Cocktail Class: Peach Caipirinha

Peaches are the most seductive fruit of summer: Their aroma, when ripe, is both tart and intensely, beautifully sweet. Just one sitting on my counter can perfume the whole kitchen. Apply slight pressure at the top, near the crown, and the flesh beneath the skin gives way slightly; peeling it is like slipping off the clothes of a lover.

Or as Wallace Stevens writes—so much more eloquently—in his poem, A Dish of Peaches in Russia:

With my whole body I taste these peaches,
I touch them and smell them.  Who speaks?

I absorb them as the Angevine
Absorbs Anjou.  I see them as a lover sees,

As a young lover sees the first buds of spring
And as the black Spaniard plays his guitar.

So the end of summer, to me, is about peaches. In cobblers and salads, stirred into the batter for scones, churned into sorbet, mixed into cocktails we carry out to the front porch and toast our neighbors passing by.

Peach Caipirinha

1/2 medium peach, peeled and pitted
1 heaping Tbsp. superfine (baker's) sugar
1/2 lime
2 oz. cachaca

Place half peach in a blender and purée. Add a few drops of lime juice to keep it from browning.

Trim ends off of lime so white rind is gone. Cut lengthwise and remove pith from center. Slice almost all the way through perpendicular to axis of lime, leaving rind side intact. Slice diagonally a couple of times, again, not slicing through. Cut in half, perpendicular to axis and put in glass, flesh side up.

Put sugar over lime. Muddle gently, squeezing out all the juice you can. Add puréed peach. Put into shaker. Fill with ice. Add the cachaca. Shake. Pour with ice into tumbler.

See all my peach recipes here!

Tropical Temperatures Call for Tropical Cocktails

If you're a newcomer to our fair city, you may not even have been aware that it was happening, but if you needed any more proof that climate change is real, you had only to look up at the sky during Portland's annual paen to the be-thorned flower that gives this place its nickname, The City of Roses. You could look up because there wasn't anything falling out of the sky that would cause your eyes to blink and your head to get soaked.

Remove pith from lime, then slash.

There wasn't even a reason to wear a coat because the temperature was hovering in the 80s and the sky was the crystalline blue of some tropical lagoon. The roses themselves, which started blooming almost a month ago and which normally would be sodden masses from the drenching rain that falls from the sky in torrential sheets during the Rose Festival, were blooming in profusion on even the most hellish of hell strips.

That and the lack of snow pack in the mountains is enough to make native Oregonians more than a little nervous.

Put lime in glass and add superfine sugar.

But we're a plucky lot here, so when the sun shines and the mercury creeps up into the high double digits, we take a cue from the parts of the world where this kind of weather is de rigeur. And since this week is looking to be quite tropical, we'll be mixing up just the right blend of ice and lime and a splash of alcohol.

Muddle.

No, in this instance I'm not talking about a margarita or a gin and tonic or even a mojito—not, as Mr. Seinfeld would say, that there's anything wrong with those. We're currently enamored of the national beverage of Brazil, the caipirinha (pron. kye-peer-EEN-yah). Made with cachaça (pron. kuh-CHAH-suh), the slightly sweet, sprightly liquor made from the fermented sugar cane juice that is then distilled, it is a drink at once light and refreshing.

This is especially called for on hot days when you don't want a cocktail hammer upside your head, but instead something that is cold and sippable and makes you feel like you're sitting under an umbrella on the beach. If anything can make hot temperatures, or climate change, more bearable, it's this.

Caipirinha

1 heaping Tbsp. superfine (baker's) sugar
1/2 lime
2 oz. cachaca

Trim ends off lime so white rind is gone. Cut lengthwise and remove pith from center. Slice almost all the way through perpendicular to axis of lime, leaving rind side intact. Slice diagonally a couple of times, again, not slicing through. Cut in half, perpendicular to axis and put in glass flesh side up.

Put sugar over lime. Muddle gently, squeezing out all the juice you can. Put into shaker. Fill with ice. Add the cachaca. Shake. Pour with ice into tumbler.

Check out another perfect spritzy cocktail, ideal for summer, the Americano.

Introducing the…Pisco-rinha? Pisco-rita?

"When in doubt, punt." - John Heisman

It was my fault, so hopefully I can claim some of the credit, too. We'd been jonesing for caipirinhas after watching a video of cachaça expert Dragos Axinte of Novo Fogo mix up one of Brazil's signature cocktails. Dave was particularly keen to try his method of slicing a lime so as to extract the maximum amount of juice during muddling.

We had the limes, the sugar and the fermented sugar cane spirit the Brazilians call cachaça. Or at least I thought that's what was in the tall, clear bottle in the liquor cabinet until I pulled it out and realized it was actually pisco, the brandy distilled from grapes in the winemaking regions of Peru and Chile. Rats!

Rather than giving up on having a cool, refreshing lime drink from the southern hemisphere, we thought, well, heck, why not just sub in the pisco for the cachaça and see what happens? If it's terrible, we can just shrug our shoulders and pour it down the sink with no one the wiser.

