slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Why is that? Yes, sure you're likely to reduce the proof for bottling by adding water. But that seems entirely separate from the question of whether it makes any sense at all to infuse the spices into 100% water separately from infusing them into 75% alcohol (which, of course, is 25% water) in order to get some kind of qualitatively different "water infusion" that is added to the flavor profile.
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The point I was making is that one could theoretically have a "macerate in water" step if the idea was that the original step would extract alcohol-soluble compounds and the water step would extract water-soluble compounds. But, unless the original alcohol infusion was in absolute alcohol (i.e., 100% ethanol) then the botanicals were already being infused into water. This, then, would render an additional water-only infusion superfluous. I presume this is the theory behind this practice?
Who is going to have 100% ethanol?!?
That's exactly my point! Since you're using, let's say, 75% ethanol, you're already infusing into 25% water. This means that there isn't any point in doing a separate infusion into water -- which is what a bunch of these recipes say to do -- because you've already infused into water. That's all I'm commenting on, and we're saying the same thing: that it's not necessary. I'm simply pointing out that the spices, etc. have already been infused into water by virtue of the fact that there is water in the alcohol used to do the initial infusion.
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Yes. I don't quite understand this step. Unless you are using absolute alcohol for the infusion step, then you are already macerating the botanicals in water.
Water will be added to dilute to bottling strength after the original maceration in (high-proof) alcohol.
The point I was making is that one could theoretically have a "macerate in water" step if the idea was that the original step would extract alcohol-soluble compounds and the water step would extract water-soluble compounds. But, unless the original alcohol infusion was in absolute alcohol (i.e., 100% ethanol) then the botanicals were already being infused into water. This, then, would render an additional water-only infusion superfluous. I presume this is the theory behind this practice?
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Yes. I don't quite understand this step. Unless you are using absolute alcohol for the infusion step, then you are already macerating the botanicals in water.
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Nothing near there that will be swimming in the same waters are your preferred downtown spots.
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Let's say Whistlepig is $60 a bottle from the distributor. That's about $2.40 per ounce. A typical costing formula might be based on a 20% ingredient cost. That works out to a charge of $12 per ounce. Meaning that it might sell at $18 for a 1.5 ounce pour or $24 for a 2 ounce pour.
There are a several ways you could play this...
On the one hand, you could decide to be generous since the booze was donated, split the difference and charge $20 for a 2 ounce pour.
On the other hand, you could decide that it's for charity and charge even more than $12 per ounce. So you could charge $20 for the 1.5 ounce pour, for example, or even $25. People aren't there buying drams of rye because it's cheap.
Or, on the other other hand, you could decide that people at a function like this aren't likely to tell the difference between a 1.5 ounce pour and a 2 ounce pour, and charge the full $18 for the 1.5 ounce pour. That will seem to most people like a better value than $20 for the 2 ounce pour, and the charity gets to make more money.
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What are some good techniques for getting the firmed-white style of SV eggs out of the shell?
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I think that a lot of the pancetta one gets in the US is less cured than it is in Italy.
I'm surprised: aren't there all sorts of restrictions on the import of uncured/slightly cured meats in the US? I could swear that once it was difficult to get many of them.
Much (most?) of the pancetta for sale in the US is domestically produced. And I wonder if a significant amount of it might be wet-cured, as it often looks like it would be about as appetizing to eat raw as a slice of Oscar Mayer bacon.
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I've only ever eaten it cooked - always took it to be the Italian bacon equivalent ....
And I think that's the reason most Americans only eat it cooked -- because they think of it as "Italian bacon" (of course, bacon can certainly be cured and smoked enough to eat uncooked).
It also strikes me that Italians in general are more comfortable with eating even lightly cured pork. I certainly know people who would put up pork sausages for the year and begin eating them pretty early on when they were far softer than most any American would be comfortable eating.
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I think that a lot of the pancetta one gets in the US is less cured than it is in Italy.
