The whiskey sour, a relatively old drink that really is kind of going out of fashion, it’s very simple, it’s very beautiful and I think it bares rediscovery.

So let’s get down to a drink. One of the simplest and perhaps older style drinks available for whiskey is something called the whiskey sour. Now, the whiskey sour is—this drink category is simply called as sour, so you could go in a bar and say, “I want a whiskey sour. I want a rice sour. I want a bourbon sour. I want a brandy sour.” You can say, “I want tequila sour,” you just basically name the spirit and say, “I’m wanting a sour of that spirit,” and the bartender know exactly what you want.

We’ve already seen several cocktails in other episodes and we’ve already get fit into this model is basically a spirit, a sweetened ingredient and a souring ingredient. So the daiquiri is essentially a rum sour because it’s using rum, simple syrup and lime juice. So that makes it a rum sour, but they call it a daiquiri. In this case, we’re going to use bourbon, simple syrup and lemon juice plus an ingredient that you never—don’t really see that much anymore in sours although in many of the original sours you actually would see it and that would be the white of an egg. We’ll get to that later.

So let’s start off. Let’s do 2 ounces of bourbon and then let’s do 1 ounce of simple syrup. Again, originally, this cocktail would have been made with sugar perhaps rather than simple syrup like I’d mentioned earlier, sugar sometimes has a tendency not to dissolve fully and therefore not only you have a hard time controlling exactly how sweet the drink is, but also you end up some grit in the glass and so I prefer using simple syrup rather than sugar, simple syrup just simply being a predissolved sugar.

Now, we’re going to take and add ¾ ounce of fresh lemon juice. That was not quite enough, that half of lemon, so we’re going to do another one. As I keep trying to point out to you is you should always avoid recipes and simply say, “The juice of half of lemon,” because in this case, we wouldn’t have enough lemon juice if we had. And I’m going to add ¾ ounce lemon juice and now we’re going to take and add the egg white. I’m going to separate yolk from the white. Now, I could put the entire egg white in there but I’m thinking that’s going to add just a little bit too much egg white, so instead, I’m just going to take my bar spoon and try to add just a little bit. It’s kind of difficult. And I’m going to do something a little bit further on the unusual side and that is no ice. Kind of strange just watching someone shake your cocktail without the ice isn’t it?

Now, the reason for that is what I want to do is actually create an emulsion. Now, emulsions have a hard time when ingredients are cold and therefore if I stock the ice in here, the emulsion wouldn’t quite happen. So now, I can add the ice and my scoop went somewhere, so I’ll just use a little of my—so now, we had the ice to chill the drink down, break the vacuum. Now, we’re going to strain it into this glass. I could do this on a rock’s glass with ice. I could do this in a glass which is called a sour glass which looks kind of similar to a squatty wine glass. What I’m using instead here is a glass, it’s a pisco sour glass.

Now, the thing that the egg white did is add that nice foam to the top of it as well as adding more creamy consistency to it as well. Now, the concept of adding an egg white to making something like a whiskey sour was so popular that used to be when you made up a sour mix that you’re use in your bar, you’d actually add a couple of dashes of egg white to that as well just to add that foamy consistency. These days with people being concerned about the egg whites and raw eggs, and stuff like that, there is artificial things that people get Mr. Frothy and stuff like that. They are basically just bunch of chemicals that they can try to impart that same level of frothiness and fortunately, they also add a flavor to it as well which I don’t care for. So I really avoid any of those chemical things and I prefer using actual egg whites.

Now, people get me concerned about salmonella poisoning with egg whites because all of the different scares that are going on about it. For one thing, they’re not, the amount of salmonella in eggs is really, really low. There is a very little chance that any single egg you pick will actually have salmonella in it and to that the fact that both alcohol and citric acid kill salmonella. Both ingredients of which are in this cocktail and sugar is also something that doesn’t promote the growth of salmonella and it was also take and play a role. So wow, I’m not a doctor and neither do I play on TV. I think everything together kind of determines a fact that there’s extremely little risk that this little bit of egg white would cause a problem. But if you don’t want to put the egg white in, don’t put the egg white in. If you’re concern about raw eggs, avoid raw eggs or buy pasteurized eggs. You can actually buy pasteurized egg whites and use that instead. And there we have the whiskey sour.