slkinsey

These are mostly local bottlings. The Clicquot Club company was in Millis, Massachusetts. It was bought by Canada Dry in 1965, and subsequently closed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliquot_Club Pureoxia was also a Boston-area company (I think in Lowell, where it was turned out by the same guys who made Moxie).

Sorry, but it strikes me that everything about that recipe suggests that it is either a "custom variation" for Bombay (note that it is called the "Brambled Bombay" rather than a "bombay Bramble") or simply a bad, misquoted adaptation. Honestly, that recipe is a mess: not only does the "instructions" section call for ingredients not on the ingredient list (soda and lemonaid) but it also specifies that all the ingredients be shaken together rather than the cremé de mûre being added to the top.

Cross-pollinated from over here: Hmmm... Well, not really. A well made liqueur or Eau de Vie can capture more of a fruit (and especially a spice or herb)'s essence than simple muddling. That's like saying fresh fruit is always better than jam. Hmm. I'm not sure I agree with that first statement. I don't think one could argue that a spectacular kirschwasser has more of the "essense of cherries" than fresh cherry juice, or that the highest quality crème de pêche has more of the "essence of peaches" than peach puree, or that a wonderful calvados pays d'auge has more of the "essense of apples" than cresh apple cider (I could continue with examples of tender herbs, etc.). Rather, what these things do is capture a certain slice of the ingredient's essense, and to a greater or lesser extent, transform them (eau de vie is a good example of this). Only perhaps with ingredients like Cointreau versus muddled orange peel do I think the alcoholic version is better at presenting the essense of the ingredient. Now, as to your second statement: I agree. Fresh fruit is not always better. Sometimes we want the once-or-more-removed presence of an eau de vie, aged fruit brandy or crème liqueur. I'd rather have Apry than muddled fresh apricots, for example. But that doesn't mean that Apry has captured more of the apricot than muddling would.

You can squeeze liquid out of cooked potatoes? News to me.

Interestingly, we had a thread here a while back called Has Jean-Georges Vongerichten Jumped the Shark?

Last time I was there, I saw Brian make a half-dozen of these right in front of me. Don't recall seeing any liqueur.

Well, as someone who grew up in New England, I have to concur that we wouldn't call a quahog a clam. We'd call it a quahog. But, at the same time, we'd certainly call a littleneck a clam, despite the fact that it's technically just a smaller quahog.

The most authoritative Bramble recipe I've seen is: <blockquote>1.5 oz : Plymouth Gin .75 oz : fresh lemon juice .50 oz : simple syrup .75 oz : cremé de mûre Build gin, lemon juice and simple over crushed ice. Float cremé de mûre. Garnish with lemon slice and two raspberries.</blockquote> No muddling of which I am aware. The fruit is garnish only.

The point is, I think, that they're using fresh fruit instead of a liqueur. Thus the different, but clearly derivative name.

Practically speaking, dashes from an open liquor bottle are going to be a lot bigger than dashes from a bitters bottle with a "dasher top." I almost always take "two dashes" of something such as maraschino, curaçao, grenadine or simple syrup that comes in a bottle to mean "somewhere between a quarter-ounce and a teaspoon." I'd say that's plenty enough to notice, and for my taste, even with something like Carpano Antica Formula (and certainly with M&R Bianco), I'd find a half ounce of Luxardo maraschino dominating the drink. YMMV, of course.

Xanthan gum is a thickener and stabilizer, so it must have been lecithin. Lecithin also stabilizes emulsions, and is a surfactant. But I don't think you can create a stable foam by simply adding lecithin to something that would otherwise not foam (e.g., water and ethanol). Are you sure it wasn't a gelatin foam? It's unclear to me that there is anything that works better for alcohol foams than egg white.

An American gill is equal to four US ounces, an Imperial gill is equal to 5 Imperial ounces (4.8 US ounces). An American gill is equal to 5/6 of an Imperial gill and an Imperial gill is equal to 1.2 American gills. What does this mean? If it's an English recipe, 1/6 of a gill would be equal to 23.68 millileters, or 0.8 ounces -- for practical purposes and ease of measurement, I'd say go for 3/4 of an ounce or 25 milliliters. If it's an American recipe, 1/6 of a gill would be equal to 19.72 milliliters (20 ml for practical purposes and ease of measurement), or 2/3 of an ounce. So, your drink would come out something like: white of a fresh egg (of a medium egg) 2 dashes of Curacoa (1/4 ounce?) 1/6 gill of grenadine (3/4 ounce) 2/6 gill of Rye (1 1/2 ounces) Figure the egg white is around a half ounce, and you've got three ounces before shaking and maybe 4 ounces after shaking. Actually, not that small. I personally find three ounces to be just about right for cocktails. I don't think it's possible to overestimate how small some of these drinks were. Take a look at the original Thin Man movie, for example, in particular the Martini Nick makes in his opening scene. It's so small he's able to shoot it all in one go. Couldn't have been more than 2 ounces in the glass.

