very cold.
ORIGIN OF MARTINI COCKTAIL
The exact origins of the Martini cocktail are difficult to pin down. Before you can make a Martini you have to have gin, the first alcoholic distillate produced in quantity and available to the masses. Gin was flavored with juniper berries (Juniperus communis) to mask the bad taste of cheaply made spirits. The name geneva comes from the French ‘genèvre’, meaning juniper berry.
There were several cocktails with ingredients similar to the modern day Martini cocktail popping up in cocktail recipe books at the turn of the 20th Century. Also, in 1863 an Italian vermouth producer chose the name Martini to brand their product, known today as Martini & Rossi. One popular story is that it is a development from a cocktail known as the Martinez. This cocktail was originally served at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco in the early 1860`s which people would visit before they took the evening ferry to the nearby town of Martinez. A further anecdote was that it came about when a miner struck gold in California during the gold rush. The story goes that a miner walked into a bar and asked the bartender to mix up a drink to help celebrate his new fortune. The bartender had vermouth and gin at hand, so he mixed them together and called it a Martinez after the town in which the bar was located.
VARIATIONS/TYPES OF MARTINI;
There are many variations on the original Martini, such as the Dirty Martini, which adds olive brine to the cocktail and the Perfect Martini, which uses equal amounts of sweet and dry vermouth. Many drinks are now named martinis but this is mainly due to the martini glass they are served in and very little else. These “new” martinis give us the chance to taste many different flavors, such as the fruit flavors in the Watermelon Martini or sweet, chocolaty flavors of the Toberlone Martini.
DIRTY MARTINI
A lot of people wonder what makes a martini dirty, what the story behind the name is and why it is such a hit in the cocktail world. Dirty martini has a pleasant saltiness that is fascinating against the gin and vermouth background. Well in the real sense of it, the classic /traditional martini are made of gin and dry vermouth with unstuffed olive but dirty martini on the other hand is usually garnished with olives, jalapeno stuffed olives. The olive brine is the catch; it adds a cloudy color and gives it a more sinister character. So the brine transforms a crystal clear drink to a dirty colored/cloudy drink, hence the name dirty martini.
This particular type martini was said to have been made popular by Franklin Roosevelt. He was said to have met up with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill during the World War II and he served them dirty martinis
WHAT IS THE BEST MIX FOR MARTINI’S?
Every hit of martini is a hit back to back. Whether it’s the sweet and savory kind or the dirty dry one. But from research and visibly statistics the majority of martini drinkers prefers the dirty martini and the dirtier the better. Clearly is a matter of taste and preference. So before you make up your mind on the particularly martini to stick with, remember to try it all. All the different flavors and shakes adhere to all palettes.
SHOULD A MARTINI BE SHAKEN OR STIRRED?
Booze being stirred or shake boils down to the tradition, logic or old fashion. In one of the James bond franchise (Gold finger), Sean Connery of blessed memory made the iconic statement that “A martini, shaken, not stirred,”. Basically any booze enhanced drink should be stirred. Stirring these drinks produce “a silky mouth-feel with precise dilution and perfect clarity. Shaking adds texture and aeration, changes the mouth-feel and binds ingredients that would readily separate with simple stirring”, says Trevor Schneider, Reyka vodka’s U.S. brand ambassador.
While shaking drinks or starring them might not seem like a big deal but it actually is. Stirring cocktails that requires shaking actually ruins them, so also shaking cocktails that requires stirring.
When you are out or on a vacation and you feel like adding a bit of snacks to your martini. Although olive is the best thing in the glass for classic gin martini. But some seafood and a lot of snacks go particularly well with the cocktail.
SOME OF THE FOODS THAT GOES WELL WITH MARTINI
It is always advised never to drink on an empty stomach, so you can nibble on something or have a full meal depending on your appetite. The smell of gin might not be so pleasant but nonetheless it goes well with a lot of food.
Cheese pastry;
The salty sharp taste of cheese pastry can better complement the sour loud taste of classic martini.
Shrimps;
The plant compounds in gin really and truly complements almost every seafood. But shrimp is usually the classic pick for any occasion. The sweetness of the shrimp and the fragrant gin makes a great and spectacular combination.
Steak;
Well if you are not a fish lover or lack love for every water creature, you have this steak to complement your palette. Steak sandwich is a low key snack and a fancy well blend martini will go rightly with it.
These are few of the things you could enjoy with a martini classic or dirty. So next time you decide to go out or you are on a vacation or you are hosting a dinner. Order/make a glass of delicious martini; raise a glass to all those who made this awesome blend come to life, toast to life and more martinis.