A Zombie Riff with Secrets of Its Own

Today we make the creature comfort which is the make and drink zombie. My version of the zombie does not stray too far from that original at least not in my opinion but it leans heavily into the rum and into the spice so much so that you will need four rums for this one and you'll need some secret spices the make and drink or the mad secret spices number seven and i'm not going to be stingy here i will be sharing with you this ultra secret recipe today and if you want to know more about that original zombie from the 1930s i just shared a video on that and i'll leave a link to it in the description and there will be a link to it right here as well the departures here from the original are threefold the spice the bitter the booze let's start with the spice i wanted to come up with a house made syrup that was essentially in everything but the kitchen sink variety using the spices that i like the most but also using things that hold up and not just making something that would eventually taste like an allspice tram so you'll need quite a few spices for this but these are easy to find and worth it you probably even have most of these first thing first is we're going to put a towel down on the bar so i don't scorch it i need 10 grams of cinnamon which is about this much and i'm taking half of the cinnamon and setting aside for a moment and the other half i'm breaking up into smaller pieces now i'm going to set aside those smaller pieces grab the rest of the cinnamon and break that down as well now i'm grabbing my blowtorch and i'm going to use this to get to work on the cinnamon you could always toast this to an extreme degree in a pan but this is faster and it smells better and hopefully doesn't sit off the smoke detector because it's getting kind of smoky in here but this will impart a very unique burned cinnamon flavor now we can start adding everything to our saucepan including all of our cinnamon now i'm adding five grams of cardamom five whole cloves that's five cloves not five grams then one star anise broken up into smaller pieces now i'll add in 400 grams of white sugar and 200 ish grams of water 400 grams of sugar and 200 grams of water will make this a two-to-one rich simple syrup which is what i want but i'm also going to be simmering this for about 15 minutes and even when i leave it covered it will lose some to evaporation so i'll add some extra water to account for that about 25 to 30 grams which just so happens to be one ounce bring this up to a simmer and then drop the heat to very low cover and let it simmer for 15 minutes after i took this off the heat i left it alone for six hours to steep more or less is up to you but at least several hours when i checked the bricks here i got 65 which is close enough to me and it would have been higher had i not added in that extra water let's fine strain this through a fine mesh sieve into a bottle and we're not done yet i'll add in one teaspoon of vanilla extract and one ounce of an allspice dram i'm using my own allspice dram here link in the description and for my bottle i'm using the crew bottles with the removable base which are dishwasher safe which you can pick up following my link in the description and you'll get 20 off your first order of 50 or more and the final thing we need to do of course is to label it and there you go the mad spices number seven tastes like cinnamon and clove you get that burned cinnamon flavor in there as well it has a it tastes much i think than a typical allspice dram or syrup because you get some of the i would say some of the zestiness from the cardamom as best to describe but i do think that each each spice that is in this spice mix you can taste so it's not like something that gets overpowered by an allspice dram or by clove which is why we just use five small cloves but all of these ingredients working together with that toasted cinnamon make something that's unique to this syrup now that we have the spice component done let's talk the bitter the original zombie uses dawn's mix mix of cinnamon and grapefruit juice we have the cinnamon part covered with the spices but not the grapefruit part and i'm fine with grapefruit in cocktails sometimes i love grapefruit and cocktails sometimes i don't but more importantly to me at least i don't keep grapefruit on hand i always have limes i usually have lemons and then i often have a fresh pineapple or at least pineapple juice but i rarely keep grapefruit on hand so to simplify things i wanted to get rid of the grapefruit and use something else that had some bitterness to replace it the first thought was obviously campari which is not an original idea to me marie king uses campari in her italian zombie and it's great you can use campari here and should if you have a bottle but i'm using the luxardo bitter bianco i find the flavor to just be lighter less earthy less intense but it still brings the same amount of bitterness or at least close and it's delicious now honestly part of using either of these is to be a little bit different but it's also about replacing the grapefruit with something that's shelf stable that i will always have on hand no matter what so we go to the trouble of making a syrup but the rest of this is easy so let's talk about the rum there's a part of me that rolls my eyes whenever i hear don the beachcomber would have done this if he was alive today because i have no idea what he would do today and neither do you or anyone else but keeping in that spirit and me trying to be less cynical i think he would have definitely used and showcased many different rums that were not available to him at that time i mean we can just pretty much guarantee he would have done that which is why most of these rums that i'm using today are just good and generic but i'm also using a cachaça as well and more on that cachaça in a moment instead of a puerto rican rum i'm using chairman's as the base a rummy rum that just tastes like rum it's hard to describe and i don't