slkinsey

Erik: This is not to say that there aren't great bartenders and cocktaiks in California, or that fresh ingredients don't have a place in cocktails. Just that I prefer for my cocktails to be about the booze, with the fresh ingredients as an accent, rather than being primarily about the fresh ingredients. Andy: Meyer lemons have substantially less acidity compared to standard lemons, so exactly the opposide of calamondin (aka kalamansi) in that respect. FWIW, I think kalamansi juice is about 1000 times more interesting in cocktails than Meyer lemon juice.

Clearly someone somewhere thought of breading and deep-drying pieces of boneless chicken breast before the introduction of the Chicken McNuggett in 1983. For example, Chris has pointed to a 1960s era Chinese-American menu listing "chicken fingers." Whether these had much relationship to what we now think of as "chicken fingers" is another question. I wonder whether they were breading or battering these to order, or just dusting with corn starch -- which would make a very different product. To make another example, these guys in Alabama claim to be the "original chicken finger specialist" dating back to 1978. However, just like the "Jalapeno Popper", it strikes me as very likely that it was the availability of frozen pre-breaded chicken fingers that restaurants could drop into the fryer that made their ubiquity possible. It sounds like Robert Baker's process for adhering breading to chicken probably had something to do with making this possible, and of course it was the popularity of McDonald's Chicken McNuggets that exploded "little bits of deep fried bonelsss chicken dipped into a sauce" into the American consciousness. My strong recollection is that "chicken fingers" didn't find their way into standard American menus until after the success of Chicken McNuggets. And I'm not sure they were called "chicken fingers" with any kind of regularity until quite some time after that. This says to me that, irrespective of any pre-McDonald's examples, for all intents and purposes the chicken finger evolved from the McNugget because they became a common part of the culinary landscape due to the industrial techniques required for fry-from-frozen chicken fingers and the popularity of McNuggets.

I've never been particularly fond of Meyer lemons for cocktails. Like eje, I think it's only useful in the few cocktails that have been designed specifically for Meyer lemon juice -- and those tend to be in what I'd loosely call the "California Fresh Produce" school of mixology, which is not one that has much appeal for me. To be clear: the Meyer lemon is a kind of citrus fruit, but it is not a "kind of lemon" any more than a tangelo is a "kind of tangerine." I would argue that there is more comonality between Persian limes and Mexican limes than "regular" lemons and Meyer lemons. The Meyer lemon has some lemon-like qualities, but is missing the true lemon's bright acidity as well as its unique ability to contribute to a cocktail in the background without necessarily standing out as a parsable flavor. This makes Meyer lemons somewhat similar to oranges with respect to mixability -- which makes some sense, since the Meyer lemon is supposed to be a hybrid of a lemon and a sweet or mandarin orange. The difficulty with Meyer lemons (and oranges) is that, since they don't pack the acidity or strong flavor of lemons and limes, you have to use a lot of the juice in order to get much of a flavor impact. This presents a bit of a mixological challenge, which is also one of the reasons there are so many more cocktails with lemon and lime than there are with orange juice. Adding to the difficulty, for me anyway, is the fact that, unlike orange juice, I don't find Meyer lemon juice particularly pleasant in the concentrations required to make an impact worth the trouble of procuring a Meyer lemon.

This strikes me as unlikely. Are they using Kold Draft cubes?

I do my sous vide using a Lauda clamped to a 5 gallon stainless steel stockpot. Typically I stretch some plastic film most of the way across the top of the stockpot (there is some open space where the unit clamps on), and secure it with a large rubber band. Even as high as 80C, I get very little evaporation.

More Munchos trivia: Munchos were invented in an attempt to recreate Biblical manna out of potatoes.

I have found that pre-salting steak is a good idea. It allows the salt to penetrate the steak better, and it draws out a minor amount of fluid which facilitates the creation of a maillardized crust (the amount of fluid drawn out is significant to the formation of the crust, but insignificant with respect to overall juiciness). I would not, however, pre-season with either herbs or black pepper, as these will tend to burn on a hot pan.

This is why it's good to go to Fairway during a rainstorm. These pictures were taken during what would ordinarily be peak hours (pardon the crappy cell phone pictures). The entrance Appetizing counter Express checkout lane What's missing? About 600 people that should be in those pictures.

