Chris Amirault

Say more, Homaro. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? And how do you address critics who see this as merely a prank?

I've been thinking about this topic quite a bit lately, as I'm doing research on two projects (an article on Khmer home cooking and a classic cocktail course) that require me to develop a keener sense of Chris's question: I just finished the BarSmarts Wired course, and they approach this very systematically indeed. You're expected to line up a few examples of a given ingredient -- gin, say -- and taste each one to compare. Meanwhile, they give you a list of terms to use as you taste: flavor components (the big five -- sweet salt, sour, bitter, & umami -- plus specifics like vanilla, lemon, pepper, etc.), textures, and intangibles. Specific spirits have their own more detailed lists; for gin, it's clean or dirty dry or slightly sweet smooth or aggressive gentle or powerful fruity, floral, vegetal, earthy and/or herbal rich or thin soft, sharp, or burning light-, medium- or full-bodied oily The idea is to link sensory experiences that are often ineffable with the terms that break that input into components, terms with which quality cocktail professionals are expected to be familiar. Ultimately, those terms are to be used to talk with customers about preferences, to build new and better drinks, and to make adjustments based on what you think tastes good. The nice thing about thinking through spirits is that you can't settle into a simplistic understanding of how things taste. Citrus is not merely sour; it can also be sweet, oily, floral, powerful, sharp... on and on. (I've been seeing that simplistic understanding in descriptions of Khmer ingredients: sdao is a lot more than "bitter," for example.) Sipping on Plymouth and Tanqueray in comparison and asking yourself these questions forces you to concentrate on those components and articulate what you taste to yourself.

Made the leen yeep joong today and documented it. Here's the set up with a basic chicken filling (including mushrooms, onions, garlic, ginger, water chestnuts), the rice, and the lunch container my wife will be using for school. The filling was a bit wet when I finished it, so I reduced the sauce by half before adding it back to the filling. (Good move, as the packets has just the right level of moisture in them.) In response to the question above, I made 9 Zojirushi "cups" of rice, in two batches; that's about 3 1/2 pounds of rice (6 ounces per cup). That rice made about 20 packets. And I cooked it all using the regular "sweet" setting on the Zojirushi, which turned out rice that was perfect for steaming later. The leaves I got weren't in the best shape. After trimming off the stem end, I had about three packet wraps per leaf -- unless the leaf had serious damage, as many did: I used the lunch cup as a shaping base: Layer of rice: Layer of filling: Top layer of rice, then fold and tie (badly; this was #1): I steamed them for 30 minutes, again in two batches: Results: I'm very happy with the way that they turned out. The filling and lotus suffuse the rice, and the texture of the rice is excellent. Thanks to everyone here for their posts, which really helped a lot.

An entire episode devoted to drinking, from mother's milk to brandy to vodka to the bitter tea of disappointment and loss. Best booze line from, of course, Sterling: "Not the Stoli." I predict bumper stickers and T-shirts a la "More Cowbell!" LA Times claims that the Stoli placement wasn't paid for -- another sign that this show's commitment to historical drink accuracy is unparalleled.

Go to the generic site homepage: http://www.barsmarts.com/ Then click "skip intro" and you should see the login prompts.

Is this the stuff in the squat little bottle with passion fruit on the label? Any good?

Burgers tonight, and I'm trying to decide between doing the full-on breakfast burger (bacon, egg, and cheese) and something quasi-Korean (kimchi, ssamjang, some quick pickles). Surely I'm not the only person grilling burgers in this crazy heat....

The prep part is easy if you neglect the usable product concerns. Just cut it into the largest rectangular block you can fit (and buy pieces that are conducive to this treatment), then cut in each dimension for slices, julienne, and, finally, mince or chop. There's a great illustration of this in Barbara Tropp's first book if you have it handy.

You've got two of the three basic mirepoix components still available (onion and celery). Play around with substitutions: I wonder if red bell pepper, for example, would be a non-lousy sub. Actually, bell pepper probably is on the nix list, which seems to be "vegetables starting with A, B, C, and P." Maybe you can use favas? Jicama? Zucchini?

