As you’re building your cocktail making skills, you’ll find a variety of shaking techniques which are useful to know. Shaking ingredients with ice helps to dilute and chill your drinks, with the water that comes from the melted ice bringing the cocktails into balance. Most often you’ll see instructions in cocktail recipes to simply shake the ingredients with ice, but there are other methods to know about as well.
If you’re looking for a light and frothy texture, for example, you’ll often see instructions to either dry shake or to whip shake your ingredients. We’ll explain how to whip shake — a technique not often seen outside of bars in New York, but handy to know about — so you can get perfect, fluffy drinks every time.
How to whip shake a cocktail
In most cocktail shaking, you use a good amount of large ice cubes in your shaker. Once you’ve shaken for around 15-20 seconds, you strain out the drink and discard the remaining ice. In a whip shake, however, you do things differently. You put just a very small amount of ice in the shaker, and then shake until it is completely dissolved.
The key to getting this right is to not use too much ice, or you’ll be shaking for ages and your drink will be overly diluted. You need to use small format ice as well, as this will melt quicker due to having a proportionally larger surface area. So when whip shaking, add just a couple of small ice cubes or a small amount of ice pebbles to the shaker.
As you shake this ice until it is completely dissolved, it adds a lot of aeration into the drink. This aeration gives a cocktail a light, fluffy texture, but keeps the dilution of the drink low so it still has plenty of flavor.
When to whip shake and when to dry shake
You can’t just throw any ingredients into a shaker with small ice slivers and expect them to come out frothy though. You need ingredients which fluff up well, such as egg white, aquafaba, or cream, to get a foamy look and texture to the finished drink. These ingredients can trap tiny air bubbles, giving them a lighter, airy texture.
But these are also the kinds of ingredients you’ll typically see used in a dry shake technique, where you first shake them with no ice whatsoever to fluff them up before adding ice and shaking again to chill and dilute.
So when to whip shake and when to dry shake? Most recipes will specify what is likely to work best with your ingredients. You will find some recipes which use whip shaking for particularly hard to mix ingredients though, like the heavy cream of a grasshopper or juices like orange juice which can be lightened if not fully frothed by the use of a whip shake.
So feel free to experiment with different shaking techniques but when in doubt, follow the instructions on the recipe.
