Iain McPherson’s latest probes have centred around texture. He explains the thinking behind his new ‘densing’ technique. 

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Then it flipped again. In came rotary evaporators and centrifuges – with drinks becoming clarified and poured over large block ice with disc zest garnishes. This minimal movement laid its roots in the late 2010s and is today still the prevalent style, to the point it now dominates nearly every menu you come across.

Be it through Milk Punches or high-tech equipment, clarification is a wonderful technique, but it has narrowed the lens of flavour and texture. More and more I see that the bar community is showing signs of clarification fatigue and is starting to lament its overuse – I’m as guilty as anyone of letting this style of drink dominate my thinking.

It’s this observation that became the premise for me putting my sub-zero explorations on ice, so to speak, and start exploring textures. Densing, you may have heard, is what I’ve come up with.

Densing

Densing allows bartenders to create liquids with richness, texture and length provided by a stable fat content.
Though densing involves a heating process – oils are at their most liquid state at 40-60°C – contrasting with my sub-zero switching and sous pression techniques, there is a connection. Oil integration is inspired by ice cream homogenisation.

Thinking about Garibaldis, one day I started playing around with a vacuum blender, which is something we’ve had for a long time, but I didn’t appreciate its potential for integrating fats into liquids.

How does it work? Well, our tests suggest keeping the fat and the liquid at 55°C (using an immersion circulator), then putting them through one cycle of the vacuum blender. We’ve created experimental liquids from more than two months ago that still haven’t separated.

At its core, densing is a highly efficient alternative to fat washing, completed in a fraction of the time.

We’re using a lot less oil and we’re not having to throw any away, unlike with traditional fat washing. What might take a day to prep with traditional fat washing – with the marrying followed by freezing – we can do in minutes. It takes 10 minutes to get the fat and liquid to the same temperature and then 90 seconds in the vacuum blender.

For a fat-washed character, we use about 2.5% of fat by total weight. At 0.5% or less we can add aroma. So we can integrate things like citrus oils and the result will be initially clear, but once it’s mixed will louche, so that’s a really cool aesthetic. Think of it as reverse engineering of non-chill filtration.

ensing is a pathway to a lot of directions. The obvious choice is the aforementioned efficient fat washing – which we call full fat washing – but you can now think of oil as the white colour in an artist’s colour palette when painting. The oils allow for a more pastel colour aesthetic in your cocktails. You can also immerse citrus oils into the spirit so the aroma stays from the first sip to the last.

The new Panda & Sons menu this month showcases the technique. We’ve got an Old Fashioned, which shows how to use densing like fat washing, and there’s a Coconut Oil Tommy’s Margarita to showcase it in a shaken drink too.

Down the line, we’ll have densing in a warm drink. Something like a Hot Buttered Rum would work really well – usually the butter floats to the top, but now we can integrate that butter into the liquid, and then you have consistent oil to the lips from the first sip to the last.

Texture

Densing opens up a lot of textural possibilities. But also serves to remind us of traditional methods – muddling, blending, adding gum Arabic etc.

When texture becomes the feature, great drinks can be created. Think only of the fluffy Garibaldi from New York’s Dante. It took a dusty, slightly unexciting cocktail and completely transformed it through texture. What would the Irish Coffee be if it was just cream added to the coffee and stirred in without the float?

And for those who love their rotary evaporators and centrifuges, I promise this is not an attack – I love them too. Clarified drinks should be on the menu, but they shouldn’t dominate it. Just as we look to achieve a diversity of drinks styles, strengths and spirits bases in our menus, there should also be variation around texture.

We shouldn’t overlook cloudy or creamy cocktails, denser drinks, fluffy mouthfeel, grainy or astringent profiles. The list of textures to explore is vast – bartenders should be exploring them. It's time we shifted the focus from tasting with our eyes to our mouths.