Clarification and High-Acid Stirred Drinks With Theo Ouya of Bar Contra

It’s impossible to overstate Dave Arnold’s impact on the world of cocktails. The New York-based food scientist, bartender, and technologist pioneered techniques like centrifuge clarification, force carbonation, rapid infusion, liquid nitrogen chilling, and nitro-muddling, just to name a few. His book “Liquid Intelligence” is a James Beard and Spirited Award-winning masterwork that changed the way bartenders around the world make drinks. He also designed and built the Spinzall, a centrifuge designed for use in the kitchen as well as the Searzall, a blowtorch attachment that puts the power of a commercial broiler in your hand.

Arnold’s bars, Booker and Dax and Existing Conditions (which he opened in collaboration with Don Lee) may have closed, but both were bastions of his brand of understated technical excellence. No fancy glassware or garnish, but countless hours of development and prep led to speedy service of some of the most delicious cocktails I’ve ever tasted. I’m biased, of course, because I was head bartender at both bars. When Existing Conditions closed, I founded Solid Wiggles with my partner Jena Derman and started writing. My time behind bars came to a close, but I never stopped missing those drinks.

Imagine my joy, then, when I caught wind that Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske were revamping the brilliant Lower East Side tasting menu staple Contra as Bar Contra, featuring drinks from Dave Arnold and Existing Conditions alum Theo Ouya. At long last, New York has one of these wonderful cocktail programs again. While I loved coming up with drinks in Dave’s system, the greatest joy came from seeing how other bartenders would adapt his techniques around their own inspiration and life experiences. Only days before the grand opening, Theo was kind enough to talk with me about what he had been working on, and one of my personal favorite techniques: using clarification to make high-acid, stirred cocktails.

Why We Clarify

The week before a new bar opens is a mad dash of finishing construction projects and putting final touches on menus and the back bar, but Theo is cool and collected even as we dodge painters and woodworkers to move between the kitchen and bar. It’s a leftover skill from a childhood spent exploring the back-of-house bowels of hotels, especially their big banquet kitchens.

Theo was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and his father worked for a hotel management company. As he came of age, the energy of those kitchens had fully gripped him, and he echoes the same age-old refrain as many hospitality lifers: “I couldn’t do anything else.” Theo went to culinary school in Geneva, Switzerland, and from there (after a brief stint in kitchens in Palo Alto, Calif.) made his way to New York. He cooked at the now shuttered Momofuku Ko, but his true passion was for cocktails, and he landed a job at Existing Conditions where he was immediately hooked by the drinks and the techniques.

“Not to compare it to a Dirty Martini, but it’s adding another dimension to a stirred cocktail where previously there wasn’t one.”

When I visit, Theo is working on sub-ingredients — a tincture for a carbonated non-alcoholic cocktail and he’s got multiple Spinzalls set up to clarify strawberries. The kitchen feels like a mad scientist’s lab, so we settle into the calm of a freshly upholstered banquette to chat about the future of those berries.

Of all the techniques in the modern bar lexicon, I think the one that’s the least well understood is clarification. Many bartenders get bogged down in the visual aspect of it — so focused on the end goal of making a drink clear that they don’t pause to consider the actual utility of a clear ingredient. When I ask Theo about what’s exciting about clarification, he explains: “It opens up a lot of space for manipulation where there was not previously.” He uses papaya as a case study. Fleshy fruits like papaya are a pain to juice and drinks including them tend to be incredibly thick. If you blend and clarify, Theo says, “now you have papaya flavor, but it still feels like a cocktail, not like a smoothie.”

Clarified citrus juices like lime and lemon are exciting, because they take ultra-bright flavor profiles that were previously locked into shaken drink territory and open them up to stirred applications. A drink with the rich texture of a Martini but with the brightness of a sour is as compelling as it is unexpected. It’s not simply a novelty, it’s just underexplored as an idea.

Of course, bars have been making high-acid clarified milk punches for centuries, but the boldness of the spirits in a punch are dulled because the milk solids strip away tannins and other flavor compounds. Stirred cocktails with a clarified component, on the other hand, keep the spirits intact and showcase them at full strength. “Not to compare it to a Dirty Martini,” Theo says, “but it’s adding another dimension to a stirred cocktail where previously there wasn’t one.” In the same way that salty, savory olive brine transforms a Martini, clarified juice can supercharge a drink.

Putting Clarification to Work

Theo is not content to limit himself to citrus for his high-acid stirred cocktails. He’s utilizing those strawberries he was clarifying earlier to make a super-tart cordial that’s bright red and crystal clear. The berries themselves start in a blender, blitzed until completely smooth and emulsified. To the blended berries he adds Pectinex, an enzyme that breaks pectin — the natural gelling agent that holds fruit cells together — along with Kieselsol and Chitosan, two fining agents commonly used in conventional wine production. The Pectinex breaks solids out of solution in the juice, then the fining agents cause those solids to clump together and fall to the bottom of the container. At this point he runs the juice through a Spinzall to remove the solids, leaving a perfectly clear juice.

