

“Salty… No… sweet!" - Donald Duck, Kingdom Hearts II
Inspiration
In August of 2024, we created a recipe for Kingdom Hearts’ sea salt ice cream, but as an alcoholic/non-alcoholic snow cone. I recently finished a marathon of playthroughs including Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories, and Kingdom Hearts II. Since then, I’ve learned a number of new techniques for mixing cocktails and have a better understanding of what the characters in the series know of this salty and sweet treat. Now, do I know it like I would if I played through Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days? Probably not. But when I get there, I’ll be sipping on this new and improved salty, sweet, and blue dessert cocktail as if I were right there in Twilight Town. It’s salty… no… sweet, and do I taste a bit of vanilla and rum in there?
Workshopping
Critiquing the Old Recipe
As I mentioned above, it’s been almost half a year since I put out a recipe for Sea Salt Ice Cream Snow Cones, so I whipped up a fresh one using a shaker and served it over shaved ice. It’s still as salty and sweet as I remember it to be, and my partner Anna still loves it to boot! That may seem like a success, but what I’m really interested in designing is a cocktail form of sea salt ice cream. This would mean that the shaved ice would have to go! Naturally, I tried just pouring the original recipe right into a glass to see if my job would be easy. Hmmmm…
My first critique comes in the form of a ratio, or rather a volume. There’s only 2 oz of liquid in the original recipe, which works fine if you’re pouring this into a standard coupe glass pre-filled with shaved ice. Maybe just scale up the recipe? That wasn’t going to work either. When I tasted the drink without any ice, it was really unbalanced. It's salty and sweet for sure, but way too much. Without all of that ice in there, the drink wasn’t diluted enough to be enjoyable!
My final critique was on the texture of the ingredients and the drink itself. In the original recipe, we use granules of salt. Fine for when you’ve got shaved ice since any leftover granules after shaking will disperse naturally via gravity throughout the snow cone. This adds some variability of when you get that salty flavor pop. Some scoops are sweet, some more salty than others. The same thing applies to any leftover powdered milk which helped with color and texture in the snow cone version of the drink. If we remove all the shaved ice though, those extra salt granules and bits of powdered milk, are rather unsightly and kind of unpleasant, especially at the bottom of the glass. Some people like a bit of sugar at the bottom of their Old Fashioneds, but I feel like you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s yearning for “salty dry milk” as their final tasting note.
Just a few more critiques here (I’m the drink’s creator so I can be as harsh as I want to). I’m a slow drinker, and as the no-ice recipe sits in the glass, I can see the powdered milk coming out of the solution because of the added lemon juice. Also, for a cocktail, there just ain’t enough booze in here.
Cocktailification
So where to begin? Well, I broke this down into a couple of goals for myself as I refactored the original recipe.
No extra solid bits - If I’m adding salt or powdered milk, it better be all dissolved first, and it mustn’t separate!
Needs a base - Just blue curaçao (a sweet liqueur) just ain’t boozy enough.
Needs to maintain that blue color and be more accurate to the real thing
Liquid Salt and Liquid Milk
The presence of those small granules of salt and powdered milk really wasn’t doing it for me, and I figured this would be the easiest thing to mitigate. Instead of adding salt to the shaker, I whipped up a 20% saline solution by adding 80g of water to 20g of sea salt (you can scale this recipe for larger batches). Saline solution when used as a few drops is great for enhancing flavors in pretty much any drink, and in larger quantities, it can make things taste, well salty. Adding just the right amount of saline took a bit of tweaking, but the amount in the final recipe is balanced enough for the liquid in the drink (you can always add more salt by sipping the drink on the salted side of the rim). Any more saline at these ratios makes the liquid taste much more salty than sweet to my palette.
The second granulated substance to be rid of was the powdered milk. According to the bag that the powder comes in, ⅓ cup of powder makes 1 cup of milk, so I figured just dissolving it in water first would work for the cocktail. It kind of worked, but I ran into some issues that I’ll detail a bit below when I walk you through some flavor workshopping. Glossing over a bit of those details for now, suffice it to say that the powdered milk just wouldn’t stay as a liquid. No matter what I tried, there were always granules at the bottom of the glass that I thought were kind of gross.
At this point in the workshopping process, I was still adding lemon juice to the recipe. The idea here is that sourness balances out sweetness, and can allow for more complex flavor development. It just didn’t work though. I tried lessening the amount of juice and even tried using some 10% citric acid solution until there was basically none in the drink at all. Even in the case of no acid, there were still bits of powdered milk. Maybe the bag I was working with was a dud, but I didn’t want to keep trying. I briefly experimented with using coconut milk in place of powdered milk to prevent the “milk granules” issue, but the coconut flavor didn’t fit the theme of the recipe.
This was kind of an impasse for workshopping this recipe for a while until I picked it up again after seeing a drink that seemingly combines citrus and milk without any curdling! A popular beverage called Brazilian Lemonade typically combines quartered citrus, water, sugar, and sweetened condensed milk in a blender. The missing ingredient, so I thought, might be sweetened condensed milk! I’m not sure how it seemed to work at the time (and I’m not convinced that it did work in the way that I needed), but it appeared to me that this milk product could withstand the added citrus!
