Perfect drink for a hot summer day: the "Orange Olive"

2 cocktails: 10 cl Crodino, 6 cl Maraschino, juice from 1/2 or a whole freshly squeezed orange, 3 tsp olive oil, ice.

Wow. Who would have guessed that olive oil can give this drink such a kick. This instantly became one of my favourites.

This potion features a unique combination of the three key cocktail ingredients: spirits, bitters and sugar. Maraschino and OJ give you sweetness and alcohol while the non-alcoholic Italian Crodino and the olive oil take care of the essential bitterness. And what a surprise the olive oil is. Perfect for a hot summer or fall day and wonderfully refreshing.

Add Crodino, Maraschino, OJ and olive oil to ice. Shake well, pour and be amazed. Be careful when shaking with sparkling additives like Crodino. The drink is so simple and yet convincing.

Best served in a Martini glass to minimize oil precipitation on the glass walls (the highball glasses in the photo are not ideal for this drink). After a few minutes the finely dispersed droplets of olive oil may start to aggregate and form smaller but visible oil puddles on the surface of your cocktail and possibly on the glass. This may affect the optics but definitely not the taste.

I am not sure if and how oil precipitation can be avoided. Oil-water mixtures are so called emulsions, i.e. metastable mixtures of two liquids. The metastability (from Greek meta (μετά) - meaning "beyond") is what makes the trouble here. As well as the hydrophobicity (water-fearing) character of oil and the lipophilic (fat-loving) character of glass. Technically, the addition of soapy molecules (surfactants) should help stabilize the oil droplets in water. Useful, except .... well, they taste like soap (please don't try this at home).

Well, lets look at those text books on supramolecular- and colloidal chemistry to see if we can come up with something ... for the next cocktail or for the next lecture.