slkinsey
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Here's the relevant passage for posterity:
Years ago when I was travelling through Morocco I was told that I just had to go and see a well-known anthropologist who had developed a new style of quick Moroccan cuisine. I took the train to her city, Rabat, and during lunch she showed me a pressure cooker. So I have witnessed the start of a trend which has since taken the country by storm. The result is not the same as the long slow cooking over a constantly replenished wood fire of the traditional tagine, the clay pot with the conical lid, which produces, at the end, a rich reduced sauce. Some also now bake their tagines in the oven which are relatively new in many homes.I'd be interested to hear from those in a better position to understand Moroccon cuisine and culture than I whether they think the use of a pressure cooker means that a "new style of quick Moroccan cuisine" is emerging or whether it's simply a way of shortcutting and ultimately shortchanging the historical cuisine. I'd also like to hear thoughts on whether pressure cooking will eventually make slow tagine cooking a historical footnote, or whether there may be some backlash and return to using a tagine. In my own limited experience, I haven't found slow cooking with a tagine to be all that difficult or time consuming. Put the ingredients into the tagine, slap it on the stove with a low flame and a heat diffuser then come back several hours later and eat it.
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I suppose it depends on your definition of "authentic" -- a topic that has been the subject of some debate in these forums of late. I don't have a hard time believing that younger urban Moroccans use pressure cookers rather than clay tagines nowadays. But I'm not so sure that makes it "more authentic." Indeed, I imagine pressure cooking was hardly known in Morocco fifty years ago.
To make a comparison, most young urban Italians nowadays buy fresh pasta that is made by a machine at the "pasta fresca" store instead of making it by hand at home. Does this mean that handmade fresh pasta is "inauthentic" and "for the tourists?"
So, to a certain extent, I'm not sure it really matters what the current generation of younger Moroccan home cooks are doing today. If they're using pressure cookers instead of tagines, it's only a sign that this wonderful, complex, slow cuisine may be losing some of its uniqueness and glory to the pressures of modern lifestyles.
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Bruce, not only can Luxardo maraschino be used to make an Aviation, many would argue (and I among them) that Luxardo is the best maraschino and therefore makes the best Aviation.
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The article says:
Of all the aperitifs, vermouths vary the most in quality. Before subjecting a garden full of friends to any one brand, taste it first and make sure it's good enough to serve on its own. Noilly Prat is dependable. It can even be sublime if you've picked up a bottle while visiting France. It is made differently there, and flaunts a more assertive and complex personality than its blander American counterpart.This seems to imply that Noilly Prat produces vermouth for the American market in America. I'd be interested to know where she got her information. As well as I can recall, bottles of Noilly Pratt say "Product of France" on the side. I would be shocked to learn that there is really a difference between Noilly Prat manufactured for the US and the Noilly Prat manufactured for France and Europe. Here is some good information on the process, for those who are interested.
As for The Hersh's thoughts on more expensive vermouths (i.e., Vya). . . I think you'll find that if you try Vya you'll see that it's good for a whole lot more than just Martinis and cooking. Indeed, I would consider using Vya for cooking somewhat of a waste. Vya on the rocks with a twist, on the other hand, is a great drink. I also enjoy "Reverse Martinis" with Vya.
In other news, the Noilly Prat web site has a link to a nice article about vermouth and Audrey Saunders:
Audrey Saunders . . . has chosen as her house aperitif the Eve, a soft infusion of McIntosh apples and soft Noilly Prat dry vermouth . . . softening the distinctive qualities of each ingredient into a taste at once familiar and utterly fresh."I've tried the infused vermouth, and it's really nice.
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Yea, there are good reasons to go with 2:1. The problem with using it, to a certain extent, is that many of the new recipes call for simple syrup at 1:1. It's easy to make without heating, overpours aren't as much of a concern and the bar will likely be ditching any unused simple syrup after service anyway.
The problem is that it doesn't necessarily follow that a half ounce of 2:1 simple syrup has the same sweetening power as a full ounce of 1:1 simple syrup. One ounce of 1:1 simple syrup contains about 17.75 grams of sucrose. A half ounce of 2:1 simple syrup contains only about 14 grams of sucrose.
So you have to be careful in executing a recipe to make sure you know what kind of simple syrup you should be using and adjust accordingly. This is an issue when attempting some of the old-school drinks including citrus, until you read their recipe for simple syrup and realize that they're using a supersaturated syrup.
