Plant-based mocktails to try this week
Whether you're alcohol-free or cutting down on your drink!
Plant-based cocktails are all the rage right now, but if you’re cutting down on alcohol or you’ve cut it out completely, you don’t have to miss out on this trend. I’ve put together some recipes for you inpired by some cocktails that I experienced on a holiday in Mykonos!
We are going to look at which herbs, berries and flowers you can add to your drinks to give them extra flavour as well as extra show-off potential! You can grow many of the ingredients yourself too - even in a windowbox. Imagine hanging out the window on a sunny Sunday morning and watering your very own mocktail garden!
As I’m sure many of you know, the most exquisite mocktail recipes manage to balance aroma and fruitiness with sweet, yet sour tones. Herbs and berries can really contribute to this equilibrium, and are always much better used fresh, and what can be fresher than growing your own? Who would put dried herb mix into a martini, for god’s sake?!
Now, the sober market seems to have an ongoing obsession with alcohol-free gin... and if your habit outweighs your available bank balance, did you know that adding herbs can actually improve the flavour of cheaper alcohol-free gins!? Lying on my sun lounger in Mykonos, I was often seen sipping on a fantastic creation called Gin Smash, which benefits from the clove-like, almost savoury injection of basil leaves. Tear the leaves rather than cutting them, as the jagged edges will release even more aroma! The barman sneakily told me his recipe for this gin orgasm; 50ml gin (alcohol-free for your mocktail!), 25ml lemon, 12.5ml sugar syrup and EXACTLY 8 basil leaves!
Basil is a windowsill crop, so before you scream ‘I haven’t got a garden’, relax... You can either grow it from seed, or buy those growing pots you see in all good supermarkets! It isn’t just good for mocktails either - stir fresh leaves through pasta sauce... yes, even the ones that come in jars!
To transform whole bottles of ‘cheap’ alcohol-free gin into ‘botanical love juice’, you can steep a range of different berries and herbs into the mix - in fact why not experiment and see what you can create?? A classic is sloe gin, and sloe berries can be found in many UK hedgerows around November time. This is called foraging, do not get it muddled with anything else! No cooking will be required to make the gin either, only patience! Prick each berry and blend with sugar and alcohol-free gin, before leaving it in a dark cupboard (for as long as you can manage to leave its tasty gin-ness alone!) Don’t worry, the sloe berries aren’t alcoholic themselves.