I have really enjoyed reading through this topic and learning about everyone's approach to joong & joongzi! Now for a couple of questions. I am planning to make a large batch of leen yeep joong this weekend in preparation for a family member who loves them and is heading off to graduate school. I'm estimating that I'll want to make 4" x 4" packages. Can anyone give me a sense of the amount of dried glutinous rice needed per package? In addition, for those of you with neuro fuzzy Zojirushi rice cookers, do you use the underdone (or whatever it's called; I'm at work) setting for the rice you'll be later steaming in the lotus leaves?

Finished up the course and passed the final exam. I can't speak for anyone else, but I found the course really fantastic, not only for brushing up on old skills and knowledge, learning some new tricks, and -- for this home enthusiast -- learning a ton in Module 4 about quality bar operation. Like others here, I also found a (very) few burps in the online material, but I found that the help desk team was extremely responsive to and appreciative of all of my feedback. The written materials are outstanding, and though I hate tests more than puncture wounds, the test questions were nearly always fair. Finally, as someone gearing up to teach my own cocktail course, I was glad to participate in a very high quality program and learned a lot about how they approached this vast topic. I can't say whether cocktailian pros would learn too much from it, but I would definitely recommend it for anyone who wants to get their bar staff up to speed quickly. You could, for example, supplement the online components with in-house trainings, tastings, and so on. And, for other home obsessives like me, it's just great.

I thought that last night's finale was the best Top Chef episode of any season: great challenge, great dishes, great stories. Bravo indeed.

Interesting notes about citrus from the (excellent, btw) BarSmarts Wired program on the subject:

Yikes. I don't want to condemn the New Pal! It just happens not to be a good drink with those components; the recipe called for the decidedly less assertive Herbsaint, and I wanted to fiddle. Perhaps, someday, the New Pal and I can be friends....

Yeah, the combo of the Marteau, Peychaud's, and Campari was the culprit here. I really wanted to like it, but it was just a discordant glass of slop.

Got a bottle of Inner Circle green, which is blowing me away; I've been nursing 1 oz shots for hours while doing routine cooking and cleaning. So, after a misbegotten attempt at a New Pal, I went old school with a Rum Old Fashioned using Adam's Boker's bitters (about five dashes for ~3 oz rum). 115 proof rum on rocks can take this heat and humidity, too.

Tried a New Pal from Art of the Bar, an equal parts Negroni riff with rye subbed in for the gin, Peychaud's, and a bit of pastis. I used Rittenhouse BIB, M&R rosso -- and a new, prized bottle of Marteau absinthe. Wrong, wrong, wrong: the ridiculously complex Marteau muddied the whole thing, leaving a sloppy, unpleasantly bitter mess. A less spicy rye (Jim Beam?), the aforementioned Herbsaint, and perhaps a wee bit less of the Campari... maybe this works. But as made above, it all went down the drain.

I think that this is an excellent point, and it could apply to a wide variety of items besides Plymouth Sloe Gin. And, to add a voice from the non-NYC northeast, here in Providence we still cannot get many of these items consistently or at all. And finding them overrepresented on a restaurant's cocktail menu? I wish we had that problem....

A few more questions I've been asking myself: What's the plan and clean-up materials (paper towels, mop) for spills? What is the function of drinking the drink? Of a spirit tasting? What should people be doing when they taste something? How should you communicate that? One-to-many lecturing is deadening no matter how fascinating the content. What other options are there for engagement: materials; turn and talk to your neighbor; small group discussions; Q&As; whole-group polling (who thinks it's too sour? too sweet? just right?).

