Kitchen & Food

#6 · Cocktail stirrer

Give your Negroni or gin and tonic a dignified stir with a chopstick. Feels very sophisticated for something you got free with a takeaway.

A bar spoon is a long twisted stem with a small bowl, and it costs about £8. For stirring a drink in a tall glass at home, a chopstick reaches the bottom just as well, looks considerably better than a plastic swizzle stick, and can stay in the glass as a serving flourish.

How to do it

1. Chill the glass first - a warm glass melts ice faster than any amount of careful stirring can compensate for.
2. Build the drink over ice.
3. Slide the chopstick down between the cubes to the base, then stir in slow smooth circles for 20 to 30 seconds.
4. Stop when the outside of the glass has frosted. That is the signal, not the clock.

Why it works

Stirring does two jobs at once: it chills, and it dilutes. The meltwater is not a flaw, it is roughly a fifth of a finished stirred drink and it is what softens the spirit. Slow stirring achieves both without whipping in the air bubbles and ice shards that make a stirred drink cloudy.

Tips & warnings

• A lacquered or metal chopstick is the better choice here - bare bamboo is porous and will slowly pick up whatever you last stirred.
• Stir, never shake, anything that is all spirits. Shaking is for drinks with juice, egg or cream in them.
• Leaving the chopstick in the glass gives the drinker something to stir with as the ice melts.