We’ll be celebrating the kickoff this Friday night of our first NYC Remodelista Market at Canvas, with wild-inspired cocktails created for us by our favorite Brooklyn forager and cookbook author: Gardenista contributor Marie Viljoen.
Photography by Marie Viljoen.
For The Triple Juniper, it was with Marie’s chance encounter in early March with an eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) loaded with powdery blue fruit.
After tasting the fruit of an eastern red cedar, at home Marie used juniper in three different ways to build up layers of flavor. The last gin layer comes from the New York Distilling Company’s Dorothy Parker Gin.
“To balance the sweetness of the syrup I needed a tart element, which came from a concentrate of summer sumac,” says Marie.
“This is a riff on traditional sumac-ade where you dunk whole heads of sumac in water overnight (method in 66 Square Feet: A Delicious Life) to make a sour pink drink,” she says.
Says Marie: “The Sumac Sour, our second cocktail, is rye-based, with a rim of spicebush sugar (Lindera benzoin is an understory tree native to the eastern US, and about to bloom in New York City). Freshly ground spicebush is herbal and citrusy, working well with whisky.”
Bring all the ingredients to a gentle simmer in a saucepan, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Mix the juniper and sugar well and spoon onto a side plate.