I'm not sure when Cognac went over to the current standard proof of 40% abv. I believe that, according to Dave Wondrich, most pre-phylloxera Cognac (which would then account for most 19C usage) was at around 100 proof. This would make the Louis Royer Force 53 a great spirit for Improved Brandy Cocktails and the like. I'm getting some!

I have a friend who works at the FCI and supervises the kitchen there. I'm told that there are more or less two "teams" working the kitchen, and that these teams correspond to the two seatings. The first seating is the one you want, as this corresponds to more experience, etc.

I'm not saying I think it's okay or entirely correct -- I'm just pointing out how it is. At some point, it seems a bit of a quibble (as indeed this fork of the discussion is) to try to figure out how much vide equals enough vide. My semi-pro vacuum sealer at home doesn't pull a vacuum nearly as well as an expensive professional chamber machine. Does that mean that my cooking isn't "sous vide"? What about if you seal the bag while there is still plenty of air in there? Is that "sous vide"? After all, it isn't called "sous un sachet en plastique." Eggs are a bit of a special case, IMO. Eggs come with the food part already sealed in a reasonably airtight package created by nature. If one were to put whole eggs together with water into a plastic bag, suck out some of the air and seal the bag, and then cook the bag at XYZ degrees for ABC length of time -- I suppose that might satisfy some more strict definition of "sous vide." But the reality is that (a) the eggs wouldn't turn out any differently, and (b) it would be a silly distinction. For all intents and purposes, cooking eggs in the shell is sous more vide than plenty of home and professional implementations of this technology. Personally, if I were writing a menu, I would probably call them "long cooked " or "slow poached" or something like that. But if you say "sous vide" I think everyone in the know understands that they're being cooked in the shell to a very precise temperature -- and "sous vide" does convey that information better than those other descriptions. (Edited to fix missing words.)

Yes, technically "sous vide" requires cooking vacuum. But a cursory glance at the sous vide thread on this site, as well as the things that have been written about it elsewhere, will reveal that this has come to be a catch-all phrase describing the range of techniques available with sous vide technology. This includes mostly precise temperature control of ingredients vacuum-sealed in a pouch, but also is informally used to describe cooking techniques such as precise temperature control via a precision water bath heater but without a vacuum pouch (e.g., cooking vegetables at a specific temperature in an open container) and also various effects possible with vacuum equipment (e.g., "pressure cooking," compressed fruit, cucumbers vacuum-infused with gin, etc.). Getting back to the example of an egg. . . no, the shell of an egg is not 100% airtight. But it is certainly airtight enough that it's not entirely inappropriate to describe an egg long-cooked to precise temperature inside the shell as "sous vide." As a matter of practical chemistry, the eggs are likely exposed to less oxygen using this method than they would be if they were cracked into a plastic bag which was then vacuumed and sealed. Also as a matter of practical chemistry, quite a bit of sous vide cooking isn't really done under vacuum. I understand that "sous vide" means more or less "under vacuum." But one has to understand that there are plenty of terms that come to have a somewhat different meaning when they are imported into another language or become part of the technical jargon of a certain field. A good example might be the musical term "rubato," which is an Italian past participle adjective meaning "robbed." The full phrase would be "tempo rubato" meaning "robbed time." Employed in music this implies a certain accelleration and relaxation of the tempo within a musical phrase such that time is "robbed" from one part of the phrase and "paid back" in another part of the phrase. In English usage, however, we use this adjective as a noun. For example, "I am going to do a rubato here." Strictly speaking, this sentence doesn't make any sense -- but any classical musician in America would know what you meant if you said that. This is because the strict meaning of the word changed when it was imported into English and became part of the classical musician's technical jargon. I would suggest that some of the same things are at work with "sous vide."

Despaña in New York could probably ship you some morcilla. Or, heck... I could ship you some of it. They have a very nice Asturia-style morcilla. It comes vacuum packed,

There's an interesting articles in the Health section of today's New York Times entitled When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why, by Benedict Carey. Some excerpts: The article goes on to detail how binge drinking behavior -- not to mention binge drinking itself -- changes depending on the cultural millieu and the attendant expectations of the binge drinkers. Interestingly, studies have shown that people exhibit expected binge-behaviors even when they have been tricked into thinking they have been consuming alcohol (and even more interesting, the reverse also appears to be true). This got me to thinking about how binge drinking, binge drinking behavior and attitudes about the same have changed over the years. If you check out the second Thin Man movie (After the Thin Man), for example, you see that Nick and Nora return to their San Francisco home to face an uproarious cocktail party with everone getting pickled and acting out. Part of this is for effect. But my mother, whose parents threw plenty of swank cocktail parties back in those days and who remembers some from her early childhood, told me that it wasn't all that uncommon in those days for people at a typical upper middle class cocktail party to drink themselves to complete inebriation. This wasn't considered embarassing, as it would today among similar company, but was rather tolerated and even expected.