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Grand Daisy makes awesome PB, but I don't know if they make panini with theirs. I'm usually too busy scarfing down their cauliflower pizza to notice.
Sam - I've had that and it's delicious (the PB that is). Is it the operation the Jim Lahey opened after Sullivan St. Bakery?
No, I think it's the opposite. Jim Lahey and Monica Von Thun Calderon were the original partners in Sullivan Street Bakery. They split their partnership.
Calderon kept the Sullivan Street location which she renamed Grandaisy, and opened branches.
Lahey kept the Sullivan Street Bakery name and the 47th Street location.
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Grand Daisy makes awesome PB, but I don't know if they make panini with theirs. I'm usually too busy scarfing down their cauliflower pizza to notice.
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Seems a bit short. Why would it be different from beef tenderloin?
Per Modernist Cuisine, you don't want to cook venison SV using the equilibrium temperature technique. It takes too long, and becomes mushy (due to enzyme activity I think) and gamy. So in order to cook it more quickly, you set the water bath higher than the target temperature and pull it out according to a strict timetable (and let it rest).
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croissant = kwa-sawn(t)
Let's put a touch of an "r" in there (krwa), and omit the final "t".
This, of course, is nit-picking.
In my experience in the US, croissant is most commonly pronounced "cruh-SAHNT", with an English "R" sound, and the "T" is definitely vocalized.
What phatj said. I wasn't writing how it should be said, just how it is said. And in the grand scheme of things, leaving in the T and using an English R or largely leaving out the R are pretty low on the list of proper pronunciation faults around here. Hey, I'm still fighting the (losing) battle to get people to stop referring to a single Italian-style pressed sandwich as a "panini."
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jalapeño = ha-la-pain-yo (one does also hear: ha-la-peen-uh)
As you point out, one may "also hear" hal-a-PEEN-no, but that's so wrong that it's irritating to the ear and grating on the nerves. We have an enormous Spanish-speaking population in the US and the popularity of Mexican food and its ingredients can't possibly be overstated. It's not like jalapeño is some exotic ingredient from some foreign land like Outer Slobovia and it's asking waaaaaay too much for Americans to be able to correctly pronounce the names of even the most obscure Outer Slobovian ingredients. And nobody takes Slobovian in our high schools.
I get your point. But, yanno... the places where we tend to hear it that way are the same places that have been saying San Jacinto as "san jah-sin-tuh" and Amarillo as "am-a-rill-uh."
I've never seen "yeeros" on a menu here, either. But you do see "heros" quite a lot. So often, in fact, that I doubt most Americans even make the connection to gyros.I think people don't make that connection because there isn't one. Heros (as in "hero sandwich") are associated with Italian-Americans, not Greek-Americans. "Gyros" also didn't enter the American lexicon until the late 1960s.
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As a non-American, I'm curious how 'croissant', 'habanero', 'chipotle', 'jalapeño', and 'mocha' are all pronounced up there.
Is there any consensus on 'pecan', too?
As far as 'gyro/gyros' goes, is it at all common to see it written as 'yeeros', in the US/UK?
The most common approximations into English are:
croissant = kwa-sawn(t) (also sometimes simply as "crescent")
habanero = one most often hears ha-ba-nyeh-row (despite the fact that there is no diacritical mark over the "n" and it should be ah-ba-neh-row)
chipotle = chih-poe-tlay
jalapeño = ha-la-pain-yo (one does also hear: ha-la-peen-uh)
mocha = mow-ka
pecan = pih-kawn (one does also hear: pee-can)
gyros is never written as yeeros in the US, to my knowledge.
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Yes, the IIF 2x-cooked scallops are definitely the way to go. The scallops have a better shape, due to being firmed up SV before searing, and somehow they seem to form a better crust without overcooking compared to pan-searing them from raw.
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Sous vide pate is pretty easy too. I change the temperature depending on the ingredients and the final texture I want. I don't think I would a duck and lamb pate to 70C, that seems to high. Maybe around 60-65C, with that recipe I would probably shoot closer to 60C.
