Dry ice cocktails! ~ Ham Pie Sandwiches

25 June 2012

Dry ice cocktails!

mai tai with dry ice smoke. pic by Wondergus.

Guess what Veronica, Gus (to whom I am indebted for the above pic), Cookie and I did this Friday! If you said "made use of a huge block of dry ice in several over-the-top smoking cocktails," you win.

Dry ice keeps your drinks super-cold and makes a constant bubbling noise. It settles at the bottom of the glass, where the temperature contrast engenders a massive amount of frost and makes it painful to hold. We decided it was probably best to serve dry ice drinks in a hurricane glass, since the stem keeps the ice from sticking to the table and the upper curve of the glass makes for a non-freezing handhold. Check it out:

dry ice mai tai in hurricane glass

The entire business is SUPER ENTERTAINING.

We had Mai Tais and Zombies, each with a small chunk or two of dry ice in place of ordinary ice. I wasn't the one mixing these cocktails, so I'm just going to refer you guys to the recipe links. However, Cookie and I did make cinnamon-infused simple syrup for the Zombies, so I can tell you all about that!

Cinnamon-infused simple syrup

equal amounts sugar and water
(OR a premade batch of simple syrup)
cinnamon sticks

Make simple syrup by heating water and sugar together until the sugar dissolves. If you already have simple syrup, just heat it up; we used a finished cup. Add a couple roughly crushed cinnamon sticks and continue to heat gently for a few minutes. Then take the pan off the heat and let steep. The original Zombie recipe calls for a 2-hour infusion, but we ended up straining out our cinnamon a bit earlier.

If you are making Zombies, you mix this simple syrup with grapefruit juice to create "Donn's mix." All right then!

dry ice mai tai

These were entertaining but also extremely alcoholic. You won't want to drink anything else after having a Zombie. However, they are definitely very good--and a much better solution to "what do we do with all this dry ice?" than chucking it out on the back porch to slowly melt.

Happy Monday!

7 comments:

Kat said...

Wow. My husband's a chemist so he has an appreciation for dry ice. I've never had a Zombie but after looking at the recipe I see what you mean about having just one. Certainly a good way to make use of the stuff!

kristina said...

You can safely eat dry ice? Well, I guess that's my fact-I-learned-today.

The Zombie sounds perfect to go with it, since I associate dry ice with Halloween special effects (ok, and dance recitals too!).

Eileen said...

We didn't exactly eat the dry ice--it just carbonated the drinks. So we had a few occasional extra-carbonated mouthfuls if our straws were right over the dry ice, but no real problems. Also, the last inch or so of each drink was not really drinkable due to dry ice deposit.

Jes said...

Wait, what?! You have the coolest (ha, pun wasn't originally intended...but you know) Friday nights ever! I'd like a science experiment zombie drink please :)

Aylin @ GlowKitchen said...

Wow I love the look of this! Talk about entertainment whilst getting drunk, as if the act itself weren't enough!

Joanne said...

We use a lot of dry ice in lab but I would never have thought to do something culinary with it! Great idea.

Stephanie said...

Wow how cool is this! Very creative...way to think outside the box. Thanks for stopping by today. Hope you have a wonderful trip too!