catscandal

I feel like I'm the only person on earth who loves campari but doesn't drink negronis. It's all about campari highballs in my book. EDIT: as a followup to the measurement conversation, I did pick up an oxo conical jigger the other day and my life has been greatly improved already.

you're probably right. the book did say it was an "adapted" recipe. it was probably written something like 1.5oz bourbon .25oz sweet vermouth 1 barspoon maraschino 1 dash orange bitters but regan likes a more hefty pour of whiskey in his drinks (his sazerac recipe calls for 3oz of rye ) so he scaled it up to 2oz despite the awkward results. metric seems unlikely since 10mL is an equally awkward amount. my brief google is not revealing the original recipe, but i think we can assume. and you are also correct about the oxo jigger. maybe i'll pick one up, i'm well sick of mine. not strange at all! my teaspoon takes almost as much abuse as my vegetable peeler (which i may as well rename the lemon twist maker... it hasn't seen a carrot in months). but if i ever wrote down a drink recipe that required the use of two tsp of anything, i'd scale it up or down. bartenders are busy people, they shouldn't need to pour five times in a three-ingredient drink. it's a manhattan variation, not tiki.

tried a Deadly Sin tonight which i had never heard of before reading the joy of mixology but i thought it was a very intelligent use of maraschino. although the given proportions were a pain in the something or other. what jigger has a 1/3oz measurement? i ended up using teaspoons =P given how much i enjoyed this i MUST try a red hook, but i promised myself i wouldn't buy any more aromatized wine until i finish off the sweet vermouth i have. and then my heart will be absolutely shredded trying to decide between dubonnet, punt e mes, and vya sweet.

picked up my first bottle of maraschino ever, and a bottle of beefeater because i just ran out of gin and what's the point of buying maraschino if i can't have an aviation? i made a ritz of new york (from regan's recipe) to try it out, and while my hand may have been a bit heavy with the champagne, i'm pleased at how much the scant 2 dashes of maraschino adds to the drink. tasting the stuff neat was a bit much though.

Thanks, I'm not a big fan of chipotle (depending on the application), but I'm fairly sure I should be able to get some cascabel when I'm in Watsonville this weekend, I'll give them a try. I don't own any Kennedy books myself, but I'll check with some friends, I'm sure someone does.

yes, i did mean dried, just not powdered i've never really heard of anyone using fresh peppers in adobo

kinda. you split them, seed and devein them, toast and soak them, then blend them to make the actual marinade. i live in california, so we don't really use a lot of powdered peppers, as whole ones are readily available everywhere.

I just took my first swing at making my own adobo marinade from Bayless's recipe in Authentic Mexican. It was most delicious, but it was a little off from the adobo of the restaurant I was hoping to imitate, particularly it was a bit sweeter and fruitier. I think the culprit is probably the use of ancho chiles, which of course have that raisin character to them, but I fear the marinade would be considerably more one-note if i simply used all guajillos. Bayless calls for 4 anchos and 6 guajillos, I was wondering if anyone had tested any other proportions, perhaps with some de arbol or even some cayenne/japones in the mix for a more savory character.

Well, I'm mostly echoing other sentiments here in saying that there is really no point in buying tequila that is not 100% de agave, and no mixto exists that will not mar your drink with off-flavours. For most tequila recipes, blancos are definitely the way to go, because the lively, spicy flavour of the unaged liquor has more backbone in a drink (same way we prefer a London dry to a sipping gin for mixing), and is more harmonious with the ubiquitous fruit flavours in tequila cocktails. But there are a few exceptions of tequila cocktails which are modeled after whiskey cocktails, and using an anejo for a tequila old-fashioned can be quite rewarding if you're a sucker for barrel-aging. This is not a sub you can make in just any recipe, but it's good to be aware of. As far as decently priced mixing tequilas, I've had great success with Cazadores silver, which I think has more refinement than most tequilas in its price range, but if I'm looking for an even more budget option, 1800 will still make a decent drink, but it is considerably hotter and rougher, so it's not my go-to. Most of the tequilas named in this topic are excellent, but I can never come across good prices on El Tesoro or Don Julio, and haven't tried Corralejo yet (really should get around to that). Herradura isn't quite to my taste... it's just not as exciting as other blanco tequilas, though there's certainly nothing wrong with it.

West coast here, and I can most certainly say that we use ginger ale (or, more frequently, ginger beer) as a mixer pretty frequently. I drink gin and gingers with friends as often as G&Ts, and dark and stormies are part of my regular rum rotation along with mojitos and daiquiris. We also drink El Diablos on occasion, though not as often as other tequila drinks. Many of my friends drink strong ginger beer anyway with food or when having stomach troubles, so pouring it on top of some liquor is pretty much a no-brainer.

Cocktails changed a lot for me. They made the ideas of balance and synergy much clearer to my palate, and this gave me a much greater appreciation for these elements in desserts, savory cooking, coffee drinks (a well made single cappuccino is definitely a level of elegance rivaling the best of cocktails), and all manner of other worldly delights. The first time I made a well-balanced margarita with quality ingredients, I was just blown away at the splendid interplay of flavours and that mysterious something that makes a drink more than the sum of its parts, and I began to seek out such relationships in other media (quality Chinese food is splendid for that, as are fruit desserts). As for my actual drinking habits, it was mostly a matter of context. Shifting drinking from "social gatherings" to before dinner, after dinner, winter, summer, and so forth helped me appreciate each individual drink's personality a lot more. And I'm much more likely to offer friends drinks when they come over because I feel like I can serve something I'm proud of instead of grabbing a cold beer out of the fridge (and without committing to drinking a whole bottle of wine). And of course cocktails led me to drink more simply because they taste far better than other alcoholic options (other than a brandy after dinner or the occasional sparkling treat). And call it a fetish, but straining a drink into that frosty 4.5oz glass just feels great.

Right now I'm sipping a delicious concoction called the Tia Juano. It's basically a poor man's Rosita (or, conversely, La Rosita is a perfect Tia Juano), which I've discovered on my quest to try out every reasonable tequila-based cocktail on cocktaildb (by reasonable I mean no creme de banane, kahlua, or weird unbalanced beasts with three liqueurs and no bitters/citrus). Once I narrowed down the duplicates and eliminated the nasties, I ended up with 43 cocktails, this one among them, and I'm working through them as I get the ingredients, as well as many of the cocktails from the tequila MxMo and the thread here on tequila cocktails. This is all part of a grand project to create more quality, respectable cocktails with my favorite spirit. I'm hoping the testing will reveal flavours that pair well with tequila and lead to new and delicious creations until we have as many well-loved tequila drinks as gin drinks (so we on the west coast can have something more suited to our culture and tastes). So far, I know that tequila has great synergy with campari, creme de cassis, citrus, and Cointreau, and I suspect it may also work well with certain rums and with Galliano, maraschino, and vanilla flavored liqueurs, given the frequency of those in recipes. Anyway, the recipe for the Tia Juano is thus: 1.25oz silver tequila 1 oz dry vermouth .25oz Campari garnish with flamed orange peel I was making this with 1800 (very agave-forward rather than subtle and complex, and a bit hot, but good flavor for the price, and it's 100% agave) and Noilly Prat dry vermouth. With a more subtle tequila like Cazadores or Herradura, I might bump the tequila up to 1.5oz, as I was tempted to do anyway, but regardless, a very tasty drink that integrates the Campari very well without letting it take over, and is nicely smoothed out by the high quantity of vermouth (though I don't find that tequila and dry vermouth are really made for one another. case in point, the "tequini", which fails utterly to be as satisfying as a real dry martini, though possibly due to lack of bitters).