dry shake , also more obscurely known as the “mime shake,” is a technique devised to emulsify egg whites by shaking all the ingredients without ice. All the ingredients are first put into a cocktail shaker and shaken vigorously without ice. This is then immediately followed by a second, more traditional shake that utilizes ice. Agitating all of the ingredients together in this manner enables the proteins in the eggs to denature and aerate, creating a foam akin to a meringue. Excluding ice from the process allows for more time to unfurl the protein bonds of the eggs without the limiting factor of dilution. Though not the creator of this technique—the instructions for the Hotel Georgia cocktail in Ted Saucier’s 1951 Bottoms Up noted that the technique gives the drink “a nice top,” and a version of it had been recommended the year before by Henri Babinski to take the funky edge off of “paraty,” or cachaça—bartender Chad Solomon, formerly of New York’s Milk & Honey and Pegu Club, discovered it independently and helped popularize the dry shake in the early 2000s. See Milk & Honey and Pegu Club. Popular thought maintains that the dry shake produces a loftier foam than the traditional shake with ice, although in recent years the “reverse dry shake” has seen an uptick in usage.
See also eggs.
Ali Bab [Henri Babinski]. Gastronomie pratique, 9th ed. Paris: Flammarion, 1950, s.v. “Cocktail au paraty.”
Kamholz, Roger. “Is There a Better Way to Make an Egg White Cocktail?” Punch, March 13, 2017. https://punchdrink.com/articles/how-to-make-egg-white-cocktail-reverse-dry-shake-flip/ (accessed March 3, 2021).
Morgenthaler, Jeffrey. The Bar Book. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2014.
Saucier, Ted. Bottoms Up. New York: Greystone, 1951.
By: Chloe Frechette