On Ice — A Primer

A great cocktail is more than just a recipe. When you’re sipping on it, the whole package adds to the enjoyment of the drink. Apart from quality ingredients, you need the right glassware, the right garnish and, when the drink requires it, the right ice. Darcy O’Neill has a great post on why ice matters which you should read before continuing.

Here is a quick guide to the various types of ice used and hints for the home mixologist.

Cubed Ice

What you get out of your freezer, and the base for the rest of the ice types featured. Ideally, you should use big solid lumps of ice, so if the ice trays that come with your freezer make small or hollow cubes, ditch them and buy some trays that make bigger cubes. It’s important to not take your ice out of the freezer until the very last minute. The last thing you need is your ice sitting on your kitchen counter melting while you measure out your ingredients, squeeze your fruit, etc.

Cracked Ice

The next size down, cracked ice is just cubes broken up into fairly large pieces. The usual way to make this is to put cubes into a kitchen cloth and break them inside. However, I find that many times the ice pieces stick to the cloth, making it difficult to serve into the glass.

My preferred method is to put a few cubes inside a sturdy plastic freezer bag and, with a kitchen mallet or sturdy rolling pin, hit each cube pretty hard once. Serving from the bag is easy and, since it is transparent, you can see what you’re doing.

Crushed Ice

Everyone’s seen it, but how do you get nice crushed ice without expensive bar equipment? As with cracked ice, some people claim that banging up ice manually in a cloth will work. I find this unsatisfying because your pieces of ice won’t be a uniform size and with the finer pieces resulting from a good beating, you may get excessive dilution in the drink. Another option would be a blender, but this tends to make the ice too fine (see Shaved Ice below).

I struggled with this problem for a long time, and ended up forking out for an ice crusher. It’s an affordable manual crusher I bought at Ikea (I can’t find a link to it), and while it can be hard work crushing up ice for four or five drinks, the quality is just about ideal. I highly recommend getting some apparatus for crushing ice.

Shaved Ice

Shaved ice is basically ice ground up very fine to a snow-like consistency. The best way for getting this is to place ice cubes in a blender or food processor and just let it rip. There isn’t really an alternative apart from doing the ice-in-a-towel trick for a long time (a freezer bag won’t handle the beating for very long). The key difference between this and crushed ice is that shaved ice should be like a mass of malleable ice, while crushed ice should consist of individually identifiable pieces of ice.

And that’s about it for your ice needs. I can’t think of any recipes that require any other type of ice, although if you know one I’d appreciate a comment.