The Sack Lunch Milk Punch

milk lunch sack punch

Greetings, clowns!

Hope you’ve had an awesome week. I mean, you all did eat a bunch of raw oyster Crunchwrap Supremes for Valentine’s Day, right?!

Today’s edition of the newsletter (which is for paid subscribers, psst) is about an interesting subject: cocktails. I have not delved into them terribly often on this newsletter, though I did invent a cocktail involving clam juice in 2020. I don’t mess with cocktails much because I do not need any more reasons to act like a jackass.

However, there is one type of cocktail that has been on my radar recently.

When journalist Adam Reiner was in the process of interviewing me for that profile in Bon Appétit that came out earlier this year, he jokingly asked if I’d ever made a clarified milk punch.

In case you’ve never seen or tried a clarified milk punch, they’re definitely one of the more interesting types of cocktails out there. They’re made with milk, but they’re not creamy cocktails, per se—essentially milk is used to clarify a drink in a somewhat gross process that involves deliberately curdling it with an acid component.

According to Wine Enthusiast, “The curds that form strip away bitter and astringent notes in the spirit and leave a supple texture and secondary arc of flavor.”

There’s nothing I love more than a supple texture, you guys. After you strain the curds out of the cocktail, you’ll end up with a clarified boozy drink that has a velvety quality to it, but doesn’t necessarily taste like milk.

I’d never made a milk punch because they sounded pretty complicated, but Adam and I joked that if I ever did, I should use Nesquik. I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of cocktail I could make with Nesquik, so I closed my eyes and did some free association. Like, what the fuck could I do with chocolate milk and alcohol?

That’s when memories formed in my head. The only thing I associate with chocolate milk is childhood. And when I was a kid, I used to occasionally drink chocolate milk with my lunch at school.

My sack lunches usually involved a sandwich of some sort, a salty snack like chips, occasionally a dessert, and yes, chocolate milk. It’s what I think of as the three-course meal for kids. Eureka! I could make a sack lunch-inspired drink containing all of those flavors!

I’d call it the Sack Lunch Milk Punch.