Ina Garten Elevates Whiskey Sours With Microwaved Bourbon Cherries

Ina Garten's cocktail credentials are legit and her cookbooks and television shows are chock full of great drink recipes. Who could forget her massive martini glass cosmopolitan that went viral during the 2020 lockdown? That recipe included a whopping three cups of booze for, presumably six people. Giant cocktails for a crowd are just another of her clever hosting tips that will get everything on the table at once.

The popularity of the whiskey sour has waxed and waned since the 1960s, but it's worth reviving a drink with centuries of history. Adding citrus juice to booze was a favorite of sailors for hundreds of years. They'd bring citrus on the boat to fend off scurvy, a nasty vitamin C deficiency. They'd also bring plenty of alcohol as it wouldn't spoil while at sea, and could very well have been the safest liquid to consume. Combining those two only made sense, and it caught on.

Whiskey sours became popular with the rest of us in the 1860s and quickly became a mainstay of bar menus, both in restaurants and at home. Garten's whiskey sour recipe is a simple version of this classic cocktail.

To top it all off, Ina Garten also gets back to a more traditional garnish in her recipe. She skips those impossibly bright red maraschino cherries for a more sophisticated marinated cherry. Dried cherries are soaked in bourbon to re-plump while maintaining plenty of natural sweetness. To speed up the process, Garten microwaves a half cup of dried cherries and four ounces of bourbon for one minute. Once they've cooled, she suggests piercing them with a skewer and adding it to the cocktail.

This cherry garnish is a far cry from what most of us fell in love with atop a Shirley Temple. Those artificially colored cherries have fallen out of favor in today's modern cocktail culture. In addition to reviving classic cocktails, bartenders have scoured the guide to cocktail cherries and rediscovered what a maraschino cherry was meant to be.

Imbibe tells us that Luxardo cherries have become the standard for modern maraschino cherries. These Italian cherries preserved in jars of sugar syrup and cherry juice have been produced for over a century. They provide sweetness, intense cherry flavor, and a hint of nuttiness. Not to mention, a satisfying treat at the bottom of many cocktails. However, they are very expensive.

Ina Garten's whiskey sour recipe is a perfect base for some simple variations. The most common include adding an egg white foam to make a version called the Boston Sour. Simply shake up the whiskey sour ingredients, egg white included, without ice until it's foamy, then add ice to the shaker and shake again until ice cold. You can serve it with or without the ice.

You could also try a New York Sour, which is just a whiskey sour that has some red wine floated on top. Some more creative variations include the Mott and Mulberry which subs maraschino liqueur and rye for whiskey and some tart apple cider for a portion of the citrus juice. Or, you can try an Ol' Pepper which uses spicy honey in lieu of sugar. 

Go ahead and get creative. Just be sure to make a big enough batch for friends, just like Garten.