[ruby_title]Tangan Raja by James Cooper, Shelley Yu’s, Kuala Lumpur[/ruby_title]
The trick to making durian work in James Cooper’s Tangan Raja, he’s found, is to keep it separate from the alcohol. “We tried making a durian sugar syrup, but that overpowered the alcohol in the cocktail,” he explains. “We tried infusing it directly into the rum, Campari and sweet vermouth, and again, it just didn’t come out the way we wanted it to.”
So at Shelley Yu’s, their way of making the thorny fruit’s presence felt is upfront and right in the nose, with an egg white-based foam that features cooked musang king (what maoshan wang is known as in Malaysia) pulp, brown sugar and a bit of lime zest “to bring out the fresh, fruity, sour character of this variety of durian.” Drunk together with the cocktail below, “you’ll get the slightly sour-sweet hit of durian as you drink through the foam, then the bitter cocktail at the end balances things out in the flavour profile,” explains Cooper. After experimenting with nitrogen-charging his foam mixture, which turned his fruit bitter, the bar team now blitzes up a quick head of durian froth with the immersion blender before layering it on the drink. The lime, he says, binds the mix together and helps keep it bubbly for five to ten minutes after serving.
To keep the bar from smelling up each time they prepare a batch of the froth, the head bartender is tasked to go round to his local seller, go out back with a chef’s cleaver to break open the fruit and mince the flesh down to a fine texture. “When I moved here in August to start working at Ril’s and Shelley Yu’s, I asked the team, ‘Why aren’t we making a drink with durian in it?’ and everyone looked at me like, ‘Really? White guy from England wants a durian in a drink?'” he laughs. With the durian’s short seasonal window about to expire, Cooper and his team are experimenting with freezing their own supply of the fruit to thaw down and use when needed. “It kind of works so far,” says Cooper. “The texture and flavour is slightly affected and is a little less potent in the flavour profile, but for us, it just means we’ll have to rebalance it when we use it between batches.”
And as for that old bit of wisdom that warns of mixing alcohol with durians, Cooper’s got it covered. “I’m a chemist and biologist by degree – which I very, very rarely use – but I did a lot of research into it, and believe it or not, if you type “durian and alcohol scientific paper” into Google, you’ll find about 10 to 15 studies that have been done on whether durians and alcohol will cause a chemical reaction in your body,” he says. “And I’m not kidding, a lot of it is peer-reviewed studies. They’ve even done case studies on someone who’s got a friend who has a brother or aunt who had two bottles of beer, ate a whole durian and dropped down dead the next day. They had high cholesterol anyway – that and durian, not a great combination!”
Recipe (click to view)
Tangan Raja by James Cooper
