arielle_j

SccopKW's link cites Dr. Roger Boulton, who I consider to be an excellent authority on wine chemistry. I was going to make a few further comments on a wine chemist's perspective on sulfites in wine but Prof. Andy Waterhouse does a thorough job here http://waterhouse.ucdavis.edu/winecomp/so2.htm and if you all can excuse a brief moment of friendly pedantry, speaking as an analytical chemist and sensory scientist of wine and food, you'd be on pretty shaky ground to call beer far more chemically complex than wine. Maybe a tie, depending on your criteria, but certainly not vastly more complex. And I find I can love beer just as much in spite of that! I find classic cocktails like manhattan, old fashioned, martinez, sidecar, and negroni are good starting points, and newer-style cocktails like audrey saunders' madeira martinez or gin-gin mule, things with some good bitterness or acidity and some aromatic complexity, can be really smashing with food. Some of the better NY cocktail bars (if the OP gets up there sometimes) I'm thinking Pegu Club, Amor y Amargo, Death & Co, Mayahuel do a really nice job with pairings and I'm sure could make some excellent recommendations.

Took a trip down to Alameda to visit St George Spirits and left with their three new gins (Botanivore, Terroir, and Dry Rye)! All delicious and sippable, dry rye is probably my favorite.

I think they are planning to sell the caviar commercially (at least, I've seen a mock-up of the packaging). Also, they had a video of the equipment set-up for making it at Ferran Adria's harvard talk in September, which I believe is available online. For inspiration, if you like.

Hi. The olive oil spheres they serve at elBulli, if I remember correctly from what I learned at Alicia, are a two-phase system with regular (or rather, high-quality but not amended by anything else) liquid olive oil on the inside and an alginate skin on the outside. They accomplish this using a specialized, high-pressure pump that generates drops of olive oil surrounded by a liquid alginate solution , which drip through a calcium bath that sets the skin. They have some way of forcing two liquid streams together so that one ends up inside the other, which is how they get the liquid oil centers. Not sure how you'd do it at home but thought the info might be clarifying.