ChrisTaylor

Three additions to the collection. None of them scotch. Altho' I admit to being sorely tempted by something I tried recently: Bruichladdich Octomore 6.1. I think it was a six year old variant. A beautiful dram. After enjoying it and the classic--The Laddie--so much I have to look into their 'specials'. Anyway. Stuff I actually paid for: Nikka Miyagikyo 12. A blind buy, really. My local bottle-o suddenly spat out a range of around 10 Japanese whiskies--well up from the two or three they used to have. All were between the $100-150 mark so price wasn't a motivating factor. Well, there were a couple of 'distiller's editions' of malts that were significantly cheaper than the standard single malt offerings but I couldn't really deduce what they were. I shied away from them more out of ignorance than anything else. The dram itself is ... balanced. That's the first word that comes to mind. The word that sticks. It has a bit of peat up front but then mellows out, becomes sweeter. A long finish. It's big. I reckon you'd be hard-pressed to not enjoy it. It's already one of my favourite whiskies. Eagle Rare. This is a funny one. When I first tried it a couple of years ago, I thought it was the most overrated of the premium whiskies I'd ever tried. I've warmed up to it now. Despite having a relatively low APV--45% off the top of my head--it benefits from a couple of drops of water. Still, as much as I like it I don't know if I'd buy it in preference to the standard Buffalo Trace next time. Sacrilege, probably--it is better than the younger model--but diminishing returns and all that. James Pepper 1776. This was a blind buy based on a positive review. I hadn't even heard of it before. Quite different to many of the bourbons I've tried ... in a good way. Spicy and robust without being as blatant and provocative as many bourbons. I could see people disliking this. Bad people.

Nikka Miyagikyo 12.

You're right: if you vac seal a loosely-bound patty of the sort described by the Modernist Cuisine people or Heston Blumenthal, you'll crush it. This is why 'sous vide' burgers are often cooked in a zip lock bag rather than a pouch (hence the inverted commas). Of course, you could always freeze them first or stand there with your finger on the 'seal' button of your strip sealer.

James Pepper 1776 bourbon. Stunning.

I made this sexy beast using Meletti and Mole bitters in place of the Meletti. It's as wrong in the right kind of way as a woman in a leather skirt.

I binned most of them but got to the point where the jars I couldn't easily open just went back into storage. Attack of the cbfeds. I guess I'll leave them a while to see what happens. If they're still a little bitter and shite after a month then I guess it was a total failure. Thanks for the PM. If I see another discount box of olives over the weekend at the market I'll have another run.

Disclosure: I'm offering a teacher's perspective here. I teach children aged between six and seven. I do not regularly feed them full meals. I have done some 'food exposure' things with children of this age group before but with my actual classes I only 'enforce' a policy of trying things children are presented with as part of our 'food for everyone' programme, things that I have made with the vegetables we grow as a class and the odd science lesson (learn about bitter/salty/sweet/savoury/sour by testing a variety of things ranging from BBQ sauce to chinotto to white chocolate). Some points: Pressure. If you come across as 'forcing' a kid into anything, they won't want to partake. Even if you promise that it'll be good. Don't nag them. Again, I say this as a teacher and not a parent. I'm not feeding them their daily meal. If they're unsure encourage them to try it and make it clear that if they dislike the item that is acceptable. You can throw it away if you have a bite and it's no good, although it must a 'real bite' (i.e. not poking your tongue out and allowing the tip to brush against the item). If you really, really, really don't want to even try it that is also okay.Pressure. Despite what I said, pressure can be a good thing. Peer pressure, that is. If I offer something to a class some children will say yes straight away and others say no. Many of the 'no' kids will change their mind if friends try the item and like it (or, you know, don't die). You don't need to say a thing. It just happens. This can win over the children that don't want to even look at the item.Involving them in the process. We grew the beans, radishes and potatoes we have consumed as a grade. Children harvested them and helped shell the beans. They got their hands quite literally dirty. This was not presented directly as a 'you grew it therefore you must taste it' deal.An understanding of what the item is.Keep it simple but also make it presentable. I reckon most adults wouldn't count a plate of boiled-to-shit broad beans as a good time. I know I wouldn't. Last year we sauteed our broad bean harvest with bacon and garlic. Really simple but most students that tried it--the vast majority of my grade--liked it. Most had never eaten beans like this before. For our potatoes the pitch was we were making potato wedges from scratch (right down to the potato). For the radishes I simply sliced them and hit them with a store-bought balsamic dressing. Nothing flash but the kinds of sweet/salty/sour flavours children like.Start with things that are hard to dislike. I mean, beans cooked lightly in bacon fat? Tomatoes cooked down to a sauce and served with pasta? Everyone likes those things. If you can develop a bit of trust with that sort of thing you can slowly get more and more interesting.

