8 Sept 2026
Passion fruit sucks
It’s just such a pain.
First of all it’s very expensive. I just paid $3 per passion fruit. Second of all it’s a pain to cut into. The outside is relatively tough and if you’re not careful your knife can slip on it. There usually isn’t even that much fruit inside of it. Maybe if you have good passion fruits they’re full, but mine only had ~1oz of fruit in each. Lastly, the tasty bit is attached to these crunchy seeds. Fine if you’re eating it but less so if you’re trying to make a drink with them.
But they do have one redeeming quality: They’re very tasty.
The pornstar martini1
The pornstar martini is a fascinating drink. It does things that most cocktails just don’t do. Passion fruit is relatively uncommon flavour in general (at least in my Western view) and that goes for cocktails as well. Not only that but it uses vanilla too! I can’t think of another cocktail off the top of my head that calls for vanilla. That’s not even it, it’s the only cocktail I know of that is supposed to come with a separate drink. You are canonically supposed to serve a small glass of sparking wine with the martini.
What I will say is that it is worth it. Somehow the passion fruit and vanilla work together wonderfully. Unfortunately I found that you need about one passion fruit per martini, and those come in at $3 each for me, making this a particularly expensive cocktail to make at home.
In defense of vanilla
I’m not sure how exactly vanilla came to be known as the “boring” or the “default” choice2 but it really does not deserve its reputation. Have you ever had unflavoured ice cream? I’ll tell you what it’s not: it’s not vanilla. The flavour of vanilla is comprised of over 250 compounds3. It’s shockingly complex and delicious. Unfotunately the good name of vanilla has been sullied by cheap vanilla products, which might not use real vanilla.
Artificial vanilla isn’t bad per se, it just isn’t the real thing. Usually it’s just vanillin in alcohol with some colouring4. Vanillin is indeed the main flavour compound in vanilla, but on its own it lacks the complexity brought by the hundreds of compounds found in real vanilla. This is acceptable in baked goods where most of those compounds decompose under the heat, but the difference is immediately noticeable in a cold product. If you’ve had a quality vanilla ice cream you know exactly what I mean.
It’s well at home in the pornstar martini. Use real vanilla here.
There is probably an interesting story to tell here, but I don’t know it.