Is it really vodka … or something else?

Smoked salmon vodka?

Yes, it does exist.

So do vodkas formulated to taste like cookie dough, salted caramel, s’mores, peanut butter and jelly, buttered popcorn, glazed doughnuts, rhubarb, espresso, whipped cream, bubble gum, cola, cotton candy, cake, sweet tea, watermelon and cucumber-watermelon. It appears there is no limit.

Well, maybe there is.

“There are a few I can’t imagine playing around with, like the oyster from the Three Olives family,” said Gene Samuel, head bartender at Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill at Caesars Palace. “You have to go to the distillery to taste it, but it’s pretty nasty.”

“Adding too much glycerine is a turn-off as far as flavored vodkas go,” said Patricia Richards, master mixologist for Wynn Resorts. She remembers tasting a glazed-doughnut flavor. “You literally feel like you’re licking the top of the doughnut.” And artificial flavors, she said, make some vodkas taste like laboratory experiments — failed laboratory experiments, we presume.

But Richards and Samuel said flavored vodkas have their place.

“Definitely in Las Vegas, because you have that young partying element where they want to have a good time and try new things,” Richards said.

Among her favorites: Charbay Green Tea, Effen Cucumber, Stoli Vanil, Three Olives Triple Espresso, Absolut Pears, Grey Goose L’Orange and Ketel One Citroen.

“I’ve always used many on property, and I continue to do so,” she said.

She recently used Pearl Wedding Cake flavor to develop a chocolate-cake milkshake at Sugar & Ice at Wynn Las Vegas.

“Skyy Blood Orange vodka is very nice in a blood-orange cosmopolitan,” she said.

“Flavored vodkas are mostly about your imagination,” Samuel said. “I think of those mad men from MIT or Cal Tech. They’re in some room inventing it. They master it all. It’s a beautiful thing, because you can always pair an array of flavors to a vodka.”

Samuel pointed out that because we taste with our nose as well, the aroma of a vodka is important.

“With van Gogh PB&J, when you open that, you smell that, it takes you back to your childhood,” he said.

Which is kind of what inspired the Maloof family in choosing a flavor for its new Zing vodka brand.

“My mother used to bake red-velvet cake,” said Gavin Maloof. “My dad said one time, ‘Someday, somebody will make a liquor that tastes just like your mother’s red-velvet cake.’u2009”

So when the family, who had been in the liquor-distribution business for almost 60 years, decided to launch the vodka line, red velvet was the natural choice.

“We went back and forth probably for a month or two before we got the right formula,” Maloof said. “The higher the alcohol content, the less the flavor’s pronounced, so we did a 70-proof.

“It tastes just like red-velvet cake, actually. I drink it straight on the rocks. You can shoot it, drink it with orange juice, Sprite, Coke or Diet Coke. It’s not too sweet.”

Some flavored vodkas, Maloof said, are indeed too sweet and lead to flavor fatigue.

“We’ve had so many people tell us it tastes so good, it’s not too sweet, you can have three or four very easily,” he said. “And you’ll still want to have it the next day, just because of the way it tastes.”

Maloof said Zing is planning to introduce additional flavors in the next few months.

And if one thing is certain, it’s that other brands will as well.

“Bartenders being as creative as we are, it’s going to go a lot further,” Samuel said. “So just be on the lookout.”

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RED VELVET CHOCOLATE MARTINI

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Mix of dehydrated raspberries and cocoa nibs

2 ounces Zing Red Velvet Vodka

1 ounce Marie Brizard Chocolate Royale Liqueur

Fresh raspberry, for garnish

Rim a pre-chilled martini/cocktail glass with raspberry-cocoa-nib mixture. Set aside. Shake vodka and liqueur with ice and strain into rimmed glass. Garnish with raspberry speared on a long prism pick.

— Recipe by Francesco Lafranconi of Southern Wine & Spirits for Andrea’s and VDKA at Encore

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GOODBYE BLUE SKY

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1½ ounces Hangar One Maine Blueberry Vodka

½ ounce simple syrup

½ ounce lemon juice

Four to six fresh blackberries, muddled

Dash of Chambord black raspberry liqueur

Asti

Shake all ingredients except Asti with ice. Fine-strain through a double strainer and top with a little Asti.

— Recipe from Gene Samuel, Gordon Ramsay Pub & Grill