ChrisTaylor

Evening lads (and ladettes, etc). Another sake. Bishonen Junmai. Big fruit. Boocoo fruit. Too boocoo. Ripe banana. Stone fruit. Pear. Raw booze on the finish. Yeah, that bit's not so pleasant.

Well, I tried it. I agree, really. Lemon and Suze dominated. Followed by the Luxardo. The garnish, even when backed up with lavender bitters, had a subdued presence.

Could also be indicative of some kind of oversupply (unlikely) or a poor quality batch.

Looks interesting. I can't help but imagine the aroma of the garnish dominating proceedings, though.

Oh, right. In that case the contents of that jar can go meet the lawd.

To be honest, I didn't think to hit my other Chinese cookbooks--Dunlop's Sichuan classic being my most frequently referred to--to resolve the 'problem'. Oh well. I guess we'll see what happens when you drain off the liquid, hey? EDIT The photograph accompanying the article also makes clear the liquid is meant to stay in the jar. Grand.

Two is a boringly round number. Let's try three today. This one is Tatewaki Samurai Sake. Dig the samurai on the label, hepcats. Junmai. Boozy on the nose. Smells more potent than the others and ... guess what? It is. Considerably so. 3.3 standards for the 300 mL bottle. The nose is a little 'closed'. The bouche bit: Crisp. There's a fair whack of booze on the palate, too, but also some spice. A bitter pepperiness. A touch of fruit that expands during the finish. Tropical fruit. Then, right at the end, there's that classic savoury rice booze flavour. And, as an epilogue, there's the flavour of booze. Just plain old booze: think vodka. This from a sake that's a pure sake. No distilled stuff thrown into the mix. It's kind of interesting, I guess, but I don't think I enjoy it as much as the other two I had today.

Recently, I made a beef dish that called for salted chillies (the recipe came from Neil Perry's Balance & Harmony, if anyone's interested). It referred to one of the book's base recipes. The recipe involves a wait period of a couple weeks so I just used fresh chillies at the time, but set the base recipe aside to work on later. These chillies are promoted as being a nice flavour bomb in stir-fries and such. Anyway, a few days ago I did the extensive prep: roughly chop some chillies and drop them in a jar with some salt. Unsurprisingly, after a few days you have a lot of liquid in the jar. The recipe does not say whether you should keep this liquid or dispose of it. My theory is that you're dealing with a product like salt-preserved capers. You don't want half of the product immersed in brine, right? So I went ahead and ditched the liquid. I did the correct thing, right? Obviously, there's no photograph of the finished product in the book.

Sawanotsuru 10.5. First impressions: nicely rounded. Smooth. I hate the word 'smooth' in relation to booze but this is smooth in the ... buttery, velvety sense of the word. We're talking texture here. Savoury with a wee bit of sweetness to round off the edges. Reminds me a little of the breakfast cereal Special K. The one with ads that imply a few bowls of the stuff will turn you into a sexy woman in a sexy red dress. And who doesn't want to be a sexy woman in a sexy red dress? I don't even know enough about sake to really know what I like but, still, this one's a winner. EDIT And here comes another. Taru Sake de Kanpai served in a glass I stole from a former workplace. I had six such specially-branded glasses. I broke five very quickly. Anyway, onto the sake itself. This one is jacked with extra distilled booze but still only weighs in at 2.1 (Australian) standard drinks. Marginally more than the earlier drop. This one is funny. It's not as clean as the 10.5 and I was about to write it off as less interesting, but then came the finish. The finish has this ... planty note. Like mezcal planty. Agave. A touch of smoke. And I ain't talking no cheap rotgut worm-infected mezcal. I'm talking quality mezcal. It's there. Rice plonk with hints of mezcal? Pretty rad. Also, I think it's going to be traditional to set my sake against some randomly-selected reading material.

Bump aimed at Rafa, Adam George, Hass, Jo & etc. I want to experiment with sake cocktails. Most I've seen online, tho', sound sweet. Fruity and sweet, sweet, sweet. I'm not calling for a 2 ounces of bitters-fuelled extravaganza but something that's not a sugar fest would be appreciated. The savouriness of sake makes me wonder if it could work as a sub, with some tinkering to make up for its subtler flavour, for fino sherry.

