Turn Your New York Flip Into an Eggy, Creamy, Holiday Manhattan
Cream. A whole egg. Whiskey. Vermouth. It only takes a minute.
So maybe you don’t want to make a big batch of eggnog, then wait a day — or weeks — to consume it. 1
Maybe, instead, what you really want is a rich, eggy, creamy cocktail that you can probably make right now, in just a minute or two without any advance prep.
What you want, then is a flip — a cocktail with a whole egg in it, and maybe some milk or cream as well.
We first looked at flips several years ago, when this newsletter was first getting started.
But I want to return to the category this holiday season, in part because flips are decadent and delicious, and in part because it’s a surprisingly easy category for home bartenders to work with. Indeed, as with eggnog, the flip format allows you to take many classic stirred-and-boozy cocktails and convert them into frothy, dairy-rich, dessert-like concoctions.
That’s what we’re going to do today. We’re going to start with one of the most enduring drinks in the flip category, the New York Flip, which mixes bourbon, port, egg, and cream. And then we’re going to use that as a template for making something a little more modern, a little more familiar to contemporary cocktail geeks, and — probably — a little easier to make for those of you who don’t keep bottles of port around the house.
Flip You For Real
You can think of the flip as a sort of simplified, single-serve, a-la-minute eggnog. As with eggnog, you’re combining…
eggs, and sometimes milk, cream, or similar products
with liquor (sherry, whiskey, brandy, and rum are the most common picks here, but practically any bottle you can think of could conceivably work in a flip)
plus some sort of sweetening agent (as in cocktails, this can come from a liqueur or syrup or some combination)
and sometimes there are spices or spice-like elements as well.
A very basic flip might just use brandy, syrup, and whole egg, perhaps with a bit of cinnamon or nutmeg grated on top for the spice element. Alternatively, it might be built on sherry, which tends to add some sweetness to a drink, so you’d need to dial back the sweetener somewhat.2
With flips, the main things to master are…
the texture, which needs to be thick, eggy, and perfectly consistent without becoming undrinkably heavy and rich. Getting the texture right means making sure you use a dry shake (an initial shake without ice prior to a second shake with ice, in order to fully incorporate the egg) and managing the proportions for any cream or milk elements
and the sweetness level, since egg plus booze without any sweetener is actually pretty unpleasant, but you also don’t want something obnoxiously sweet. This format works best if the sweetness is dialed in to about the level of a good pancake — it should resemble a sweet baked good, but not candy
The more complex the flip, the more delicate the balance is.
If you want to step up from a simple booze-egg-sweetener flip, the best place to start is with a New York flip, which combines bourbon, port, syrup, heavy cream, and egg.
Google around for New York Flip recipes, and you’ll find a lot of variations, some of which work better than others.