Chris Amirault

Butt question for y'all. I brined a bone-in, skin-on 10 lb butt for 24 hours and am preparing to smoke it tomorrow (or late tonight to start). It was too big to brine in the fridge, so I put it in a cooler with lots of ice (which I've done in the past to good effect). This morning, as I prepared it to go in the fridge to dry off on a rack, I noticed it was warmer than I'd like: 55F about 3" in (I didn't try to go to the core by digging a hole). Knowing that temp affected the brining adversely (warmer is bad for penetration), I'm assuming that I can still bring it down to below 40F in the fridge (or even freezer, following Susan's tip) and then smoke and cook it safely. It was sitting in brine the whole time, after all, and the internal temp of my pulled pork has always been well over 200F. If you think I need to worry about this, please give me more information rather than less. I couldn't find much information on line, as the sites I found tended to emphasize finished temperature, not temp during prep (nor in a brine). Thanks in advance.

euuuuwwwwwww! Looks like I won't be buying that chicken any more! Even if the smell is not because of feces, it will still remind me of what you wrote! ← Yeah, sorry, Rona. I figured that was going to happen. But, hey, you don't eat used cat litter, right? No great loss to the diet, then, removing ammonia-flavored items.

It seems to me that someone trained adequately with a (western) chef's knife would find a santoku awkward in terms of balance, blade shape, weight, and many other things. But, hey, I can't use 'em either, so that's my excuse.

I'm bumping this up because I spent several hours reading TCB while my daughter and her friends ran amok in the Boston Children's Museum. It's quite a remarkable book, and would be, I think, one of the short list of books that would be good introductions for new cooks who might harbor ambitions. The sections by Trotter on vegetables, Herme on pastry, and several others are fantastic. One significant problem, however: the sections on "ethnic" foods. Some are passable introductions to the cuisine, but most struggle with the impossibility of encapsulating the entirety of, say, Indian, Japanese or Chinese cuisine in a few pages. The ones that work for me include the section on Thai food by David Thompson -- but that section would reduce a novice to tears, I'm sure.

I think that releasing the oils from the limes requires more pressure by far than doing the same with delicate mint leaves. So, yes, I'd say limes with some energy (& with granulated sugar, if you've got the time) and then the mint gently.

I have no authoritative answer here, but I did some reading around, and, well... you might want to read this article, from Science News online: Sounds like chicken feces produces a remarkable amount of ammonia. I'm no scientist but, if the chicken meat smells like ammonia and chicken feces smells like ammonia....

Thanks for the snaps, John and Wendy! Any more info on the "Lost Ingredients" seminar?

Several quick points on the lobster matter: Fat Guy, being from NYC, is ill-informed on this particular issue. Any New Englander knows that knuckles are the best eating. That's pretty gross, it's true. Even more gross is when you are cleaning the meat out of a freshy dismembered lobster: the translucent flesh twitches even when the limb is detached from the rest of the body but is still sitting in a tail or claw. To make lobster sausage, for example, requires scraping fidgeting meat out of shells. I've killed a lot of lobsters in my time and none have ever smelled bad. Briny to me isn't bad, however. If it smelled like a good oyster tastes, that's fine. If it smelled like a bad oyster after three days on your porch in the sun, toss the expensive garbage. David Foster Wallace wrote about this in Gourmet -- an article that featured prominently in our eG Spotlight with Ruth Reichl; click here for that particular topic.

Thanks, John and Sam. Last night's drink was a White Lady, so I didn't have a chance to practice. Sam, this point made a lot of sense to me: Just seems smart.

Thanks for the props -- but I don't deserve them. I'm trying to knock off a decent imitation; Audrey Saunders of Pegu Club in Manhattan is the Van Gogh to my paint by numbers efforts. Having said that: what rum did you use? Interesting idea. I'd think the rum and the Pernod would bang heads.

That sounds great, Nathan -- and similar to the gingered gentleman that I've been fiddling with for a while. Not sure if the rye/ginger combo would work as well as the bourbon/ginger one does.

Thanks, Katie and Sam: I don't really understand that. I've been muddling mint in 6+ oz of liquid for these French Pearls without difficulty or mess. What do you mean by "screw something up"? I'm not sure what could happen in this situation. That makes sense. Yep: it's one I picked up from johnnyd here, in his preparation of caipirinhas. Interesting question. Perhaps I need to return to the lab....

