Banana-Cinna-Yinz Cocktail Recipe

Bananas can be tough to make into a syrup but we nailed it and made a great cocktail out of it.

I admit that I have a love-hate relationship with bananas. Most of the syrups I’ve had in the past have a chemical aftertaste that I’ve never been a fan of. I think that bias may spill over into my feelings for bananas in general. At the same time, the roasted banana and brown sugar milkshake at 24 Diner here in Austin is stellar. So they were my inspiration.

I wanted to caramelize the bananas so I coated them in brown sugar and threw them in a pan to caramelize. Unfortunately for me, the bananas had other plans. I couldn’t get the caramelization that I was looking for. But while they didn’t strictly caramelize like I was hoping, they cooked beautifully and the flavors really opened up. Then as the brown sugar turned into a nice caramel, the flavors joined together into a great reduction.

When it came time to make the reduction into a syrup, I adjusted the amount of sugar to take into account the added brown sugar. Instead of a straight 1:1 ratio of sugar to water for a normal simple syrup, I reduced it by half to a .5:1 ratio. That ended up being a perfect ratio once I took into account some of the caramel from the reduction. I may make that change to all of my fruit based simple syrups in the future, especially ones where I cook the fruit.

There is an interesting side note about those syrups. I actually made two batches of bananas: one didn’t caramelize much at all while the other got some nice browning. I ended up handling them differently because I just ran out of bottles, but the difference may have been really important.

The batch that effectively caramelized the best was immediately bottled and we felt like it had the best flavor by itself. The batch that didn’t get as brown sat in the fridge with the sugar solution overnight before I bottled it. That one was slightly stronger in banana flavor and held up better in the cocktails. So while the concept of caramelization is great, I found that if you go too far with it, you lose the unique flavor of the banana in the brown sugar caramel.

So now it’s time for the cocktail itself.

While we were testing these banana syrups in all of our potential cocktails, I really wanted to avoid rum. There’s nothing wrong with rum, but it just feels too obvious for a banana drink. I wanted to go to opposite extremes and tried mezcal and other liquors to varying degrees of success. Then I remembered just how well banana can work in rye. Once we broke out the Templeton Rye, the flavors were perfect. Everything clicked. I wanted a little more complexity to the flavor so I added in Aperol. Kelley’s suggestion to add cinnamon to it at the end really bumped it up a notch.

Long story short, the pain of making a home-made banana syrup is well worth the awesome result at the end of the day. You should absolutely give it a try. And don’t forget to watch the video after the recipe.