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Of course, the problem with smart cards is that if every business uses them everybody will have to carry around a hundred different smart cards. So eventually there will have to be consolidation. I imagine what will (or at least should) happen is that the credit card companies will integrate smart-card-like functionality into their centralized systems, so that you can have, for example, all your Starwich profile data stored in a database that associates that information with your Visa card.
Actually, the (supposed) beauty of smart cards is that the data is carried on the chip rather than in a centralized system. There was already the capability to carry multi-vendor information and different kinds of information on a smart card back when I was working on them, and I can only assume that there has been a great deal of progress in that area. We were already talking about putting financial information, cash and emergency medical information (among other things) on a single smart card at least 5 years ago. When you think about the kind of data a place like Starwich might like to put on the chip, it's really not very many bits of information.
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Starwich’s plan is to issue each customer a “smart card,” a small plastic credit card–sized device with an embedded computer chip. The Starwich smart card remembers your name, your three favorite sandwich combinations (right down to special requests like “extra mayo”), and your last ten orders. Customers can also access their profiles online, where they can add money to a virtual account that lets them pay for sandwiches with the smart card (if you add $50, you get $55 worth of credit).
Nice work, dude. I worked on smart cards for several years at one of my day-jobs in Citibank. If it gives you some idea of the times, the entire Citibank internet group in NYC was maybe a dozen people. We did a big pilot of an "electronic purse" on the Upper West Side where people were storing cash on their smart ATM cards and using the stored value to make purchases at Fairway, Zabar's, etc. Steven, do you know if they're gone forward with their smart card program?
If anyone is interested, there is a good thread on Starwich Salads & Sandwiches in the NY Forum.
Current NYC locations of Starwich include:
153 East 53rd Street (at Lexington Avenue)
63 Wall Street (between Pearl Street and Exchange Place)
525 West 42nd Street (at Tenth Avenue)
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There are times when muddling makes sense and times when it doesn't, I suppose.
There is not much to be gained from muddling a sugar sube with bitters, if that's all you do, compared to simply combining the bitters and the appropriate amount of simple syrup. However, if you muddle the bitters and the sugar sugar cube together with a fat slice of lemon zest and "abrade" the surface of the zest against the sugar grains, you will extract flavors that are simply not possible with an aggressive twisting of the lemon peel. Try it and see.
Similarly, there is an obvious difference in flavor between a drink that has been made with muddled citrus and one that has not. Try making a Sidecar with regular fresh lemon juice and then make the same drink by muddling the lemon in the mixing glass. The flavor will not be remotely the same, and again, the flavor of the muddled drink would not be possible with aggressive twisting. First of all, you would have to twist the peel of an entire lemon into the drink to equal the same amount of lemon peel. Second, muddling directly into the mixing glass is simply a more efficient and thorough method of oil extraction. Third, muddling will also extract a small amount of the bitter flavors from the pith. There is a certain pungency that results from muddled citrus that is not available any other way. This is not to say that muddled always equals better, by the way. I wouldn't want a muddled Sidecar.
In other cases, I think you're exactly right. It's simply the most efficient way to incorporate things like strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries into a drink. It's relatively simple to do, and you wouldn't want to have to make up a batch of "strawberry juice" before service every night. I assume there would also be serious issues of flavor degradation with things like fresh strawberry or blueberry juice.
You do have a point with respect to muddling tender herbs into drinks that you're planning on shaking hard. But whether the drink can be shaken hard enough without risking dilution will be highly dependent on the ice you're using (ice has been the subject of much discussion among my friends in the bar biz of late).
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The purpose of vodka in a vodka sauce is to bring out flavor components that are sensitive to alcohol (but not necessarily sensitive to other liquids).
This is a standard explanation for why we add things like vodka and wine to foods, but turns out to not be true. It is true that certain substances are only (or better) soluble in water or in alcohol. However, a solution of water and alcohol does not have the same chemical properties as pure water or pure alcohol. More to the point, it does not follow that an alcohol-soluble substance will necessarily be soluble in a water-alcohol solution.
