Get Your Chemistry Drinking on With Uncommon Goods Molecular Mixology Kit
I recently received the Uncommon Goods’ Molecular Mixology Cocktail Kit in the mail – without even ordering it! I know, I’m lucky (and trying not to be smarmy about, too). It’s an interesting combo kit in a way, with three boxes covering fun ways to science-up three classic drinks, the Margarita, Mojito, and Cosmopolitan.
Each box contains recipes for three different molecular mixology takes on the drinks, including making “caviar” bubbles, tasty foam, and what I’d call liquid “spheres,” as well as the food additives and some of the tools needed to make the drinks. It’s like a little chemistry kit that just needs booze (and sometimes some mixers and stuff) to take your drinking into another realm, a sorta futuristic feeling place that’s still awfully jolly (oh, I suggest when you get your molecular mixology on, you do it with friends. It’s even more jolly. Of course this is pretty much true with all drinking)!
Oh, wait, before I get in to my experimenting with the kit, I suppose a little about UncommonGoods might be, well, good. Heck, instead of me trying to talk it out, let me tell you what they say:
UncommonGoods is a retailer that endeavors to feature unique designs and handcrafted gifts created in harmony with the environment and without harm to animals or people. We make it our mission to support and provide a platform for artists and designers; in fact, half of what we sell is made by hand. Most of the products we carry are created right here in the USA, and about one-third of our entire collection incorporates recycled and/or upcycled materials.
And now you know! And now we can get to the drinks. I took on (with the help of wife Nat) the Margarita sphereification first (and, I’ll admit, it’s the only one so far, though I look forward to more), cause in some past molecular drinking, I always love the sphere-ing. Really!
The kits come with nice little recipes books. I’m not gonna walk through every step, cause that’d get long. But will give the highlights. You mix a little calcium lactate with some water, orange liqueur, and mango, freeze it into spheres (in the handy sphere freezing tray), mix some water and sodium alginate, drop the frozen spheres in it, then rinse them with water, and top them with tequila, coconut milk, and lime. Boom!
The instructions were by-and-large pretty good (it would have been nice to have a general idea how long the spheres will take to freeze, as the instructions just flow as if that doesn’t take time – but that’s pretty easy to figure out). I wasn’t a huge fan of the tequila-and-coconut milk combo as it was, honestly. But I loved making more of an actual “deconstructed” Margarita (as they call it in the book), just with tequila, lime, and the orange liqueur (I used Gran Gala) mango spheres:
I love, love, love slurping the tequila and lime and sphere, and then breaking the spheres open in my mouth (hah, that sounds bad – but tastes so, so good). The whole process creates this little skin around the orange liqueur/mango liquid combo, and when you bite down, all that flavor is a blast. A blast! Very swell stuff.
I can’t wait to try more, both the other recipes for the Marg and the other two cocktails, but also playing around with my own recipes using some of the science-y stuff that came along. Neato!
