Egg Washing and Chitosan-Gellan Washing: Cognac and Cabernet

Why egg

Dave Arnold came to egg washing through a tea cocktail he admired, Audrey Saunders’s Earl Grey MarTEAni from Pegu Club, made with Earl Grey gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and an egg white. He had assumed the egg white was for texture; it is also there to bind the tea’s polyphenols and soften the astringency, as Saunders confirmed. That raised another question: why is a whiskey sour shaken with egg white while a margarita, daiquiri or gimlet with similar sugar, acid and booze ratios is not? His answer is the whiskey. The egg white mellows what would otherwise be too astringent a drink at sour temperatures and dilutions.

Finding the ratio

A large egg white, about 30 ml, can be a quarter of the liquid in an undiluted cocktail, 3:1 cocktail mix to egg white. He aimed a little lower, 4 parts booze to 1 part egg white, with bourbon. The egg coagulated hard and filtered out easily, but it wiped out the flavour and colour and left something like weak vodka. Unlike an egg-white cocktail, where the white stays in the drink, washing removes all the protein, so the stripping is starker.

• 8:1: better, but still too stripped, with the bourbon’s spiciness gone.
• 20:1 and 40:1: the winner was 20:1 booze to egg white, which left the whiskey’s character intact and made a balanced drink.

The 20:1 ratio is for washing pure aged booze. For a harsher strip, as with coffee or tea liquor, use 8:1 or somewhat more, which strips about as hard as milk washing. Milk washing adds foaming power and egg washing does not, so a stirred tea cocktail calls for egg washing, and a shaken drink for milk, to gain the texture.

For a stirred tea cocktail, use an egg wash.

Egg-washing technique

You need one extra-large egg white (after removing the yolk and what clings to the shell, about 32 grams, a little under the 37 a true 20:1 needs), 1 ounce (30 ml) of filtered water and 750 ml of liquor at 40 percent alcohol or higher. Below 40 percent the egg coagulates less firmly, and under about 22 percent not at all.

1. Mix the egg white and water, then add the liquor while stirring. The water only adds volume: one egg white alone is hard to add liquor to without curdling at once. At 8:1 or stronger omit it.
2. The egg breaks fairly quickly. Rest a couple of minutes and stir gently to swab stray proteins into the coagulum.
3. Let it stand an hour, then strain through a coffee filter. It should be clear.

Egg washing needs no equipment, and most people have eggs in the fridge. Because little protein stays in the liquor, you can use it to soften drinks too harsh to carbonate and carbonate them without much foaming. Milk washing never suits a carbonated drink, because it makes foaming worse.

Cognac and Cabernet

With a dry red wine and a spirit like Cognac, he strips the tannins instead of masking them with a sweet wine. The drink is deep pink, dry, raisiny and satisfying, and drinks more like a wine than a cocktail. The wash uses 1 part egg to 6 parts booze, a large proportion. It makes two 145 ml drinks at 14.5 percent alcohol, 3.4 g/100 ml sugar and 0.54 percent acid.

• 1 large egg white (30 ml), 2 ounces (60 ml) Cognac at 41 percent, 4 ounces (120 ml) cabernet sauvignon at 14.5 percent.
• 2 ounces (60 ml) filtered water, half an ounce of clarified lemon juice or 6 percent citric acid solution, half an ounce of simple syrup, and 4 drops of saline or a generous pinch of salt.

1. Break the egg white up thoroughly in a small container with a bar spoon, with no water.
2. Combine the Cognac and cabernet and stir them slowly into the egg white. The mix looks chalky for a moment and goes cloudy, then breaks. Make sure all of the white meets the liquor, until wisps of denatured egg show.
3. Spin in a centrifuge, or let it sit several minutes, stir again, settle several hours, and strain through a cloth napkin and then a coffee filter.
4. Add the water, acid, syrup and saline to the clear liquid, chill to -6 degrees C (20 F) and carbonate by any method. Some egg protein remains, so it foams quite a bit when carbonated.

Chitosan-gellan washing

For aged liquors that need less stripping before carbonation he found a better method, with two specialty ingredients: chitosan, which is positively charged, and low-acyl gellan. The amounts are 15 grams of liquid chitosan solution (2 percent of the booze) and 15 grams of Kelcogel F low-acyl gellan (2 percent) per 750 ml of booze.

1. Add the chitosan to the booze, shake or stir, and rest an hour, agitating now and then.
2. Add the gellan and stir to suspend it. Resuspend it every 15 to 30 minutes and leave it with the booze for 2 hours.
3. Strain through a coffee filter. Done.

The technique is preposterously easy and the yield is high, and the colour left on the gellan is what you stripped out. Two percent is a lot of chitosan: he uses 0.2 percent for clarification. Oddly, less chitosan seemed to strip the liquor more, and he cannot explain it. The 2 percent gellan is also much more than the 0.5 percent that makes a hard gel, because only the surface of the granules works and most of each granule is wasted; a finer powder would need less, but is not easy to buy. Gellan alone strips some flavour, by surface area, but not much.

Carbonated Whiskey Sour

A simple test for booze washing, with chitosan-gellan washed bourbon, or egg-washed bourbon if you prefer. It makes one 162.5 ml drink at 15.2 percent alcohol, 7.2 g/100 ml sugar and 0.44 percent acid. Combine 2 5/8 ounces (79 ml) of filtered water, 1 3/4 ounces (52.5 ml) of washed 47 percent bourbon, 5/8 ounce (19 ml) of simple syrup, 2 drops of saline or a pinch of salt and a short half ounce (12 ml) of clarified lemon juice, which can be unclarified if you add it after carbonating. Chill to -10 degrees C (14 F) and carbonate with your system.