Dave the Cook

Riley Maddox is a week old tonight: AJC Peach Buzz. Scroll down to "STORK REPORT."

Any idea where the name of the cocktail comes from, Erik? Is it just a contraction of pidgin German? Or French?

The car is just stupefying. They couldn't send the winner on a culinary tour of Spain, Japan or China?

It's hard for me to imagine not having a momentous occasion at most of the places Brooks recommends (which is pretty much my list, too) simply by phoning ahead and telling the staff what was up. A place can be special, but it has to be the right place for the right people at the right time.

Grits are very smiliar to polenta, except they are made from hominy instead of regular corn. They are supurb with lots of cheddar cheese, garlic, and butter mixed in. YUM! ← The terminology is sometimes a little loose, but technically, hominy grits are made from dried hominy (which is corn treated with lye to remove the hull and the germ). Regular grits are made from dried corn -- just like polenta.

Sorry, I should have added earlier: the reason I included the second photo even though it's less clear in most aspects, is because it shows the correct proportion of steel to aluminum to copper (pretty close to 1:2:4). If you look at the upper edge in the second photo, you'll see the steel is thinner than the aluminum. Also, although I had no way to measure it, the upper and lower layers appeared to be mirror images of each other. Just for fun, here's an All-Clad S/S edge (one of the two pieces of A-C that I own, neither of which I paid for:

I happened to be in a cookware store with my camera today. The staff was occupied with a freezer breakdown, so they didn't notice me using a Staub French oven as a tripod to catch the lip of an All-Clad Copper Core saute pan. Anyway, maybe these will be helpful: Can someone else do the geometry?

A lovely package arrived in the post yesterday: a generous friend had sent me a copy of Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide. Since I'm about to teach a cocktail class including the John Collins, and my teaching partner thought it would be a good idea to have a few notes on the drink, I figured I'd see what Mr. Bergeron had to say about it. Going to the recipe from the index, this is what I found: 1 oz lemon juice 1/2 oz sugar syrup 1 oz bourbon 1/2 lime Club soda I browsed a bit, and realized I was in the "Whisky" section of the book. Call me naive. I learned the John Collins from Dave Wondrich's Killer Cocktails, where Wondrich seems to attempt to recreate the Gin Punch from London's Garrick Club (feel free to correct me, Mr. Wondrich -- I pieced that together from your spiel in Imbibe!): 2 oz Bols Genever gin 1/2 oz lemon juice 1-1/2 t maraschino fizz water I checked a couple of other books: Joy of Mixology; Harrington's Cocktail; my copy of Duffy. The first two call for bourbon; the latter for Holland gin. Now, I buy the nation that "Tom" replaced "John" as an unintended consequence of the drink's being unleashed in the US (supported by a childish but effective trick for gaining a seat at a crowded bar). What I don't understand is the switch to bourbon as the apparent standard base spirit (Harrington calls it "the accepted and 'correct'recipe). When did that happen?

Friday as in tonight?

It seems to me that you're simply making different compromises -- you compromise on gin, I'm willing to compromise on Cointreau. Neither one of us will get the cocktail we really want. However, your arithmetic makes sense: given my local pricing, using MB instead of Cointreau saves only 7% on the cost of a Pegu Club!

Better, actually, and there's a funny story involving sweetbreads and Blais to illustrate it. ← Perhaps even closer to the mark, as part of a tasting menu at OMK, Blais once served me something he called -- well, I can't remember what it was called, but it was a riff on "Chik-Fil-A." It was a dead ringer for the Chik-Fil-A nugget, except that it was impaled on a plastic syringe filled with an analogue of the Polynesian dipping sauce that accompanies the Chik-Fil-A product. You put the nugget in your mouth, squeezed the syringe and ate it. Of course it was sweetbreads -- a typical Blais food joke referring to the long-running Chik-Fil-A cows ("Eat Mor Chikin") ads.

I haven't tried it. My guess is that there's a limit to how much salt nuts are going to absorb, regardless of salt quantity or time -- there's just not much water in them to replace. All I've done with nuts is to cold-smoke some raw almonds with a hodgepodge of other stuff: cheese, salt, pepper, sugar and maybe some garlic. I wasn't too impressed, but I plan on trying it again.

I would start with the Bradley smoker recipe (here). It calls for a much denser brine than klkruger's -- almost 2:1 by volume -- and a whole day of soaking, then three hours in the smoke at 200F. (They tell you to stir the nuts every ten minutes, which seems too often to be productive.) The recipe also includes an interesting glaze of egg white, sugar and spices. I would never have thought of egg whites, but it might just be brilliant. (May I point out that this isn't a brine in the sense of a brine for meat or fish? I can't imagine it has any effect other than seasoning.)

