slkinsey

Nope! Sorry! My guess is that it's caramel or chocolate or taffy or something like that, partially solidified in a pan of some kind and then turned over.

Usinger's! Takes me back to my college days in Wisconsin. Does anyone in NYC serve Usinger's?

No egg?

I posted this in another thread: Since the word "cocktail" to describe a spiritous libation wasn't mentioned in print until 1806, I have a hard time believing it originates from a punch spoon used 200 years earlier. That said, I suppose it's no less likely than any of the usual suspects.

Probably for the same reason Puglia is known as "Apulia." The UK's "rocket" most likely comes from the French roquette.

Real Spanish chorizo -- which is to say the dry cured paprika-loaded sausages (not Mexican chorizo, which is entirely different) -- should stand in for Portuguese chorice nicely.

Not to mention that quite a bit of the bottled water for sale is simply municipal water that has been filtered. I've never had bottled "spring water" that comes close to the NYC tap water I run through my massive plumbed-in under-the-sink water filter. Mineral water, on the other hand, is entirely different. There are wide differences in the tastes of mineral waters. Bah, you can lampoon the hell out of everything else but stay the hell away from my collection of gourmet salts. I *can* taste the difference and it *does* matter. Research would suggest that you can feel the difference due to the different shapes of various specialty salts, but that you cannot actually taste the difference between the salts (which makes sense, since aven fancy sea salts are something like 99.5% sodium chloride anyway). This is why it doesn't make sense to use fleur de sel to season the water you use to boil vegetables or to salt your soup.

I might be wrong here but isn't a martini traditionally gin? So saying you want a vodka martini is correct - but asking for a martini should result in a gin "martini"? Well, here's the thing: A "Martini" is a drink made with gin and dry vermouth, maybe (hopefully?) with a drop of orange bitters. If you change the basic ingredient, it is no longer something that should be called a "Martini." Think about it this way: A Margarita is made with tequila, Cointreau and lime juice. If I mixed up a drink made of bourbon, Cointreau and lime juice, it wouldn't be a "Bourbon Margarita." To us, a drink made with vodka and dry vermouth is so different from one made with gin and dry vermouth that it doesn't make sense to call them by the same name, even if we modify "Martini" by saying "Vodka Martini." But I think it's more than that. When you start calling everything a "Something-tini" or a "Whatever Martini" it starts to take away some of the meaning and value from the word "Martini." It's also not very interesting, and we're missing out on some really interesting and more informative cocktail names. Isn't it much better to have a "Vesper" than a "Vodka and Gin Martini?" I also think there are more interesting ways to indicate in a cocktail's name that it is inspired by another cocktail without just tacking something onto the name. As it so happens, this is something Alchemist and I have been discussing in this thread about swizzles. There is a famous swizzle called the Queens Park Swizzle that Alchemist has been riffing on. The QPS has a rum base. Alchemist came up with an interesting variation using gin instead of rum. Now, he could have called it a "Gin Queens Park Swizzle," but instead had the idea of naming it after a park in London to give a nod to the city of London Gin: the "Hyde Park Swizzle" or something like that.

Kohlrabi gives me the cold robbies. (Ten points for anyone who knows the reference.)

Dude. . . you drank straight Wray & Nephew overproof rum?! No ice? Wow.

I think we've solved the mystery of your "bag bloat." If this is your short ribs and mushrooms after sealing, it doesn't have nearly enough air removed before sealing. To my eye, there is still plenty of air in there. The bag should be tight on all the food.

More sous vide experimentation. This time it was chicken breasts with scallions and shitakii mushrooms. I bagged it all together with the FoodSaver and cooked it for 40 minutes in a 65C water bath. Nothing else in there but some salt, white pepper and around a teaspoon of rendered chicken fat from the freezer. Yea, yea. . . I know I could have gone for a lower final temperature, but as this was the first time I wanted to make sure it had a familiar "cooked chicken" texture. Here are some looks at the bag after it came out of the water bath: Mushroom Side Scallion Side (the vacuuming sucked the scallions into the "valleys" between breasts) Here are the results. Incredibly moist and tender, and exquisitely perfumed with shitakii and scallion. The juices in the bag made a very nice, light "sauce" that I poured over the chicken. On the Platter With Wilted Savoy Cabbage (I think this gives some idea of how moist the chicken is) This really couldn't have been easier, too. And hardly anything to clean up! With Nathan's charts, it's very easy to get started. Next time: fish.

