Jazz up the Red Snapper with some unusual ingredients like green ant gin, strawberry gum syrup and soy sauce

As far as cocktail ingredients go, soy sauce isn't the most common thing you reach for when making a drink. Yet that was what we found ourselves doing when meeting a challenge issued to us on Instagram. The aim? To make a drink with the first nearly empty item in our fridge/pantry. And that item happened to be a bottle of soy sauce. 

Savoury cocktails are not really our thing, but boy, it definitely will be now. If you're looking to add some umami in your drink, soy sauce has that in spades. So what to pair it with? On that, we looked for savoury and spice-driven ingredients, such as the Adelaide Hills Distillery Green Ant gin, distilled in collaboration with Something Wild Australia with the latter harvesting the ants that go into the distillation. The gin itself is quite savoury and spicy, with distinct coriander-ish notes coming through which we think is from a combination of the ants and strawberry gum used. It's not your conventional juniper-led gin and is definitely distinctly Australian through its use of the native botanicals such as finger lime, lemon myrtle, pepperberry, the said strawberry gum and boobiala, a native species of juniper. We were lucky enough to score some fresh strawberry gum from the guys at Something Wild, which on their recommendation, we steeped in some simple sugar syrup for a few hours to give the syrup that herbaceous flavour. 

Working with all those profiles, we decided to make a twist on a Red Snapper, itself a twist on a Bloody Mary, which is quite an umami-rich cocktail through the use of tomato juice. We pureed and strained about 4 roma tomatoes, which was more than enough to make 2 of these cocktails, but you could quite easily use store bought tomato juice. 

Ingredients

• 45ml Adelaide Hills Distillery Green Ant Gin

• 60ml fresh tomato juice

• 15ml strawberry gum simple syrup

• 10ml lemon juice

• 5ml soy sauce

• 2cm (approx) lemongrass

Muddle the lemongrass. Combine all the other ingredients and shake all over ice and pour into a tumbler with one large cube of ice.

Garnish with coriander, some cherry tomatoes and a lemongrass stick. (pro tip, you could hollow out the lemongrass and use it as a straw!)