New, new, new. White Rabbit's Belgian-style Pale Ale. Malty. Light carbonation. Slightly watery but with a bold-enough flavour to make up for it. Not likely, sorry to say, to knock their standard White/Dark Ales off the top of the White Rabbit pile any time soon. That pile, granted, is made up ONLY of the standard White/Dark. That slightly metallic quality I associate with Belgian beers. Good enough, but glad I didn't buy a case of the stuff.

Zombie season. Dictador, which is from the grand land of wherever, in favour of the Dem. What a grand drink.

Dante's Requiem. Rit for the rye. Possibly need to cut down on the Benedictine. Even going HARD with the Fernet, the Benedictine pulls its way to the top of the pile like fucking Bailey's. A socially acceptable Bailey's, to be sure, but still très passive aggressive. Not the kind of Bailey's that likes to expose itself to unsuspecting members of the public and dance grotesquely.

Batch #2 of my home brew. It has been stored for ... um ... three or four months now. Thereabouts. It was all canned stuff. A wheat beer. On the advice of a friend I did a secondary fermentation. The advice was good: dig the lack of sediment. On the advice of a friend I batch-primed rather than used those little carbonation drops. The advice was good: dig the even carbonation, bottle to bottle. The beer lacks a little body but, you know what? Aside from that wee flaw it's pretty fucking good. I couldn't finish the (large) first batch which had been in storage since the start of this year. I opened it recently and found that it had aged past the point of redemption. This, compared to how it was a month or so after being bottled, has developed nicely. If I can figure out how to achieve greater body I may well stick to the same cans for another batch.

Zombie off the back of finishing the latest Ellroy. Beaucoup booze. Baaaaaaad rum juju.

Hijack time. Or, rather, time to commandeer the thread. Nautical term. First up in the Official Sake and Assorted Rice-Based Booze Tasting ThreadTM is Takara Shuzo Co.'s Shochikubai Nigori Sake Junmai. My first taste of unfiltered sake. Served lightly chilled. Shaken. Poured into inappropriately-shaped glassware. Appearance, obviously, is cloudy. Almost like orgeat. Slightly milky texture but not as thick as I was expected. When I read about this stuff I envisioned something with the viscosity of Bailey's plus or minus a few lumpy bits. It's slightly sweet with a lemony sort of edge to it. Aroma of homebrew beer: yeasty, fermented. What you'd expect an unfiltered product to taste like, really. Berry. Blueberry, maybe. Fun misprint on the English language sticker suggests this bottle contains 21 standard drinks rather than 2.1. Which is fitting, really. This is pleasant enough, yeah, but clearly a little bit of unfiltered sake is a lot.

I feel a sake kick coming on.

Very likely. Onion with good caramelisation.

Must try this. A friend and I have found that some ciders serve as a nice basis for a riff on the Dark n Stormy. I think we even appled it up to the logical extreme by subbing in Calvados (the very apple-y Eric Bordelet) for the rum once ... but, yeah, something sugary like Appleton works nicely.

At least there is a menu. I understand that for some restaurants, the menu changes regularly (although, realistically, they usually have a pool of 'base' dishes from which they spin off many a riff) and that maybe they don't want to futz around updating the website on a daily/weekly basis, but really. A menu, even one a few weeks old--i.e. one branded, clearly, as a 'sample'--gives me an idea of the price point and the sort of food I might find if I walked in for lunch today. It's bewildering how many websites still manage to tick all of those horrid boxes: no menu, difficult-to-find location details (i.e. if I need to click half a dozen times to get the address, you're doing something wrong), a booking page that directs me to the phone or regular email. Or, you know, some fruity proprietary e-booking system that ... doesn't ... fucking ... work.