Just to be clear, I can't find pucks locally, either. But ever since I placed an order for $150 worth of pucks through Amazon, the site reminds me every time I log on!

I'm not telling you something you don't already know, but . . . it depends. For a long time, I used Marie Brizard triple sec as a compromise between the mostly-sugar cheap brands and the expensive Cointreau (around here, it's usually 50% more than MB). Then, about six weeks ago, the price on MB went up and the price of Cointreau went down, so much that the differential dropped to less than 20%. Afraid that someone would come to their senses, I snapped up the Cointreau, even though I wasn't really in need of triple sec. This has given me a chance to do some comparisons. In the Pegu Club, Cointreau makes a big difference; in a Sidecar or Applecart, not so much. It makes a different but not better Margarita. What's nice about this situation is that now I know that I can save the Cointreau for the places where it matters, but continue to contain my costs, because I can't imagine the current price situation will last forever. As for maraschino, all I can get is Luxardo, so I haven't done real comparisons. On the few occasions where I've had a chance to try Stock, I've found it to be a much flatter liqueur. Of course, I'm dealing with very few data points. I have no problem substituting MB curacao for Grand Marnier. I acknowledge that there is a qualitative difference, but it's not one that bothers me, given that I don't make many cocktails that call for it, and that the cost differential is even larger for those two than for the triple sec comparison.

The puck heater on the Bradley is rated at 125 watts. Given that, the cost of power isn't much of an issue (Bradley makes a propane unit, too, but I think it's smaller than the basic model). If you want to cold smoke, the WSM is simply not an option, unless you rig something up, like melkor's ductwork. That's what I've done with my Bradley so that I can cold smoke in the summer, since cold smoking is usually defined as < 100F, and on an 85+F day (common here), the inside of the box will go above 100 just from the smoldering puck. Marlene, I'm surprised that you can't find Bradley stuff, since it's a Canadian company.

The day after my campari and soda, I was at a cafe in Newport, KY. I checked the bar, which was full of long shadows but also harbored a decent VS Cognac, whole lemons and Cointreau. I asked for a Sidecar. The bartender screwed up his face for a minute until a light came on. An acquaintance caught my eye at that moment, and while my attention was diverted, the bartender free-poured Paul Masson brandy and Hiram Walker triple sec into the shaker, finishing up with a splash of pre-packaged sour mix. He shook it for a second and a half, then poured it, ice and all, into a rocks glass. When I got out into the light of the cafe's courtyard, I found some extras protein in my drink: a half-dozen fruit flies. It was wine for me the rest of the night.

The rap on the cost of Bradley bisquettes is off the mark. At Amazon, a 48-pack of apple pucks (which, surprisingly, is cheaper on a per-puck basis than the 120-pack) costs $15.89, or about 30 cents each. Bradley claims, and I've found it to be true, that a puck lasts about 20 minutes -- three pucks per hour. That's a dollar an hour to operate the smoker (excluding electricity). That cost is constant, whether you're smoking 20 pounds of andouille or a kilo of cheddar. Let's say you want to smoke baby back ribs. The cheapest I've seen lately (outside of ethnic markets) have been $3.69 per pound. With a little cutting and the use of vertical rib racks, I can fit six racks of ribs in the Bradley -- about 14 pounds, a cost of $51.66. I usually go about six hours in the smoker, adding $6 to the cost. Total: $57.66. I've added 11% to my costs, which sounds like a lot, until you calculate cost per serving. If I get 12 servings, I've increased the cost per serving from $4.30 to $4.80. Big deal. Obviously, if you're smoking denser cuts like brisket, the additional cost per serving goes down. On a per-pound basis, wood chips are about half the price of Bradley pucks, but in the larger picture the difference doesn't amount to much, especially when you consider the ease of use, precision and predictability of the Bradley -- well worth an extras 50 cents an hour to me.

Really? Water? Water? To quote Jim Backus in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, "Stop kidding!" Of course, he went on to say "...and make me an Old Fashioned," which is nowadays generally unobtainable. But what's wrong with a Scotch and Soda? ← To quote Milton Berle in the same movie: "Don't hit me! Don't hit me!" This last weekend, I was at a renowned hotel in Cincinnati, and spent a great deal of time at the bar, for reasons that aren't relevant here. First I tried my advice (checking out the bar), then took a chance on a Manhattan (giving specific instructions) and ended up with a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon -- no bitters, very little vermouth. For the next round, I followed your advice: Scotch and soda. Eh. Barkeeps like to serve heavy drinks, and this one (or the waitress) had already proved untrainable. So the next afternoon, it was Campari and soda. Nice.

