"Have no fear! Amy Rose is here!" - Amy from Sonic Adventure 2

Inspiration

Amy Rose, the hedgehog so named for her similarity to the flower (see, roses have thorns and hedgehogs have quills) gets a cocktail interpretation drawing from her name and her flavor preferences. Sonic the Hedgehog The Official Cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal and Ian Flynn showcases a grapefruit-adjusted lemonade recipe that Amy describes as “a little sour, a little sweet, a little tart, and a lot of pink”. Well, Amy, I hope that this tart grapefruit and rose-flavored whiskey highball suits your preferences if you ever get the opportunity to indulge a bit in the world of alcoholic beverages (and in the meantime, no worries, I’ve got a non-alcoholic mocktail recipe for you too!)

Workshopping

Piko Piko Slammer

As with our other hedgehog highball cocktails, Amy needed a base flavor to build around and a base spirit to be infused. We pulled inspiration for Sonic and Shadow’s flavors from their energy drink implementations by G-Fuel, and we got the inspiration for Silver from the official Sonic the Hedgehog cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal and Ian Flynn. Flipping through the pages of the cookbook yet again, we found a recipe for Amy Rose’s “Piko Piko Slammer” (I see what you did there Victoria ~ like “Piko Piko Hammer”). Amy’s “slammer” is a pink lemonade drink that adds a bit of grapefruit into the mix and some beets for color. Personally, our first thoughts for an Amy drink involved roses since it’s literally in her name. That being said, we hadn’t done a lot of work with grapefruits up to this point so we figured we’d give it a go. Either way, Amy’s drink in the Sonic the Hedgehog cookbook is described as being “a little sour, a little sweet, a little tart, and a lot of pink”, and we set off to accomplish that with grapefruit and rose (and alcohol ~ or not).

To start with, we spun up two rose-based infusions. One is a simple rose syrup (by mixing equal parts sugar and water by weight and simmering with rose petals until fragrant and colored). The other is a rosehip-infused vodka by cold-infusing dried rosehips with vodka (Ketel One). We haven’t experimented much with rosehips before at the XBar, but we read up that they are a bit sour which could fit the “tart” note that Amy uses to describe her official slammer recipe (yes, I am going to continue referring to that recipe as her “slammer”). More details on the rose ingredients in a bit. Please allow me to share the workshopping process for the grapefruit infusions covering an interesting technique that works especially well for infused spirits.

Amy Suprême

Having worked briefly in the past with grapefruits, I’m already familiar with how bitter their peels and piths can be. If you’ve yet to experience a grapefruit’s bitterness I’d recommend trying a grapefruit peel oleo saccharum. You can make this uniquely bittersweet syrup by peeling a grapefruit and covering the rinds in equal parts sugar. Over time the sugar draws out the oils in the rind thereby creating a syrup. Although not present in the alcoholic recipe, the mocktail version will use this syrup.

What we tried to do here though, is take the flesh of the grapefruit (specifically Rio Red grapefruits) and infuse it into some vodka (Ketel One) and unaged corn whiskey (Stoll & Wolfe White Dog Corn Whiskey). We weren’t sure which spirit would work best here, so we took a safe approach with the vodka and a more explorative approach with the whiskey. In the blog post about Shadow, I explain how we chose an aged spirit for Shadow because he’s canonically like 50+ years old. Amy on the other hand (and the other hedgehogs) are all relatively young, so they don’t use aged spirits as their base. Amy’s personality is quite energetic and bold and the characteristics that I personally get from this bottle of unaged whiskey are not dissimilar. Would it work? At this point, we didn’t know!

To infuse the spirits we’d use sous vide for a controlled infusion environment. However, before we put the spirits together and vacuum-sealed the sous vide bag, we took a moment to consider the typical bitter properties of a grapefruit. Typical of citrus fruits in general, the white membrane between the rind and the flesh, called the pith, tends to carry a bitter flavor. Back to Amy’s slammer for a moment, I don’t recall her describing her drink as “bitter”. So we utilized a technique called suprême (or spelled “supreme”) to remove the bitter parts of the grapefruit as much as we could before the infusion process.