Manly cocktail? Deliciously gendered. I assume we're talking about some big classics here, right? An Old Fashioned, yeah? Something like a Manhattan? A Daiquiri? I mean, if the latter was good enough for Hemingway--a dude who went deep sea fishing and fought in foreign wars and ate buckshot for breakfast--I assume it's good enough for you. A martini? This is tricky. Four bottles. You can't just buy spirits. You want vermouth. You went a sweet vermouth if you want to be able to make a Manhattan (2:1 rye:sweet vermouth + a couple dashes of Angostura bitters) or similar cocktails, such as the Hanky Panky (a similar drink, really, but with a slightly different ratio and gin instead of rye). So a question of definitions: if a bottle vermouth counts as 'a bottle', you'll probably want sweet. I think sweet is more versatile, but then again, I don't really like martinis. Sweet vermouth will give you access to the Manhattan family. It'll also serve you well if/when you expand your collection: drinks like the Negroni and its many relatives, for instance. If vermouth isn't 'a bottle', get both sweet and dry. I operate under the assumption that vermouth isn't part of the four. If it is, well, you'll want to lose one of spirits. You want a white rum. When you say rhum, I assume we're talking a grand grassy agricole like JM. That'll serve well in some 'manly' classics like the Daiquiri and Mojito. You want a whiskey. I'd argue for rye as the most versatile kind of whiskey from a cocktail-making perspective. You can use it in an Old Fashioned. You can use it a Manhattan. If you eventually expand the collection to include, say, a small bottle of absinthe or pastis, you can make a Sazerac. Starting with a small collection is a sensible idea--we all did--but as you gain more experience you can spiral off in different directions. One of the first cocktails I really liked was the Old Fashioned, for instance. This led to me getting into the Sazerac. And to eventually focusing on the 'brown and stirred' category. I've come to really like mezcal. I just think that in a small collection, though, that it's not very versatile. There are a few mezcal cocktails around but most require a lot of ingredients that wouldn't be sensible purchases for a starting-out, four-bottle-only collection (i.e. Rafa's brilliant Man Comes Around). I'd probably argue for tequila over mezcal but even then ... unless you're getting an orange liqueur as one of your bottles, you're not going to do a lot with it. Not with such a small collection. Gin is good. A London Dry like Tanq. is what you want as a starting point. Genever, Old Tom and all these modern craft gins can come later. An entry-level London Dry will serve you well in a martini, a gin and tonic, a Collins (you can make a Collins out of basically anything, but I find that whiskey-based ones tend to just taste like watered down whiskey). I would not buy a bottle of brandy. I like brandy, but I don't think there are enough delicious brandy-based cocktails to make with a four bottle collection if the idea of that collection is versatility. By all means, get a brandy if/when you expand the collection, but if I was starting afresh it wouldn't be one of my first four bottles. Now, I assume Angostura bitters doesn't count as an all-the-way, honest-to-God bottle of something. You want some kind of bitters. Angostura is your starting point. Eventually you can grab a bottle of orange bitters and expand your horizons a little. Curacao and Campari are both nice but pose a problem. Let's say you only have four bottles. What are you going to make? Two different Negroni variations? The Campari--and I love Campari--isn't going to be particularly versatile in that context. Unless you really like Americanos and Negronis, I probably wouldn't buy it as one of the first four.

Veal Holstein is a veal schnitzel served with anchovies, capers and a fried egg. Typically freshened up with some chopped parsley and lemon juice. Steak Diane is similar to steak au poivre, although the sauce--prepared table-side--is a bit of a kitchen sink affair. You can throw in basically anything and someone, somewhere will deem it to be Diane so long as the sauce is based on the pan juices that are left over from cooking the steak.

Veal Holstein! How grand. A restaurant in Melbourne (The European) still regularly digs that one up. What about beef Wellington?

In that case, here's the recipe in shorthand. Melt 25g butter in pan. Add 150g frozen sweetcorn and 1 tsp caster sugar. High heat: 1-2 minutes. Add 50mL ea. chicken stock and double cream. Bring to boil. Simmer: 10 minutes. Blend until smooth. Strain. Return puree to pan and season. Consistency should be similar to thickened cream. Can be loosened with a dash of hot water if necessary. Can be made in advance and reheated for service. I haven't made the puree, but instinctively if I was aiming for a sweetcorn flavour I'd be inclined to replace part of the chicken stock with a corn-based stock. From memory there's one in Modernist Cuisine. And I seem to recall a corn-based stock as being the basis for the sweetcorn soup in Daniel Humm's Eleven Madison Park. EDIT 11MP was close to hand so I had a quick look. The corn bisque (served with lobster) sounds a bit more complicated than what the words 'sweetcorn soup' bring to mind. It's based on equal parts lobster stock and corn juice. It's jacked with a lot of things. Having made it some time ago (well, a modified version--I used crab) I seem to recall it being quite rich and spicy. Still, the corn juice idea might be worth hanging onto.

Have to back what Lisa says. I have a stick blender. It was basically a second attachment that came with my (admittedly decent) burr grinder. Whenever I want to make curry paste (i.e. lots of ingredients like garlic clove-sized bits and pieces), puree a soup or perform the kind of task you're describing, I load the ingredients into a plastic jug. This was just a cheap, shitty jug. A dollar, maybe two. I intentionally bought something tall so 'splash back' wasn't an issue. You can even puree hot things.