Curtis Stone wants you to think differently about sparkling water.
Bake with it, cook with it, make ice with it…the uses are more varied than you know, says the Los Angeles-based, Michelin-starred chef, restaurateur, and judge of Crime Scene Kitchen. Stone has recently partnered up with Waterloo Sparkling Water.
“I love sparkling water - I just do,” Stone says. “I love the way it tastes, I love the way it feels on your tongue, but the reason I got excited about Waterloo is how seriously they take flavor.”
Sparkling water, Stone says, is another tool in both the bartender and chef’s arsenal. “It’s just another something you have to play with,” he says.
When you create a cocktail, Stone says, you start with one ingredient and then you add to it. “If you’re using Waterloo’s ginger citrus twist, you’ve got a contrast in those flavors,” he says. “You have a brightness and a little bit of spice with the ginger, but you’ve also got that bright acidity with the citrus. So, then you ask, what other flavors do you want with that. I’m a big believer of tasting things to see what works.”
With the citrus and the ginger, Stone immediately thought of tequila. The sparkling water would go quite well in a ranch water cocktail, but it also would work with vodka or gin, he says.
“Then, you could take it a step further and use some finger limes, which we get out of Australia,” he says. “They look like limes shaped like fingers, and there’s a sense of caviar when it pops in your mouth. You could mix something like that in, but I think lime leaf and maybe even lemongrass would be interesting. Then, when you stir you cocktail together, you could use the lemongrass.”
For the orange vanilla flavor, Stone advises using a warmer, heavier spirit. “When I think of orange and vanilla, it’s a warm flavor combination, and I think of bourbon and rum and whiskey and some of those richer, alcohol bases,” he says. “Rum, especially dark rums, would work really well. and I think you’d pick up on the vanilla tones. Then, maybe you’d need someting in there like a squeeze of lime to contrast, to break through that sweetness.”
Stone recommends muddling the lime with some herbs and rum, and then stirring in some sparkling water, riffing on a mojito.
But one area of cocktail making that Stone is especially excited to experiment with is using sparkling water in creating ice. “You can freeze anything into ice, put a slice of lemon or herbs, but when you put an ingredient in the water, the flavor is caught in the ice,” he says.
When you freeze sparkling water, however, the flavors of the water actually flavor the ice. “The flavor is caught within the ice, by making ice out of something that has flavor, and it’s very subtle,” he says. “It’s a fun way to incorporate a flavor really subtly into a drink.”
The orange vanilla flavor of sparkling water would work in a whiskey sour cocktail. “I hadn’t had a whiskey sour for a long time, and someone just made me one recently, and I thought, ‘Dang, that’s a good drink,’” he says. “It was a really good cocktail.”
Stone, of course, also experimented with the water in the kitchen, using the orange vanilla to make crepe batter, and using the ginger citrus to make a batter for fish. “Well, we cook with champagne, and we cook with beer, and when you cook with beer, you often make a beer batter for fish,” he says. “I used the ginger citrus to create a light, airy batter, and it gave it a really light flavor and a real brightness to it.”
Stone also used it for granita. “When you make a granita, you pour the liquid into a container, and then you freeze it pretty solid, then scrape it with a fork and it turns into a bit of snow,” he says. “I never tried it with a sparkling drink, but when you freeze something that’s been carbonated, you get that intense coldness on your tongue like any slushie or shaved ice, but what I noticed when I froze the Waterloo it still retained some of its effervescence. It’ s a multidimensional kind of thing, which I thought was really cool.”
One of his favorite recipes was a combination moijto and granita, the blackberry mojito with golden ginger citrus granita.
Stone says he and his team are going to continue to experiment with Waterloo sparkling waters. “It’s a really fun partnership,” he says.
In the meantime, he’s gearing up for the release of the second season of Crime Scene Kitchen. “We’ve got some really good bakers this season,” he says. “We also have some different celebrity guests who will drop in - the weird, the wacky and the wonderful, and they all bring a real element of difference to the show. It’s going to be a really good season.”
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Curtis Stone Teams Up With Waterloo Sparkling Water - Forbes
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