I’m having a party on Friday, and I thought it would be fun to make these Strawberry Granita cocktails. Also it’s very hot here so something granita based sounds very good.
The recipe calls for champagne, but I do have some friends coming who don’t drink or might not be drinking much, so I was wondering what I could use as a substitute for champagne for at least some batches. Would sparkling water be a fitting substitution?
Any alternate cocktail recipes are welcome, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic. I’m not a big drinker so I don’t know a lot about cocktail recipes but am very willing to learn.
The ones I’ve tried varied from flavorless to disgusting. None tasted like champagne. White grape juice tends to be pretty dry. I’d try mixing it 50/50 with seltzer water as a champagne substitute. Using ginger ale will introduce a flavor, ginger, that isn’t a part of the original recipe. Using straight grape juice may make your final product too “grapey.”
True about the ginger ale introducing another flavor, but I think that flavor would work great in this recipe. My only wonder is if it freezes any differently than an alcoholic champagne and whether it would affect the texture of the final product, but I’m guessing not. My other thought, though, was whether straight ginger ale might be too sweet for the recipe, but I still think a direct substitution would probably work well.
Just remember kids: all Champagnes are sparkling wines, not all sparkling wines are champagne.
Difference: COST and then some. OP, if you want to stick to a sparkling wine with alcohol to serve your guests drinks like this, please bear in mind your audience. Mostly, the booze is what they’ll be after, and the likelihood of someone you know picking out the Veuve Clicqout first batch of drinks over the Asti Spumanti ones in the second is slightly above zero. Barely.
Just use cheap, slightly sweet sparkling wine for this. It’d be like if you asked which high end vodka we’d recommend for a Strawberry Daquiri.
I’d pick the sparkling non-alcoholic cider over the ginger ale for most things where “fake champagne” was the goal. But maybe that’s no longer the goal.
‘Twang’ is a term for bitter or unpleasant tasting. It never occurred to me to be foreign.
Sorry, I don’t think I made it up. I made up a word in another thread today, so maybe I did.
I do believe I have heard ‘twang’ to describe country singers. It means something different for that usage.
I’ve found various granita cocktail recipes, I’d say they are somewhat between drinks and desserts, like slushies. The sparkling cider sounds like a good idea, I’ll look for that. And for anyone who doesn’t feel like drinking a dessert I’ll have enough champagne and sparkling cider they can just have that straight.
