Drink · 5 min · Amounts not specified
White Lady
Gin sour with orange liqueur. Shake hard. Egg white if you want foam — never assumed.
The sheet · 1 coupe · 5 min
easyWhy tonight. Gin sour with orange liqueur. Shake hard. Egg white if you want foam — never assumed.
What it needs
Nothing confirmed on your shelf yet — this list is the whole ask.
- gin
- cointreau
- lemon
Good if you have them, fine if you do not: eggs.
Method
- Gin, Cointreau and lemon in roughly two to one to one, shaken very hard.
- Egg white if you want the texture, and dry shake it without ice first for fifteen seconds to build the foam.
- Then shake again with ice. Doing it in the other order gives you a thin, sad head.
- Double-strain into a chilled coupe and let it settle a moment before the first sip.
Technique coach
What the method is trying to make happen
Sequence, correction, heat and texture, equipment workarounds, scaling, and component reuse are available with this cook sheet.
An educational pour, not a reprint of a licensed spec. No allergen or alcohol-safety claim.
Cook or pour it, then edit the shelf if you emptied a bottle or used the last of something.
The technique underneath this
- Building a sourSpirit, citrus and sugar in a fixed geometry, then adjusted for how strong the particular bottle in front of you is.thin and sharp · cloying · spirit disappears · no foam
- VinaigretteDispersing fat into acid so it stays dispersed for as long as dinner takes, which is all it has to do.separates immediately · greasy · too sharp · dull
Going wrong while you cook it? Say what it is doing and the triage will tell you what is happening, the smallest move, and the instinct to resist.
Watch the technique behind this one
Third-party video. Opens in a new tab — nothing is embedded and nothing is fetched from a video platform until you click.
Reviewed video matched to this method, not to the cuisine. Opens in a new tab.
- Cocktail structureHow to make a great Whiskey Sour - MasterclassBehind the BarA whiskey sour with egg white, including the dry shake that the foam depends on.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Eggs and custardEggs Part 2 | Basics with BabishBinging with BabishOmelets and poaching, with the failure modes shown rather than described.Link checked 2026-09-08
- Eggs and custardScrambled Egg Omelet - Food WishesFood WishesScramble against omelet on the same stove, which makes the heat-and-stirring tradeoff visible.Link checked 2026-09-08
Why each of these is on the list
What the ingredients are actually doing
- gin
- Botanicals over a neutral base, and every bottle draws its own map — juniper-forward gin makes a bracing drink, a softer modern one makes a floral one.
- cointreau
- Clean bitter orange with real sweetness behind it, so it does two jobs in a sour and lets you use less syrup.
- lemon
- Acid you add at the end, not the start.
Missing one of them? The substitutions are written against those jobs rather than against a chart, so they say what each replacement costs this dish in particular.
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Next
Cook it, then tell the shelf what you used.
The ranking is only as honest as the shelf behind it. Empty the cream, and everything that leaned on cream should stop being offered.