I wasn’t such a good blogger this week. Michael IM’ed me at one point to tell me that my blog just wasn’t the same without photos of Hawaii pasted all over it, and I can emphasize. I’ve been trying to get a little more color in these pages, and somehow “work sucks” doesn’t inspire much color. Or commentary.
So…
Ray’s birthday is coming up next month. I had already promised our friends that we would have a tiki party when we got back from Hawaii, and somehow the tiki party and Ray’s birthday got mixed together, so now we’re having a tiki birthday party for him. Planning it has been remarkably fun because there’s so much tiki party crap out there. (Seriously — there are some hard core tikiphiles out there. Check out konakai.com to see what I mean.)
The most important items on the menu for any tiki/Hawaiian themes party, however, are the drinks. You’ve got to have tropical drinks, and the sort of classic beginning for a Hawaiian drink is a maitai.
Looks Hawaiian, don’t it?
The problem, as I have discovered is … well, numerous-fold.
First off, there is such a thing as maitai mix on the market. However, I have recently developed something of an issue with drinks that are mostly colored corn syrup. Seriously, the next time you hit the grocery or liquor store, look at those margarita and piña colada mixes and check out the inclusion of “high fructose corn syrup” as one of the ingredients. There are very, very few that use anything else — I like Stirrings, which uses cane sugar, but man, it’s expensive. I recently started making margaritas with fresh limeade from the grocery store. They’re pretty damned good if I do say so myself.
The next issue is that no two people seem to be able to agree on what actually goes in to a maitai. The bartender cheat sheet that we have at home gives the following recipe:
1 part light rum
1 part dark rum
2 parts pineapple juice
splash of grenadine
garnish with cherry, pineapple slice, umbrella, and any other flair floating about the house
I find pineapple juice just a little too bitter on its own, so I’ve been using pineapple/mango juice. It comes out nice and fruity with a little bite to it:
So, while I was perusing the above tiki Web site and its myriad of links, I decided to get some inspiration for other drinks to serve at the party. You’ve got to have Blue Hawaiians, because they’re blue. You can’t go wrong with blue drinks at a tiki party.
However, I was a bit puzzled/alarmed to discover that one site, which claims to be engaging in the search for the definitive maitai recipe, included these words: “the original maitai included only lime juice. For this reason, anything that includes any other kind of fruit juice (orange, pineapple) is not a real maitai.”
Who knew?
Now, speaking blunty, some of the recipes I’ve found are just cheating (you don’t use orange juice, you use orange curaçao or triple sec). But I dutifully tried some of the recipes just to see how they came out … and wound up adding the pineapple juice anyway because they came out so bitter.
The other problem is that the “definitive recipes” include things like orgeat — almond syrup — and something called “rock candy syrup.” I know of a place locally that probably carries them, and I’ll check them out … and the first thing I’m going to do is look at the ingredients to check for high fructose corn syrup. If I want my guests going into diabetic shock, it’ll be from the food, thank you very much.
Otherwise, I’ll just stick with my current recipe, which is:
2 parts dark rum
2 parts light rum
1 part lime juice
1 part orange curaçao
a good helping of pineapple/mango juice (roughly 4 parts)
a splash of grenadine
flair
Shake and serve over ice.
On to testing the next recipe. This is the kind of homework I can get with! 
So — anyone have other tiki drink suggestions?