The second book I came across is Rocco's Five Minute Flavor: Fabulous Meals with 5 Ingredients in 5 Minutes. Ignore the titular promise, because it's wildly misleading. But it's a fun look at the challenge of bring great flavor to the table in a little time, on a budget. It's also an implicit examination of the value of prepared ingredients. Rocco shamelessly invokes jarred pasta sauces, canned and powdered soups, pre-made salsa, rotisserie chickens and the like, but tends to use such ingredients when they support the dish, rather than carry a starring role. The emphasis is on efficiency and flavor. Chicken and Wild Mushroom Streudel goes together in minutes, looks luxurious and tastes great. Fusion dishes (Cod Flash-Fry with Mint uses General Tso's sauce; Goya Sofrito and clams round out a jambalaya) work more often than not. There's clearly a clever and talented cook at work, and the focus of the title is relentless, if not always accurate. It's not perfect, but it's a great resource for pantry cooking. I don't care for the design, and the organization is lackluster. Luckily, it has a great index. Also, lucky for us to have this memory of a time when the mention of Rocco invoked the word "food" before "foible."

For $110, you can get a Sitram Profiserie saute pan and lid. It's 11 inches in diameter, holds 4.9 quarts, and has a 6 mm aluminum layer. (And the handle won't abuse your palms.)

Of course that's possible -- even likely. But in such a place, the sushi will be bad pretty much every day, won't it?

To go back to the titular issue -- how not to look like an idiot -- the trick is not to set yourself up for disappointment by asking for something that the bar can't deliver. I've developed a sort of observational scorecard that helps me determine my chances for getting a good cocktail at any particular bar. First, look for fresh juices. You don't necessarily have to ask, unless it's a big bar in a busy place. Just watch a few minutes and see what's being used. Sometimes, you'll see bottles of juice -- a sign that the bar squeezes at the beginning of the shift or the start of the day. You can tell when it's juice and not sour mix because the bottles will be different sizes and hold slightly different colorsof liquid. If you see citrus squeezers, knives and whole fruit, you've hit the jackpot. Second, look at the back bar. See if they have things like Plymouth gin in addition to the usual suspects; Maraschino (tall, straw-covered green bottle); orange and Peychaud bitters, rums other than Bacardi; rye whiskey; liqueurs other than DeKuyper, Hiram Walker or Bols; lots of unmarked bottles full of pretty liquids, clear or pearlescent (these will be homemade tinctures, bitters and infusions); small bottles of tonic, bitter lemon and ginger ale or ginger beer. These are all signs that the bar cares about good cocktails. Finally, watch a few drinks being made. Look at how the glass is prepared -- did it come from a cooler or was it filled with ice and water before the pour -- or did it come from a rack above the bar exposed to smoke, dust and heat? What's the ice look like? Is it large and usually squarish, meant to fill the glass appropriately, or does it look like it came out of a Days Inn ice machine? Do the cocktails get shaken vigorously and stirred conscientiously? Does the barkeep taste the drink before pouring? If the drink is made for the service bar, does it get picked up quickly -- while it's still smiling -- or does it sit and warm up or dilute? If the signs aren't positive, get wine, or order something easy and safe, like Campari and soda (and if they look funny at you upon that request, you might want to stick with water).

The Cooks Illustrated recipe (I assume we're talking about the January 2008 recipe) just says "Sprinkle all sides of roast evenly with salt. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate 18 to 24 hours." The only mention of cutting it before cooking is a direction to deal with a larger eye round (the recipe calls for a 3-1/2 to 4-1/2 pound roast): "For a 4 1/2- to 6-pound roast, cut in half crosswise before cooking to create 2 smaller roasts." Which not to say that what Anna does wouldn't work just fine -- and she says it does. The whole CI thing is amusing to me. In their November 2002 "Illustrated Guide to Beef Roasts," they say of the eye round "This boneless roast had mediocre flavor and was considerably less juicy than any other roast." I note that in the 2008 recipe, they emphasize the improved juiciness of the roast, presumably due to the low-temp method. There's not a word about flavor, except to say that salting early seasons the meat throughout. Perhaps the highest and best use for eye of round is breasola.

For me, rather than ahead of its time, it was the right book at the right time. In 1977, I was becoming interested in cooking as more than just sustenance, and my sister-in-law gave me T&P for Christmas. I practically slept with it; here's how close it stayed to my stove: Outside, it's burned; inside, the spine is broken. Thanks to this book, though, I landed a job in a first-class kitchen -- without experience, without schooling (and without any idea of what I was getting into!)