Occasionally, I have found gamey meat cooked low temp is becomes livery or has the gamey notes are accentuated. So you might want to cook to a core of 65C or so, but in a 70C bath.
I've made the Momofuku "Vietnamese-style" pate for banh mi using sous vide techniques. It's essentially equal parts ground pork shoulder and pureed chicken livers seasoned with fish sauce, garlic, shallot, Chinese five spice, salt and sugar. The actual recipe says to bake it in a main marie until it reaches 145F. I just packed it into small loaf pans, sealed it and dropped it into a 63.3C water bath. Came out perfectly. It's a crumbly, spreadable type rather than a mousse type or a solid sliceable type.
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Anyone heard of/had 'Nduja, that killer-good hot spreadable sausage from Calabria? I think it's a corruption of andouille, but not sure how to pronounce it, since j isn't standard Italian. N-dooya?
That's correct" "ndoo-yah." And it does come from andouille.
"J" may not be standard Italian now, but appears in plenty of dialectical and historical spellings (e.g., Jesi and Jacopo). It's origin was as a variant of "i."
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So CDM is using refrigerated, pasteurized milk.. to make Milk Curds that are presumably kept at a "safe" temp zone... then you order & they make it... or do they go from cold milk to mozz ball when you order?
As explained above, I am almost certain that CDM starts with prepared curds. Just looking at the size of the place (it is tiny) and the amount of volume they go through, I don't see how they could possibly curdle their own milk. Let's say you might get a pound of wet mozzarella out of a gallon of milk. These guys would literally blow through hundreds of gallons of milk a day.
From what I can tell, demand at CDM is such that they are continually making mozzarella. And they sell it in a few different configurations (large balls, knots, etc.). So it's typical than when you come in and say you want two trays of bocconcini that the guy in the back pulling the cheese goes directly from the water into your tray. It seems likely to me that they have someone else bringing the product from the curd stage to the stage where it's ready to pull, but I can't say for sure.
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However, with my personal, limited frame of reference it seems a solid Mozz should not be that impossible to sell in a fast paced retail environment.
Bufalita, a fresh mozzarrella made in Guadalajara with local milk from Mexico's dairy capital sells never refrigerated Fresh Mozzarrella in f-ing 7 Eleven's all around Guadalajara...
I don't disagree with your premise, but I'm guessing that the health regulations aren't as strict (or as strictly enforced) in Guadalajara as they are up here. We're not even allowed to sell raw milk cheeses less than 60 days old! (grumble) There's no way a place around here would be allowed to sell unrefrigerated fresh mozzarella that's just sitting out in a counter all day. Places like Casa della Mozzarella literally make the mozzarella while you wait, put it in a tray and give it directly to you -- which is the only way I think they're able to get away with not refrigerating it.
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Sorry again--I'm not usually that unpleasant. I've actually enjoyed most of the thread. A few things just got to me--you may or may not like Caprial Pence, but her pronunciation of mascarpone is not wrong. In South Italy, from which virtually all Italian-American families originally came, dialects (though an excellent case can be made that the "dialects" of much of Italy are in fact separate languages, individually derived from Latin; "standard Italian" is itself a construct based largely on Dante and the grammar and pronunciation of cerain influential cities)--anyway, in the dialects around the Bay of Naples, the norm is the deletion of final vowels. In other words, calzon', mascarpon', mozzarell', etc., are not ignorant variants of somehow perfect "Italian" originals.
This is an issue I've posted on a few times. Yes, prior to 1986 more Italians spoke dialect in the home than did Italian. And in Italy, dialects are generally not regional or even micro-regional, but in fact local (or even micro-local). Never mind that people in the Veneto don't have a common dialect... people in different areas of Venice might speak different variants of veneziano.
