“it's a beautiful day outside. birds are singing, flowers are blooming... on days like these, kids like you… Should be burning in hell .” - Sans, UNDERTALE
Inspiration
Sans and his brother Papyrus are drinks sharing similarities in both appearance and flavor to the corresponding characters in Undertale. Like his brother’s cocktail, Sans had to be opaque and white and have a flavor profile complementary to how he acts in-game. Sans enjoys drinking ketchup, so his drink’s fruit choice is a tomato. Yup, it’s a fruit, and so we’re gonna use it like one. The result of Sans’s drink had to be appreciable and laid back in stark contrast to his brother-drink’s sweetness. In addition, I wanted it to evoke a feeling of unease just by looking at its ingredients alone.
Workshopping
Tomato Water
Sans drinks ketchup. That being said, I originally figured that I could re-create that viral clear ketchup thing and then just stick it in a cocktail with something to make it opaque. Turns out, one of the ingredients of this alleged “clear ketchup” is tomato water which is just the non-red parts of tomato juice. This seemed to make sense as an ingredient, and I could readily Google drink recipes that called for using tomato water and gin together.
The XBar recently acquired its first bottle of Pectinex Ultra SP-L which in addition to being able to clarify many juices can also increase the yield of tomato water you can get from a single tomato. The general rule of thumb is about 1 ml of Pectinex to every 1 kg of other stuff. My bottle doesn’t have any means of measuring, but I was able to get a sizeable amount of tomato water from 2 or 4 tomatoes at a time with 2 drops from my Pectinex bottle.
Now that I had tomato water, I just had to figure out what to do with it.
The Trials Began
I think I learned a lot about how NOT to use tomato water while workshopping Sans. I had experiences with this drink ranging from “that’s pretty good” to “I can’t stomach this”. Although it didn’t take me nearly as long to settle on a recipe compared to fighting Sans himself (10 hours just about…), it still was just as torturous.
I’ve seen a number of martini variations out there that use tomato water as an ingredient, so it felt natural to start my trials there. If I could take an established recipe, and just make it white and opaque, I’d be done. I came to find that this wasn’t very easy. I first attempted a very simple combo of cucumber jalapeño gin, celery bitters, some saline, and tomato water. The small solution tasted something like a salad, so I figured I was going in the right direction. Adding sour cream for that opaqueness turned this from ‘oh kay’ to ‘oh no’. Although it wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t on the mark for Sans.
Further attempts with sour cream and gin just kept getting more off the mark. I had adjusted ratios with the sour cream and swapped out a few gins, but I just couldn’t get the cream to work. I scrapped it in favor of tahini, just to give it a try, and I genuinely couldn’t stomach it after playing with the sour cream. Feeling sick to my stomach, I searched for something else white and opaque that might be useful here. Greek yogurt? I gave it a try anyway, and although it was still completely unbalanced, I at least learned that nothing curdled. Success in small pieces, I suppose.
I took a break from workshopping and stopped in to check out the Flavor Matrix book, which informed me that flavors of tomato go well with honey. My brain linked honey and Greek yogurt together based on experience with honing in on the perfect breakfast routine (I settled on cream cheese and capers on a toasted bagel by the way). Carefully, I mixed some honey, yogurt, and gin before incrementally adding the tomato water. To my surprise, every drop of tomato water made it taste even worse!! What the heck was I doing wrong here? Surely these trials would amount to something? Lest, what do I learn from this mixological purgatory!?
* breathes * “Okay”, I thought, “let’s just try something else”. Back to the Flavor Matrix, I find that tomato, in addition to its harmony with honey, also has some similarities to sake or Japanese rice wines. Something in me didn’t want to throw sake, a fermented beverage, into the mix. I just tend to lean towards distilled spirits. A bottle of Soju, a distilled rice spirit, was new to the XBar at the time, so I figured “Why not?” Starting from scratch again, I made a little test of 3 parts spirit (gin and soju side by side) with 1 part tomato water and 1 part honey syrup (1:1 ratio). The gin combo, just as before, was terrible in my opinion. I just can’t get gin to taste good with tomato water. The soju combo, on the other hand, was, and I quote “not terrible!” What a breakthrough! Shortly after this discovery, I reworked some ratios, threw in the Greek yogurt and a bit of saline solution to complement the tomato, and “hehehehe” I had my Sans.
This was likely, the hardest time that I’ve had with a drink recipe up to this point. I couldn’t be more proud of the experience. For the sake of the scientific method. Isn’t that right, you two?
Sans’s Face
In case you also fancy a face on your glass, feel free to use this sticker sheet for Papyrus’s and Sans’s faces.
Flavor Analysis
Light with a mild floral sweetness and savory overtones. The texture is rather dry, especially on the finish. The floral tones from the soju carry every other flavor across the drink’s evolution, starting somewhere semi-sweet, rising to a savory vegetalness, and then ending dry and honey forward. The aftertaste is lightly vegetal and reminiscent of a cherry tomato.
Sans
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