cdh

Might "Jewish Food" be a cuisine simply because a significant number of people who make up a community identify it as one, and want it to be considered a separate cuisine? How is this dumpling soup unlike all other dumpling soups? Because the community says it is. Other foods get included because they are similarly recognized as belonging to the group, regardless of where they came from.

Bingo. When research indicates that markets are shrinking, money to expand into them tends to dry up. What needs to happen is a split between the yellow fizz market and the craft beer market... but how do you go about doing so.

If the market is making the jump from Bud and Miller to Yellow Tail and Red Bicyclette, then yes, I think it is something to lose sleep over. People deciding that they don't like beer because they don't like Coors is a loss to all brewers of a potential customer.

Slate quotes Lew Bryson extensively on the slide beer's been experiencing in the marketplace lately. It seems the attraction of connoiseurship is bringing people to wine, and the low-brow market niche the megabrewers have carved for themselves is starting to feel a bit constrained. There is a great big world of beers out there, but the industrial manufacture of absolutely consistent and unchallenging product has become beer's identity in the market. Can craft brewing pick up some of this slack and head off a mass defection to wine? Lots of beers outclass wines in terms of tradition and backstory... and flavor and complexity as well. How do we get the mass market to notice and stop expecting beer to be bland yellow fizz with a trucker hat attitude? http://www.slate.com/id/2167292/nav/tap1/

Correction- PA had it until about 2 years ago, but has modernized recently. Now we can buy booze from the state on Sundays, though in doing so we're still contributing to the Johnstown rebuilding effort.

Talk about timing- Look what appeared on Slashdot yesterday. Looks like a patent for another method of throwing massive heat by infrared radiation expired recently and is getting incorporated into grills right now. 900F is attainable in a different way now... and pizza cooks very well on a grill.

Watching this space anxiously for you to one-up the Pimms recipe with something much better... It's getting to be summer lawn party time and a new option would be much fun.

Your question was akin to asking "I've got some spare wine. What recipes have wine in them?" Then you don't tell us whether you've got Sauturnes, Vinho Verde, Malbec or Beaujolais. You'll admit that asking for recipes with "wine" in, is a pretty generic question, no? Exactly the same for beer. No good answers will come without specificity as to what you've got. And "ales" is as generic a term as "beers". The Portsmouth lager would be fine in a welsh rarebit sort of melty cheese thing. I wouldn't do a stout in that recipe, though. For bigger hoppier brews, I'd do a stew with lots of bittersweet root vegetables like turnips and parsnips... maybe marinate the meat in the beer before adding the lot to a slow pot to cook for a long time. Lamb and guinness is a classic stewing combination. If somebody left you a sour beer, its would be the candidate for a quick pan deglazing... it has less hop bitterness to concentrate as it boils down and an acidity that would work nicely in a pan sauce. Wheat beers would fit in this category too, as they're generally lightly hopped.

It really depends on the beer. As somebody with particular preferences, you clearly know that... so why are you asking for recipes with "generic beer" as an ingredient when there really aren't recipes (except maybe beer batter) where the flavor profile of the beer doesn't matter? If your friends are leaving you Coors Lite it would lend itself to different applications than if they're leaving you Hopzilla Imperial IPA. The former would be a slightly grainy substitute for water in a braise maybe... the latter would need to be carefully considered because its intense bitterness would need to be carefully complemented in any dish you used it in...

Even the New York Times thinks that Berlin is not a good beer town. Check out this very current story on unusual beers in Germany. You're really out of luck, as Berlin's specialty is a very sour and sort-of funky mostly-wheat beer.

You could call it the Late Lunch menu...

In the eyes of your state's oligopoly, Single Malts are hot. They have cachet. And they make the $$$ flash in the eyes of retailers, who pay the distributors for lots and lots of different varieties that may or may not sit on the shelves. Even when they do sit on the shelves, they are perceived to telegraph class to the incoming customers. Rums less so. They're not the purview of dead-white-folks who favor kilts and bagpipes and don't conjure up the same fancy thoughts in the minds of folks who spot them on the shelves.

I find that the St. Marcellin and St. Felicien readily available at Zabar's and Fairway and Murray's are quite good. Maybe I'm a terrible philistine for thinking so, but I rather like them. Imported Bries and Camemberts are often unexciting. I'm not so much the fan of even the best Epoisses, and other red-mold washed rind cheeses I could take or leave.

Pimms benefits from citrus oils, but the more important flavor is the cucumber, at least as far as I'm concerned. The citrus juice is unimportant. Years ago, here on eG, Jack Lang posted a recipe for ersatz Pimms that consisted of gin, sweet vermouth and orange liqueur, and it makes a reasonable facsimile of Pimms... That provides an interesting way to look at the Pimms flavor profile. I'll see if I can find that post and link to it. ETA: Found it: Here it is: ersatz Pimm's recipe. The challenge in that recipe is figuring out which gin, which vermouth and which orange liqueur make the best combination. I lean towards Cinzano for the vermouth.

