Damien mixes: House Sour from Apple Peels
© Damien Guichard
Damien Guichard shows how apple peels can be ideally used in drinks.
Apple: what a seemingly boring ingredient to mix with, you might think. And "Why don't you just buy apple juice and get it over with?", some of you may be wondering. But today we’re going to leave out the main part of the popular fruit and focus on something else: the peel.
From experiment on the bar menu
The idea to use apple peels as an ingredient came because of using, well, apples for a different menu drink. The zero-waste movement was soaring, and I kept wondering what to do with what was considered waste. As a challenge to myself I started playing around with different techniques: infusion, blending, dehydrating but the most efficient way to utilize the peels was applying the ancient technique known as oleo saccharum.
Make apple oleo with oleo saccharum method
You are probably aware of the method as it is used applied to citrus in some of the oldest recipes known to bartenders: punches. The idea is simple: mixing sugar (saccharum) to extract the natural oils (oleo) of any given ingredients. Thanks to modern techniques such as vacuum packing and sous vide cooking, we have been able to apply the method to “drier” ingredients and it happens to work wonders with apple peels.
Vacuum:
- 1:1 ratio of apple peel to sugar
- Add 1% citric acid powder and 1% malic acid powder
- Add 10% apple cider vinegar
- Add 10% water
Cook sous vide at 54C for 3 hours. Empty the bag and stir until all the sugar has been diluted. Strain through a cheese cloth and dilute 1:1.
Wax On House Sour
Now that we have our Apple Skin Oleo, let’s crack on and mix something nice with it. This is the recipe for Wax On’s current House Sour:
- 45ml Gin
- 20ml Apple Skin Oleo
- 20ml Lemon Juice
- 5ml Adriatico White Almond Liqueur
- Egg White (we use a substitute)
Shake vigorously and strain into a Nick and Nora glass. Voilà!
© Damien Guichard