That's a new one to me (not that I am anything but a novice!). What is it? Spatchcock.

Either/or, really. A lot of people like the curved sides for sauce making. I have a small regular sauteuse evasee and medium curved sauteuse evasee. I like them about equally. If the thermal mass is higher then, all other things being equal, it will hold temperature better. Of course, if the thermal mass is higher and the thermal conductivity is lower, it just magnifies the difference. FWIW, from what I have been able to glean, I suspect your ICM Cose Casa "Le Pentole" cookware is not copper core, but rather heavy stainless with a thick encapsulated aluminum base. One would expect better heat retention from such a design. Personally, I prefer heavy stainless body with an extra-thick aluminum base for a saute pan. I think it balances the need for a high heat capacity with some responsiveness and no reactivity. I can't say that I've experienced the situation you describe with my heavy copper frypans (losing heat and getting "sticky"), but my gas stove also puts out a considerable flame for a regular NYC apartment stove. The more heat you can pour into the copper pan (i.e., the more powerful your heat source) the less likely you are to experience any heat loss issues with heavy copper. It's when you pull the copper pan off the stove and put it in the oven, where the heat transfer to the pan is drastically reduced, that you would really rather have low thermal conductivity instead of high.

According to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. . . <br />(Note: this material not subject to copyright protection)

That's an interesting question. It definitely seems to be the case that some things are allowed to be sold unregulated in certain forms, regulated in other forms and not at all in other forms.

I see what you're saying, I just don't agree that it's something to be concerned about. You can still get wormwood, can't you? I don't think we're in any danger of seeing the government ban the sale of all bitter orange peel. The only potential issue would be if the FDA were to ban dietary supplements containing bitter orange peel. One could still buy ephedra herb legally in the US even while the FDA ban on ephedra supplements was in effect, because the FDA ban only applied to dietary supplements containing ephedra. Regardless, in April of 2005 a judge in Utah overturned the FDA ban on ephedra supplements and told the FDA they would have to do more testing to determine safe levels if they wanted to continue the ban. Very few companies are coming to market with ephedra supplements after the lift, most likely because of liability issues and concerns that the public won't buy it after the negative publicity. So, again, I have very little fear that we will see a ban of any kind on bitter orange peel in the forseeable furure. Look on the bright side: if they ban bitter orange peel dietary supplements, that means that there will be even more available for brewing and other culinary applications. There is plenty of other stuff in the two orange bitters with which I am familiar (Fee's and Regan's). Plus, I have to believe that you'd have to drink an awful lot of orange bitters to get a dose equivalent to one of those diet pills.

Interesting. Whether a piece of heavy copper loses a lot of heat when, for exmple, introduced to a large piece of meat depends on a lot of variables: how hot was the pan preheated, how high is the flame, how powerful is the stove, what kinds of heat source are you using, how large is the piece of meat, is the pan being taken off the heat and put into the oven, and if so how soon, etc. There is little doubt that cast iron or stainless with a thick aluminum disk bottom is the better choice for certain food items and for certain cooking tasks. However, I usually find that I wish cast iron cookware was substantially heavier than it is. There is often only a marginal difference in the heat capacity of similar sized heavy copper and cast iron pieces, and most cast iron pieces are not thick enough to avoid significant hotspot problems. That said, I'll usually reach for some of my old cast iron if I'm going to be searing a steak or a pork chop and finishing it in the oven. I don't often use cast iron for something like a spatchcocked chicken I'm starting skin side-down on the stove and finishing in the oven, but that is simply a shape issue: I don't find the cast iron skillet shape to be very good for this task and prefer a frypan shape. If they made large extra-heavy cast iron pans with low sloping sides I'd use them. I'm curious. . . what kinds of things do you do where you feel that copper loses heat for you?