This is explained in some detail by Robert Wolke in his new book, What Einstein Told His Cook 2: The Sequel: Further Adventures in Kitchen Science. He did an experiment where he took annatto seeds, which are coated in an alcohol- and oil-soluble but water-insoluble yellow-orange pigment, and attempted to infuse the seeds into test tubes of water, 13% abv white wine, 40% abv vodka and 95% pure ethyl alcohol. He would judge the amount of potential flavor extraction by observing the change in the color of the liquid. After several days, the water and wine showed zero color change, the vodka was a very mild yellow and the 95% ethyl alcohol was intensely yellow. This, he concluded, demonstrates that the liquid must be at least 40% abv to dissolve even a minimal amount of an alcohol-soluble/water-insoluble compound. He also points out that these concentrations never happen in cooking anyway: adding half a cup of vodka to a quart of sauce yields a solution that is only 5% abv.
Does a more expensive vodka have much impact once it's made into a tomato-based sauce?Expensive vodkas are usually differentiated from less expensive vodkas on the basis of having less flavor, the idea being that the flavor components in the less expensive brands are "off flavors." (It's actually a little more complicated than that . . . the big secret of the vodka industry is that they are allowed to "add back" minute amounts of things like glycerin and citrus oils after the vodka is rectified, but I digress.) In the context of a vodka sauce, it's clear that you don't want to use total rotgut that might bring medicinal flavors to the dish, but there is plenty of inexpensive vodka of quality to be found. I'll put up Luksusowa against any "super premium" vodka costing three times as much. And, of course. Smirnoff was recently judged best in the NY Times.
As noted upthread - vodka should be tasteless so if you cook it out for 10 mins then all the alcohol is gone. Now cream and tomato is an excellent sauce on their own. Does the vodka actually make any difference then? Can you taste the difference somehow?The vodka will make a difference, yes. This is not because the alcohol extracts alcohol-soluble/water-insoluble flavor components, but rather because the alcohol reacts with the acids and oxidizing substances in the sauce to create esters and aldehydes.
I've noticed Nigella Lawson adds the vodka at the very last second in her recipe (I mean basically splashing it on the tossed pasta).This makes some sense if you like the strong flavor of alcohol in the dish. Whether you want that will depend on the dish. Penne alla vodka is often a very rich sauce and can perhaps benefit from being "cut" by plentiful unevaporated alcohol. Of course, the alcohol never boils off completely no matter what.
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I don't think institutions like Tony Luke's are easily duplicated. There is too much 'tude, and look and feel about the original. Plus the employees at the orginal, the institution, very likely have more pride in their restaurant and the food they put out. Plus some of the employees at Tony Lukes have probably worked there for decades.
That said, while it isn't easy it is possible to duplicate the quality of the food if management is dedicated to that proposition and not just in it to make money by franchising the name. A perfect example is the (sadly defunct) Philly branch of Lombardi's Pizzeria, which made a high quality pizza and maintained high quality while the original went into decline.
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"Resting" seems to be one of those things that is necessary for conventional cooking methods, where the cooking environment is substantially hotter than the target temperature of the meat. But even in the LTLT method Shalmanese propounds, it would seem that resting is somewhat necessary, so there has to be something to the idea that a reduction from the meat's peak temperature is beneficial with respect to cooking method regardless of cooking method. Whether something like Shalmanese's method LTLT cooking followed by another LTLT reduction in temperature constitutes "resting" is perhaps another question entirely.
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My father used to regularly win bets from his colleagues at MIT by gargling liquid nitrogen. I'm not sure what the trick was, but he never burned himself. I'll have to ask him about it.
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we also are doing cocktails spheres that are liquid in the center and frozen on the outside........
This sounds very interesting. Can you explain how you do it?
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And of course, tobacco, just in case you're looking for a real cocktail challenge.
Nothing like a good "spit julep"!
Nicotini, garnished with a cigarette butt speared on a safety match?
Oh, the irony. You think this isn't done? It's done, alright.
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I have been reading a very interesting book lately, The Botanist and the Vintner : How Wine Was Saved for the World by Christy Campbell. As the subtitle of the thread indicated, it's a book about the phylloxera aphid and the plague it caused among the vines of Europe in the mid-1800s. I recommend it very highly.
For those who are not aware, phylloxera (aka Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) is an aphid of American origin that is a grapevine parasite. It has a very complex lifecycle involving both above-ground forms that cause leaf galls and below-ground forms that are root suckers. American grapes (Vitis labrusca, V. berlandieri, V. riparia, etc.) have some natural resistance to phylloxera, but European grapes (Vitis vinifera) do not. Unfortunately, V. vinifera is the good king of grape for wine making.