Fortunately, that was not the case, and we can now claim it as a house variation on a classic. That's not so bad, is it? And yes, we do have cachaça on the shopping list for our next trip to the liquor store.

Pisco-rinha

1 heaping Tbsp. superfine sugar
1/2 lime
2 oz. pisco

Trim ends off lime so white rind is gone. Cut lengthwise and remove pith from center. Slice almost all the way through perpendicular to axis of lime, rind toward flesh, leaving flesh side intact. Slice diagonally a couple of times, again, not slicing through. Cut in half, perpendicular to axis and put in glass flesh side up.

Put sugar over lime. Muddle gently, squeezing out all the juice you can. Put into shaker. Fill with ice. Add the pisco. Shake. Pour with ice into the glass.

Heresy or Genius? You Decide!

I have to admit, when I heard that beer cocktails were the latest thang on cocktail menus, it got one of those big-time eyerolls usually reserved for bartenders who ask if I want my martini with gin or vodka.

Really? Cocktails made with beer? Spare me!

But, as usually happens when I get all up on my high horse, a comeuppance wasn't far behind, and it came in the guise of nice guy and bartender extraordinaire Jacob Grier (left) of Metrovino. He'd been playing around with beer cocktails, seeing if our local microbrews could be insinuated into some cocktails for the benefit of spirit, brew and drinker.

You might remember him from my post about Kopstootje, the Dutch tradition of drinking genevere with a beer back, when he had the bright idea to introduce the folks from Bols to Upright Brewing's Alex Ganum. So when asked to come up with a couple of unique libations using the Brazilian sugar cane spirit called cachaça, he knew he'd found a good candidate for his experiments with beer.

The first round of the drink was good, but not quite the knockout Grier wanted, so with some juggling of ingredients—he decided to jettison the traditional mint because it added an unpleasant bitterness—he came up with a libation he's calling the Caip-beer-inha, a twist on the national drink of Brazil.

While some might argue that Ninkasi's Total Domination IPA is a fabulous beer on its own and a caipirinha doesn't need any help, thank you very much (neither of which I can deny), the combination does have a certain je ne sais quoi as a summer sipper. Try it at your next lawn party and see if it doesn't get some nods of approval!

Caip-beer-inha

From Jacob Grier

2 oz Novo Fogo silver cachaça
Half a lime, quartered
1 spoon superfine white sugar
Ninkasi Total Domination IPA

Muddle the lime and sugar, add cachaça and ice and shake. Dump contents into a rocks glass, top with more ice, and finish with the beer.

Frisco Road Trip, Pt. 10: The Last Meal

After the intensity of the Frida show, the whole group was completely wrung out and needed not only some food, but liquid refreshment. Fast.

Tom and Judy had done their research and found a Brazilian churrascaria named Espetus just down the street. And these two know Brazil intimately, since Tom had taught at a university there some years ago and both speak some Portuguese, Tom being fluent. Can you see where this is going?

Now, churrascaria (pron. shuh-ras-car-EE-a) is roughly translated as "steakhouse" but, my friends, it is much, much more than that. We walked in and were seated at a table where we ordered a beer with a caipirinha, which is something like a margarita without the salt and made with a Brazilian spirit called cachaça.

Next we were ushered to the salad bar, again an understatement, since it was not only a smorgasbord (not to mix metaphors) of brilliant salads but also featured the foundation of Brazilian cuisine, pinto beans, black beans and rice with a topping of a granular farinha that had been cooked with pork fat. The salads ranged from a potato salad made with carrots and mayonnaise to a tabbouli-like grain and parsley salad to a corn salad to one resembling cole slaw.

Plates full, we returned to the table where we were met with a man dressed in a gaucho costume wielding not only a very long, very sharp knife, but a two-foot-long skewer full of meat. As he cut thin slices off the meat, we were instructed to pick up the tongs next our plates and grasp the wafers as they peeled off and then put them on our plates.

This was repeated with men bearing skewers of pork loin, steaks, pork chops, sausages, chicken hearts and more meat than you can shake a...well, shake a skewer at until Tom picked up the coaster on the table and turned it from the green side to the red side. Suddenly all the gauchos disappeared. Genius! Turn it to green, they're back, then red...well, it would have worked except they kept coming by to speak Portuguese with Tom.

And the desserts were awesome, one a papaya mousse with an orgasmic cassis sorbet, the other a passion fruit sorbet in a caramel crust that was sublime. What a meal, and a truly unique experience we couldn't have had anywhere else. Thanks, Tom and Judy!

Details: Espetus Churrascaria, 1686 Market St. Phone 415-552-8792.

Note: Tom writes: "The name of the place, 'Espetus,' is the original Latin word for the Portuguese name for the skewer: espeto (pronounced, roughly, ehs-PET-oo). Saying that word, you will recognize a phonetic resemblance to the English cognate: spit, as in the spit (or skewer) on which the meat is skewered (not spitted)."

Read the other posts in this series: Getting There, Paying Our Respects, Resting in Redding, Schmoozing in Sacto, Home Away from Home, Off on the Right Foot, Choosing Chinese, The Ferry and the Hog and The Point of It All.