Pina Colada Night

Saturday was Pina Colada day at our house. The first recipe I mixed up was supposedly the 'luxe' version: pineapple chunks instead of just juice, light rum, coconut cream, passion fruit liqueur, mango nectar, lime juice, maybe somethng else, I've lost track. I hate drinks with a cast of thousands list of ingredients. There were so many ingredients that I had to pull out my large glass shaker and fight with the lid for 5 mintues to get it off. All this with ice whirled in a blender.

I'd just bought a bottle of Tommy Bahama rum to replace my soon to be emptied bottle of generic Bacardi (see below), and I'd located passion fruit liqueur without any trouble, for a change. That's pretty good stuff just drunk straight.

I'm not a big fan of frozen drinks, but this isn't bad. My only complaint is, as I said a post or two ago, pineapple juice tends to overpower everything else in a cocktail. I couldn't taste the passion fruit, or maybe that was a 'layer of flavor' that was just a little thin.

I looked up pina coladas on wikipedia: originally it was just the juice of a pineapple. Then it turned into a spiked pineapple drink, which as you'd expect, didn't take long to happen. The earliest mention of a pineaple juice drink with rum and coconut cream appeared in 1950, with various bars in Puerto Rico claiming to have made the first one. Today, it's the national drink of Puerto Rico.

So anyway, after my blender full of pinas, I needed a break to have something to eat (chicken croquettes, popular with the 4 legged denizens here). Protein and grease are efficient absorbers of alcohol. Next I tried a recipe from a day or two ago, not a frozen version, just shaken and over ice: pineapple juice, coconut cream, rum (I finished that bottle of Bacardi), and lime.

This version seemed like the early pineapple juice spiked with rum incarnation of the pina colada. Not much substance; I liked the frozen version better. I'll have to make my way to San Juan soon and take a scientific survey and learn how the authentic version is made, and drunk.