The Elevated Spin Geoffrey Zakarian Puts On His Holiday Martinis

A good martini is a simple glass of gin (or vodka), vermouth, and often extra embellishments like orange bitters, a lemon, or even an olive. If you're hosting family or friends for the holidays, though, you might want to leave an impression by working with something more interesting. Instead of just garnishing a martini with a single olive, have you ever considered an olive oil martini?

During the NYC Food and Wine Festival, Chowhound got a chance to speak exclusively with restaurateur and TV personality Geoffrey Zakarian, the co-host of Food Network's "The Kitchen" and a very frequent judge on "Chopped." An expert in modern American cuisine, Zakarian's offered advice on baguettes to chicken Milanese and everything in-between, and on the topic of upgrading a normal martini during the holidays, Zakarian brought up olive oil martinis. According to Zakarian, he prepared some of these cocktails himself during the last holiday season: "You have to marinate the olive oil and the gin together. Then I strained it and I did a fat wash too. It was actually very good." An olive oil martini is similar to the dirty martini, which is made with olive brine, but you're working with slightly fancier ingredients here.

Olive brine is the usual mix of salt and water that you'd find in a container of olives – which absorbs the flavor of the olives — but this time you're instead working with olive oil, which is extracted directly from harvested olives. However, you're not just adding olive oil directly into the martini, which would mess up its texture. For an olive oil martini, you need to "fat-wash" it: this means mixing the spirit and the olive oil together, letting the mixture sit while the spirit becomes infused with the oil, and then chilling the mixture in the fridge until it's easy to skim off the solidified oil and fat.

You can also fat wash coconut oil, duck fat, or even butter into spirits for other oddball cocktails. For Geoffrey Zakarian's martinis, strain the oil and gin before chilling and skimming it later. The resulting olive oil martini tastes smoother than a saltier dirty martini, and some good extra virgin olive oil will give the martini a rich flavor. As for final garnishes to make the martini look nicer, Zakarian dismissed the idea, because the flavor is all you need: "You didn't have to. It was enough." That said, nobody would bat an eye if you added an olive.