We all have one: that friend who watched “Fat Sick and Nearly Dead” on their Netflix Instant Queue and then suddenly became dedicated to juicing. You know, throwing every fruit and vegetable imaginable into a juicer and pretending it’s delicious.
“The kale is responsible for turning it bright green, but you really can’t taste it – I swear!”
Right.
Many times people will get on their juicing kick for a while and lose a few pounds, but then a few months down the road, their juicer just becomes a really expensive paperweight. We don’t like to see things go to waste, so we started thinking about how those juicers could be used to make something that actually tastes good – like cocktails. Many great restaurants and bars are loving natural, fresh ingredients, so the juicer is perfect.
We can see this working two different ways. The first way is adding fresh juice to classic cocktails. Adding “real” juice rather than the canned stuff, ensures that certain flavors will be brought out and drinks we’ve had a million times will suddenly taste way better. For example, would you rather have a Bloody Mary made with canned tomato juice and hot sauce, or one made with freshly juiced tomatoes and a jalapeno pepper for heat?
The second way we can see this working is simply for experimenting. How about a carrot margarita? Carrot juice actually comes out crisp and sweet – and how can you resist that bright orange color? There’s a restaurant in New York City called The LCL Bar & Kitchen that specializes in fresh juice cocktails and they’re DEFINITELY experimenting there. One of their cocktails is called The Green Dream and it’s a combo of kale, mint, cucumber, collards, cucumber vodka, apple and lime juice. The green juice normally freaks us out, but suddenly when cucumber vodka is incorporated, we think we could get behind it.
However people choose to use their juicer, we truly think it’s usefulness in creating awesome cocktails has been overlooked. In addition to the fresh taste it can add to your favorite drink, it can also let you get creative behind the bar. Regardless, it’s a win-win situation: you get to drink and you’re eating (drinking) your vegetables.