As chefs sometimes do once they’ve settled into a kitchen, Pazzo’s Executive Chef John Eisenhart asked himself “what else can I learn” four years ago. So he turned his eye to Pazzo’s bar program and began thinking about developing cocktails from a chef’s perspective.
After educating himself using antique spirits books and rare cocktail tomes (and, we imagine, a bit of trial and error), Eisenhart began making some of the ingredients that go into the bar’s cocktails. Last night, a group of spirit-loving members had the pleasure of discovering what he’d learned.
We started with the classic Italian digestif known as limoncello. The chef promised it was “criminally easy” to make, and he was right. We simply placed the peels from four lemons into a mason jar that Eisenhart had filled with grain alcohol before we arrived. The hard part is waiting: we have to let those peels seep for 3 months before we can strain them off and add a simple syrup mixture to finish the liqueur. To tide us over, Eisenhart poured us a sample of his limoncello and passed around polenta cakes that he brushed with the liqueur the night before.
Our last task was making bitters using orange and grapefruit peels, juniper berries, tamarind seeds and coriander seeds. We added these ingredients to a tiny jar filled with vodka, which we’ll shake every few days for the next 12 weeks until it’s done. We did get to sample bitters though – twice in fact. When we arrived, we were greeted with a champagne cocktail “garnished” with a bitter-soaked sugar cube; just before leaving, our PCA President Lota LaMontagne served us a gin and grapefruit cocktail with a dash of bitters that we declared refreshing at first sip.