In the culinary world, “supreme” essentially means the best part of the food, whether that be meat or fruit. In the context of citrus fruit, supreme is just the colorful and juicy flesh on the inside with little pith. I learned from Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence that Pectinex Ultra SP-L (the same enzyme I’ve used to clarify certain ingredients in the past) can also be used to supreme citrus fruits with minimal precise cutting! To do this, take all of your grapefruit wedges and submerge them in a cold water bath with a bit of Pectinex Ultra SP-L and let sit in the refrigerator for two days. To ensure everything stayed submerged, I put a paper towel overtop. After a while in the Pectinex bath, most of the white pith had dissolved and the remaining bits were easy to peel off with our fingers. The grapefruits that used to look pithy like this (covered in a white pithy mesh), now looked like this (like little wedges of pink flesh)!

To set up the sous vide, we separated about 11 supremed grapefruit wedges into two sous vide bags with 6 oz of base spirit. More exactly, this was 212.07 g of grapefruit with 6 oz vodka (Ketel One) and 187.81 g of grapefruit with 6 oz unaged corn whiskey (Stoll & Wolfe). After the sous vide both spirits had a mild yellow color to them with a minimal degree of cloudiness. They also both took on a light sweetness and mild tartness with the whiskey having an extra degree of tangy “funk” to it. I’ll provide some more details in the next section regarding how we settled upon the whiskey infusion instead of the vodka infusion, but here’s a summary of how to make the infused whiskey for reference.

Grapefruit Infused White Dog Whiskey

• Peel some grapefruits. (we workshopped with four Rio Red grapefruits for this recipe but any will work, you can reuse the rind for an oleo saccharum if you don’t feel like tossing them out)

• Separate the wedges of the inner grapefruit pieces and prepare a bath of cold water and Pectinex Ultra SP-L. Add enough water to completely submerge the grapefruit pieces and I’d recommend adding about 1 drop of Pectinex per whole grapefruit (the enzyme bath will dissolve the white pith on the grapefruit pieces)

• Supreme the grapefruit wedges by allowing them to sit in the bath for about two days (make sure the grapefruits remain in contact with the Pectinex bath by laying a paper towel overtop of the bath, allowing it to cover the grapefruit and soak up a bit of the water)

• Remove the grapefruit wedges and pat dry with a paper towel. Optionally, you can now peel off the remaining white pith with your fingers, it should come off pretty easily!

  • While peeling, you might notice that the “skin” of the grapefruit wedge might come apart spilling out the small “bubbles” of grapefruit on the inside. No worries! If it comes apart, discard the “skin” and preserve the little juice “bubbles”, throw those in the sous vide bag in the next step)

• Take the supremed grapefruit wedges and place them in a sous vide bag with unaged white corn whiskey (or a spirit of your choice). I’d recommend 6 oz of spirit per two grapefruits (that’s about 200g of grapefruit to 6 oz of spirit)

• Vacuum seal the sous vide bag and prepare a sous vide bath at 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Allow the sealed bag to sit in the bath for 2 hours and allow everything to come down to about room temperature.

• When cooled, strain out the liquid from the solids, and you’ve got some infused spirit!

And before I forget, don’t throw away the supremed grapefruits used for the infusion! You can craft a really interesting syrup with the remaining scraps by combining them with an equal weight of sugar. A sort of “unaged whiskey grapefruit syrup” if you will. This process of taking the typically scrapped infused fruit and making syrup out of it is naturally a bit less wasteful. We use this type of syrup for the Sonic the Hedgehog cocktail (which we made with peach-infused shochu and correspondingly a shochu-infused peach syrup).

