Upgrade Your Cocktail With A Surprising Cooking Leftover

Although often reliant on the spirit, sugar, and citrus template, mixed drinks welcome creative components. Typically, unusual craft cocktail ingredients involve exotic fruit, produce, or hard-to-find alcohol. Yet boozy upgrades lurk in many forms, and a surprisingly terrific candidate is an often discarded kitchen foodstuff — pasta water.

Yep — in recent years, bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts have discovered the ingredient's merits in drinks such as martinis and Negronis. Its flavorful effects may be on the subtler side, but there is reasonable motive to hold onto the starchy liquid.

Employed in a martini, a splash of salted pasta water adds a depth reminiscent of dry vermouth. Cocktails often shine with a dash of saline solution anyway, so the ingredient perks up other additions to the drink. Meanwhile, when examining the liquid's character against a classic Negroni, one Redditor notes that the "pasta one [is] noticeably softer, maybe even a touch sweeter." And in whichever cocktail you craft, you can also expect a subtle thickening of the drink's mouthfeel, lending an opacity that evokes drinks like ouzo. Most importantly — don't worry; the resulting cocktail won't taste like pasta.

The process of integrating leftover pasta water into a cocktail can feel daunting. The first and most crucial step is to cool the liquid down, as a lukewarm, starchy tipple is far from appealing. The rest of your strategy will depend on the specific cocktail you're crafting.

When it comes to shaken, martini-style builds, dilution with water is more forgiving. Simply throw a couple ounces of pasta water into the shaker and proceed as normal. The ingredient melds delectably with herbal-flavored gins and shines alongside vodka, too. Olive brine's savory qualities are still welcome, though most people opt to leave out the vermouth, as the pasta water can replace the aromatized wine.

Meanwhile, when crafting stirred cocktails like a Negroni, focus on avoiding an overly watery consistency. Remedy this by freezing the pasta water into starchy ice cubes that you can stir in for delicious effect. With such a convenient silky addition in hand, you can craft Negroni riffs like the sbagliato, as well as the white Negroni. You can even add richness to a whiskey sour with the ingredient.

For more pasta water inspiration, think of the component like rice starch. Borrowing a page from horchata, the mixology world has embraced stirring uncooked rice into classics like daiquiris and old fashioneds. So if any of your favorite cocktails could use some added body, throw a couple frozen pasta water cubes into the mix.

Beyond simply tasting good, this concept offers a tantalizing crossover of cocktails and culinary applications. Merging a pasta night with accompanying cocktails is convenient — and who doesn't love a theme? For instance, consider pairing the bitter notes of a Negroni with anchovy spaghetti, or matching the dryness of a martini with a decadent truffle pasta. To intertwine the concepts even further, you can use the spirit in the pasta itself, as with a splash of gin to flavor spaghetti or a classic batch of penne alla vodka (also called disco pasta).

The trickiest aspect is timing, as you'll need to let the pasta water cool before using it in the mixed drinks. Don't forget to transfer the starchy liquid to a non-metal vessel. And creating pasta water ice cubes requires more patience, so you'll need to batch them in advance. However, with these considerations taken care of, you can savor the starchiness in both liquid and solid form.