Death & Company is going a good drink that uses fruit in an interesting way. The Ramble is a fairly simple drink with lemon juice and gin in a tall glass over crushed ice. What makes it interesting is that the poured drink is topped with several muddled raspberries, small pieces of which, along with the muddled-out raspberry juice, gradually seep down into the drink. I've also had a good Blinker variation (made, I think, by Jim Meehan) that substituted muddled fresh raspberries and simple syrup for raspberry syrup (double strained for the seeds, of course).

I've probably bought from 4-5 different vendors this Summer (ironically, I've never bought the ones from Paffenroth, an error of omission that your report will correct on my next visit!). I do often go to Stokes for one or two, because I have a pretty good relationship with the farmer and I usually buy herbs from them anyway. But they don't always have my favorite varieties (no Costoluto Genovese, for example). If I'm ever in front of a booth that seems to have a lot of heirlooms, and it's a grower I think has reliably good quality in general, and I see a cultivar I've been wanting -- I'll buy a few. I'm fairly cultivar-biased. I don't care for the green cultivars in general and find that the yellow or orange-fleshed ones don't often have the flavor profile I like, so I stay away from those cultivars (other people love them). I do need to try those German Striped tomatoes next time, though, because I'm told that they have a more tomatoey flavor than many of the yellow or orange tomatoes. I love Brandywines, and generally find that the purple/black varieties have the tomatoey flavor profile I'm looking for. All of which is to say that, if I see someone like Norwich Meadows Farm with a big table of cultivars I like, and especially if I can talk to the grower and he seems like he knows what he's doing and has specific recommendations based on my stated preferences, I'll buy from anyone down there. There are probably a few growers I haven't bought tomatoes from simply becasuse they don't sell other things I like, so I haven't got to know them.

That's what I'm saying, and why I don't buy the "decline in quality at the Greenmarket," if such a thing exists, as anything other than bad luck and weather (I haven't had a single heirloom from the USGM this Summer that wasn't delicious, but obviously can't speak for other people's experiences). There are, of course, other things that can ruin a Brandywine other than weather and the genetic/horticultural luck of the draw, but these tend to be the same things that make for bad supermarket tomatoes, namely: picking it early, refrigerating it, long transportation, perhaps hybridizing with a thicker-skinned variety for better storage/transportation properties, etc. But none of the USGM growers are doing these things. They're all ripening them on the vine, many of them are using hoophouse/tunnel systems with adjustible protection against frost and excess rain, they're picking the tomatoes the day before they are sold and transporting them a relatively short distance to the market, etc. I don't see what else they can possibly be doing better than they are already doing. Berried Treasures Farm, from whom Steven bought the horrible tomatoes, are extremely well-regarded growers. Their produce is highly sought after by high-end restaurants. The tomatoes didn't end up terrible because the people at Berried Treasures are screwups or don't know how to grow good heirloom tomatoes, and I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of their tomatoes were delicious this Summer (they certainly know good produce when they taste it, and if they were offering samples, that would indicate a certain level of confidence in their product). It seems to me that, if Steven is getting a bit more than the 20% mediocre heirloom tomatoes he experienced at his last visit to the USGM, and the likes of Mitch and myself are getting somewhere in the range of 0% to 1%, the reality is somewhere around 7% to 10% -- which is as good as I think one can reasonably expect with this kind of product. Again, maybe it's good luck this season for Mitch and me... maybe we've gone during times when heirloom tomatoes have been really good, we've happened to favor the growers who were having optimal weather that week and we've just not been unlucky enough to put our hands on a bad one. Maybe it's bad luck for Steven this Summer, maybe it was better luck for him in the past. You make a normal distribution curve, and simple statics will tell you that some people are going to have worse luck than others: 15.9% of the tomato buyers will experience more than one standard deviation better in average tomato quality, and 15.9% will experience more than one standard deviation worse; 2.3% will be more than two standard deviations better and 2.3% will be more than two standard deviations worse than average tomato quality. 2.3% of heirloom tomato buyers at the USGM is not a small number of people getting a high percentage of bad tomatoes! The question, I suppose, is whether the average quality has declined, and whether the curve has dramatically widened along with such a decline -- but Steven seems to be saying that he has experienced a greater percentage of "bad tomatoes" rather than that there has been a wholesale slide in heirloom quality across the board (this would not only make the average tomato lower in quality but would also make the "mindblowing tomato" increasingly rare, which does not seem to be the case). Rather, given the experience of Mitch and myself, it suggests that chance may have played a part.