Couldn't you freeze the juice in perfect portions?

That's as much as I suspected. I took a risk. I rinsed them, drained them and put them in jars with olive oil to cover. For some reason I made the assumption that because all the other recipes I've tried in this book have been good, the olives would be too. Yeah. Remind me to taste one of the olives before pissing away two litres of extra virgin olive oil next time. I reckon I needed to soak them in plain water longer. And they also didn't taste particularly cured. I put a little more vinegar than what the recipe called (in the quantity of vinegar to quantity of olives sense) and they didn't taste particularly ... cured. Not a particularly cheap failure, considering I started with a $18 crate of olives.

Any subs for Meletti?

My assumption is the same as Nick's: if you've removed the breast from the bird you'll have a little 'overhang'. Trim the excess. Clean it, in other words, the way you would a chicken breast that you've removed from a bird purchased whole. Of course, if you purchase it pre-butchered it's probably already been cleaned up.

Eagle Rare 10. When I first tried this at a bar I wasn't overly impressed. Now I ... like it. A fair bit. I find just a drop--a literal drop--opens it up a lot. A bit surprising, given 45% isn't that high. It's lovely, yeah, but I can't help but wonder if really is that much better then the standard Buffalo Trace. I mean, it is better but it doesn't quite have the same bang-for-buck--diminishing returns and all that--as its younger sibling.

So long as it's not rot gut you're probably not going to notice much difference between the cheaper end of the 'good bourbon' spectrum and the more expensive stuff. I really doubt you're going to pick much of a difference between the acceptable, lower priced offerings if you're cooking with them. Unless, you know, you're making something like Heston Blumenthal's whisk[e]y 'wine' gums. But I strongly doubt they're on your menu. If you can get Wild Turkey locally, go for it. No need to make a special trip. It's not like there's only one passable cheap bourbon. Wild Turkey will successfully handle both jobs you have in mind. And when cooking with it, at least, you--especially as someone that doesn't partake in whiskey--won't notice much, if any, difference.

Shel_B isn't the biggest drinker, from memory. If you can get Maker's Mark (or even the entry-level Wild Turkey) in that price range then that's the way to go. I don't know US prices very well: I assume Buffalo Trace is more expensive than that. I mean, if it is <$20USD, that should be your go-to.

Went shopping for bourbon. Spotted, on the walk to the whisk[e]y section, Moa beer. Dead bird/New Zealand. Hadn't had the beer before. Three varieties on offer: a wheat, a pils and something else. Went wheat. The presentation of the box was nice but the marketing doesn't translate trans-Tasman, I think. I mean, it's pitched as 'beer for Olympians' so I'm assuming some New Zealand athlete promotes it but I have no idea who this person is. Granted, with my knowledge of sports if the athlete was Australian I still wouldn't know who they are. But. Yeah. The marketing's a bit pish, aside from the box that makes it look all upmarket and shite, but it's a passable wheat beer. Not my favourite by any stretch and I doubt I'd bother buying it again once I get through the four pack. EDIT Okay. A bit of research tells me that this is the official beer of the New Zealand Olympic team when they're competing in the Olympics and Commonwealth Games (for most of you: this is kind of like the Olympics but gets rid of all the teams that ordinarily do better than Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK so we can feel good about ourselves). So there's that.

I bought some green olives from the market. Following the recipe in the MoVida cookbook, I did the following: Rinsed them.Split them.Soaked them in waterfor about a week.Parked them in a mixture of white vinegar and water for three weeks with some other items (lemon wedges, fennel, garlic) as per the recipe. The book is an Australian book. It said to do this at room temperature. I did.In short, the recipe looked pretty much the same as a lot of the recipes I saw online. One might use fennel, another might use ... nothing but the core parts of the process were very similar. I'm at the point where the recipe says to remove them from the brine and place them in sterilised jars with salt, olive oil and (optionally) some other ingredients (i.e. chilli, more garlic). And yet I am concerned. The surface of the pickling liquid is covered with things. It almost reminds me of hardened lumps of fat. The container was new and had been cleaned before I used it so it's not like it's some nasty residue from a half-arsed cleaning job. Whatever it is has come from the ingredients I put in the container. What you see in the photo is what there is. They don't look like the spores/signs of contamination I've seen before but I don't have any idea what they are. Is this normal? Is it a product of some of the oil from the olives being released into the water? Could it have come from the lemon, garlic or fennel? I simply washed the lemon and sliced it, crushed (but did not peel) the garlic cloves and washed and sliced the fennel. It doesn't smell bad. It doesn't smell any different, in fact, to what I'd imagine it should smell like. That is to say it smells primarily of watered down vinegar. There's no funk of the sort I'd imagine something that had 'gone off' and been sitting at room temperature for a while would have. At this stage I'm holding off doing anything until I get reassurance that the olives are okay.

