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I heard you like stories. So I would love for a chance to tell you one. This one is a story about adventure and passion, grounded in the sense of warmth and comfort.
Mango is such a uniquely complex and irreplicable taste. Its flavor profile is remarkably sweet, floral and tart, with a finish of underlying citric brightness that brings a liveliness to round out the experience. It brings me back to those days when my mom used to chop up mangoes into cubes and pack them to bring for us when she would pick us up from school. I would have already exhausted myself from kicking shuttles after cramming for our entrance exam into sixth grade, and those mango chunks could have never tasted any sweeter. In the back of my mind, though, the thought of having to follow the same routine over and over again was starting to wear on me, and there was a sharp sourness that lingered throughout my time pushing through endless sleepless nights to study and write and memorize everything I could see on our practice exams and cheat sheets. But at the end of the week, me and my study friends would bike to a park close to our school, play badminton until our arms hurt, and share a plastic cup full of "chili-salt shaken mango", a staple of Saigon street food. It was such a bright and lovely memory, and having this fruit always brings me all the way home wherever I am.
Your favorite comfort drink, mango lassi, was a recent discovery, introduced to me by three of my close friends, Aishi, Nirmal, and Adittya, back in 2022. From making it way too many times throughout the two years following their introduction, I got unexpectedly good at making a drink I did not grow up with, and whenever we would hang out Aishi would have already bought all of the ingredients for me to make another batch. The drink had brought my friends so much joy, we were almost using it to soothe each other from the fact that Aishi was moving to Chicago for her newly-accepted PhD program. We would hang out to watch some TV regardless of what we decide to put on, and drink the impending sadness away. This dessert was an incredibly bittersweet drink for me, and it always reminds me of her, and especially Nirmal who practically grew up with it in Gujarat. My custom spin to the drink was always an addition of a light vanilla extract and a measurable amount of cinnamon and green cardamom, to add a warm bright floral touch and rounding out the experience. The drink brings way more joy and brightness to me than I would think to admit.
If I'm honest, I was inspired by my initial conversations with you. For people who leave really unique impressions in my mind, my artistic mind would have a flavor that I would associate our conversations and synergy with. For example, for one of my recent close coffee friends in Austin, I told her it gave me "strawberry". And for you, my mind gave me "mango". And I wanted to explore where my mind would take me.
I remembered having come across the mixologist Heena Kewalramani's work at a famous Indian bar in Thailand, where she crafted a "clarified mango lassi" cocktail that looked absolutely stunning from her website's showcase. And immediately I went to the drawing board, since I saw a few areas that I would have been able to optimize from her secret recipe if I were to tackle it myself. I didn't want to make an alcoholic cocktail, since it deviates quite a bit from the traditional welcoming and easy-to-drink nature of mango lassi. And I wanted a drink to be had at any point of the day, without a doubt or a second thought.
I studied techniques from a cocktail book I had been wanting to read for the longest time by a bartender in New York, and a few small winemaking techniques from various sources to properly extract and precisely adjust the acidity levels from the starting mango. I wanted to amplify the characters of the mango that focuses on a bright sweetness with a pop of tart in the aftertaste. I was still set on telling a story whose emotions I know you're likely also able to relate to. Rounding the sharp sweetness out with floral and warm notes of ground cinnamon and green cardamom, I wanted to highlight that emotional warmth and comfort you had mentioned having associated with mango lassi.
The "clarifying agent", the base of the main process that turns the drink into what you see right now, contains coconut cream, Greek yogurt, and pandan-infused soy milk. As you know, coconut cream and yogurt is shared by a lot of both Singaporean and Indian cuisine, and the pandan-infused soy milk, of course, is a distinctly Singaporean staple. The pandan soy was, by nature of the clarifying process I used, mostly muted from the presence of other flavors, but I thought it was appropriate given that you mentioned you were born in Maharashtra and are still very much Marathi at your core.
Topped up with a light infusion of saffron, I call this drink "The Highness". The finished product is royal yellow, bright, shiny, and is a slightly far wordplay on stars being high above in the night sky. It's also a humorous ironic play on the mango lassi being a such a common drink for quite literally everyone that theoretically takes so little time and effort to make, but instead I took a month to brainstorm this idea and pursue it as if it was some drink of the nobility.