500 Words on the Silly Wabbit

Sometimes, you write a cocktail because you’re trying to find a vehicle for a clever flavor combination that you’ve just discovered. Sometimes you want to try out a recipe you’ve read on social media and end up riffing on the recipe to come up with a brand-new cocktail. Sometimes you write a crowd-pleaser to welcome the start of a new season. 

And sometimes you write a cocktail because Courtney drops a bottle of carrot juice in front of you at the beginning of a shift and says, “Make a cocktail out of this.”

I don’t hate carrot juice. I can’t recall ever having tasted it by itself before this; most of the time I’ve had it in a nine-ingredient juice cocktail from a “healthy” smoothie bar. That’s pretty much consistent with its history. Carrot juice was first promoted as a health food by Norman Walker in 1936 at the dawn of the fresh juice movement. Ever since, carrot juice has been recommended as a natural, healthy beverage that promotes well-being. No one has ever claimed that it’s tasty. 

It’s not bad. Honest.  Sweet, a little creamy, vegetal, but not “green” tasting. My first impulse was to lean into the vegetable flavors and make something with a mezcal base. A little genepy, some lemon, and some other odds and ends, and I had… something. I offered it to Roz and Courtney for tasting. They nodded, smiled, and said it tasted “nice”. Not what I was hoping for. 

I called my wife and asked her to pull one of my reference books off the shelves –  The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dorenberg. This book is worth its weight in gold when dealing with a new ingredient. It’s a “cookbook” with no recipes; just a list of what flavors go well with specific ingredients, an endless list of flavor pairings and inspiration. According to Karen and Andrew, carrots have a cooling flavor that pairs well with soft, round flavors like butter and cream. Lemon was a solid pick. So was maple. I kept looking.

I stumbled across a recipe from Robbie Dow from Bespoke in Wilmington, North Carolina. He’d written a version of the Surfer on Acid – a banging 90’s cocktail featuring JaegerMeister, rum, and pineapple – and elevated it using some broad rum choices and lime juice to balance things. A splash of coconut rum intrigued me. Carrot and coconut had great potential. The idea of building a shell of a tiki drink, with multiple rums, pineapple, and citrus, to surround and elevate a problematic ingredient had potential. Could I use the core of this drink to make something special?

The answer was a resounding “yes”. When I offered a “carrot and coconut” drink to Roz and Courtney, there were a lot of oohs and ahs over the notion. The final flavor profile was rich, smooth, comforting, and funky all at once. A parsley garnish for brightness and color completed the drink. Who says carrots have to be good for you?

Written by Matt Hooper
as part of his 500 word on bartending Series