I am usually not a big fan of mocktails! Really - come to a bar and drink some proper drinks - or just drink water, a soft drink or orange juice [please spare me, with something like watermelon juice or kiwi juice!]. However being a beverage manager of a resort, also included "creative" introductions of alcohol free drinks - and especially in family restaurants, you will sell a lot! So - as you can see on the picture, these are a quite evolutionary type of drink! Basically it is an instant soda pop. You muddle your fruit and/or herb [you can add also some syrups like elderflower or vanilla] - you fill the glass with ice and fill it up with a neutral soda pop base. This contains water, sugar, citric acid, carbon dioxide, a small pinch of salt and a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda. I actually realized, that adding a bit salt and bicarbonate really boost the flavors and make the "pop" sing! I am using Soda Plus, to carbonate the soda b...
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A decade or so ago, I was jealous about bartenders in the US and a bit less to them in the UK. Germany wasn't in this time well served with new products for the bar. Then I came to Dubai - and learned, that it wasn't that bad in Germany. Even today, there are a lot of limitations, when it comes to availabilities of products in the UAE. But on the other hands, I have learned a lot: limitations are fueling your imagination and creativity and if I would have stayed in Germany, I don't think, that I would have become the same bar-person, I am today... There are a lot of ingredients in the kitchen, we usually oversee. One of them I would like to play around today: fennel. Fennel seeds to be exact. Sure, you could mess around with the fennel bulb - juice it [after that you might want to agar-agar clarify it...] - but spices are so much easier to work with - and sometimes the result is even better. This is what google has to say about it: ...
I am using Amarena cherry several years now. I thought they are the best compromise (even if they are a compromise at all) between taste, looks, quality. If only they were Amarena cherries with stem (they've got lower points in the style, due to this reason). Amarena cherries are beautiful almost black cherries in very sweet syrup, they still have a snap and they are quite natural [this is a bit confusing - because obviously they are heavily processed, they are cooked in a lot of sugar and half inverted - with quite natural I mean, that the producer don't help themselves with the box of food-additive wizary - all ingredients are "really" natural]. This is pretty much the opposite of the typical bright red Maraschino cherry, which is bleached, stabilized, dyed and flavored with artificial colors and flavors. It was not long after I've started to use this amazing product, that I wondered, how to use the dark sweet syrup, which is full of the Amarena flavor ...