When you’re eating a perfectly smoked beef brisket or pork sausage, one spirit typically comes to mind — bourbon.
“We were experimenting on cool ideas we could use our centrifuge for,” says Rory Van Nostrand, who owns Old Fields Barbecue Setauket, a barbecue restaurant that also specializes in craft cocktails, with David Tunney. “We’ve made a bunch of different ingredients with it but the banana-infused old-fashioned was everyone’s favorite.”
Fans of the old-fashioned won’t be disappointed by the restaurant’s subtle twist on this classic drink. Many of the ingredients in the banana-infused old-fashioned should be familiar to cocktail traditionalists, and that was done by design.
The drink’s ingredients include bourbon, banana, an orange, an amerena cherry and Aromatic Bitters.
“We blend up bananas with bourbon,” Van Nostrand says. “Then we spin it in the centrifuge to remove the banana pulp and leave the flavor. This really smooths out the bourbon.”
To finish off the drink, they add an orange and an amarena cherry. As is the case for traditional old-fashioned cocktails, the banana-infused old-fashioned is served on the rocks.
“It’s a bourbon drink that doesn’t drink aggressive and boozy like a lot of classic bourbon cocktails yet it’s not overly sweet,” he says. “We feel that it’s a cocktail a bourbon drinker would love but someone who isn’t necessarily into bourbon will drink and enjoy.”
The cocktail also “goes especially well with barbecue or a steak,” Van Nostrand says.
“Everyone loves it,” he says. “We’ve been serving it now for three years, and it’s still our most popular cocktail.”
Old Fields Barbecue is located at 130 Old Town Rd. in Setauket. It can be reached at 631-675-1313 or ofsetauket.com
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