Author: John Fladd

A bartender explains how bitters & tinctures add flavor

When a bartender is developing a new cocktail, a constant challenge is being able to add subtle or sophisticated flavors to the drink in a way that doesn’t throw off the ratios of other ingredients. Maybe she’s spent a week calculating the exact balance of alcohol and mixers, for instance, and introducing a new element might throw that off or make the drink cloudy. Maybe the flavor of the new ingredient is inconsistent from week to week, and it’s hard to reliably get the right flavor in the finished product.

One of Marissa Chick’s favorite ways to address these issues is to use highly concentrated flavors in the form of bitters and tinctures in her cocktails.

Chick is the bar manager at The Birch on Elm in Manchester, and she uses commercial bitters but also makes a lot of her own.

“They’re really fun to work with,” she said. “What I end up making at the Birch on Elm is more of like a tincture but essentially it’s a really concentrated burst of flavors. So you can have your simple cocktails — like for example a dirty martini — something that I like to add to that is a black pepper tincture that I make. It adds just a little bit of something and you usually only need a few drops, but it’ll just bring out a burst of flavor that you didn’t already have or you might have been missing.”

Chick uses alcohol to strip flavors from ingredients she wants to incorporate into a new drink recipe.

“The way that I make them, honestly, is usually with a super high-proof alcohol,” she explained. “I usually use Everclear [an extremely potent brand of grain alcohol that can run as high as 95% Alcohol By Volume, or 190 proof] and then I will just add my ingredients to it and let it sit in the dark for anywhere from five days to a few weeks, depending on how strong I want it to be.”

These tinctures often use fresh herbs or whole spices but can also use more unusual flavoring agents. Chick recently won a daiquiri-making competition that used a house-made bubblegum tincture. She said coming up with a recipe she was happy with involved a process of gradually increasing the amount of bubblegum she used.

“I grabbed Dubble Bubble, because that’s the one I like the best,” she said. “I tried a couple different ways, but I ended up needing way more bubble gum than I thought I would. In the end, it was practically an entire jar of bubble gum and just filled to the top with Everclear, but I ended up having to redo it a few times because it turns out that surprisingly it didn’t produce as strong a scent as I thought it would. You learn a lot through experimentation and trying again and having fun with it, which is exactly how that one came about. In the cocktail itself, I used a lot of ingredients that bubblegum is made with, like mint, pineapple, cranberry and cherry. Then I added that tincture to it to add a pure bubblegum flavor on it so that it tasted a lot like bubblegum, without making it too sweet.”

Chick said that as she was working up the bubblegum tincture, she decided not to cut the actual bubblegum into smaller pieces. “I just put them in whole,” she said, “and then I shook it up multiple times a day. I took a lot more care with it than other ones, I suppose.”

One of her favorite concentrates is one she makes from Fresno chilies. “It just tastes like the real pepper,” she said, “and you get such a good heat from it. It takes on the same orange-red color as the pepper. I’ve used other [chilies] like jalapeño, and it’s slightly green. Habañero is a brighter, almost neon-orange color. So that is a fun part of it too. Sometimes tinctures can add color sometimes as well instead of just flavor.”

And it doesn’t take much of a tincture to have an effect.

“It’s a lot of flavor,” Chick said. “Just a couple drops does a lot. If it’s something that you really want a lot of, you could use a whole pipette, but that’s the biggest measurement I would use for that.”

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Small batch marshmallows play with flavor

Krista Melina has a day job, but she spends a lot of her time thinking about marshmallows. Molina is the owner and head marshmallow-maker of Twisted Mallow, a Merrimack company that produces handcrafted marshmallows in small batches.

“Mallow is sort of a shortened version of marshmallow,” Melina said. “Back in high school, in ninth grade, I was starting at a new school, and my biology teacher was taking roll call. My maiden name is Malowin and he couldn’t pronounce it, so he said, you’re now Miss Malow. It kind of stuck, so I thought that was kind of a cute little link. And then Twisted — I was just trying to play with words a little bit and I thought, ‘Well, I have 30 flavors of marshmallows and I have potentially up to 50 more ideas for new ones.’ I just thought it’s sort of a twist on an old classic but using new flavors and making it different.”

Melina said creating a marshmallow company began as a joke.

“I was sitting with a friend and we were having martinis. I just sort of blurted out, ‘I think I’m going to start a food truck, and it’s going to sell s’mores.’ We were laughing, and she had a really funny comeback. She said, ‘Oh! You can park it in front of funeral homes and call it S’Morbid!” And it was just really hilarious but then on my way home I began wondering how hard it is to make a marshmallow. After a few days, I made one. I started to bring them into work. And then I started to play with the flavors and everyone was giving me really great feedback. I think it was my mom who said, ‘You should start at a farmers market.’ So that’s what I did. So that’s how it sort of launched. I mean, it literally was a joke. I’m a great believer that humor actually reflects our personality and our soul.”

The first batch of marshmallows was fairly traditional, Melina said.

“When I went home for that first time to make marshmallows, I found a really simple vanilla marshmallow online recipe. And that’s what I started with. But what I’ve done since is I will tweak it to add the flavors. And so with my strawberry chocolate, I make a strawberry puree out of fresh strawberries. And I had to fine tune that because if the temperatures aren’t right the gelatin won’t gel and it won’t firm up. And so it’s just interesting. It’s sort of been a science project for me.”

The Twisted Mallow flavors quickly spread beyond vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.

“I have some pretty classic ones,” Melina said, “but I do a dulce de leche, which is fun. I make the caramel and fold that in. I make a mango chili lime, which is probably one of my favorites. I make a lemon-lime, which is really popular. I’ve been working up a lavender [marshmallow]. What I do is I make a lemon marshmallow and then I fold in lavender buds.”

Melina’s rose and cardamom marshmallows were originally supposed to be in rotation for just a week or two. “It was a surprise for me,” she said. “That was only going to be a Valentine’s Day flavor. I was just using it because it’s special for that, but I’ve added it to my website because so many people were asking for it afterward. I use rose water in the formula and then I crush rose petals that are meant for tea and sprinkle that in. So it’s just, I don’t know, it’s fun being creative and coming up with these wacky kinds of twisted flavors.”

Twisted Mallow
Twisted Mallow marshmallows are available online at twistedmallowcompany.com and at the Concord Farmers Market (Capitol Street, No. 65, Concord, concordfarmersmarket.com) on Saturday mornings.

Featured photo: Photo courtesy of Twisted Mallow.