How To Make The Yakety Yak Cocktail
Art of the Drink returns with a grown-up version of the classic New York egg cream!
Step 1: Welcome to art of the drink:
Welcome to Art of the Drink, my name is Anthony Caporale and we are so excited to be premièring our second year from our new studio space in the green room lounge at the John W. Engeman Theatre in Northport, New York. We’re also thrilled to be working with our new drink-art girl Carlyn; how are you dear? I’m great how are you? Good, thank you so much for being with us. Absolutely, it’s my pleasure.
Step 2: The Yakity Yak:
Okay, so, in honour of the theatre, the John W. Engeman Theatre, I went ahead and created a new drink for the show that we’re currently doing which is Smoky Joe’s Café. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Smoky Joe’s Café, it is a musical review of songs of Leiber and Stoler. So Carlyn, who are they? Well, they’re pretty much the guys who revolutionized music as we knew it. In the 50’s and 60’s, everything that the music world knew became something completely different and now we have songs like Stand By Me and Poison Ivy and all those. All the great Rock and Roll and R&B classics of the 50’s, exactly. So again, their music is very closely associated with the 50’s, so I went ahead and created several drinks, for the green room here, one of which I want to bring today and it’s named after one of their most popular songs, called Yakity Yak. And I based it on another thing closely associated with the 50’s which is an egg cream, which is a type of drink that used to be sold in soda fountains. Now, soda fountains are kinda thin on the ground now. Most people don’t know what an egg cream is, it’s definitely a New York drink, another reason that I went ahead and picked it. So what I want to do is first show you how to make a traditional egg cream, then I’m going to show you how to make the Art of the Drink version of the egg cream which is kinda like an egg cream for adults.
Step 3: The recipe:
Alright? So, let’s start with a real New York egg cream. A New York egg cream has three ingredients in it. Always. Always has chocolate syrup, always has milk, and it always has soda water. And again it was made in a soda fountain back in the day when you would actually, what they would call, jerk the soda, like you see beer towers but they actually had soda coming out of them and that would froth up the milk. So I’ll show you how to do that. First thing you want to do is get some chocolate syrup and put about two good tablespoons of chocolate syrup in there. Again, depending on how chocolatey you like it, I like things pretty darn chocolatey. Alright, so, about two tablespoons of chocolate syrup. And then you want to take about three or four ounces of milk. Just about halfway up the rest with milk. Now at this point you can stir it, if you like, and you can get all the kind of chocolate incorporated in that, but I like to leave it the way it is for right now and go ahead and put the soda in and the soda, as I said, is going to give you a nice frothy head that looks kinda like whipped egg whites which is why a lot of people think it’s called an egg cream and there’s still a lot of debate about that, but it’s probably not why it’s called an egg cream. A lot of people think there’s eggs in it. There’s no eggs in it; this is a traditional New York egg cream. Now, what you’re supposed to do at this point is take your straw and stir this bad boy up before you drink it and that’s going to give you several different colours and several different flavours throughout the drink. You have this nice creamy, frothy, top, the head, and then you have, basically chocolate milk with soda water in it, and then you’ve got a nice reserve with chocolate syrup at the bottom. Okay? So that is a classic New York egg cream.
Step 4: Now you try:
Now, what I’m going to have you make is the Art of Drink version, which, again, is called the Yakity Yak in honour of Smokey Joe’s Café, at the Engeman Theatre. Want to give it a try? Absolutely. Alright.
Step 5: The method:
So, first thing I want you to do is set your glassware. Alright, we talk about that a lot. You always want a place to work. Good. Now, what I’m going to do is actually prep this glass for you a little bit. In a Yakity Yak, the way I created it, there’s no chocolate syrup in the actual drink, but I’m going use chocolate syrup almost as a garnish or a decoration for the glass because, again, if it doesn’t have chocolate syrup in it somewhere, it’s not really an egg cream. So I’m going to go ahead and drizzle just a little bit of chocolate syrup down the side of the glass and you can make any pattern you want and this is really more for decoration than for any flavour it adds to the drink, but it does look really pretty. So we have our nice prepped glass. Now instead of the chocolate syrup in the drink, I want you to put one ounce of dark chocolate liqueur. Alright. And about a half-ounce of vanilla vodka. Good job. Now it’s the same thing we did with the egg cream. We’re going to take milk up about half way the rest of the glass. And soda water to the top. So how is this done, any special technique? Yeah, actually this was, you would judge a soda jark by how they made their egg creams and the real way to do it is to give it a good shot of soda right in the middle of the drink and then kinda take the soda to the side so that you don’t end up frothing over the glass. So why don’t we try and do that. Just give it a shot right down the middle, then go off to the side a little bit. Okay, without messing up the chocolate garnish. Exactly. Wish me luck. Yeah no problem. Perfect look at that! Well done, good job. So you throw a straw in that, and that is our Yakity Yak in honour of the premiere production at the John W. Engeman Theatre at Smokey Joe’s Café. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you! Salut.
