“Ryan just has a passion for tiki drinks. He wanted to do something with coconut cream, and I was like, ‘tell me if this is crazy: agricole, coconut, and anise.’ He’s looking at me for a minute, and, I’m thinking, ‘is this good or bad ’… and then he grins. That was the moment he fell back in love with me all over again.”
“I have four of those moments every day.
“The coconut cream is actually a collaboration between Jenna and I and one of our friends. Coconut cream is one of those ingredients that’s embarrassing how fake the canned stuff is. Well, not embarrassing exactly, because I love using it. It’s just a lot of work to make it from scratch. Jenna and I were searching high and low for a method to make better coconut cream. We ended up talking to our pastry chef at the time who’s still one of our best friends and is now the pastry chef at The Table at Season to Taste, Mary Edinger. She worked with us to develop the recipe that we use now. It’s a two-day process, but the end result is awesome.
“We take unsweetened coconut and we toast it. We then bring it up to a boil with sugar, water, and fat. We let that sit overnight in the fridge and strain it out through a cheesecloth. There’s so much coconut oil at this point that we let the oil solidify and pull it off the top. Then, we just mix together the toasted coconut syrup, which is, in of itself, a delicious cocktail ingredient, with Perfect Purée coconut purée. It adds a roasted coconut flavor and this extra layer of complexity.”
“The anisette brings us those anise notes. Our mint simple syrup is not necessarily to bring in mint, but it supports the other herbal notes. After we played with it, we needed something to give it some body, so we added Fortaleza blanco tequila. It’s oily and full, the kind of tequila I prefer honestly. We also used a higher proof white agricole, so it’s going to have those cool grassy and earthy notes too.”
