LOL, It’s a Green Bean Martini.

It's funny. It's also good.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Last week, I told you we’d be making a drink that rhymed with lean, mean Houdini, and at least one of you guessed what it was: That’s right — this year we’re making a Green Bean Martini. 

It’s a funny drink. It’s also surprisingly delicious. And it’s scalable and batchable, so it can be made to serve just about any size crowd. 

In making it, you’ll learn something about cocktails and how they work. In this edition, we’ll work through strategies for incorporating novel flavors into a cocktail. We’ll discuss pre-freezing and batching drinks for a crowd, and using “microspace” — tiny portions in larger-format drinks. We’ll also discuss workshopping drink ideas: I made about a half dozen iterations of this cocktail over the last month before finally getting it right. But when it finally came out right, it was really, really right.  

Green Lantern

Already, I sense your skepticism. Fair enough. Why a Green Bean Martini? 

Well, one reason is that I genuinely like are-you-kidding-me gimmick cocktails, at least when executed well.

In recent years, the world of high-end cocktails has been taken over by high-concept cocktails, like those served at the buzzy, award-winning Double Chicken Please. DCP’s best-known menu items replicate familiar food staples like Cold Pizza, Waldorf Salad, and Roasted Sweet Potato. These drinks are culinary magic tricks, designed to surprise and delight and maybe even stump you a little bit, to make you laugh out loud and then shake your head and mutter, how the heck did they manage to make tequila taste like that? 

This sort of show-offy setpiece drink tends to require a fair amount of prep, and thus has somewhat limited application for home bartenders: Let’s just say none of the drinks on DCP’s menu will ever make the cold-weather comfort canon.

But Thanksgiving is fundamentally a food holiday. It’s about preparing and sharing food with friends and family. So it’s an opportunity to try something a little bit more ambitious and elaborate. 

Another reason is that I really, really like Martinis and twists on Martinis. And it’s clear that today’s drink consumers and cocktail cognoscenti do too. Dirty Martinis are back in style. Yes, far too many are sloppily made, obnoxious olive brine bombs. But it’s possible to take that essential idea — something Martini-esque accented by a savory, salty element — and make something excellent out of it. 

Consider another one of the most awarded new bars of the last couple years, Martiny’s. Martiny’s isn’t strictly a Martini bar, but the current menu includes an entire Martini section, with entries like a Blue Cheese Sake Martini and an Olive & Honey Vesper.¹ I wouldn’t exactly describe either as a Dirty Martini, but as you can tell by the names, both have savory and/or salty elements. They’re in the same family as the Dirty Martini. Just because a lot of Dirty Martinis are bad doesn’t mean that the general concept can’t be a good one.  

Finally, we’re going to make a Green Bean Martini because making cocktails inspired by classic Thanksgiving flavors and foodstuffs is this newsletter’s longest-running tradition.

One of the very first editions was devoted to the Thanksgiving Sour, an apple-cinnamon brandy sour that I’ve made every year for nearly a decade now. The next year there was a Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioned, made with a homemade pumpkin spice syrup. The following year we made two different drinks, in two different formats, designed to taste like taste like pecan pie. And last year we made a tangy, tasty cranberry-sauce Sidecar. 

As you can see, I’m running out of Thanksgiving staples. It’s frankly somewhat worrying. Next year, I fear I might end up making a Turkey Negroni, or mashed potato Mai Tai. Let’s not even think about what I might do with stuffing. 

But for now, we have green beans. 

Gimmick Cocktail Goals

So yes, this is a gimmick cocktail. But it’s also a surprisingly tasty vegetal Martini. Indeed, that sense of surprise — the how the heck did this drink happen??? factor — is part of the appeal. 

For me, the ideal foodstuff gimmick cocktail meets the following tests: 

• First, it fully lives up to the premise. A Pumpkin Spice Old Fashioned should clearly taste like Pumpkin Spice — but also be sufficiently Old Fashioned-y, delivering on the promise of the underlying drink. 

• Second, it should be surprising, a little bit head-spinning, even, in the sense that when you sip it you should have this sense that something odd or magical has happened. A foodstuff gimmick cocktail should be amusing, even funny. 

• It should also be serious — and seriously delicious. A gimmick isn’t worth it if the drink is cloying or out of balance. A gimmick cocktail needs to be rigorously constructed and thoughtfully executed, not just a joke. In other words, it needs to be an actually good cocktail, the sort of thing that someone might want to drink independent of the gimmickry. 

I think this year’s Green Bean Martini meets all of those tests. 

Casseroling My Eyes 

Green beans might not seem like a strong contender for a cocktail ingredient, but it turns out that they are a surprising and delightful addition to a salty, vegetal Martini. 

But we’re not just going to use green beans. I wanted to give this a more complex and distinctive flavor arc, and green beans alone would probably be a little bit boring. When I started this project, I had in mind something a little bit more complicated — there was a flavor combo that I could just taste in my imagination.

So we are also going to incorporate two other flavors: mushroom and onion.  

That’s right. This isn’t just a Green Bean Martini. It’s a midwest-style Green Bean Casserole Martini. 

Again, I promise you that it is, in fact, actually good. 

Admittedly, it wasn’t the first time I attempted it. 

When I started, the challenge was to figure out how to take a Martini format and meld it with the flavors of green bean casserole. 

We needed a Martini. And then we needed three additional elements: green beans, mushroom, and onions. 

For the Martini, my starting point was a fairly strong Martini that I already knew worked well with salt and olives: 2 ½ ounces dry gin, plus ¾ ounce dry vermouth, or a 10:3 gin:vermouth ratio. 