He brings the clarified juice to a bare simmer on the stove, then cuts the heat and adds enough sugar to raise the Brix to 50 along with citric, malic, and succinic acids. He’s left with a liquid that has the same sweetness as simple syrup and exactly mirrors the acidity of lime juice. To mimic this flavor in a traditional cocktail, you would need to add a measure of strawberry juice, lime juice, and simple syrup, bloating the size of the build and potentially washing out the flavor of the spirits you were hoping to highlight. He stirs this strawberry cordial in the “Fantasy Island” alongside Uruapan Charanda (a Mexican raw sugar cane rum), mezcal, Dolin blanc vermouth, and saline solution. Only a half-ounce of the cordial leads to a cocktail that’s rich, smoky, vegetal, and boozy, while still delivering a bold punch of tart strawberry flavor. It’s one of the most exciting new cocktails I’ve tasted this year.

Try It at Home

Trying clarification for the first time is daunting. It requires new ingredients and tools, but once that first skill barrier is breached, it’s a technique that will keep paying dividends in both home and professional bars. Beyond yielding delicious and visually striking cocktails, making clarified cordials is a great way to reduce waste at the bar.

At Existing Conditions, we were using fresh juice every day, so inevitably there would be some left over at the end of service, primarily lime and lemon. We would store this spent juice in the walk-in until the end of the week, then clarify it and make lemon cordial, which was primarily used for stirred drinks, and lime cordial, to which we would add additional botanicals and bittering agents for our house Gin and Tonic.

We would fly through these syrups because of the volume of the bar, but one of the best things about clarified cordials like this that have been heated until they’re sterilized and treated with sugar and acid is their remarkable stability. I have kept a bottle of lemon cordial in my home fridge for well over a year with no spoilage or noticeable change in flavor. You can make a huge batch for a bar, or just a liter for home, and it will give you access to phenomenal flavor with no need to go out and buy fresh citrus. The following cordial is Dave Arnold’s recipe, and pound for pound my favorite cocktail ingredient. It’s the same sweetness as simple syrup and just as sour as lemon juice in one compact, complex, perfectly clear package.

Clarified Lemon Juice

There are scores of methods to take a juice from cloudy to clear. For the (very) few among us with access to a centrifuge, the following method is hands down the best in terms of flavor retention and yield, but I believe it’s also great for home bartenders. It just takes a bit more time. To clarify using this method, you will need the following ingredients and tools:

• Pectinex Ultra SP-L
• Kieselsol
• Chitosan
• 5-milliliter graduated cylinder (or a 10-millilter if you plan to make larger batches. Professional bars can consider investing in a micropipette for ultra-accurate dosing if this will be a regular part of service)
• 1,000-milliliter graduated cylinder (or liquid measuring cup, but I love the precision of a graduated)
• Centrifuge or coffee filter

The Pectinex and fining agents are all available from Modernist Pantry and cylinders are very affordable from online big box retailers. A roughly $50 investment will set you up for dozens of clarification experiments.

The methodology is different than most people are used to here, because it involves specific timing. This will work for any juice containing pectin but will do absolutely nothing for juices that are pectin-free, so please don’t ask me why your sweet potato juice didn’t come out clear! Keep in mind that this technique is for individual ingredients, not finished cocktails. A common blunder I see among bartenders is trying to centrifuge- clarify a fully batched cocktail. The enzymes and fining agents will not work once juice is combined with sugar and booze.

Here is how to clarify one liter of lemon juice:

Combine 1,000 milliliters strained lemon juice, 4 milliliters Pectinex, and 4 milliliters Kieselsol in a large clear container like a cambro. Stir to combine. Wait 10 minutes.

Add 4 milliliters of Chitosan. Stir to combine. Wait 10 minutes.

Add 4 additional milliliters of Kieselsol. Stir to combine. Wait 10 minutes.

By now, the juice should have visibly “broken.” There will be clumps of solids forming and a layer of clear liquid starting to form. At this point, you can spin it in a centrifuge to remove the solids. If you don’t have a centrifuge, move the container to the fridge and let it sit overnight, or for as long as 72 hours. The solids will steadily sink to the bottom of the container with the clear juice on top. Slowly and carefully pour the clear juice into a new container to disturb the sediment as little as possible. Now strain that sediment through a coffee filter to improve your yield as much as possible. You now have clear juice that can be used immediately or made into cordial.

Clarified Acid-Adjusted Lemon Cordial

Ingredients

• 650 grams clarified lemon juice
• 650 grams sugar
• 75 grams lemon peels (roughly three lemons worth)
• 22 grams citric acid

Directions

Add lemon juice, sugar, and peels to a saucepan over medium heat. Stir to make sure the sugar dissolves and doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. Stir regularly and keep a close eye on the pan so it doesn’t overheat. As soon as the mixture hits a bare simmer, turn off the heat and allow it to cool. Strain the syrup to remove the peels. You should have one liter of syrup. For every liter of syrup, add 22 grams of citric acid. This brings the percentage of acid by weight in the solution back up to 6 percent, the same acidity as fresh lemon juice. Store in a resealable container in the fridge indefinitely. Use it in the following cocktail that was on the Existing Conditions menu from the day we opened until the day the bar closed.

The Portfolio Cocktail

Ingredients

• ¾ ounce Del Maguey Vida Mezcal
• ¾ ounce Chivas 12 Year (or similar blended scotch)
• ¾ ounce Ramazotti
• 3/8 ounce  clarified acid-adjusted lemon cordial
• 5 drops 20% saline solution (1 part salt dissolved in 4 parts water by weight)

Directions

1. Add all ingredients to a mixing glass.
2. Fill with ice and stir until diluted. This is an incredibly rich cocktail, so it needs a few more stirs than most drinks.
3. Strain into a chilled coupe and serve.

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