A few years ago we were working on simple ways to make large round ice cubes. The first comment on our approach mentioned creating ice shells and then filling them with alcohol. A great idea and one we had worked on a few years prior in a liquid nitrogen demonstration and had run into logistical issues. However, if you follow to the bottom of the post there is a link to a video by the Aviary team tackling the idea of cocktails in ice. They utilized the idea of freezing a shell and doing it rapidly with the use of an Irinox Blast Chiller. Since they had tackled the task we left the idea alone, until recently. I became enamored with making cocktail filled ice cubes again. Yet I wanted cubes. I thought beautiful ice cubes with the cocktail inside would be beautiful and fun to play with. So I fired up, or rather cooled down our EF10.1 and filled a silicone cube mold with water. Once it had frozen an outer shell, we poked holes into the top and drained out the water. Then we filled the cube with a mixture of bourbon, lemonade and grenadine. We returned the cubes to the blast freezer to solidify the inside. Then we capped our hole with a bit of water and froze them one last time. Then we removed the cubes from the mold and put them into a traditional freezer to allow the interior to melt. The end result is a beautiful cube of bourbon in the rocks.
Years Past
