Wild Greg makes almost all of my drinks. That is because I am very picky and no one else knows how to do it right. He also frequently tastes my drinks in restaurants before I try them. A piña colada is one of my favorites. For me, he makes it with the barest amount of rum. I like rum a lot, but I don’t like it very concentrated. If there is a drink category that I have learned to like in my two or so years of learning to appreciate some alcohol at the tender age of 53, it is the category of drinks made with rum. Finding out I like rum is funny to me, because I previously only knew of it from stories of pirates! Anyone know why rum is associated with pirates when it has such a sophisticated taste? Oh, well. Can’t let the pirates have all the fun.
Here is how Wild Greg makes my piña colada:
List of ingredients:
¼ cup cream of coconut, which we find as Coco Re’al made by Simply Squeeze
½ cup of coconut rum
~ 3 tablespoons of frozen pineapple juice concentrate
1 small can of pineapple juice, 6 ounces, NOT concentrate
¼ cup granulated (white) sugar
~ 1 can of club soda
¾ to 1 cup of milk
one normal size tray of ice
First of all, make sure that you have shaken your cream of coconut well. For our last bottle of this, he had to even stick a table knife down into it to get it going. It was just too solidified. Then, he started by putting some of the ice, the pineapple juice concentrate, the small can of pineapple juice, and the sugar in our Kitchen Aide blender, which crushes ice very nicely. He added more ice cubes later, because being someone who usually improvises in the kitchen, he decided he needed more. In the end, it came to very close to a full ice cube tray of cubes.
After the ice was sufficiently chopped, he put in the other all of the other ingredients and ran the blender on the puree setting briefly, so that it was like a coconut pineapple rum smoothie. Or, in other words, a piña colada.
I really should try to make some popsicles out of any leftovers. Except we never have any, because there always seem to be other people who show up to enjoy his drinks, too. He does add more rum, probably another ½ cup to the mix left in the blender, after he has served mine. That seems to be how everyone else likes their piña coladas! However, now that he has shown me his secrets, I can make one when no one is looking. As long as I can shake the cream of coconut.