So tons of Italians came to the United States starting in the late 19th century. These were largely poor people, and largely from the Southern parts of Italy. They all spoke different-but-related dialects of Southern Italy, and many (most?) of them probably didn't speak Italian. I still know a few older people in Italy who really only speak dialect with any fluency. So unless people from the same town just happened to move en masse to the same American neighborhood, there was likely to be some difficulty in making one another understood and also not much critical mass for perpetuating the dialect in any meaningful kind of way. And, of course, the new immigrants wanted to assimilate. This is borne out in the fact that usable Italian or dialect language skills can be observed to decline dramatically in the first "new world born" generation of Italian immigrants. I grew up in Boston, where there is still a strong presence of Italian culture, and had several friends whose parents spoke to them in Italian but replied to their parents in English and had limited Italian speaking skills themselves.
As you point out, the Southern Italian accent and many of the Southern Italian dialects feature radical de-emphasis of unstressed final syllables. There is also a tendency for vowels and consonants "softer" as one goes South. So, while someone from Milano might pronounce the word bene similar to "bay-nih," someone in Palermo might pronounce it similar to "bah-na." So, in this way, we can understand that a Southern Italian might say mozzarella something like "mah-za-rel" instead of "mow-tza-reh-lla" or capocollo something that sounds like "gaw-ba-gawl" instead of "kah-poe-koe-llo."
So what happened is that first generation Italian-Americans, who generally-speaking wound up less than fluent in Italian, would hear their parents refer to a certain kind of sausage as "gaw-ba-gawl. So that's what they would call it. Or rather, they would call it the same thing only with an American accent added. And then their children, who generally don't speak much Italian at all, would emulate their parents and the next thing you know the pronunciation of "capocollo" becomes "gabbagool." And many Italian-Americans have come to believe that all Italian words should leave off the final unaccented syllable.
This isn't quite the same thing as continuing dialectical pronunciations or names (although this does happen with some things, such as pasta e fasul). Especially since many of these products come from areas of Italy where these dialects or accents are not applicable. Mascarpone is not pronounced as "mar-sker-pone" by Northern Italians in Lombardia where it comes from. And precious little would have been making its way down to Calabria prior to the 19th century Italian diaspora. Rather, this is a habit of pronunciation that filtered down into non-Italian-speaking Italian-Americans across multiple generations and was applied to an Italian product which was encountered in the new world.
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One possibility is that CDM and Fairway start with the exact same curds but through artisanal family handiwork the CDM people transform the curds into superior cheese.
"Artisanal family handiwork"? It's mozzarella. My 11 year old makes a great mozzarella. I learned how to make it in about an hour. I would not call my excellent mozzarella "artisanal" and I make my own curds from milk I hand milked from my own animals.
I would suggest that unless you've had some of the superior examples of handmade mozzarella made by acknowledged leaders in that craft, you're not in a position to say whether your 11 year old makes objectively "great mozzarella" at a similar level to these people. Because I have to say, I've made mozzarella fresh from scratch using raw milk, and while it was certainly worlds better than what passes for "fresh mozzarella" in fancy supermarkets, it didn't hold a candle to the stuff I've bought at Casa della Mozzarella. Nor does the fresh mozzarella made by the famous Little Italy latticini like Di Palo and Alleva compare to CDM. I agree that it's not rocket science, but I would disagree that one hour is all that's needed to match the quality of the best makers in the business.
Of course, as I and others have observed, temperature and age are also huge variables independent of raw materials and technical skill, and perhaps these are the most important variables. It's certainly not difficult to do better than gourmet supermarket quality on the basis of freshness and temperature alone.
For what it's worth, all "artisinal" implies is that the product is effectively handmade with care by a skilled manual worker using traditional techniques, as opposed to largely mass-produced using machines and modern shortcuts. Your mozzarella would certainly qualify if you were doing it for money.