I think it was a labeling/branding issue rather than a production issue. Apry (now apparently called "Apricot Brandy" in the US) has been back on the shelves for quote some time in NY.

Only one way to find out! You'd have to liquify the cheese in the alcohol somehow, though.

For example, PDT is also doing a drink made with popcorn-and-butter-infused rum. Don has also done a drink made with a foie gras-infused spirit. Beyond animal fats, there are plenty of other possibilities. Olive oil infusions come to mind. But also something like avodado-infused tequila might be interesting.

My understanding is that "enfleurage" refers to infusing aromatic compounds into fat, not infusing flavors out of the fat that are already in there. The classic enfleurage procedure involves passivelty infusing aromas from flowers (enfleurage = "enflowering") into cold neutral fat until the fat is saturated with aromatic compounds (the "enfleurage" part) then washing the "enfleurage pomade" with alcohol or some other solvent, and and then letting the alcohol evaporate leaving behind the essential oil. It's an extremely inefficient and costly method of extraction, and most everyone uses straight solvent extraction without fat these days.

This isn't that different from the thread on weeniecello. To me, there's something a little amusing but not all that interesting about the typical "duuuuude! have some relish-flavored vermouth with that hotdog-flavored vodka" scenarios. It's nothing that I'd really want to drink other than as a temporary amusement. But fat-washing is a powerful and compelling technique that is far more interesting than mere novelty infusions. Just about every taste and aromatic compound that is soluble in fat is also soluble in alcohol. All that is needed is to mix the fat with the alcohol, wait a while, freeze the alcohol and skim out the congealed fat. Substantial taste and aromatic compounds will have transferred from the fat to the alcohol. Right now, Eben Freeman at Tailor and our own donbert at PDT are doing the most interesting things with fat-washing of which I am aware. A good example of this would be PDT's Benton's Old Fashioned, which is built on a foundation of bourbon infused with fat from rendered Benton's bacon. It's not a punch-in-the-mouth of bacon right up front, but, especially after the first few sips, rather a subtle hint of smokey pork in the finish. This is a unique, interesting and delicious cocktail that is much more than a novelty. Part of the trick, of course, is picking the right spirit into which the fat will be infused. Vodka is not particularly interesting, in my opinion, and will typically yield a product that doesn't have much potential for serious mixology. Perhaps at some point we can start a serious thread about fat-washing. It's a technique that is only just beginning to be explored by mixologists. I'd like to learn more about it, and I'd also like to popularize the technique (which is not difficult to execute).

You're right that it's not common, but there are a few classics: The Blood and Sand and Satan's Whiskers cocktails come immediately to mind. These both include orange juice rather than lemon or lime, which is interesting. There's a version of the El Floridita that includes sweet vermouth along with Cuban-style white rum, lime juice, crème de cacao and grenadine. The Palm Beach Special is a nice one, with gin, grapefruit juice and sweet vermouth. I can't think of any notweorthy ones with lemon juice and sweet vermouth.

Other than preventing oxidation, it's not clear that sous vide cooking has any particular advantages when it comes to fruit. Using some of the sous vide equipment, it's possible to do some interesting effects with certain fruits -- for example, compressed fruits or fruits that are infused with other liquids by vacuuming the fruit in a liquid bath and then returning the fruit to atmospheric pressure, causing it to "suck" the liquid into the spaces previously occupied by air. But these things require a machine that can pull a pretty hard vacuum. I tried doing Negroni-infused cucumber using a vacuum container and a friend's FoodSaver the other day, and the infusion was only partially successful.