Yea, that seems about right. There was certainly no visual-inspection basis for knowing those Berried Treasures tomatoes wouldn't be good. But, according to your own shopping experiment, you got eight out of ten in the range that you would describe as being within your 1997 expectations. Or, rather, you got 20% crap tomatoes, all from one grower. This may just be luck of the draw. Maybe you happened to get two bad tomatoes from them, maybe they've been having a bad week, maybe they're not very good growers, whatever. The microclimates at Stokes Farms (very near NYC in Jersey), Berried Treasure Farms (upstate NY near the West tip of Catskill State Park), Norwich Meadows Farm (even further upstate in the Chenango River Valley) and Eckerton Hill Farms (half way between Allentown and Harrisburg, PA) have to be quite different. That said, anyone who has been around non-commercial tomatoes for any length of time (e.g., every single tomato-grower who has posted to this thread, as well as my own experiences growing up with my mother's home-grown tomatoes) will tell you that sometimes the best tomatoes grown by the best grower will turn out to be crap anyway. Or, to put it another way, while you may not have bought any of them yourself, it's literally impossible that there weren't any crap heirloom tomatoes at the greenmarket in 1997. In my ten-plus years of regular shopping at the Union Square Greenmarket, I've had crap examples of just about everything. I've certainly had heirloom tomatoes from the USGM over the years that didn't appeal to me -- although to what extent those may have been due to cultivar or simply bad tomatoes is hard to quantify. Some of both, I imagine, although I've historically attributed it to cultivar (wishful thinking perhaps?). All of which is to say that I'm not willing to extend two bad tomatoes from one farm into "dramatic decline in average heirloom tomato quality at the Union Square Greenmarket."

In the NYC Greenmarkets, you're not allowed to sell it unless you grow it yourself. These are all actual farmers selling their own stuff. The guy at Norwich Meadows also recommended this cultivar as one of their best right now. I would have tried one, but was already laden with many tomatoes.

Sounds like a fun time, Steven. From what you describe, other than the terrible tomatoes from Berried Tresure, a luck-of-the-draw overripe tomato from Stokes and perhaps a slight bias against green-colored cultivars (which I share), these would all appear to be in the excellent-to-mindblowing category. That strikes me as being pretty good. These are natural products, and there is going to be some variation even in the tomatoes from an excellent grower like Stokes. As you've pointed out in the past, even Alain Ducasse can have an off-night -- and even Stokes can have a not-so-good tomato every so often. I have to say that I don't see how you could possibly have expected do to any better than you did on your trip -- and I don't care if it was 1997 or 2007. Out of ten tomatoes, you got two bad tomatoes from the same grower, one mediocre tomato past its prime from an established great grower, four tomatoes in the excellent-minus to excellent-plus category, and three in the mindblowing category. I can't believe that it was possible in 1997 to go to the Union Square Greenmarket, buy ten tomatoes and have them all turn out to be in the mindblowing category of your Stokes #1, Paffenroth and Eckerton samples. I also have to believe that part of our collective remembrance of heirloom tomatoes from 10-15 years ago has to do with their relative novelty at the time. Even something like the past-its-prime Stokes tomato would have tasted pretty good compared to supermarket tomatoes in 1992, and more importantly it would have looked and tasted different from anything we were getting around here. I can remember when Samuel Adams beer first came onto my radar in the 80s. It was a revelation, because all the American beer I had had up to that time was crap. I thought Samuel Adams must be the most delicious beer ever made, and had friends in college who regularly took orders and made weekend road trips from Wisconsin to New England to pick up cases of Sam Adams. Now, more than 20 years later, I've had enough American craft beer to have a different frame of reference. Whereas Sam Adams blew me away in 1987, it would register as "middle of the road" today and I'm unlikely to be impressed by their products. I could, I suppose, interpret this difference as "there's been a huge decline in quality of Samuel Adams," but since the brewing process is not so variable and the methods haven't changed, I recognize that it's me that has changed. I think the same thing may be at work here with heirloom tomatoes. It might be interesting to do a similar kind of sample in the three or so weeks we have remaining of heirloom tomato season, but talking with each grower and asking advice about which of their heirloom tomato cultivars to buy from them (e.g., if you're me it's: "I want something with an intense, concentrated tomatoey flavor, and I'm not so fond of the green varieties"). That might provide a more meaningful basis of comparison.

