First of all, it's $10. Your homemade Old Fashioneds and Whiskey Sours will stay delightfully undiluted with large ice cubes. Your kids will say, "Holy shizzle, look at the size of those fracking ice cubes! Swaggy fresh! {emoji drinking glass} {emoji smiley} {emoji thumbs up}" The Instagramming of your at-home cocktails will get 20% more faving action. The tray is cheaper and probably easier to use than these spherical ice molds (which, admittedly, I had never seen before and do look pretty cool and I think I might have to get them yup just pushed the Add to Cart button so I will let you know how it goes). Your friends will gape in wonder at your seemingly fancy-cocktail-bar-grade at-home cubes and ask you where you got such a wonderful contraption and you can tell them, hey lady I don't ask you about your secrets just drink your drink.
Cocktail enthusiast Martin Doudoroff explains how to make an Old Fashioned without using any of the "various bad ideas" (e.g. "There is no slice of orange in an Old Fashioned") that have crept in over the years.
Sugar (and the scant water it is dissolved in) mellows the spirit of the drink. Not much is required, just a little, as the quality of today's spirits is so much higher than it typically was when the Old Fashioned was born. A little splash of simple syrup generally suffices. Gum syrup, rich simple syrup, demerara syrup, brown sugar syrup, sugar cane syrup (the variety filtered of molasses solids) all are great choices. Agave syrup or other neutral diet-sensitive sweeteners may suffice.
Honey, maple syrup, molasses or other strongly-flavored sweeteners do not belong in an Old Fashioned, which is not to say you cannot or should not create nice variations on the Old Fashioned with them.
With the current popularity of the craft cocktail bar, massive ice cubes, and vigorous cocktail shaking techniques, comes the risk of injury.
"When they're shaking a drink, it's very similar to the motion of a pitcher, or a tennis serve or throwing a football," said Lisa Raymond-Tolan, an occupational therapist in New York. "It's the same motion, back and forth, back and forth, rotating up high. You have a heavy weight at the end of the arm, out in the air. It's not just the shoulder. It's the wrist as well."
One of the bartenders at Varnish, Chris Bostick, shook his cocktails so vigorously that he ripped out the screws that had been inserted in his clavicle after a snowboarding injury. He was sidelined for weeks.
Maybe instead of Tommy John surgery, they'll start calling it Johnny Walker surgery.
Many of the fancy-dan cocktail bars serve their drinks with huge ice cubes so that even slow sippers don't have to deal with over-watery cocktails (less surface area = slower melting). If you want to do the same thing at home, get yourself the impressively named Tovolo King Cube tray; it'll churn out an infinite number of 2-inch cubes for about $8. (via american drink)
Mr. Uyeda, who owns a bar named Tender in the Ginza district, is the inventor of a much-debated shaking technique he calls the hard shake, a choreographed set of motions involving a ferocious snapping of the wrists while holding the shaker slanted and twisting it. According to his Web site, this imparts, among other things, greater chill and velvety bubbles that keep the harshness of the alcohol from contacting the tongue, while showering fine particles of ice across the drink's surface.