think you can accurately replace this but the best thing i could say it's like a jamaican rum and a barbados rum had a baby appleton estate 8 is my jamaican rum because it carries the most jamaican flavor of the appleton rums and i like it a 151 is definitely a necessity in a zombie so i'm using hamilton and then i wanted something very untraditional and i happen to love cachaça even though i don't think we talk about it here enough long before i ever knew anything about rum i loved leblanc cachaça and i still do but i'm using the bar strength nova fogo not because you need to find this bottle but i have a couple of this bottle and while not the same proof as that original bottle of nova fogo this is 43 abv versus normal 40 so it's not that big of a difference but any cachaça will do or the best sub in my opinion would be the much higher proof barbacord asian proof which will be higher proof but it's closer to cachaças than the agricoles i would go down that road before jumping into an agricole and here's the deal with these rums this is not something i have set in stone next time i make this i might change it up but the basic principle here is a somewhat generic gold rum a somewhat generic gold jamaican rum a 151 demerara rum and then a sugarcane juice rum but use whatever you like don't run out and buy every single thing just to make this cocktail just take the principles here of the gold rum the gold rum the demerara and then a cachaça or a sugarcane so let's make the creature come and i will start with six dashes of angostura bitters one ounce of lime juice three quarter ounces of the mad spices number seven half an ounce of the bitter bianco or campari one ounce of chairman's reserve rum one ounce of appleton eight rum half an ounce of hamilton 151 rum and half an ounce of cachaça garnishes with some mint and some lime peel with a cherry and i almost forgot some freshly grated nutmeg so there you go creature come try it cheers i played around this a lot with the the amount of cachaça starting with one ounce and then working my way down from there and i found that half an ounce still comes through you definitely feel that there's cachaça in there without it being overpowering and that bitterness coming whether using the bitter bianco or campari it it doesn't make it taste like a bitter drink it's just like a small bit there it adds a touch of sweetness and then a little bit of bitterness and then the spice in here is not overwhelming uh that that the spices provide that the spice syrup provides all the sweet most of the sweetness still gets sent from campari but most sweetness comes from that three quarter ounces if you like things drier use a half ounce you like things sweeter use a full ounce so you get the spices through there with the angostura and then you get rums that i think complement spice they're not too aged so you don't have too much of that oaky vanilla character you still get the rummy flavor from the chairmans from the appleton and that hit of deep molasses caramel flavor caramel flavor that you get from hamilton 151 we're dropping the rum here instead of using four ounces of rum with one ounce being a 151 there's three ounces total with a couple of being over 40 percent like the 151 the the campari maybe the appleton is that 43 yes it is so you're getting three ounces of spirit you're still getting a higher proof that if you just use three forty percent abt rum so it's not quite the four ounces but i find that that drink is not um something you're ever really going to want more than one of and i personally do like this version better than that original one but that's not because the original is bad is this better than the one from the 50s with uh with the pineapple juice and the passion fruit it's totally different is it better than the tropical center one no it's just it's different it's uh something i wanted to contribute to the the broad category of zombies that have my own little spin but also like it was important to me to make this not have to go and get a bunch of stuff and do all these processes yes the syrup is intensive in the in the fact that you need a bunch of spices but for many of you you're gonna have all those spices on hand already and then afterwards you just need lime juice you know you should have stuff like this on the bar shelf whether it's campari or the rums if you follow this channel and you make a lot of drinks you probably have all these things already so that was a driving component because it wasn't just about making it easier for someone watching this video but also for me so if i had a zombie on my menu and i wanted to stray from that original 1930 zombie then i wanted something that had campari without the grapefruit my own spice blend and i'm still thinking to the future about how to use that syrup and other things and if you have cocktails that you come up with using that syrup if you make that syrup and make the zombie and then want to try other things then share those with me in this video's comments who knows maybe one day i'll come back and revisit that and make some of those cocktails i i thought about doing that beforehand like hey just use this syrup in cocktails in like a competition but i i'm unwilling to commit to that because i probably wouldn't get around to it but um if you do have something that you come up with that you love using these this spice syrup then seriously let me know in in the comments or uh you can join the make and drink patreon and you could share those recipes on the matrix patreon and then you can workshop it because trust me those people they drink a lot they'll be making whatever cocktails you share there in the future so there you go that is it for this one my version of a zombie that i'm calling the creature comfort so if you enjoyed this video please give it a like below consider subscribing to this channel and if you want to support this channel more go check out that patreon page otherwise see you on the next one and cheers to the zone