COCKTAIL: Fields of Gold

This cocktail originally appeared in the October 4th, 2024 edition of The Action Cookbook Newsletter.

As my currently-overflowing home bar would attest, I love an esoteric bottle.

I’ve got cordials and Amaros and herbal liqueurs galore, and I’m always looking for new and interesting things to add to my cocktail repertoire. A few weeks ago, I responded with interest to a bottle that reader @319e17th posted about: Nixta Licor de Elote, a “Mexican corn liqueur made from a base of tender, ancestral cacahuazintle maize, grown in the high valleys and foothills of the Nevado de Toluca volcano”.

(That’s straight from their website.)

The concept was intriguing, and the corn-shaped bottle visually stunning, and I had to know more. As luck would have it, he was passing through Louisville shortly thereafter, and was kind enough to bring me a bottle, with the charge of making a compelling cocktail out of it.

Challenge accepted!

I tried it on its own, and it’s a lovely, interesting liqueur—the corn notes are quite evident, but in a pleasant way. It’s also quite sweet, and I realized it might play well in place of some or all of the sweetener in a cocktail I’d already tried.

I recalled the Old Pepper, a cocktail by Houston-based mixologist Alba Huerta that I featured here three years ago. I swapped in the Nixta for some of the syrup in that drink, but also decided to have a little fun with the cereal-grain theme: I’d use a wheated bourbon, and also add some rice into the cocktail shaker, a trick I’d recently learned about for additional smoothness in drinks.

Fields of Gold

• 1-1/2 ounces wheated bourbon
• 3/4 ounce Nixta Licor de Elote
• 1/3 ounce fresh lemon juice
• 1/4 ounce Demerara syrup
• 1/4 teaspoon Crystal hot sauce
• 1 dash Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tablespoons uncooked white rice
• 1 dried chile de Arbol, for garnish

Add the bourbon, Nixta, lemon juice, Demerara syrup, hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce and rice grains to an ice-filled shaker; shake well for 30 seconds. Using a fine-meshed strainer (you don’t actually want rice in the drink, just some of its starch), strain into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with dried chile.

There were a lot of ways this could have gone wrong, but it all went right here. The corn flavor came through clearly and cleanly, but didn’t overwhelm, and the sweetness of the liqueur balanced out the acidity and spice otherwise present in the drink.

This is a fun “show-off” drink to make—people are going to be really surprised if you offer them a whiskey cocktail with corn and hot sauce in it, but they’ll be hard-pressed not to admit that it’s a damned fine drink if they try it.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)