"I’m just a guy who loves adventure!" - Sonic from Sonic Adventure 2

Inspiration

Sega’s iconic blue blur, Sonic the Hedgehog shares his name with another simple drink, the “sonic” typically consisting of soda and tonic water. As an ode to the Sonic G-Fuel “peach rings” flavor, this mocktail presents as a peach-forward take on a soda and tonic highball. Rather uniquely, tomato water balances the sweetness of the syrups used and the inclusion of pear syrup works to support the main flavor of peach.

Workshopping

“Barley made it”

In typical mocktail fashion, I started with the recipe of Sonic the Highball (the cocktail) as a base to create a non-alcoholic version. The alcoholic recipe features prominently the flavor of peach with an underlying savory/umami note from the use of a barley-based shochu (a Japanese distilled spirit). I had never tried barley tea before, so I took this as an opportunity to add some to the stock and give it a try.

I’d describe barley tea as tasting slightly roasted and a bit woodsy with a mild savory note. It really gives me the vibes of eating oatmeal but sort of in liquid form. Those roasted notes didn’t seem very appropriate for use in the mocktail since it really didn’t taste the like original inspiration, but I gave it a try anyway!

I spun up a highball recipe using a bit of peach skin oleo saccharum (peach skins macerated with an equal weight of white sugar) with a proportion of fresh barley tea (made by steeping roasted barley in water) and topping with soda water. It was a really interesting combo that wasn’t super forward on flavor. It tasted more like a grainy peach soda which lacked a bit of sweetness. To attempt to remedy this, I added equal parts sugar to the barley tea to make a barley syrup that on its own tasted almost like popcorn! Combined with the peach skin and soda water it was very peach oatmeal-like. I have memories as a child eating specifically Quaker brand oatmeal, and they definitely had a peach flavor that I was getting flashbacks to. Although it was an interesting combo, it was in a direction much farther than tasting like the original cocktail inspiration. It naturally didn’t need to taste exactly like the original, but some flavor changes would warrant their own drink in my opinion (like a hypothetical grainy, roasted peach-flavored drink vs a savory peach-flavored one)

A Spin “Dash” of Savor

So barley was a bust. It was a nice flavor combo with the peach flavor from the syrup I used, but it added so much roastedness that the flavor was getting a bit off-course (much like me overusing the spin dash and glitching through parts of the stages in my recent playthrough of Sonic Generations - credits @TheUpperDiamond). In my search for another savory combo, I reflected upon the experience I had workshopping the Sans cocktail from the UNDERTALE series.

I tried to think of other savory ingredients and tomatoes gravitated into my workshopping sphere. My Dearest and I have recently begun snagging grab bags of discount produce from our local Philly markets, and have come into possession several times some ingredients that we wouldn’t typically have in stock. Things like cilantro sprigs, tomatillos, and even little cherry tomatoes come in some of these mixed bags. I searched briefly in The Flavor Matrix book for anything that I might now have that shares a similarity with peaches (listed as “stone fruit” in the book). Tomatoes share roughly a 63% similarity to the aromatic compounds found in stone fruits according to the Flavor Matrix. This means that the flavors and aromatics, being at least half similar, might go well with each other. Naturally, I asked if I could use the cherry tomatoes we got in a new recipe, and my Dearest happily obliged (neither of us is a big fan of tomatoes generally).

To make tomato water, I blitzed the cherry tomatoes in a food processor with 2 drops of Pectinex Ultra SP-L (to increase the yield) and let the slurry sit on a fine mesh strainer. After a few minutes, I had enough clear yellowish liquid with a pleasant tartness and mild savoriness to use for my next mocktail attempt. Starting with a few drops of tomato water to peach skin oleo syrup, I found that they complemented each other wonderfully! The sourness of the tomato water balanced out the prominent sweetness of the syrup and gave just a hint of a vegetal savoriness that added a nice depth of complexity. I almost kept with just a peach and tomato water combo for the end recipe (topped with club soda and tonic water), until I saw an interesting label on another ingredient I anticipated to work with (but ultimately decided against).

A-”pear”-antly

When I first started workshopping Sonic’s drinks, I snagged a can of sliced peaches from the store with the intent to use them if I found that peaches were out of season. Lucky for me, I’ve been able to find them consistently during most of the workshopping process, so I never had a need to open the can. However, when I glanced at the can this time, I noticed that it said the peaches were in “peach & pear juices from concentrate”! While workshopping the alcoholic version of this recipe, I found that some of the earlier demo drinks had a quality that tasted almost like pear. I wondered whether the addition of pear to the mocktail version would help add that extra layer of complexity that I was looking for. I go into a bit of detail in the next section about how I settled on the process for making the pear syrup. It’s a bit of a rant, so feel free to read it at your leisure.