The varieties of rum you can have are almost infinite. It all depends on the level of specificity you want in your cocktails, and whether you make cocktails that call for certain kinds of rum. No need to have a rhum agricole, for example, if you don't like to make rhum agricole drinks (e.g., Ti Punch). As a very general statement -- and I'm no Ed Hamilton when it comes to rum expertise -- I'd say that at most any color/aging level there are two broad styles of rum: refined and funky. So, for example, in the mid-amber range you have the funky Lemon Hart demerara rum from Guyana and the refined Appleton Estate Reserve rum from Jamaica. If you were to have one funky and one refined rum at most every color level, you would be able to make appropriate versions of just about every rum drink. Perhaps at the very lightest color you'd only need the refined (Cuban) style, unless you like rhum agricole). And at the very darkest color you might be able to get by with only one example -- again, depending on what drinks you like to make.

Gold rum to me says just that: Rum that is right around the same color as a lager beer. This will, then, be lighter in color and less intense in flavor/wood than an amber rum, which I see as being right around the same color as a good bitter ale. Ultimately, though, it's not clear that these are great distinctions to make. All you're really doing is describing the color and approximate degree of wood aging. You could describe Flor de Caña Extra Dry as a "white rum" but you could also describe La Favorite or, for that matter, Wray & Nephew Overproof as "white rums." I think we will all agree that these three are radically different products. Rather, Flor de Caña Extra Dry is a Cuban-style white rum and La Favorite is a white rhum agricole. Going back to your earlier questions about Dave's description of a certain rum as "Barbados-style" -- that has to do with the fact that different areas have different traditions associated with rum distilling. A Cuban amber rum by Havana Club or a Cuban-style amber rum by Flor de Caña is not going to be the same as a Guyanese amber rum by Lemon Hart or a Jamaican amber rum by Appleton. If you're making a Queen's Park Swizzle, it's just not going to turn out right with the Cuban rum or the Jamaican rum. This is why it's possible to make the full range of stylistically appropriate rye drinks with one or two different brands of rye, but in order to make the full range of rum drinks you need to have around a dozen bottlings of rum or be comfortable with a good bit of stylistic approximation. I remember going to an rum event maybe 3-4 years ago and running into Dave there. We just so happened to be standing together when we were called in to a side-room to offer some comments on rum for a video they were shooting (which for me involved keeping my mouth as shut as is constitutionally possible for me and looking at Dave). Among the many interesting things he said for the tape was one that stuck with me: He said that rum has by far the widest range of all other spirits. You can go from rums that are so light and subtly flavored that they are practically vodka to rums that are so dark, thick and full flavored that they're practically still molasses -- and ever imaginable variation between those two extremes (this is all the more true when you consider that cachaça could be considered rum as well). So it make a certain amount of sense that we'd need a lot more bottles of rum to cover the available ground than we'd need whiskey, gin or tequila.

There's been some expansion in availability, but -- and I don't want to speak for everyone -- I think there's also simply a greater awareness of what's available. When I look at people's lists, I don't see so many new products as I see products that in 2004 might have been considered obscure but are now the focus of cocktail enthusiasts' interest. Awareness certainly makes a difference. But if today one can get Luxardo maraschino in the hinterlands, I'm betting it wasn't so in 2004. For example, everyone was using Bacardi back in the day because you just couldn't walk into a liquor store and see bottles of Flor de Caña and Brugal alongside the Bacardi. To name a few that are either new, have recently seen radically increased availability or radically increased variety since 1994: Laird's bonded, Rittenhouse bonded and any number of other ryes, several new high-end bourbons, rhum agricole, decent cachaça, decent pisco, crème de violette, pimento dram; Saint Germain elderflower liqueur, absinthe!, Bitter Truth orange, lemon and aromatic bitters, Hermes orange and aromatic bitters, Fee's lemon, grapefruit, peach and barrel-aged bitters, Regan's bitters, Angostura orange bitters, homemade bitters too countless to name, Bittermens bitters for those who can get 'em, radically expanded rum choices, etc, etc, etc. Isn't Luxardo Bitter a Campari knock-off? Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suppose it's a knock-off in the same way that Luxardo's amaretto is a knock off of Amaretto Disaronno. What I get out of Luxardo Bitter is that it's like the "Punt e Mes" version of Campari, with more of everything. Dutch gin, aka "Hollands" is a lightly sweetened, old-fashioned style of gin made in pot still on a base of what is essentially unaged whiskey. Or so I'm told. None is currently imported to the United States, aside from Boomsma, which those in the know say is not terribly indicative of the style. Damrak? Not really. Damrak has some genever-like qualities (softer, wetter), but fundamentally it's still within the universe of dry gin.

I demand that you come over immediately and make me a dozen biscuit dogs.