Video Transcript

Hello everybody I'm Steven Kowalczuk the Cocktail Chef. And today we are going to make one of my favorite cocktails. We are making a cucumber mint cocktail. And what this is going to require is a vodka, a melon liqueur of some sort. We are going to use an cucumber juice. And what I did was take a juice extractor and I ran a cucumber through there and made a nice juice that's going to be great for cocktails. And we have a little bit of simple syrup. Simple syrup is a sugar water predominantly sugar, a little bit of water. About a 60, 40 percentage. And at that point we are going to make a syrup that's going to be all sweet but not much water because we don't want to add water to our cocktail. You want to add sweet to our cocktail. So we also have a little bit of mint and a cucumber for our garnish. So lets get started. Now we are going to build this cocktail in our mixing glass. First thing we are going to do is add our vodka. We are going to add one and a half ounces of vodka which is going to be a six count. Every count that you pour is going to be a quarter ounce of liquor. Then we are going to add three count of a midori which is going to be three quarters of an ounce. Now with our cucumber juice we don't want to add too much cucumber juice. In fact when you juice this you are going to get a little bit of foam on top. You can run it through a strainer but in this case I'm just going to spoon a little bit off. And that's ok if you have a little bit of the pulp and the meat from the cucumber in there because that just adds texture to our cocktail. So we are going to pour a little bit of that in about three quarters of an ounce. Not much at all. Enough to add the flavor but not to overpower so it's just all cucumber. We want to accent it with the melon which is the midori and of course we have our spirit base which is the vodka. Now we are going to add three quarters an ounce of the simple syrup to sweeten that cocktail slightly but not to make it a sweet cocktail. What we want to do is bridge the gap between all the flavors, the vodka, the midori, and the cucumber. Now at this point we are going to take a piece of mint. We are going to do a mint smash which is basically I'm going to take this mint. I'm going to put it in my hand and I'm going to smash it. Now what that did was quickly release all the oils into the basically the surface of the leaf so when we put it in our drink we start to shake, it's going to break up a little bit. But it's definitely going to have the essential oils mixed in there as well. So now lets take our ice and top our glass off just like that. We also sorry I'm going to go out of sight, have our martini glass ready to go. Now we are going to shake this out. Always get to shake on this it's a signature move. This is where it all happens. You want to make sure you've shaken enough so you are going to mix all this flavors together. You want everything to bind. We've got our vodka, we've got our melon, we've got our cucumber juice and our sweet. Now we are ready to go. And we are going to just strain this off. In this case I'm just using my mixing glass to strain it. All I'm doing is holding back all of the ice and what's left of the mint. And now we are going to move onto our garnish. So for our garnish I think obviously the perfect garnish for this is going to be a cucumber wheel nice and thin. So when you do it nice and thin that's going to float right on top. At that point we are going to find ourselves a nice leaf of mint to garnish it perfectly by adding that mint leaf right on top. And there you have a cucumber mint martini.