Rich, you are gonna make a Mai Tai? That's correct! It is one of the pillars of Tiki
bar tending, but despite the fact that's its a Tiki drink which are normally really complicated
and super opulent with loads of crazy ingredients.
Opulent good word!
Yeah!
This one is kinda simple
its just got three base ingredients and then a little bit of a kicker. So it's
got rum, lime which is a nice kind of refreshing and then it uses a dry orange liquor as a
sweetener, kicked with a little bit of almond syrup, Orjeac. So shall we start making it?
Yeah man, do it dude! Perfect, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna squeeze in our lime
juice fresh, like this. You can use just your fingers at home if you want. We're making
two of these drinks so I'm gonna squeeze two whole limes into the bottom of this shaker here.
We're gonna keep these little bits and pieces as well for garnish for later. So why
a lime, why not a lemon? Lime and rum is a lovely combination together, lime has a little
bit more spice to it, it's got a touch more acidity to it which means it balances with
the sweetness of sugar cane based rum. So we're gonna balance that, it's basically about
fifty milliliters of lime juice or the juice of two whole lime's normally, with fifty milliliters
of orange liquor. Then the rums, right so originally this drink was created in the nineteen forty's
coined by a guy called Trader Vic, in fact that's actually where the name
comes from, he created it in Hawaii and the Polowijen word for out of this world, the
best is 'Mai Tai' and it was said that when he served it to the first guests they liked it so much that that's what
they called it.
Man I bet he felt really good when they were like "Wow, out of this world, Mai Tai!"
So we have fifty milliliters of this old, this aged Cuban style rum. This
is going to add a little bit of that maturity. Yeah. Those toffee, butterscotchy kind of
notes that are gonna work really well with this almond syrup. Then we're gonna use this
slightly younger rum, a gold rum still that's a bit fresher, it's kind of got these hints
of smoke to it. Woops, there's no dasher bottle on there. Out it comes. So we've got fifty
milliliters of each, so it's basically one part of everything, its really simple. And
then on top of that, this is almond syrup, Orgeat, it's like traditionally a French thing.
It's basically blanched almonds, sweeteners and all this kind of stuff. You can make you're
own but the stuff you get in the supermarket is just as good. Tres facile, that's french
for very easy. Shake it off the spoon. There's all these hot chicks staring at you dude.
He is taken sorry, he's got a four month old, he's a rad dad. So we're gonna shake this
really really hard. That's really important for a lot of drinks is to get a lot of aeration
and make it super cold. How much ice? As much as you can fit in an still shake it up.
(Cheering off camera)
Oh god really? That's your shaker face? I've been practicing, I've been doing
it a while, so this is our drink. Now while it's just sat there it's not diluting, we're
not putting ice in it because we need to make the garnish for this drink. So we're just
gonna cut an orange twist like this. Very simple, you can use a wide peeler, a potato
peeler if you want. We've got some mint and we've got these lime wedges that were spent
from the juicing. There we go, right. So. We've got the lime husk that we got earlier,
its kind of ruff and a little bit robust but it looks nice. Rough and robust. We're gonna
just put this orange zest on top like this, so like a long zest of orange. We don't need
to put it in the drink. Okay so you're getting that kind of orange oils to kind of like,
you know, flavor the top of the glass. And then we're gonna use just a couple of mint
sprigs. Sound like you know what you're doing. Wouldn't that be great. A couple of mint sprigs
and some straws. There we go, now we've got some pre cut ones because these glasses are
slightly shorter. I gotchya. I've gotta hand these off to some good people. Do you mind
if I taste it first? We have to taste it first man, you're the creator! Cheers dude.