Sharkbait’s Cocktail of the Week: Maximize the Leftovers

I apologize in advance of this week’s column. I may be providing a drink that you probably won’t be able to make until Christmas, assuming you don’t keep any sort of cranberry sauce on hand at all times.

To be fair

I don’t either and I made this the day after Thanksgiving to make sure I took advantage of the leftovers situation, as well as the fact that I was making turkey stock all day and I needed a cocktail. Plus, this is a much better use of leftovers than just a sandwich.

Anyway

The Christmapolitan comes from Greg Boheim and Cocktail Kingdom via the New York Cocktails book, in their fantastic “seasonal drinking” chapter.

This is neither the first, nor the last drink I’ll be making from this chapter…

Christmapolitan

1.5 oz. Vodka

1 oz. St. Germain liqueur

1 oz. Spiced cranberry sauce

.5 oz. Fresh lime juice

2 dashes fig bitters

Shake all ingredients with ice. Strain into a decorated coupe

Quick note, I used an alternate label for the St. Germain, and used angostura bitters in place of the fig bitters.

The nose is heavy lime up front. Under that I also get some some cranberry aroma from the fresh-ish sauce I added in there.

The initial sip is cold, and very smooth. I really don’t get much of an alcohol flavor in this at all. I guess its because I’m usually making drinks with stronger flavored ingredients like gin, whiskey and rum. Whereas vodka doesn’t really have much of a flavor. After all, a lot of really smart and talented distillers are paid well to make sure good vodka doesn’t taste like anything at all. That talent is very apparent here.

Once the smoothness wears off, the predominate flavor is mostly sour from the lime juice. However the elderflower liqueur helps keep the lime from taking over completely, which given the lack of booze flavor, is a very good thing. I will say I was a little concerned about the leftover cranberry sauce. Now we got the Ocean Spray canned sauce, so it was a bit more…solid than homemade cranberry sauce would be. Fearing large chunks of gelatinous cranberry, I decided to break it up as best as I could and measure out the ounce  I needed that way and see what happens. For the most part, it was a non issue. However I did get some small cranberry bits that collected at the bottom of the glass towards the end of the drink.  A Hawthorne strainer or fine sieve would be better then just using the shaker as strainer as I did.

This was surprisingly good, but I don’t think I could do more than one of these. The sour lime flavor does stick around after your sip for a few seconds, so quick back to back sips ends up compounding the after taste. This is an excellent and very creative use of leftover cranberry sauce. Which does limit this upscale, and in my opinion, better cosmos appearances to really one to two times per year.

(Banner image found here)