Most times I don't think it is the state itself that is making those picayune decisions (except in monopoly states like PA and WA). IT is the state that says that only licensed importers/wholesalers can sell to licensed distributors who can sell to licensed shops who can sell to you. Then they make it difficult enough to get and keep those wholesaling and distributing licenses that only a few large businesses can do it. And in states with inconvenient labeling or bottle size or other regulations, those large businesses are not interested in quality of the product they sell. They're interested in the volume and profit margin and things that don't cost them extra. And something that is not deemed fast enough moving won't find itself clogging up shelf space. So it is the guv'ment's fault that the sad state of the booze market is as it is. But not directly. It is oligopolistic capitalism supported by bureaucratic regulations that you can blame it on.

Indeed I do. As a matter of fact, I've got a 5 gallon batch of homemade lemon/ginger ale carbonating as we speak. That batch taught me the utility of adding citric acid to up the acid balance while keeping the flavors otherwise proportional. I use Cornelius soda kegs, which are 5-gallon stainless steel pressure vessels rated up to 130 PSI. They're available relatively cheaply through a number of net vendors. They'd be perfect for carbonating small batches of artisan sodas, though they aren't instantaneous. To carbonate most quickly, you need to chill everything down close to freezing, and apply about 30 PSI for a few days.

I agree completely. I've tried the Goya guava, and it doesn't have the right acidity... adding citrus knocks the flavor balance off... And most juices don't have the right acidity to mix well. That's why the exceptions we find here are such useful news.

Lots of good inspiration here. Another (sadly departed from the market) favorite mixer was Ocean Spray's guava drink Mauna Lai. That had a great balance of sweet, tart and fruity that mixed remarkably well with both rum and tequila. Trader Joe's peach juice and their peach-apricot juice are stellar with bourbon in a high-ball format. A wee splash of bourbon in a sugared espresso explodes with flavor in a way I'd not have expected, given the generally insipid whipped-cream-fueled state of Irish coffees. Only a few ml are required to get the effect, and too much bourbon does wreck its balance.

Would that make it a Pimms julep?

Cocktails are lovely things, different flavors carefully juxtaposed in just the right proportions, works of artisan craftsmanship. This topic is not about them. This topic is about a more simple, but no less satisfying pursuit -- the mixed drink. More to the point, the class of drinks composed of a base spirit and a mixer. Mixers have a long history in the world of booze... Tonic water goes back to tropical colonialism, a malaria vaccine that readily mixed with gin and made colonials anxious for the sun to come over the yardarm. Bitter lemon is a close cousin of tonic, and sadly rarer than it should be. Britain has a variant that hasn't made it across the pond, the Russian mixer... which I recall from my time there in the 90s. Ginger ale, ginger beer, colas and lemon-based fizzy drinks all play roles in this class of tasty beverages, as do plenty of non-fizzy mixables. Sadly, the realm of mixers has become really quite dull as its constituents have become more or less commodity products, and our thinking has dulled accordingly. The Gin and Tonic is the king of this realm of drinks, but not the whole of the story. We all know the virtues of the drink, and haute restauranteurs like Thomas Keller and new entrepreneurs like eG's own Jordan Silbert are making attempts to breathe some life back into tonic by making it themselves, rather than taking what the CocaCola Corp, or Cadbury-Schweppes have reduced their tonics to. I'd like this thread to unearth particularly tasty combinations of reasonably available beverages and common booze. I'll start off with a few observations of my own: Aged rum and commercial tonic with a squeeze of lime is a remarkable cousin of the G&T, and should be better known. Trader Joe's Mango Lemonade and Gin make a fabulous combination, the piney-ness of the gin and the mango's own coniferous tang marry quite well with the underlying layers of tartness and sweetness. Well more interesting than Gin & any old juice (no offense intended to Snoop Dogg.) Let us know discoveries you've made in this class of drinks. The world of bottled beverages that could be mixers is huge... there have to be some spectacular complements to readily available booze that not enough people have heard of. Tell us about them!

I prefer mine made in big bowlfuls... 1 cup Pimms 1 cup Gordon's Gin 1 orange reduced to wheels 1 cucumber reduced to rounds 1 ice ring from a bundt cake pan filled with water and frozen Alternate orange and cucumber around the ice ring Top with as much ginger ale as the bowl can handle. That will keep a game of croquet fueled up properly.

I love Pimms, but I'd never order it in a bar. Pimms doesn't scale down to by-the-glass service well, and unless there was a punchbowl full behind the bar, it would be a mistake to ask some poor bartender who doesn't know what a well-made Pimms should taste like to try to get it right. So, TB's attitude confirms my position that Pimms should only be made at home, and consumed on the lawn while playing croquet. (And the necessary elements of the garnish are rounds of cucumber, and wheels of orange... anything else is extraneous, though can be pretty.)

The lukewarm reception is kind of disheartening. I hope that Matt and crew get their act together again and the new bigger place becomes manageable for them... but maybe I'll hold off on visiting for a while until they've had a chance to get past their reorientation phase. Sad, since I'd wanted to trek down there and try the new Fuji soon. Hopefully good things will come to those who wait.

Just noticed another last-of-kind item I've got stowed away in the basement- I've got a couple of bottles of Rodenbach brewery's Alexander Rodenbach, a beer that is no longer brewed. I'm trying to brew a replacement myself, and have come close... but it is a very complex beer with fiddly microbes, and wood aging involved.

A Dark and Stormy is a ginger beer, rum and lime juice drink... I bet that does make a fine gelato.