Milk Syrup
Turns out that sweetened condensed milk (SCM) is an excellent way to add a neutral sweet flavor to a drink! It imparts a creamy mouthfeel and cream flavor as well. I swapped out the powdered milk in the original sea salt ice cream drink recipe with SCM instead and things looked great! No more pesky granules and the drink’s opaque cyan appearance was unmarred! The only problem I felt at this point was that SCM is really annoying to measure. It’s incredibly viscous like honey is, and I had a really difficult time measuring it in individual fractions of an ounce. It occurred to me, that if SCM is as viscous as honey, then I could just combine it with equal parts water by weight just like you would in a typical honey syrup. It worked great until it didn’t.
Adding water to sweetened condensed milk works to make it more pourable, but now whatever was keeping it from curdling in the presence of citrus juice was too weak to work. I actually began writing up this blog, while enjoying a preliminary recipe and when I looked back at the drink, it had begun curdling about 15 minutes after I started drinking it! Evidently, I’d have to pivot the recipe once more.
Sweetened Condensed Milk Syrup
100g Sweetened Condensed Milk
100ml (100g) Water
Method: Stir until Combined
Notes: Keep refrigerated and use within 3 days.
Orange… no… Vanilla!
I was at another impasse in terms of how I typically approach drinks. Since reading some books by the Death & Co. crew, I’ve really felt it necessary that all “proper” drinks need some acid in them! This is incorrect, and merely a misinterpretation of the principles that I had been studying on. It’s all about context. Either way, I thought that at my current skill level, I couldn’t get any balance of sweet and sour. As long as milk was a part of the recipe and not as a means to modify an ingredient (like with fat-washing) I’d be out of luck. Instead of focusing on cocktail philosophy, I turned my attention back to the original drinkspiration for a bit. I did another deep dive on sea salt ice cream, but not as it’s presented in Kingdom Hearts.
It’s not news that Kingdom Hearts director Tetsuya Nomura was enamored by the sea salt ice cream at Tokyo DisneySea so much that he put it in his game (interview script for reference). When searching for what the real thing tastes like, I found a few homebrew recipes and witness accounts saying that it is indeed salty, sweet, and slightly vanilla-like. I realized that up until this point, I had been using citrus to balance sweetness and blue curaçao, a blue-colored orange-flavored liqueur. I had been using citrus as a flavor component since the very beginning of the process, but that’s not what it tastes like! In the rare cases that I’ve actually got some real-life inspiration to pull from, I don’t think there’s any need to reinvent the wheel so to speak. If sea salt ice cream really tastes like salt, sweet, and vanilla, then why the heck am I using citrus at all!?
So I tossed out the acid completely from the recipe and the blue curaçao. I completely started over and tried to hone in on that flavor description “salty… no… sweet! (and vanilla)”. It actually became a lot easier to manage, because I wasn’t fighting against the chemical processes that govern acids (lemon juice) and proteins (milk). I tweaked it a bunch and went back and forth on a number of ingredients. I started with vanilla vodka as a base and threw in some of the sweetened condensed milk syrup, saline solution, and some blue food dye (gotta preserve the characteristic color)!
That first combo was pretty good. The rework made this taste much more similar to a salty and sweet vanilla ice cream. Something about the flavor was just off though. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there were some conflicting flavors between the vanilla vodka and the sweetened condensed milk syrup. So I played around a bit. Threw some creme de cacao in there, but always too chocolatey. Dialed back on the vanilla vodka a bit and replaced it with a bit of white rum, and things got a bit better, but now I lost a bit of vanilla. I tried a dash or two of vanilla extract, which was really nice, but I left that for the mocktail. What really did it for me was adding a bit of Licor 43, an Italian liqueur that is pretty vanilla-like with some extra citrus-ish botanical notes. This was the magic ingredient that seemed, to me, to fix whatever beef the vanilla vodka had with the sweetened condensed milk. I left the rum in there, because I liked it a lot, and at this point, I had made about 8 different sea salt ice cream cocktails and had tasted every single one of them in a single afternoon.🥴
“WINNER” Stick
I had a recipe that I was incredibly proud of, and I was indeed a winner! The only thing I felt that could possibly complete a recipe that’s called “sea salt ice cream” was adding a sea salt rim. Typically whenever I rim a cocktail, I rim half the glass. This gives whoever is enjoying the drink a chance to choose for themselves. Salty? Or salty-sweet? You decide. Regardless of your choice, if I were to serve this to anyone, I’d make sure that it comes with a stick that declares you as the “WINNER”. I crafted the stick shown in the photoshoot by using a woodburning kit on a craft store popsicle stick. You could also use a laser cutter if you’ve got one!
Flavor Analysis
Sweet and mildly salty with a silky mouthfeel. Tastes prominently of vanilla cream with light tropical notes.
Sea Salt Ice Cream
Sea Salt Ice Cream
- 0.75 oz (22.5 ml) White Rum (Bacardi)
- 0.5 oz (15 ml) Licor 43
- 0.5 oz (15 ml) Vanilla Vodka (Disobedient Spirits)
- 1 oz (30 ml) Sweetened Condensed Milk Syrup
- 0.75 tsp (3.75 ml) 20% Saline Solution
- 2 drops Blue Food Dye
Method: Shake & Strain
Garnish: Sea Salt Rim
More drinks inspired by: Kingdom Hearts
Guided Recipe in 60 Seconds: YouTube
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