As I've been tinkering with the French Pearl (click, s'il vous plait), I've noticed the benefits of muddling the mint in a solution of the liquids, instead of in a dry shaker; the flavor of the mint seems rounder, richer. My rudimentary explanation is that more flavor is extracted from the mint if it has more time for contact with the variety of liquids, each of which can act as a different sort of solvent. It also seems to me that muddling first at room-temperature then shaking with with ice gives two different temperatures at which that flavor extraction can occur. To be clear: I'm not talking about a Seattle muddle with ice here (which doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, I'll add). It's more an intermediate step, muddling with just the liquids, not the ice. I can't find any reference to -- or, more to the point, explanation of or justification for -- this sort of technique in Regan's Joy, Wondrich's Esquire Drinks, or DeGroff's Craft. Am I missing something? Sam, do you have a better explanation -- or am I just off my nut?

Another French Pearl update. No change in proportions from this post, but I have noticed a benefit to a change in order. Instead of muddling in an empty shaker, I've been muddling in the room-temp liquids, the logic being that having the mint come in contact with as many different compounds as possible ahead of time increases the benefits of muddling. So: 2 oz Plymouth gin scant 1/2 oz lime 1/2 oz 1:1 simple syrup 1/8 oz Pernod 10-12 mint leaves Add all liquids to the shaker. Gently but thoroughly muddle the leaves. Shake with cracked ice, strain with a fine mesh sieve, garnish with a mint spring. I know feel confident to ask: Audrey, is this anywhere near correct?

So my wife calls me and asks if I want to get a drink after work, and we decide to head over to Temple to check it out. We walk down the dimly lit black stairs to the bar, sit down, and thus begins a very bizarre experience. The comfortable copper bar is just adequately appointed, particularly for one claiming to be cocktailian. I asked about the aforementioned bitters, and the bartender had to ask someone else to find out that they had Angostura, Peychaud's, and Stirrings blood orange. There were lots of vodkas, bourbons, and scotches on hand, of course, and single bottles of Cynar, Luxardo Maraschino, Fernet Branca, and a few other interesting things boded well. (Of course, in this town, Italian bottles behind the bar usually means you're prepared for the older guys, not that you're mixing interesting cocktails, but I digress.) The cocktail menu is heavy on cute vodka and rum drinks, often with flavored versions or "Bacardi Silver" features, but a few old school stand-bys (Sidecar, Sazerac) and some inventions were also on the list. My wife decided to try a Caipirinha with the LeBlon cachaca, which turned out just ok. The LeBlon has a very round profile -- we asked for neat tastes and both noticed a ripe-banana flavor and feel -- that throws off the balance of the drink if you are heavy with the simple syrup or light on the lime. It was cold, due to the presence of ice in the drink itself. (More on temperature shortly.) When I noticed that their Sazerac used Maker's Mark, I asked about available ryes. In response, I got sheer confusion. Of the four bartenders available, not a single one of them seemed to know the answer -- and two of the bartenders didn't know what rye was. It was a tremendously awkward moment, like an employee at Tiffany asking you what you meant by "platinum"; I even made a joke about being from "corporate" to check on their training in the hopes of lightening the mood and establishing something remotely like rapport. (Didn't work.) Since Sazeracs were listed on their cocktail menu, and since I have a pretty well-developed relationship to the drink (click), I thought, what the hell. I didn't want something too sweet, however, so I asked the bartender to substitute the Wild Turkey 101 for the Maker's Mark. He went down to the end of the bar to make the drink, so when it arrived, I asked him what he had done. Muddled the Peychaud's in sugar, rinsed the glass, 2 oz of bourbon... all steps reported dutifully. He placed it in front of me. I then had the most disappointing cocktail I've had in years. The bourbon had way, way too much sugar in it, and it also had way, way too little Peychaud's in it. As a result, it was cloyingly sweet. The lemon twist had just been plopped into the glass; there was no lemon oil atop this beverage. He may well have rinsed the glass, but I picked up nothing. And -- shockingly -- the drink was at room temperature. It wasn't chilled at all. I truly hope that this was a very strange aberration, a start-up fluke, but I fear it wasn't. We watched other drinks prepared before our eyes, and in the half hour we were there we both felt that there was a general lack of regard for the craft. The lack of awareness about the ingredients present (and not present) and poor balance suggests inadequate training; the warm drink suggests inadequate care. I write this with real sadness. There remains, as far as I can tell, no real place in Providence where we can pull up a stool or chair and get, consistently, a properly made cocktail. (Well, besides my house.) I'll admit that my disappointment is heightened by high expectations -- but everything above is stone-cold accurate. Too bad that Sazerac wasn't.

