Dairy & Egg Substitutions
I found working on The Cocktail Seminars interesting and challenging for a lot of reasons. It both tickled and bedeviled my engineer’s brain trying to fit recipes and ingredients into the five seminars subject to the constraints I had placed upon myself - to say nothing of figuring out how to order them once I had. (I imagine that such difficulties are common when building a curriculum from scratch in any subject.)
The sequential nature of the book also presented a challenge. In Classic Cocktails, I expected readers to browse the pages and select recipes to try in any order they saw fit, skipping over any with ingredients they didn’t have or avoided consuming. But this time, I’ve encouraged readers to go in a particular order, to follow the curriculum I’ve laid out and understand each recipe in the context of the ones that came before.
Readers may still choose to jump around, of course, and I expect that many will. But for those who wish to use the book precisely as I intended it, skipping a particular recipe due to a dietary restriction presents a much bigger conundrum than it does in a book without this kind of structure. How, after all, can one build a foundation for future study on the experiential knowledge of a cocktail one has been unable to make?
In reconciling this concern with the desire to include important drinks and ingredients, I have erred on the side of the latter. Egg whites are an essential cocktail ingredient, and I wasn’t going to simply leave them out of the book. But I did make a point of testing out some possible alternatives to egg and dairy products for those who, for medical or personal reasons, do not consume them. Here’s what I’ve found:
Light Cream/Half and Half
Canned coconut milk has the right overall fattiness, texture, and even color to work as a 1:1 substitute for light cream. Its flavor tends to work just fine in cream drinks as well - even the Grasshopper, in which I thought the mint and the coconut would clash badly, turned out just fine!
The tricky part is the aroma off the top of the glass, which in canned coconut milks (particularly inexpensive ones) can end up being somewhat off-putting. I’d say if you’re going to do this, go for a high-quality product, and if there are any off-smells off the top, use an aromatic garnish like nutmeg and be liberal with it.
This would also be my recommendation for a heavy cream substitute, but note that it will come out lighter in body than the recipe intended, and most heavy cream drinks (e.g. Egg Nog, the Ramos Gin Fizz) have a lot more kitchen chemistry going on in them than I’m addressing here, and I can’t be certain that coconut milk would behave the way it needs to for those recipes to work.
This also doesn’t solve your problem if you are unable to have either dairy or coconut (which some but not all people with tree nut allergies are also sensitive to), and I’m afraid I don’t have a good alternative that is both (coco)nut-free and non-dairy. If and when I find one, I’ll add it to the site.
Egg Whites
Bartenders have gotten enthusiastic about aquafaba in recent years as an alternative to egg whites: it’s vegan, it’s safe for people with egg allergies, and in addition to eliminating the waste of egg yolks that is otherwise common in commercial bars, it is often the case that aquafaba is itself a product that would be wasted if it weren’t being used in cocktails.
Fundamentally, it is bean water. Cook beans in water and strain them out, and you have it. Far easier if you get your beans canned is just to use the water that comes in the can with them. It will have enough of the protein from the beans to function as a foam creator. Chickpea water is particularly favored, because it doesn’t have a color or a strong odor of its own.
It will still be brinier than an egg white - probably salty, possibly savory, and consequently not quite as neutral in flavor - but it’s a remarkably close alternative. One ounce will roughly replace an egg white in my experience. Just be advised that it will pair best with spirits and cocktails that can handle that potential bit of savoriness; gin is your friend here.
It’s also worth noting that some people also have allergies to legumes, in which case this will not be a helpful alternative. Again, if I come up with one, I’ll let you know.
Replacing a whole egg is even trickier, but if you can have dairy, you can get something in the general ballpark with an ounce or so of heavy cream - it will at least have fats, proteins, and water, with some tendency to foam, but it won’t be quite the same. And cream substitutes will take you still further away, to the point at which I’d recommend just trying another cocktail instead.
A Note on Almonds
Orgeat is an almond-based syrup, and decidedly a problem for people with tree nut allergies. There are at least some artificially almond-flavored syrups that are advertised as safe for people with nut allergies - Monin, for example - but I have no direct experience with them.
Perhaps more surprising is that Amaretto Disaronno bills itself as allergy-safe, a claim I am sure had to be very thoroughly vetted before their lawyers and insurers allowed it to be made. (Read more here.) Disaronno gets its almond flavor from apricot pits, and its producers are confident that it will not cause allergic reactions, making it a reasonable alternative to syrups if you prefer something less artificial. Note, though, that I have not tested this claim myself, so please sue them and not me if anything goes wrong.
Why share all this now? Well, we have a cocktail class coming up this Friday that will focus on dessert drinks - including two of the most significant cream cocktails, the Grasshopper and the Brandy Alexander. They will be the first two recipes in this Zoom series that have a serious risk of running afoul of participants’ dietary restrictions, and while I was drawing up a post on dairy alternatives, it seemed like I might as well cover the others while I was at it.
So if you’d like to join us for this week’s class, stock up on light cream or coconut milk as applicable, get your tickets here, and I’ll see you at 8pm on Friday!