Let the "Asagi Orange Olive" show you how oil and your drink can become one

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

This is an iteration of the "Orange Olive", a cocktail recipe posted on this blog a few weeks ago. This simple composition uses olive oil as essential bitter, lending the drink a new aromatic dimension. The drawback of the original recipe was that oil and water are immiscible liquids, with their interactions forcing the oil to precipitate on the surface of the drink. As mentioned earlier this is merely an optical inconvenience and of no consequence to the taste.

Your kitchen sink soap is designed to negotiate interactions between water and oil, making them more like one another, but is tastes ... well, soapy. The genius idea, here came from a crafty brother in law, a chemist himself, currently living in Japan with his family.

He pointed out that proteins and some fatty acids may also serve as natural emulsifiers. Thus the added egg-white, or egg-yolk likewise used in mayonnaise, for example.

Thoroughly beat the egg-white to partially denaturate the protein and add olive oil once the egg-white turns creamy-white-ish. Add to Crodino, Maraschino, OJ and ice. Shake well. Pour.

The colour of this concoction is a much lighter, soft and light yellow (asagi, Japanese for 'light yellow'). The brighter tint comes from millions of microscopic, colourless oil droplets dispersed throughout the drink. When ambient light passes through your glass, it is scattered from these droplets giving rise to more turbid but also brighter colouration. Much in the same way that colloidal oil and fat droplets make milk white ... but I am rambling, again.

Let's enjoy this wonderful drink in silence.