Welcome To Wonkette Happy Hour, With This Week's Cocktail, Toasted Pina Colada!

Hooper went crazy with the mixology and you're invited!

This was a bit more work than putting a pina colada in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. Every once in a while, I overthink a cocktail. I indulge in way too much prep time, go completely overboard, and make a drink that’s entertaining to read about, involves far too much work, and never gets made by the general public. (Yes, I have heard your cruel taunts about “First: Mill your wheat.” What can I say, some things are just true.)

This is one of those drinks. It’s a simple concept, but the prep is utterly absurd. Unfortunately, it is also extremely tasty. If you do follow me down this rabbit hole, I promise you’ll like the result. Let’s make a Toasted Pina Colada, or read about making one at least. Here’s the recipe:

Toasted Pina Colada

2 oz Gosling’s Bermuda Rum

1 oz roasted pineapple syrup

1 oz coconut dulce de leche

½ oz lime juice

Coat half the rim of a rocks glass with coconut dulce de leche. Roll the coated rim in toasted coconut and let rest in the freezer. Shake all ingredients over ice and strain over crushed ice into the prepared glass. Garnish with a slice of dried pineapple, a lime shell, and an umbrella.

Roasted Pineapple Syrup

5-6 pineapple rings

1 cup pineapple juice

Place the pineapple rings on a foil-lined baking sheet. Roast at 350 degrees for 1 hour, flipping the rings halfway through. Broil 4-5 minutes, until the rings have just begun to char. Puree the rings and pineapple juice together. Let sit 2-3 minutes and strain finely. Store in the fridge for 1 month maximum.

Coconut Dulce de leche

2 cans Nature’s Charm Sweetened Condensed Coconut Milk

¼ cup Silk unsweetened coconut milk

Heat the sweetened condensed coconut milk over medium heat, stirring frequently, until it takes on a caramel color. Thin the sweetened condensed milk with coconut milk until it becomes pourable. Stores indefinitely in the fridge.

I originally had the idea of making a toasted pina colada pre-Covid, when I was pouring cocktails for my extended family on a Key West Christmas vacation. I used dark rum instead of clear rum for those pina coladas. I thought the caramel notes were a great addition to the standard pina colada recipe at the time, and wondered how far I could push the caramel flavor.

This cocktail is the ridiculous answer to that question. Every element of a pina colada tastes better toasted, after all. Toasted coconut is better than raw coconut. Roasted pineapple is better than raw pineapple. So why not toast all the ingredients in the drink and see what happens? The end result is incredibly smooth and comforting. This cocktail is creamy and toasty, reminiscent of coffee with no alcohol notes. It’s still a pina colada, but cozier.

Let’s jump right in and talk about the ingredients. There’s a fair amount to cover here.

Ingredient shot. In retrospect, I wish I’d taken pictures of the prep as we went, instead of showing you a picture of three brown fluids.

Gosling’s Bermuda Rum: This super-dark rum is my $20 bottle of choice right now; I drink it with a splash of water and lime after a shift. I’ve been worried about additives in Gosling’s for a while, but per my fellow Substacker The Rum Wonk and Rum Revelations, I’m fairly confident that Goslings’s is free of anything too egregious. Use your favorite dark rum if you’d like.

Roasted Pineapple Syrup: If I used these pineapple rings for cooking, I would brush them with butter or sugar before roasting them. But I’m looking for pure toasted pineapple flavor in the juice, so I put them in the oven without any dressing. You must watch the rings like a hawk; they’ll burn in a heartbeat. But the end result is worth it. I pressed the pineapple puree through a strainer until the pulp was dry; then I took the remaining juice and strained it through a nut bag to remove any remaining pulp or charred flakes.

Coconut Dulce De Leche: Sweetened condensed coconut milk is technically not a thing. Dairy milk is full of emulsifiers; remove the water from it, and it thickens. Coconut milk has no emulsifiers and will separate without some additional help. This vegan alternative to sweetened condensed milk uses guar gum to mimic the original dairy version. Guar gum is completely natural, is a fantastic binder, and holds up to moderate heat just fine — all the things I needed to make a leche-free dulce de leche. It’s such a good thickening agent that I needed to splash some coconut milk into the final product to make it pourable.

Lime Juice: By the sacred name of Jimmy Buffett, if you go through all the effort of making the cream and the juice and then use bottled lime juice in this drink, you and I will have WORDS.

We aren’t linking to Amazon anymore, because fuck that coward Bezos with a rusty bar spoon. Go listen to “Bubbles Up” by Jimmy Buffett instead. The worse the news gets, the more I take comfort in this song. Bubble up, fins up, one drink at a time.

You can find me on Bluesky at @samuraigrog!

OPEN THREAD! DRINK!