So, as chance would have it, after a trip down to Academy Records to get rid of a zillion CDs I don't want anymore, I decided to take a walk over to the Union Square Greenmarket to see what was what. Boy am I glad I did! I now have another favorite grower of heirloom tomatoes: Norwich Meadows Farm. They are an organic grower in, as you may imagine, Norwich, New York. They had what seemed like an enormous space and a ridiculous amount and variety of heirloom tomatoes for sale. I decided to give them a go to see if they were up to the level of my other guys. So I picked up a Brandywine and a few tomatoes called Costoluto Genovese that I always liked to buy in the markets in Italy during the summers. These have a very distinctive ribbed shape you can see about halfway down this page, and are very tender and juicy. Anyway, since none of the tomatoes were labeled as to cultivar, I asked after the name of the Italian tomatoes and mentioned my fondness for them. He said, "Well... Those are good, but if you want the stuff with the best flavor, I'd recommend a few other ones right now." I thought that was interesting and we talked a bit about the different varieties he had and what he thought about their flavor characteristics. We both agreed that we didn't care for the flavor of Green Zebra because it lacks a tomatoey flavor, and he sells a few other green-colored cultivars instead. Eventually, he said that if what I was looking for was an intense, concentrated tomatoey flavor I should buy his black cultivars. He was selling Paul Robeson, Russian Black (apparently different from Black Russian) and Black Cherry tomatoes. He gave me a sample, and quickly convinced me to add several of those to my order. Several tomato sandwiches later, I don't regret any of it. Apparently they grow all their tomatoes now using the hoophouse/tunnel method, where the sides can be rolled up so the vines are open to the air, but the sides can be rolled down to protect the tomatoes from excess rain, early frost, etc. So far, the only USGM growers I really haven't liked for heirloom tomatoes (and they are one of the original growers selling them at the greenmarket) are the guys who sell all the different kinds of peppers right at the apex of the two doglegs.

Right? It's definitely stupid to have uncoated rivets on interior PTFE-coated cookware. How hard can it be to spray on the coatings after the handle is riveted on. I have a nine-inch frypan I picked up for omelets at Bed Bath & Beyond a while ago. The body is made of extra-thick aluminum and I think the brand is called Invitations. It cost twelve bucks, and the rivets are fully PTFE-coated.

Ha! I must have misread the labels. They often put the Padano next to the Parmigiano. Still... 2 bucks a pound strikes me as a pretty small price for that jump in quality. If we consider that this prize-winning American-made product is approximately as good as high quality fresh Grana Padano (which is to say that it's not competing for parity with high quality fresh Parmigiano Reggiano) and it's only two dollars a pound less expensive... I don't know that that says great things about competing with the Italian product. It sounds to me like the American product will likely cost just as much as Italian product at approximately equivalent quality (which is to say that the people selling crappy, pre-grated or pre-cut dried out Parmigiano Reggiano for 14.95 will probably charge the same amount for equally crappy, pre-grated or pre-cut dried out Sartori Reserve SarVecchio if that product takes off). I'd think that the American product would have to undercut the Italian product of equivalent quality by at least 25% to make significant inroads. ETA: Has anyone tried Dry Jack? In the Cheese Primer, Steven Jenkins says: "A unique, original American cheese with a depth of flavor nearly rivaling that of Parmigiano-Reggiano. I like to use a mandoline to make heaping piles of feather-light, translucent wafers of this cheese to serve with melon or alongside dry Alalusian sherry of a special bottle of red wine." He lists Vella's Bear Flag Dry Jack as one of America's 25 best cheeses.

