(Pictured above)
ERIK SAYS: Malabar spinach is a vine that grows like crazy in the hot Miami summer. It produces intensely purple tiny berries that taste like arugula. I made a half cup of simple syrup and put in a small handful of the berries; a few hours later I got this beautiful vegetal, sweet, purple syrup. Sassoo is another green with a solid, meaty spinach flavor that thrives in the Miami summer. I’m especially enjoying putting in my summer garden treasures, with much thanks to Little River Cooperative. Quail eggs, a delicacy in other parts of the country, cost upwards of $20/dozen in Chicago. In Miami they are half the price of chicken eggs. The small eggs give just a touch of froth and provides a silky body to the drink. The recipe: Big Cypress’s delicious Magic City Gin with Malabar syrup. Shaken with the white of a quail egg. Topped with a splash of soda and sprig of sassoo spinach.
ERIK SAYS: My first attempt at creating a bitter liqueur. This is what my backyard smelled like in 1978 – all surinam cherry hedges, covered with vines that grew small, orange, decahedron-shaped fruit. They were filled with intensely red, fleshy seeds. I was 10 and we’d pop the seeds in our mouths until the flesh was gone, then spit the seeds at each other. I grew up calling this fruit kumbre amore, only learning this year it is actually called cundeamor, or bitter gourd melon. It grows in the tropics around the world. The fruits are about 1.5-2 inches long.
Surinam cherries, used as hedges everywhere in Miami in the 70s, are rather pungent and an acquired taste, but the leaves are incredibly fragrant and unique. Smelling them brings me back to burying my face in the hedge while trying to mow the lawn.
To make the liqueur, I grabbed two large handful of surinam cherry leaves along with a few feet of cundeamor vine and threw them in 2 cups of overproofed demerara rum. I put all of it a sonicator for 30 minutes. (Sonicators are used in jewelry shops or the dentist to clean things by using ultrasonic frequencies. They can also be used to make extracts from plants, a neat trick I learned from the authors of Botany at the Bar when they were at Fairchild.) I made a simple syrup (1:1) and muddled it with the red fleshy cundeamor seeds. Then I took the green-tinged herbaceous overproofed rum and mixed it with the red fruity simple syrup (3:2). This turned into an amber liqueur. I chilled it and filled an empty gourd to use as a cordial glass. I wrapped vines in a wooden sake cup to hold the gourd upright and as an aromatic garnish.
The cocktail: Big Cypress American Magic City Gin, Cynar, Dolin blanc vermouth, Fee Brothers orange bitters, muddled dragonfruit. Garnish of tomato flowers and umbrella skewer of Jamaican cherries.
The cocktail: This variation of the classic Blood and Sand cocktail uses Speyburn 10-year scotch, Dubonnet Rouge, Sint Maarten Island Passion Rum Liqueur, mamey sapote syrup. Backyard garnish. Ratio is 1:1:1:1.
It was Erik Lowman’s Instagram feed that caught our attention – beautifully styled cocktails, fabulous glassware and...
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