Really, you can't underestimate how much a difference age and temperature make. So if Fairway makes their muzz "fresh" every day but it is 12 hours old and has been refrigerated, it's going to taste very meh.Yes, time and temperature make huge differences. And I wouldn't say that you're likely to get even "same day" mozzarella at Fairway or any fancy market. These things all have "sell by" dates on them, and it usually isn't today's date -- meaning that you're likely to get mozzarella whose age can be measured in days, not hours. The Whole Foods near me sells a reasonably high quality "same day" local mozzarella that's sold out of an ice tray in the produce section. But even this, while having some qualities of truly fresh mozzarella and being head and shoulders above gourmet supermarket fresh mozzarella, has already had some of the specialness knocked out of it by age and temperature.
(What is this "muzz" of which you speak?
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My guess is that it would be next to impossible to get them to tell. But if it's true that most everyone is using Polly-o curds (which are apparently quite high in quality and a preferred brand), then this shows a lot. Frankly, I can't say that it would surprise me to find out that they use the same curds.
CDM is an artisinal operation (whether they use curds or not) where it's members of the family or closely supervised employees making the cheese in small batches -- often times to-order (there have been any number of times I've been there when I had to wait for my bocconccini to finish being made). When you get the cheese it's literally still warm, and it's only subjected to as much aging and refrigeration as you care to give it. The quality definitely declines with refrigeration, although I find that some can be brought back if you gently microwave the cheese the next day. With every passing day in the refrigerator, the CDM cheese came more and more to resemble pedestrian Fairway-level fresh mozzarella.
Fairway, on the other hand, probably makes (or has made) their fresh mozzarella in gigantic batches by who-knows-who, but I'm guessing not people whose professional pride rests on making the best mozzarella in one of the most competitive markets in the country, and it spends days and days under refrigeration. In fact, even if it's possible that Fairway's mozzarella is just as good as CDM's mozzarella when it first comes out of the waterbath, it's impossible to get any of it until it's had any chance at being special refrigerated and aged out of it.
All About Bitters (Part 2)
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted · Edited by slkinsey (log)
Say you start with 75% abv infused alcohol as your bitters base. You can , for example, dilute it with 50% water to end up with a 50% abv bitters which is now comprised of 1/3 water and 2/3 original infusion. Or you can keep it at full strength as a 75% abv bitters.
No one is arguing that the 75% abv bitters and the 50% abv bitters won't taste different straight out of the bottle.
So now let's say that you add 0.5 ml of bitters to 10 ml of water. In the case of the 75% bitters, we now have 10 ml of water and 0.5 of the original infusion. In the case of the 50% bitters, we have 10.16 ml of water and 0.33 ml of the original infusion. Effectively what we have done is dilute the original infusion by 20X in the version using the full strength bitters and by 30X in the version using the 50% abv bitters. That's a pretty big difference, and depending on taste thresholds and the intensity of the original infusion, these two glasses of liquid might taste very different.
Okay. So let's equalize the dilution of the original infusion in the finished drink. Let's take 0.5 ml of the 75% abv bitters and dash that into 15 ml of water. And let's take 0.5 ml of the 50% abv bitters and dash that into 10 ml of bitters. Now both drinks have 30X dilution of the original infusion. Is it your contention and experience that these two drinks would taste different? I won't say that it's impossible, but I will say that I'd have to taste it to believe it. I haven't had the ability to compare herbal infusions at different proofs, but I do know that 100 proof Wild Turkey diluted down to 80 proof is indistinguishable from 80 proof Wild Turkey and I assume that similar mechanisms are at work.
It seems to me that the point of diluting a botanical infusion has to do with two things:
First is economics and ease of production. Its easier and less expensive to make a very concentrated infusion that is then diluted to bottle proof than it is to infuse at the strength and intensity you would like to sell. This is why, for example, megabreweries often ferment extra-high-strength beers that are diluted with water at bottling.
Second is for use "in the field." One would like for a bitters to have an intensity that contributes the correct amount of flavor, aroma, etc. to drinks when used in the convenient and expected amounts. An especially intense bitters might be tricky to use if there is always the danger that a dash will overwhelm the drink. One problem I have with a lot of modern bitters is that they are diluted too much, so that 4 or 5 dashes are needed where 2 with a "standard" bitters would suffice.