Vice: Would You Drink Olive Oil in Your Cocktail?
Ingredients like fat and butter are all over high-end cocktails. We tried the best, then made our own at home.
By Magdalene Taylor, Vice, Published February 9, 2024
At a certain point in your drinking career, there are few surprises left. You know what you like: clear or dark liquor, straight or with a mixer, sweetened or soured. Even when you order something outside of your usual palate, you probably already have a general sense of what it will taste like. But like with food, alcohol isn’t just about flavor but about texture, too. And across the cocktail world, drinks are getting increasingly thicker, fattier, and oilier.
Over the last few years, I’ve begun seeing ingredients like olive oil and butter make their way into alcoholic beverages. It’s being added in half-teaspoon quantities to shakers, dripped atop finished drinks, and even infused with the liquor itself. It obviously sounds fancy as hell, but also—surprisingly!—unexpected. Water and oil don’t mix, but alcohol and oil do. But just because they can mix, should they? Is the oil and alcohol combination best left to the professionals, or is it something we all ought to be leveling up our drinks with at home?
I first became introduced to the terms “fat-wash” and “oil-wash” via the Netflix cocktail competition show Drink Masters, in which participants occasionally used the technique and yielded all sorts of comments about “depth” and “mouthfeel” from judges. It took some Googling actually to figure out what it meant, though. Basically, to wash alcohol with fat simply means to combine a liquor with oil or animal fat and let it sit for anywhere from a few hours to, hypothetically, forever.
“The process of infusing spirits with oils, fats, or butter has been an integral way to manipulate the taste profiles of cocktails by extracting the essential flavors from each option without having to retain the fatty byproducts,” explains Grant Hewitt, vice president of beverage at Loews Hotels & Co. The ratio of oil to alcohol can vary, but many recipes call for around a quarter cup of oil per cup of liquor. You stir the two, leave it out while covered at room temperature for several hours or longer, then freeze. Much of the oil will solidify, allowing you to skim it off the top and strain the rest. With this, you’ll “yield a spirit that now has the essential flavor profiles of your oil, fat, or butter,” says Hewitt.
Read the full article on Vice here.
