How best to press ginger? This question presented itself on my recent recent trip to Key West, during which I busted out some Moscow Mules for a party at friends' house. The ginger beer we had was a little anemic, so we sought to squeeze some fresh ginger to punch them up. Approach #1: use a ginger grater, a ceramic sluice with a textured surface over which you scrape cut ginger, and then wait for the juice and bits to slowly drain out the bottom. Clearly intended for this use, it indisputably worked, but a little patience was called for. Approach #2: place cut ginger into a citrus press and squeeze directly into the glass. General acclaim over the unexpected success with the re-purposed press ( a garlic press would do as well, but in much smaller portions). A follow up phone call revealed that the citrus park had broken a couple weeks later after too-frequent and too-vigorous ginger pressing, so it's not without a downside. Approach #3: use your hands. Chef Chris put the ginger through a box shredder then squeezed the shredded chunks inside his fist, directly into the glasses. This one takes the prize in the no-tools-required category, it's totally rock and roll, and it looks cool. Sometimes chefs do this but wrapping the ginger in cheesecloth or muslin to strain out the little bits that make it through your fingers. But that's not how we roll.
The next batch of Mules came around days later, and the improbable alchemy that ginger beer, limes and vodka can acheive wasn't happening for some reason--too much fresh ginger is certainly the likely culprit but we'd recklessly gone way off recipe and too much vodka could be to blame, too--it wasn't clear why exactly but it wasn't working. This was at a small gathering to greet Will and Mrs. Foster, and I pressed him for a solution. 'Have you got bitters?' was the response and happily we did. 3 to 4 dashes of Angostura bitters anchored the dueling citrus and lime, and brought the rogue mules back into the correct spectrum of flavor. J.R.
ROGUE MULE (loosely adapted from Dale DeGroff's Moscow Mule recipe by Will Foster)
1 1/2 ounces vodka
4 ounces ginger beer
Lime wedge (Degroff calls it a garnish, but we squeezed it into the drink)
3-4 dashes Angostura bitters
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