I also knew from the start that I wanted to make this a batched, frozen drink, like the Negroni we made a few months ago. Batched, advance-frozen drinks can be better for dinner-party sized groups, since they’re mixed, chilled, and diluted in advance. Just mix up the batch, including water (dilution), a few hours before you want to serve the drink, then stick it in the freezer to chill. When guests arrive, all you have to do is pour. 

Freezer-chilled Martinis have a silky thick texture, and they can get colder than individually stirred Martinis. And with Martinis, colder is almost always better. The higher the alcohol content of a freezer-chilled drink, the colder it can get, so while I typically advise that Martini-class cocktails use ¾ ounce of water per single drink equivalent, I started with a ½ ounce of water for this one.

Batched cocktails also allow you to fine-tune flavors by adding tiny portions to a drink — say, a teaspoon of something very strong to a 28 ounce mix — which is especially important when you’re working with strong, strange flavors. 

For example, when you’re trying to make your Martini taste like green bean casserole. 

Bean There, Done That

To incorporate the green beans, I considered an infusion method, but Thanksgiving Sour aside, I have a bias against infusions, which take time, and which can be finicky to calibrate.

However, canned green beans come soaked in water that tastes like liquid green beans. That was more or less what I was looking for — liquid green bean flavor. And I could just spoon it out of the can right into the mix. 

Once I had that settled, the onions were easy to figure out: I just spooned out a bit of liquid brine from a bottle of store-bought cocktail onions,² which provided a sort of salty liquid onion flavor. 

That left the mushrooms. I could have tried actual mushrooms. But something I know from years of looking at cocktail menus and recipes is that gin Martinis taste surprisingly good with trace amounts of oil, whether through fat washing (a sort of infusion technique) or just dropping a tiny bit into the mix.

Conveniently, there’s usually a small bottle of truffle oil in my kitchen. And truffles are, well, mushrooms. 

So I had my core elements and ingredients. The next step was to mix them all together. I started with a batched Martini, then made rough guesses about how much to use. A few teaspoons of truffle oil. An ounce or two of green bean water and cocktail onion brine. 

After a couple hours in the freezer, I had a drink that tasted like all of those things. the gimmick part of it was obvious enough. But it didn’t taste very good. The biggest issue was that the green bean flavor was far too recessed, and the truffle oil totally took over the mix. That stuff is incredibly strong. 

So over the course of several versions, I turned down the truffle flavor, boosted the green bean element, and tried to balance out the onion flavor. Balancing these elements was mostly a matter of testing, tasting, and tweaking.

Over multiple iterations, the drink came closer and closer to the imaginary flavor I could taste in my head. The truffle oil was less pushy, the green bean was coming through more, the onion was identifiable, but a grace note. 

But something was still just a little bit off. The green bean casserole flavors were better balanced relative to themselves, but they were being squeezed in the mix. The flavors felt crowded, like the overall mix was a little too loud. The novelty flavor elements needed more space — which I eventually realized was because the Martini component itself was too aggressive.   

So I changed the gin:vermouth ratio, to 2 ¼ ounces gin and 1 ounce dry vermouth (a 9:4 ratio). I also added a little more water, bumping up the dilution to ¾ ounce per single drink equivalent.  

This was the major fix the drink needed to make all the parts work together. I also added a tiny bit of salt, via a homemade 20 percent saline solution, which helped sharpen the savory, vegetal flavors. 

Finally, I had something that tasted distinctly of green beans, with elements of green bean casserole, that was also quite clearly and recognizably a silky, salty, cold-as-winter Martini. At the same time, it was strangely, surprisingly, amusingly delicious.

I had a sip and thought…LOL, a Green Bean Martini. Sure, it’s a gimmick. But it’s a good one. 

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Green Bean Martini 

• ⅛ teaspoon truffle oil

• 3 teaspoons canned (unsalted) green bean water

• 2 teaspoon cocktail onion brine

• 3 drops 20 percent saline solution*

• 2 ounces Dolin dry vermouth

• 4 ½ ounces dry gin, preferably Ford’s 

• 1 ½ ounces water 

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients in a freezer safe glass bottle with a cap. 

2. Chill in the freezer for 2-4 hours, then pour 2-3 ounces into a Martini glass. (This is a strongly flavored drink, best in small portions.) 

3. Garnish with a green bean and a cocktail onion. 

Notes:

• For a bigger batch, simply scale up the recipe by multiplying the ingredients equally. 

• Batched, freezer-chilled cocktails are typically best after a few hours in the freezer, but ideal serving time can vary based on freezer type and temperature settings.

• If your batch freezes solid, which may happen if you leave it in the freezer for a day or so, you can just let it melt/liquify for a little while in the fridge, then serve it.

• Larger batches left in a freezer for a day or longer may benefit from being fine-strained, if the truffle oil congeals.

*20 percent saline solution: Combine 1 part salt and 4 parts water, measured by volume, in a saucepan on the stovetop. Heat on medium to medium low. Do not let boil. Stir gently until thoroughly combined, so no salt sludge on the bottom. Store in a small glass eye dropper bottle. Shelf stable, keeps for many, many months. 

The Big Gal Is a Fountain of Cuteness

1. Not only the best Vesper I’ve ever had, but the only good one.

2. If you’re in the D.C. area, you can pick these up at A. Litteri, the Italian import shop in the Union Market area. Just a warning: The store has an entire rack of unusual amari and vermouth. It’s dangerous to go in there.