I tried a few combinations of ingredients to determine ultimately the ratio of tomato water to syrups and the ratio of peach syrup to pear syrup. Naturally, having a larger amount of peach skin oleo syrup to pear syrup resulted in a more peach-forward drink. I settled upon a ratio of 3:1 peach to pear for a flavor that was very reminiscent of the flavor notes I got when trying the G-Fuel “Sonic’s peach rings” flavor. I was shocked at how similar the flavors were, granted mine was less artificial tasting (because I used non-artificial sweeteners) and was less bitter likely because my mocktail lacked the energy drink’s “energy blend” ingredients. Without the pear syrup, that characteristic “peach ring” flavor was severely lacking. Interesting!

The tomato water ratio was relatively simple to determine. I had three test solutions that had about an ounce each of peach syrup, pear syrup, and a combination (50-50). I titrated tomato water into all three batches until I had something that was just the right sweetness and landed in the ballpark of a 2:1 ratio of syrup to tomato water. Again, the slight vegetal flavor here and mild savoriness seemed to add a wonderful level of complexity without a sour bite like with lemon or lime juice. With those ratios determined, it was a mathematical “plug-and-chug” to settle the final recipe with the extra criterion that it would be topped with soda and tonic water (which worked well in a 1:1 ratio as well).

A-”pear”-antly (A Pear Syrup Rant)

Yea, that’s the subheading, deal with it. Anyway, it was at this point that I had the opportunity to play around with how to get the pear flavor into the drink. Even something as simple as a syrup can have a number of ways to be implemented. Do you use only the peels much akin to an oleo saccharum? Do you cover the pears in sugar in a classic maceration? If you cover with sugar do you slice the pears into thin slices or small chunks, or just mush them into a puree? Perhaps the sugar is made by boiling the pears first and then adding sugar after the fact. So many ways to syrup, and that’s not even to mention which type of pear to use! 😅

I wound up making two pear syrups from Bosc pears (I could’ve chosen Bartlett but I think these were more ripe at the time of purchase). One syrup, the “boiled pear syrup” was made by boiling a pear that was chopped into chunks in water. Once the pears became mushy, I poured out a weight of hot pear water and combined it with an equal weight of sugar. The other syrup was a “pear maceration” which started making by chopping a pear into chunks and covering it with an equal weight of sugar. The funny thing about pears though, is that they are really dense, and the amount of sugar I added to the container was more than the container could hold! I think it wound up being 245g of pear and correspondingly 245g of sugar.

I left the pear and sugar combo in the fridge overnight and found it the next morning to be a sort of squishy block of pear-smelling sugar. Typically with macerations or oleo saccharums, the sugar does a really good job of pulling out oils and flavors and liquefying, but this time whatever liquid was produced was trapped inside of more sugar. There was just too much of it! This was a bit of a first for me so I took a muddler to the whole batch and mushed up the pear and wet sugar combo and left it for one more day. Putting this mushy sugary mass in cheesecloth and giving it a good squeeze gave me enough syrup to work with. It came out a bit cloudy, so an extra run through a coffee filter worked a little extra magic. I cut the volume in half as well by adding about half the volume of the syrup with filtered water, something I did to help this very viscous syrup flow a bit better for cocktail making. In a more advanced technique, using a refractometer to measure the level of sugar in a syrup (measured in Brix) would help create consistent syrups across different fruits and ingredients. I’ve been reading through Tropical Standard by Garret Richard & Ben Schaffer and they offer a nice explanation of how to make certain syrups (like cane syrup and honey syrup) specifically to a measure of 66 Brix which would mean 66% sugar by weight (the same as a 2:1 simple syrup) or 50 Brix (50% sugar or a 1:1 simple syrup). At this point, I do not have a refractometer to measure sugar content, but as I get deeper into syrup-making for future mocktails, you’ll be hearing from me!

Between the two syrups, “boiled” and “mushed”, I found the boiled syrup to have a more cooked flavor to it than the mushed alternative. The mushed syrup tasted more like a fresh pear and when it was combined with the peach skin oleo syrup, the end drink was more peach-forward in flavor. Ultimately which syrup you choose is up to you, but the mushed syrup done without boiling resulted in a mocktail that was much more reminiscent of the “peach ring flavor” than with the cooked syrup in my opinion.

Garnish Game (Gear)

To make the hedgehog head garnish as seen in the picture above, I provide a more detailed explanation on the blog page for Sonic the Highball (the Cocktail)!

Alcoholic Version

As compared to this mocktail, the cocktail version opts for a peach-infused spirit recipe that uses a sous vide machine to get a faithful transfer of flavor from fruit to drink. The journey from concept to presentation starts with a can of Sonic G-Fuel and hones in on some changes including the use of a Japanese spirit, shochu. If you’re interested in advanced techniques for not just spirit infusions, but syrups as well, the cocktail blog post has a few pointers for you.

Flavor Analysis

Sweet and peachy with a bubbling undertone of a bittersweet vegatalness. Has a mildly drying texture on the end palette.