Pistachios. Most other kinds of nuts if they're floating around. Some kinds of chips can be a problem: a good salt and vinegar chip, Kettle's chilli-flavoured offering, a good deal of the Red Rock range (Red Rock being a local response, I guess, to Kettle). Good olives. Cured pork goods. Also, for serious, did I just read that you can top icecream with Cheetos? I don't even know how to respond to that. The horror, the horror.

I made one of these just now--Herbsaint instead of absinthe--because a bottle of riesling just wasn't enough to see me through writing reports. This is a drink that forces you to sit up and pay attention.

In the US?

I find Beechworth to be a funny one. The first time I had it was on tap. Place in Daylesford. Wine bar/chess sets at the tables/cool jazz in the background. I thought it was fucking great. Really nice beer. Then a year, two later I found it in bottled form at Dan Murphy's. It was pish, as you say. Stupid Australiana on the label and downright mediocre contents inside the bottle.

One of my local butchers recently offered to dry age some beef for me. Their beef isn't particularly good. It's cheap. Still, they offered. So I said yes. The long game and all--a mediocre slab of steer or two and then maybe I'll ask them for a slab of grass fed wonder. You know, prove I'm reliable. That if I say I'm picking it up in four, five weeks then I will. That they won't be stuck with somethig that simply won't sell in this area. The offer was open-ended: as long as you like, brother. I said four weeks. Got pushed to buy it when I dropped in a couple weeks later to pick something else up. No, no, no. Four. I ended up getting them to slice it in half at the four week mark. I bought some then and got them to hang the rest for a further week. Here it is after trimming. I'm aware of the distinct lack of marbling. For the next piece they're going to wait until they get a nicely-marbled piece and call me. I think I'll also request that they don't cut off any of the excess fat. I can do that once the meat has aged for a while. Apologies for the shit photos. The piece after trimming off the outer layer of biltong. Didn't weigh it. When I got them to set the piece aside it was somewhere in the 5-6 kilo range. When the bloke cut it in half last week it seemed to be, you know, half. Not 2/3 and 1/3. Unsure how much weight beef loses if you dry age it for 5 weeks. I went with the roasting method outlined in Heston Blumenthal at Home: a sear followed by a low and slow roast to an internal temperature of 55C. I gave a non-dry aged piece a while ago a couple hours in the cold smoker before roasting it. Wasn't terribly impressed ... but it was a piece of meat that tasted as if it'd been dry aged for all of a couple of days. When I get my next piece of rib eye put aside I'll treat at least some of it to a gentle smoking. The idea being to give it the taste of being roasted at least in the same postcode as wood. We had company so I put a little more effort into sides than I usually would. The carrots were steamed (w/ salt, pepper, sugar and smoked butter) in a sous vide bag and the mushrooms were sauteed. I also had mac and cheese (Neil Perry's recipe from the Rockpool Bar & Grill book--my go-to) and peas (a recipe from the same book as the mac and cheese). I thought it was okay. I guess I was mostly thinking, hey, this would be really special if I had some nice Cape Grim grass fed. Always wishing for what you don't have. My guest and significant other enjoyed it immensely, tho'. Interestingly, Neil Perry--he of what I guess is Australia's highest end of high end steak houses--advocated the use of canned peas. I'm not a snob or anything (I rarely buy any peas as I'm not a big fan of peas) but I'd never purchased canned peas before. For someone that mislikes peas I thought they were okay.

A Negroni made with Maidenii vermouth. I accidentally bought the 'original' variant, which sits in an awkward-but-pleasant place between sweet and dry. Trying it in various things. The Negroni works okay, altho' it's dominated by Campari in a way Punt e Mes or Dolin wouldn't be.

I use a jeweler's scale. Cost ~$15AUD. Close to ~$15USD, in other words. Accurate--supposedly--to a tenth of a gram. It's cheap and a bit flimsy but it was a $15 scale. Handles up to a couple pounds. It's just some crappy no-name brand but it'll do. I've used it for modernist applications, even, and had no failures of the sort I'd attribute to inaccurate measurements. It's pocket-sized.

Another James Squire special. Hop Thief American Pale Ale. What's maybe kind of interesting is each batch of this beer--and this is batch six--supposedly showcases a different variety of hop. Good luck finding a bottle-o that stocks more than one batch, tho'. I think it's a really good easy drinking beer. A good intro to shower beering, too, if you're yet to partake.

I thought JM 50 pushed my Daiqs up a level. I also thought Banks 5 was pretty good.