To say the least, I'm not a regular reader of the American Enterprise Institute's journal, The American, but my Twitter account has been red hot with talk about an article appearing there with the provocative title, "The Omnivore's Delusion." Written by Missouri farmer Blake Hurst, it's a pretty devastating critique of what he considers the sweeping and ill-informed generalizations that can be found in Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma. I have to admit that I found the piece quite gripping. Hurst starts with an all-too-familiar anecdote, in which he sits in front of a "self-appointed expert" holding court on CAFOs and artificial fertilizers during a long airplane ride (boy, have I been in that seat). He then proceeds to lay out a compelling argument -- at least for this inadequately informed reader who's neither farmer nor agriculture journalist. Rapping on Pollan's knuckles is, of course, a means into a larger argument, which Hurst lays out with quasi-folksy, quasi-Tarantino-y tales about sows eating their piglets and weasels "exsanguinating" turkeys. But amid the "farming is dirty and bloody" corn-pone are many tough assertions that he claims Pollan et al get wrong or leave out. Meanwhile, he's busy dishing out classic market pragmatism about costs, production levels, and the global food supply, as well as smacking down wrong-headed assertions involving black dirt, animal-waste fertilizer, and -- this one's a howler -- using home compost in agri-business. I read and truly enjoyed Omnivore's Dilemma, and like a good food-focused, Whole Foods shopper I've talked a lot about the book with friends, trying to figure out whether it should have any impact on me as a consumer and eater. (Whatever I thought then -- full disclosure -- the answer is no impact at all.) However, many of the questions that nagged me while reading it were questions about the impact on farmers: how are production levels affected by these proposals? where do market forces fit in here? what happens when you bring things to scale? Maybe I've not read material that addresses these questions, but I was very interested to read Hurst's answers. What I'd really like to see now are responses to the piece that take on the specific claims Hurst is making. So far, in my readings, his opponents are swinging wildly and striking out. This piece by Tom Philpott leads with a cringeworthy, hyperbolic photo illustration comparing corn farming protests to the Tiananmen Square uprising -- ouch. Philpott then (1) declares his happiness that the debate is taking place, (2) states, "I don’t have the time or energy right now to take it on point by point," and (3) trots out three items he claims Hurst left out (petroleum scarcity, subsidies, and ecological blowback -- the latter of which Hurst does bring up, btw). Meanwhile, in a piece called "Agri-Intellectual Reason" (click it -- I didn't make that title up), Christopher Bedford quotes Christopher Cook (of Diet for a Dead Planet fame), who states that "Hurst conflates and confuses the personal with the systemic" and references corporate disinformation campaigns. Bedford then suggests some old strategies (stand with small farmers, vote at Walmart with your wallet) without addressing Hurst's points at all. I have no horse in this race, but as someone who cares about food I find it depressing that no one seems to be taking on Hurst's arguments without relying on every logical fallacy in the book: guilt by association, red herrings, personal attacks. (If you really want to see it play out, read the NY Times comment area about the piece.) If these issues are, truly, are the forefront of the global agricultural movement, then an actual debate about the points Hurst raises seems in order. Any takers? Any other resources out there that take this piece on head first?

Riviere.

Exploring the smoke & St. Germain connection some more.... I think Islay scotch is just too smoky, and doesn't mix well. So I tried using mezcal instead: 2 Monte Alban mezcal .75 St. Germain .5 lemon juice I call it the Desert Flower. This works much better than scotch and has become quite a hit with my friends. ← While trying to find ways to use some mezcal I got, I found this site and this recipe from Misty Kalkofen of Drink in Boston. She has a 1:1 ratio of mezcal and St. Germain; Eric Felten of the WSJ goes with 1 1/4 mezcal to 3/4 St. Germain (so says Lauren Clark at the great drinkboston blog). I made it Eric's way tonight, and I'd dial back the St. G even more (1 1/2 mezcal to 1/2 St. G?) and add a bit of cane syrup for body. Here's Felten's version with my notes: 1 1/4 oz mezcal (I used Real de Magueyes) 3/4 oz St. Germain 1/2 oz Punt e Mes 1/4 oz lemon Shake, (fine) strain, over big rocks with a lemon twist.

That Real de Magueyes Añejo Mezcal is fantastic, and for less than $30, a steal. ETA that I've been fiddling around with drinks found at this massive site.

Were all other items kept the same, or did the citrus switch as in Phil Ward's Final Word, which subs in lemon for lime for the rye. (Or is it Final Ward?)

Lunch note: that pork & eggplant dish reheats extremely well.