Sam, how does material affect thermal mass? I'm wondering here not only about glass but also metal.

For a while now, I've kept a supply of 10-12 cocktail glasses in my freezer, taking them out one or two at a time just before pouring the cold mixed cocktail into the glass. Due to budgetary constraints and a desire to have properly sized glasses, I had stocked up at thrift stores using what appear to me to be restaurant-quality glasses: thick, non-leaded glass in old-school 3-4 oz sizes and shapes. Lately, however, I've found myself freezing up some glasses that have thinner glass (I found a neat one that looks like eje's here, for example), and they've revealed a problem -- or, rather, a benefit of the thicker glasses that I hadn't appreciated heretofore. When the cocktail gets down to that <32F temperature that causes the shaker to freeze to my hand (a sure sign I'm done) and I pour it into the cold thick glass, the drink not only stays colder longer but produces the wonderful frosting effect that the sub-freezing alcohol mixture creates. The thinner glasses seem to heat up in the air more quickly and rarely produce that frost; if they do, it's shortlived. This seems to be a situation in which cheaper, lower quality glasses achieve a crucial effect that more expensive, higher quality glasses cannot. Am I missing something? Do these effects all shift if you're using Baccarat crystal instead of restaurant supply warhorses? Or is thicker just better?

FWIW, there are several places down here in RI where you can get it, including IM Gann in Cranston and Joyal Liquors in West Warwick.

While hearing Thomas Dolby shouting "SCIENCE!" in my head, I tried mixing M&R dry vermouth with (gulp) Pernod. It was yellow. Added water. Yellow. Perchance, did dad grab sweet vermouth instead of dry?

Step-by-step report with photos, if possible, please -- particularly if you're going to take Adam's careful sugggestions to heart (or bone).

Just read this rave about Maggie Longo at Temple, the new restaurant in the refurbished Masonic Temple, from Gail Ciampa in the ProJo (click for article): I've never had cocktails at 10, so I can't comment on her past skills, but I'm eager to check this place out given this single paragraph. Hell, most bartenders I know in Providence don't have any bitters, mich less "a variety." (Good thing they're flavored bitters; those unflavored bitters aren't very bitter.) And I've complained recently about the lack of tiki drinks at the "tiki bar" at Big Fish. Has anyone been to Temple to tipple? What say ye?

Moderator's note: I've just split off three posts discussing the Chicago planning into a new topic here. Feel free to add your posts for next year's event to that topic. Thanks!

I described a mistake, of sorts, while shopping at the Boqueria in Barcelona in this Daily Gullet piece. A tasty mistake, to be sure.

Since diving head-first into cocktail mania a couple of years ago, I've built in my head a listing of where one can find unusual liquor items throughout the state: bitters, ryes, and other odd things beyond the usual massive vodka or scotch selection. I'm starting to worry that I'll lose it as I grow more addled, so here's my first stab at it: IM Gan, Cranston: Peychaud's bitters, some Marie Brizard items, Plymouth gin (at $11/bottle!) Another Liquor Store, Cranston: Regan's Orange Bitters (on my suggestion, as it turns out) Town Wine and Spirits, East Providence: Rittenhouse, Sazerac, and Wild Turkey ryes, Luxardo maraschino Joyal's Liquors, West Warwick: Rittenhouse, Sazerac, and Wild Turkey ryes, Junipero gin (and others), Taylor's velvet falernum Gasbarro's, Providence: Luxardo maraschino, Punt e Mes, Fernet Branca If you've made any stellar cocktailian finds in the RI/SE MA area, please share. And if you're looking for something in particular, ask here!

I've been screwing around with this spicy vodka infusion and came up with the following unnamed concoction: 1 oz Laird's 7 1/2 apple brandy 1 oz Knob Creek bourbon 1 oz infusion 3/4 oz demerara syrup dash Angostura bitters It's a bit sweet, so I'm thinking of cutting back on the syrup or using rye instead of bourbon. But it moves nicely through the spice into the apple at the finish. It might be a good Thanksgiving cocktail....