A Balance of Roses and Grapefruits

At this point we had a few ingredients at our disposal, namely:

• Grapefruit Sous Vide-Infused Vodka (Ketel One)

• Vodka-Infused Supreme Grapefruit Slices (scraps from the sous vide)

• Grapefruit Sous Vide-Infused White Dog Whiskey (Stoll & Wolfe)

• White Dog Whiskey-Infused Supreme Grapefruit Syrup (scraps from the sous vide combined with white granulated sugar)

• Rose Petal 1:1 Simple Syrup

• Rosehip Cold-Infused Vodka (Ketel One)

• Grapefruit Oleo Saccharum (from discarded grapefruit rinds)

• Grapefruit Juice (from extra grapefruits we had lying around)

Between the spirits that we had available, I wound up choosing the infused white dog whiskey in place of the rosehip or grapefruit-infused vodkas. The rosehip infusion was a quick pass since it leaned a bit too far in the vegetal and earthy directions more so than the tart direction as intended. The subtler notes of fruit from the grapefruit infusions seemed to play along better with the rose syrup. In my decision to pass on the grapefruit-infused vodka, I also dismissed a more accessible option namely store-bought grapefruit vodka. I tested Deep Eddy’s ruby red grapefruit-infused vodka mixed with rose petal syrup, and I found that the lack of complexity was honestly too boring. The unaged whiskey infusion offered such a unique tanginess to the drink that helped it stand out. It’s a bit unconventional, and it’s got a certain prickliness to it like a certain pink hedgehog I know.

With the base spirit picked out, it came down to fixing up a highball that fit Amy’s description. It must be sour, sweet, tart, and pink (heavy on the pink). The types of highball cocktails that I’ve done in the past tend to be light on flavor. Most of the drink winds up being some form of fizzy water which dilutes the drink and also doesn’t contribute much flavor on its own. In one direction I could infuse the soda with flavor or swap it with a sugar-filled alternative. We briefly considered topping this with some sort of grapefruit soda like Fresca or Squirt, but I wanted to play with the homemade stuff first before reaching for a can of proprietary ingredients.

One of the demo drinks I made was nice but lacked a bit of character. This was made with 2 oz of grapefruit-infused white dog whiskey, 0.5 oz rose syrup, and topped with plain soda water. It had a light tanginess and tasted a little grapefruity and a little rosy. With two ounces of spirit in there already, it didn’t feel right to just add more alcohol to the mix (or sub out some of the infused stuff for a sweeter liqueur). In one attempt I added some grapefruit oleo saccharum to sweeten it up a bit and add some extra grapefruit notes, but it wound up being too bitter, a contribution from the grapefruit peel. I then swapped out a bit of the soda with some freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, and things began to brighten up a bit. Despite the drink tasting more like grapefruit than before, I still wouldn’t have described this demo drink as being “sour” like Amy’s description.

If all it needed was a bit of sourness, I had just the trick! By adding a bit of citric acid to the grapefruit, we acid-adjust it to have the same acidity level as a lemon. This slight adjustment knocked everything into that Goldilocks zone: sweet, sour, and tart. The only other criterion was that the drink needed to be pink! Adding grapefruit juice certainly made it pink enough, but for a little boost of color, some extra beetroot powder worked great. When working with beetroot powder, just be sure to sift it a bit so that it doesn’t clump up.

Rosey Grapefruit Garnish

To top off Amy’s signature highball beverages, I literally spun up a garnish using the rind of one of the grapefruits used for juicing. To make one, make as long a peel of the grapefruit as you can using either a knife or a peeler. Begin rolling the peel in on itself while pinching at one of the sides. As you roll, you should notice it beginning to look more like a small cone than a cylinder. Keep rolling until the whole peel is used, and lock the peel in this shape with a cocktail skewer. Optionally, if you’ve got a small rosebud, you can wedge it into the center of the grapefruit flower.

Non-Alcoholic Version

Yup, this one’s got a mocktail too! Creating non-alcoholic versions of all of the inspired recipes is part of a greater effort on my part (and by extension the XBar) to cater to a wider audience and keep up with the growing desire to have fun with fewer consequences. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? Some folks will say it’s a lot of work, and I agree with that. Recently it’s taken more time to develop a series of drinks because, naturally, we’re mixing up twice as many. Also, non-alcoholic ingredients tend to be perishable! So it’s not like we can reach for a bottle of grapefruit-flavored stuff that’s been sitting on the shelf for 2.5 years and still expect it to perform well in a recipe (that might be a long time but some flavored liqueurs really do keep well after all that time!) Anyways, rant: over.

Flavor Analysis

Tart, tangy, and grapefruit forward with a bubbly undertone of rose.