I take your point about freshness and storage conditions, but Bread Alone bread is fantastic. I don't think anybody in the city is making a bread that has quite the flavor of the Bread Alone organic whole wheat sourdough. If you grab a loaf in the morning either at the Greenmarket or at Fairway it tends to be quite fresh -- I imagine it's baked sometime after midnight, which is about as much as you can be sure of with a local bakery anyway. As you mentioned, some breads hold better than others, and a bread like Bread Alone's organic whole-wheat sourdough doesn't suffer much for a few hours' sitting around. I used to feel strongly about buying bread from local sources -- hey, it's New York City, why should we be getting bread from out of town? -- but Bread Alone changed my thinking on the matter. I'd definitely buy Bread Alone stuff at Fairway and stores like that. Once the bread is baked and transported to the market, the local bakeries lose their freshness advantage. There are many reasons, most too technical for me to get into in this thread in any detail without going widely off-topic, why sourdough breads have better storage properties (e.g., lactic and acetic acid act as preservatives) and also why whole wheat sourdoughs tend to have more true "sourdough flavor" compared to white sourdoughs (total acidity is dependent on the buffering power of the dough, which is higher in whole wheat doughs). So it's no surprise that their whole wheat sourdough is awesome. Neither Amy's nor Sullivan Street are hardcore sourdough specialists and can't compete on that basis (although it's worth noting that Bread Alone can't compete with, e.g., Sullivan's signature pane pugliese). Both Balthazar and Silver Moon have pretty outstanding pain de campagne and other rustic wholegrain and white sourdoughs that I've found to be better than any bread I've bought at places like Fairway. I can only assume this is related to freshness and other handling factors, since my experience is that Balthazar bread bought at Balthazar is a lot better than the same bread bought at Fairway. To my thinking, you're right on the money about BA's whole wheat sourdough boule. Not all of their breads are naturally leavened, by the way, only the ones called "sourdough" (they also call their sourdoughs "yeast free" which is unfortunate and inaccurate). The BA whole wheat sourdough boule definitely the one to get, especially if you're planning on keeping it around for a few days. I should hasten to add that I'm not saying the BA product isn't outstanding. I'm just questioning whether it's worth it to buy it at the greenmarket when you can get the exact same bread in several city groceries, and if you're willing to make a trip to get outstanding bread I think you can do better at the above-mentioned bread bakeries. This is all the more true because my experience is that the BA bread they're selling at the greenmarket is likely to actually be in worse condition than the BA bread you can get in the likes of Fairway, although this is probably fairly dependent on weather conditions (I've never understood buying bread from them at the greenmarket when it's raining).

This might be for another topic, but I don't believe that European eggs are necessarily any more dense or rich compared to American eggs. This is perhaps true when one compares American supermarket-level eggs to European supermarket-level eggs, because supermarket-level eggs are on average fresher and higher in quality in Europe (well, let's say France and Italy) than in America. However, I wouldn't say that, in my experience, European eggs are any more rich or dense than good-quality American eggs I've bought. The main difference is that European eggs tend to have a much darker yellow colored yolk, but this is merely a function of the pigmentation in their feed (marigold in particular), which I don't think has much of an impact on flavor, richness or density. One thing that does greatly affect density is age. The fresher the egg, the more dense the white and the less the white will spread from the yolk when it is fried, poached, etc. If greenmarket eggs seem significantly more dense than supermarket eggs, this is a function of age: the greenmarket eggs are only a few days old at most. For sure, any eggs you get from anyone at the greenmarket are going to be a lot better than anything you can get a the supermarket, and compared to the prices I've seen at Whole Foods, sometimes even less expensive.

Munchos are also an awesome vehicle for fish tartare.

If you cant get there first thing, Blue Moon will still have some very high quality stuff - the top of the line may be gone, but whatever they sell is still light years ahead of any retail...scallops, mussels, squid, flounder, and the like are still available after noon. Yea, everything they have is very high quality. My later remarks were more directed at the produce vendors. The main time-related worry with Blue Moon is that they might run out of something. I'm liking the baked goods from Bread Alone - (I think I first heard about their stuff from Fat Guy). Their whole grain loaves, baguettes, and boules are all organic and naturally leavened. Their whole wheat and plain sourdoughs are as good as I've had in the city. I suppose it depends on what kind of access you have to fresh baked bread. The Bread Alone stuff is very good compared to what you can get at, e.g., Fairway or Whole Foods. But compared to the best bakeries in the city... in my opinion the Bread Alone stuff doesn't compare well. Now, mind you, I'm sure that the Bread Alone people know what they're doing and make excellent bread. But there's only so good it can be when it has to be baked the evening before, schlepped two hours+ to the greenmarket from the Catskills, and stored more or less out in the open at much higher than ideal humidity. For artisinal hearth bread, I'm going to Silver Moon around the corner from my apartment, Sullivan Street Bakery or Amy's Bread when I'm in Hell's Kitchen or the Chelsea Market, and Balthazar Bakery when I'm downtown (the latter three "export" to various retail outlets, and the product available there doesn't measure up to the quality of the stuff sold at the bakeries). I don't think Bread Alone at the greenmarket can touch these places, but they can touch some of the prices if you know what I mean. I would love to try some of their stuff when it's in better condition, though. Edited to add: The above is less true for larger, longer-storing breads, such as a gigantic pain de campagne, although I'd still prefer to buy from an actual local bakery (Silver Moon makes 100% natural leavening for some of their breads, and I assume this is true of the others as well).