I'm not convinced that this will be a problem that affects the brewing or liqueur industries. There are plenty of things used in herbal infusions and brewed into beer that are dangerous when consumed in the massive megadoses used in diet pills. I think regulation is moving more in the direction of allowing small amounts of these suposedly "dangerous" substances to be used in traditional beverages. For example, real absinthe is becoming legal all over Europe and I think it's only a matter of time before it's legal here. And yet, thujone is a dangerous poison. For that matter, it's quite easy to kill yourself in short order with another common poison: nicotine. No way is whatever there is in bitter orange peel as dangerous as thujone or nicotine. If anything comes of this (which I think is doubtful) it will hopefully be the banning of megadose bitter orange peel diet pills. Is there anything taken as a diet pill that isn't bad for you?

Let's keep all the discussion in one thread -- the one cdh links to.

It's such a dense, viscous, strongly flavored cocktail that I assume the water is necessary just to provide additional dilution beyond the normal 20% you'd get from shaking. Many of the ingredients are so intensely flavored that the drink really needs to be thinned out quite a bit. Think about what you're getting in each serving minus the water: 2/3 ounce genever, 1/2 ounce rich simple syrup, 1/2 ounce Chartreuse, 1/2 ounce heavy rum and a teaspoon each of orange curaçao and Angostura bitters. That's just too much strong flavor and too much sweetness without taking extreme measures to thin the drink. It's incredibly strongly flavored even with the additional dilution. That's my guess, anyway. It is odd, though, isn't it? It's the only recipe I can recall that calls for water.

That's spelled: Mojito Criollo. I always thought the difference between a regular Mojito and a Mojito Criollo is that the former is made with regular ice cubes and the latter is made with crushed ice. Yes?

It's a good sign that this book is a year old and I'm still enjoying it. I take issue with one or two of the formulations (in particular the Pegu Club recipe, which is both way off and strangely ahistorical given the premise of this book), but all in all I think it's a wonderful book and many of the formerly forgotten cocktails it features have entered the standard repertoire not only at the slkinsey household but in many of the better NYC watering holes. So, having finally procured some genever, and having temporarily sated my craving for the Improved Holland Gin Cock-Tail, it was time to try one of the more peculiar drinks from Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, the Alamagoozlum. This is a very unusual cocktail given the long list of disparate ingredients as well as the fact that the recipe makes three cocktails rather than just one. I'm going from memory here, but it goes something like this: Alamagoozlum 2.0 oz : genever 2.0 oz : water 1.5 oz : Jamaican rum 1.5 oz : Green or Yellow Chartreuse (I used green) 1.5 oz : gomme syrup (I used 2:1 simple syrup) 0.5 oz : orange curaçao 0.5 oz : Angostura bitters one half of an egg white Shake all ingredients with ice hard, like your very life depends on it, until very, very cold. Strain into three cocktail glasses. As you may imagine, this is a very spicy cocktail and there are a lot of flavors going on -- but somehow they all play well together. I would call this a cocktail for late fall/early winter due to the rich, sweet spicyness. It's like pumpkin pie in a glass. Interestingly, it's also quite thick and viscous on the palate, unlike any other cocktail I've had. Has anyone else tried this one? Any other interesting or strange discoveries from Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails?

Hmmm. That is an awful lot of bloating. But I think I have read that certain vegetables tend to be gassy when cooked. Perhaps the mushrooms? Or the alcohol from the wine? Others will know more about this than I.

Bag bloating is supposed to be an issue with FoodSaver bags compared to bags vacuumed and sealed by the commercial machines. I don't think it's a big deal from a safety standpoint, as long as you cook for a sufficient length of time (there is safety information in the main sous vide thread). How much air are you talking about? I just did a bunch of short ribs for around 30 hours at 60C using a FoodSaver bag and a circulating bath with very little air showing up in the top of bag. That said, I carefully positioned the short ribs in the bag to minimize any hidden air pockets, I did an extended vacuum before sealing, and after sealing I sealed the bag again much closer to the meat (essentially eliminating a lot of extra bag space to which air or liquid might migrate). What do you have in the bag besides short ribs?