Soft Alibi: White Peach, Jasmine Tea, Verjus, and Pink Pepper Fizz

Bottled white-peach puree is fine, and I say that as someone who would very much rather it were not. The alternative, most of the year, is a hard peach that has been in cold storage since some other hemisphere’s summer, and no amount of enthusiasm turns that into a drink. A good bottled puree is picked ripe and sits there being ripe all year. Buy the one with peaches and maybe a little sugar on the label and nothing else.

For about six weeks in late summer, ignore all of that and use real ones. Peel them if you like, or do not; the skin adds a faint tannin that this drink can take.

Put the pepper on the peach

Pink peppercorns are almost entirely aroma. They are soft, resinous, faintly sweet, a little floral, and they have very little of the heat that actual pepper has. Drop them into a liquid and most of what makes them worth using dissolves into three ounces of cold tea and disappears.

So they go on the garnish. Crush them coarsely in a bowl with the back of a spoon — they collapse rather than shatter, so a grinder turns them to dust and a mortar is more force than they need. Cut the peach slice, brush one side with verjus so it is barely tacky, and press it face down into the crushed pepper. It will hold.

Now the pepper sits about an inch from the drinker’s nose for the entire drink, releasing steadily, while the liquid underneath stays exactly as delicate as it was designed to be. This is the split the drink wants: soft in the mouth, sharp in the air.

What goes in the glass

• 2 ounces chilled jasmine tea
• 1 ounce white-peach puree
• 3/4 ounce white verjus
• 1/4 ounce lemon juice
• 2 ounces sparkling water
• Pink peppercorns and peach slice

Note the ratio of verjus to lemon. Three to one, in favor of the low, dry, grape-derived acidity, with just enough lemon to put a point on it. Reverse those numbers and you get a peach lemonade, which is a fine thing to be and not this.

Jasmine tea should be brewed weaker than you would drink it — two minutes, water off the boil. Jasmine goes bitter and papery fast, and the floral note you are after is the first thing out of the leaves.

Method

Shake tea, peach, verjus, and lemon with ice. Ten seconds. The puree needs the agitation to properly suspend.

Strain into an ice-filled wine glass, through a fine sieve.

Top with sparkling water, down the side of the glass.

Garnish with the peach slice and the pepper pressed into it. Lay it on the rim or on the ice, pepper side up and facing the drinker.

Glass and ice

A wine glass rather than a highball, mostly for the bowl. Everything interesting about this drink happens above the liquid, and a tall narrow glass keeps the aroma trapped down where nobody benefits from it.

Cubes, not crushed. This is already a light drink and crushed ice would finish it off in about six minutes.

Ahead

Mix the still base up to one day ahead; add bubbles to order.

Bottle it, do not use a pitcher, and shake it before each pour. Peach puree is a suspension and it will settle into a sludgy layer at the bottom within about forty minutes, which means the first three drinks are thin and the last one is a smoothie. A bottle you can shake solves this in one second. A pitcher you have to stir solves it in four seconds and looks strange while you do it.

Crush the peppercorns ahead too, but not more than a couple of hours ahead. Slice the peaches at the last minute, brushed with verjus, which also keeps them from browning.

With alcohol, if someone asks

An ounce and a half of a light blanco tequila is the best version, because the vegetal note under the agave lines up with the pink pepper. Vodka disappears into it and adds nothing but a bill. A dry vermouth at an ounce works if you want to stay low-proof.

Drop the tea to 1 1/2 ounces if you add a spirit, or the glass overflows and the peach gets outnumbered.

Food

Prosciutto, burrata, cold summer things. Anything you would put a peach next to on a board.

Part of Drinks & Zero-Proof.