A martini is a chameleon-like cocktail. Since its inception in the late 1800s, bartenders have served V-shaped glasses and coupes, slender Nick & Nolas, with fragrant lemon twists, plump olives, or, in more idiosyncratic examples, pickled onions and cherry blossoms. flower. But today’s martini zeitgeist is centered around the very cold “freezer martini.” This means martinis are pre-mixed for optimal dilution, bottled and submerged in sub-zero temperatures for a lush, velvety texture.
The approach has been slowly gaining traction in cocktail circles since at least the early 2000s, but the practice has reached its peak as it appears on the menus of countless new bars, including Le Rock in New York City. has been in the last few years. From his three variations of freezer martinis to Butterscotch Den in Sacramento, Calif., you can top off your order with $3 caviar his bump.
Despite being enthusiastically adopted by top bars across the country, the freezer martini isn’t really a modern invention. It is the invention of electric refrigeration.
Refrigerators first appeared in the 1930s, but about a decade later as an improvement to the icebox (an insulated wooden cabinet lined with tin, zinc, iron, or enamel designed to keep ice and food cold). A freezer was installed. After the war, this novelty “flash freezer” device was mass-produced and the public’s craving for ultra-dry his martinis increased. “The freezer martini was a fairly common perversion in the 1950s and his 1960s,” says cocktail historian and author David Wondrich. “Americans were very engineering savvy and smart enough to understand at the time that vermouth was just one thing to dilute a martini with. is it? The solution, of course, is to store undiluted martinis in the freezer instead of churning them with ice.”
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This early, dry take on the freezer martini has quite a few fans, including writer and filmmaker Gerson Kanin, and detractors like essayist Bernard Devoto. The Hour: Cocktail Manifesto “You can’t keep a martini in the fridge, and you can’t keep a kiss in the fridge.” grew to cosmopolitan Books like Charles H. Baker South American Gentleman’s Companion, in which Baker cites a recipe for a dry martini. Then strain into a glass jar with a lid and keep very cold in the refrigerator or deep freezer. The latter is best. ”
The freezer martini’s initial heyday was relatively short-lived in the United States. By the late 1960s, the martini was completely obsolete, and it wasn’t until the cocktail renaissance of the early ’20s that his version of the regal, made-to-order mix-to-order attracted attention again, followed by the frozen martini. continued. In Europe, however, the super-chilled, pre-batched martini never seemed to go out of fashion.
Cocktail historians and bartenders tend to agree on two pivotal and enduring examples of the freezer martini. This likely spurred a return within the state. A martini from his bar at Harry’s in Venice in the 1930s, and a martini from Salvatore’s Calabrese. “Direct” Martini, which he developed at the Dukes Hotel in London in 1985. In the former, a 10:1 Montgomery Martini is prepared with chilled gin and a dash of vermouth, whipped with ice, poured into a small glass, and kept in the freezer before serving. In Dukes’ iteration, Calabrese is an ice-cold gin poured directly into a chilled glass with a few sprinkles of vermouth on top. “At first, it seemed like he had two ways of doing this,” says Wondrich. “Undiluted Dukes his style and Harry’s version with dilution, but Harry’s bar today does it undiluted as well.”
American bartender Thomas Waugh beginning He encountered Duke’s Martini in 2004 during a “Tequila to London” trip with his contemporaries Julio Bermejo, Marco Dionysus and Jack Bezuidenhout. At the time, Waugh had just recently been promoted from barback to bartender at Enrico’s Sidewalk His Cafe in San Francisco. “Honestly, I thought [the Dukes Martini] It was too strong, but it was eye-opening. I had two of them and hopped off,” he recalls. “I liked the idea, but I also wanted water and vermouth, so I started playing around with it at home.”
Waugh wasn’t the only one fascinated by the promise of a numbingly cold martini that could be pulled from the depths of the freezer on a whim. on the opposite shore, Dave ArnoldThen, working at the French Culinary Institute in New York, he says he began experimenting with pre-diluted cocktails from 2005 to 2010. “In the early 2000s, there was a lot of discussion that when you churned a drink, you were doing something mystical that added texture, but when we ran tests, we found that the churning was just cooling and diluting. With this realization, he bottled and chilled his martinis for events, refined them over time, and eventually opened the groundbreaking bar Booker and Dax in 2012.
“We were trying to closely mimic what the best people get from stirring in a perfectly consistent way on their best days. You get two to four degrees lower than you get from stirring.” ” he said. “It was novel at the time and dizzyingly fast.” In 2014, Arnold said his method Liquid Intelligencewhich has inspired countless bartenders.
Freezer martinis remained a hot topic in certain cocktail circles, but only in 2017 did they begin to seep into the public consciousness. new york times Robert Simonson’s review of the then-new bar in the former Four Seasons Space. Simonson writes: Waugh himself offered a variation of the martini.”Pre-mix and store in one of the four freezers behind the bar. ”
Considered linearly, there’s an argument that War, or perhaps Arnold, should be grateful for the modern ubiquity of the freezer martini. , it’s hard to limit the revival of the Freezer Martini to one person. “A lot of people doing interesting things at the time didn’t get the press,” he points out Arnold. “Many times, this People were doing cool things because they learned it or Man, and that is not written down.
