Taking the Pisco

Sabor Latino is a Latin restaurant in Ann Arbor that's successfully served food for over a decade, but I hadn't stopped in for a few years. I had great experiences with the restaurant early on, but Julie has the occasional allergic reaction to one or more ingredients in Mexican/Latin cooking, so we don't often stay from the proven restaurants (avocado was recently outed as one of the culprits). However, I was recently on a fish taco bender, and it brought me back to Sabor, where I was pleased enough with the results that I dragged Julie along one evening (with the promise of a quick trip home and Benadryl if things went south).

The star of the evening was their Media Noche. It's not the Cuban sandwich that the name is most associated with, but a drink featuring three ingredients per the menu: pineapple juice, pomegranate-blueberry juice and pisco (garnished with blueberries). It's a surprisingly smooth grape brandy in the same neck of the woods as slivovitz–an understated, distinct flavor riding the alcohol burn (pisco can range from 60-100 proof).

I don't have a lot of experience with pisco (certainly not enough to have a set opinion on the Peru vs. Chile battle for the appellation), but for this recipe, I put two different piscos head-to-head: Capel vs Pisco Patron. Tasting each separately, my clear choice was the Patron from Peru; the flavor was somewhat deeper and more forward than the Capel.

Recreating the drink (or at least getting in the neighborhood of the drink) was a straightforward process. The drink is summery–goes down easy, a touch sweet but not overtly so, and served over lots of ice to mask the alcohol. The pineapple juice is the source of whatever sweet there is and since it's not lemonade-sweet, it's going to be the short stack in our recipe. So, the only real experiment is how much pomegranate-blueberry is necessary to fill out the middle of the flavor profile, cut both the alcohol and the sweetness, and produce the correct color in the glass over ice. A few steps later, I had a basic 2-3-1 ratio set that seems to work well. be careful on the pineapple juice–an extra splash will add noticeable sweetness to the recipe (and you might even want to knock a tiny bit off the pineapple juice if you want to tweak the sweet down a notch.

I used both piscos in the recipe, and the clear winner was...Capel. The Patron did nothing for this drink; the flavors were subsumed by the juice without masking the alcohol one bit. The Capel produced a much smoother, balanced taste, and is the clear favorite for this drink (I'll have no problem drinking the Patron straight, and I'm saving a bit for a future pisco sour episode.)

Media Noche (Evening Alchemist version, after Sabor Latino)

1 oz. pisco
1.5 oz. pomegranate-blueberry juice (100% juice)
.5 oz. unsweetened pineapple juice

Shake with ice and serve over ice; garnish with blueberries.

Under Yeager's Law (ingredients I have trump ingredients I don't), I did try the drink first with a cranberry-blueberry juice blend I had laying about. It worked well–you might want to edge down the pineapple juice a bit to compensate for the apple/etc. in the juice cocktail, but it's not unacceptable.