The classic whiskey sour recipe is 2 oz (60 ml) bourbon, ¾ oz (22 ml) fresh lemon juice and ½ oz (15 ml) simple syrup, shaken hard with ice. Put 2 teaspoons (10 ml) of lemon marmalade in its place: loosen it in the lemon juice, add the bourbon, then shake.
A sour is the oldest shape in the cocktail book: spirit, citrus, sugar. Liquor.com dates the whiskey version's first printed recipe to about 1862, in Jerry Thomas's Bar-Tender's Guide. The sugar is the part most open to change. A spoon of lemon marmalade brings sweetness along with cooked lemon peel, a little bitterness and some body from the fruit's own pectin, so the drink tastes more of lemon without getting any sharper.
The swap isn't new. Jeffrey Morgenthaler, of Clyde Common in Portland, Oregon, gave Saveur a whiskey sour with marmalade for its January/February 2013 issue, with a teaspoon of orange marmalade shaken in alongside the syrup. Our own marmalade cocktails page drops the syrup entirely and sweetens the sour with marmalade alone, and the recipe below does the same with a lemon jar.
Swapping simple syrup for marmalade
Marmalade isn't pure sugar. Part of every spoonful is fruit and water, so 2 teaspoons stand in for ½ oz of syrup rather than a like-for-like measure, and the sweetness varies more from one jar to the next than a measured syrup does. Taste the drink after shaking and add a third teaspoon if it's too tart. The marmalade is also thicker than syrup, which is why it goes into the juice first: cold, strong bourbon dissolves it slowly and can leave clumps in the tin.
Whiskey sour recipe
Adapted from the Liquor.com classic and Morgenthaler's marmalade version for Saveur. The proportions of bourbon and lemon follow the classic; the marmalade quantity is a starting point, not a fixed rule.
Makes 1 drink · 5 minutes to prep · no cooking · 5 minutes in all
Ingredients
- 2 tsp (10 ml) Eureka Lemon Marmalade or any lemon marmalade
- ¾ oz (22 ml) fresh lemon juice
- 2 oz (60 ml) bourbon
- ½ oz (15 ml) pasteurized egg white, optional
- Ice
- 3–4 drops Angostura bitters, or a lemon twist, to garnish
Method
- Spoon the marmalade into the base of a cocktail shaker and pour the lemon juice over it.
- Stir with a bar spoon until the marmalade loosens and only shreds of peel are left whole.
- Add the bourbon, and the egg white if you're using it.
- If using egg white, close the shaker and shake hard without ice for about 30 seconds.
- Fill the shaker with ice and shake for 15–20 seconds, until the tin is frosty.
- Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice, or into a chilled coupe with no ice. Use a fine-mesh strainer as well if you want the peel left behind.
- Drop the bitters onto the foam, or twist the lemon peel over the glass.
Notes
- Back to syrup: swap the jar out for ½ oz (15 ml) of 1:1 simple syrup. The International Bartenders Association spec is a little shorter: 45 ml bourbon, 25 ml lemon juice and 20 ml sugar syrup.
- Orange instead of lemon: any orange marmalade works, as in Morgenthaler's drink. Expect a rounder, less lemony sour.
- Peel in the glass: Stir and Strain's orange marmalade sour skips the double strain because its author likes a shred or two of peel in the drink. It uses syrup and marmalade together, a middle route if the jar alone isn't sweet enough for you.
- Eureka or Meyer: our Eureka lemons grow in a Redlands heritage grove planted in 1897 and are harvested in summer; the jar lists only cane sugar, lemons and water, and its tasting notes run to lemon drop and clean peel. The Meyer, from Riverside-grown fruit, is softer and more floral, with a mandarin finish from the Meyer's mandarin ancestry, and suits anyone who finds a whiskey sour too tart.
- Less juice: lemon marmalade adds acid as well as sugar, so our cocktails page suggests pulling back slightly on the fresh juice. Start at ½ oz (15 ml) and add the last ¼ oz only if the drink tastes flat.
Do you need egg white in a whiskey sour?
No. Egg white is traditional and gives the drink a smoother texture plus the foam that holds the bitters, but the Liquor.com recipe lists it as optional; without it the sour tastes cleaner and more refreshing. If you use it, the FDA advises that dishes served with raw egg be made with pasteurized eggs or pasteurized egg products. A carton of pasteurized whites does the job.
Making marmalade whiskey sours for a group
Dissolving marmalade glass by glass gets slow past two or three drinks. Loosen it into a syrup instead: heat equal parts marmalade and water until the marmalade melts, strain out the peel, and cool. Store it covered and chilled, and finish it in about seven days. A syrup is thinner than a spoonful from the jar, so shake one test sour and taste it before you scale up to a pitcher.
Photo by Poul Hoang on Unsplash.
