Sunday, January 6, 2013

Playing with DRY Soda Cocktails at Sadie

DRY Soda is a Seattle based company that produces colorless sodas with less sugar and great flavors like lavender, rhubarb, blood orange, and the like. While originally they were made to be drank straight from the bottle, they soon realized that bartenders like to use them as mixers, and they jumped on the opportunity.

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The DRY Soda Co. owner then traveled to Los Angeles and held a cocktail pairing dinner at Sadie in Hollywood, where the main barman Giovanni Martinez created four cocktails made with DRY Soda.

Our welcome drink was a refreshing, lower alcohol cocktail, Rue and Barb made with strawberry, lillet rose, lemon, DRY rhubarb soda
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The drink was paired with watermelon, grilled romaine, blood orange vinaigrette
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Our second drink was the aromatic Lavande, made with scotch, honey, lemon, Lavender DRY soda, light absinthe spray. This was my second favorite cocktail of the night. The lavender soda works well and did not become overpowered with the strong scotch and absinthe components.
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This second cocktail was paired with a Duck confit quesadilla
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Our third course was Heirloom tomato, Persian cucumber, burrata salad. Can you guess what kind of soda this might be paired with? Cucumber seems appropriate!
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Sure enough, the cocktail was a Piccadilly with Old Tom gin, lime, simple syrup, and Cucumber DRY soda. Gio said the gin was just a natural and easy pairing for the cucumber soda.


The last course was an earthy mushroom flatbread, buttered onions, potatoes, blue cheese
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This was paired with my favorite of the cocktails, which I unfortunately didn't get a good picture of. It was the Machu Picchu, made with pisco, mint, falernum, lime, and Wild Lime DRY soda. It would've been very easy to just use the wild lime soda with ... anything, really, and make a sour. But that would be too easy, and Gio wanted to play around with it more, and resulted in the Machu Picchu, with wonderful and more complex flavors.

At home, without the stocked bar and the skills that Gio has at Sadie, I ended up just making simple high balls with DRY soda as the mixer. They still resulted in much better and more interesting drinks than the usual "X n Cokes"!

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