Starting in around 1865, grape vines in France began to die for some unknown reason. This turned out to be the arrival of phylloxera in Europe. In only a few decades, most of the European wine-producing regions were infested with phylloxera and the wine industry was in a shambles after massive die-offs of the vinifera vines. Eventually it was determined that the solution was to graft traditional European vines that produce the wines we love onto American roots that can resist phylloxera. The journey from first "outbreak" to this solution is a fascinating one.
This was a time of tremendous social and economic change in France, as well as a period of great scientific progress. But you have to understand that evolution and natural selection -- the key theory informing the eventual solution to the phylloxera problem -- were still very controversial subjects. Darwin's The Origin of Species had been published less than ten years before the outbreak. It is almost impossible to underestimate the extent to which the phylloxera plague changed the face of France and Europe. Prior to the phylloxera, a peasant in the wine-growing regions could support himself and family making vin ordinaire from a small plot of grapes, and people would come down from the hills to work as vignerons during the growing and harvesting seasons. This all ended as the vines died off. Many small growers simply abandoned their plots. The economic devestation was tremendous, and the solution for many was to move to other areas of the world where the phylloxera was not to be found -- places like Algeria and South Africa and Australia. When the vines came back decades later, the entire social structure had changed.
It's also interesting to note that many growers took the opportunity presented by replanting with grafted rootstock to change varieties, or a change was dictated according to which European varieties were easier to graft to the available American rootstocks. Thus "the old varieties of Mourvèdre in Provence and Négrette in the Tarn were abandoned when they proved difficult to graft. The once Pinot-dominated vineyards of Sancerre were remade on grafts of Sauvignon to make a white wine which would be fêted in Paris. La Folle Blanche, the traditional grape for making brandy, was supplanted in the Charente by Ugni Blanc."
The author does a remarkable job of presenting a good amount of historical and scientific information in an easily-digestible form, and weaves a compelling and interesting story while he's at it. If you're interested in wine, put this book on your reading list.
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Here's a link and a brief quote for posterity:
Conant has a deft touch for dishes that, if somewhat contrived in their complexity, are undeniably exquisite. Amuse-bouches set the tone: an oyster decked out in horseradish foam, crunchy apples, and red-beet vinegar and a silky almond gazpacho with muscat grapes and scallops were surprisingly subtle enticements. A soft polenta appetizer studded with snails, truffles, and asparagus spears was as delicate as it was earthy. Dishes that, on the page, seemed weighted by a cavalcade of luxurious elements—like raviolini filled with ricotta di bufala and accompanied by an asparagus-tarragon sauce, Pecorino, and a beef glacé—turned out to have an ethereal lightness. -
Thanks for the link, Sam. Those are some interesting variations. I appreciate the creativity that went into some of those concoctions. My concern, from a bar manager's perspective, would be that many of those drinks are too labor intensive and time consuming. And there's only so much stuff you can fit behind a bar. When you start needing 15 different ingredients outside of the standard items stocked behind a bar you get all sorts of issues like lack of space, waste from spillage and spoilage, etc. It becomes less cost effective.
I suppose it depends on the place. It's quite impressive to see the bartenders at Flatiron Lounge knock out multiple-ingredient-with-fancy-garnish drinks (including flourishes like flamed citrus twists) in volume during the rush. Of course, good drinks don't have 15 different ingredients anyway, and I rather imagine that some of the places mentioned above are mixing some of their ingredients in batch.
Hmm. . . Is the Mojito going to become the next cocktail for which the name of the drink begins to lose all meaning?I doubt it. Although much like anything in a birdbath glass becomes the something-or-other-INI these days, I suspect anything with some mint and lime could be called a mojito variant. But if it isn't a rum based drink, it just isn't a mojito or even a faux-jito. And rum just isn't as popular a spirit as vodka or gin, so I don't think it has the same potential to become as ubiquitous.
I don't think it will go as far as the Martini in losing meaning, but "Mojito = rum drink with mint" strikes me as a serious dilution of the meaning of Mojito. And look at the Daiquiri. Here is a very simple drink of white Cuban-style rum, lime juice and a touch of sugar. Now, who the hell knows what a Daiquiri is? Some kind of sweet frozen drink? If you served the average American a Daiquiri that was nothing more than 2 ounces of Havana Club, a half-ounce of lime juice and a teaspoon of simple syrup shaken with ice and strained into a cocktail glass, they would tell you it wasn't a Daiquiri (and don't even get me started on the typical "dack-uh-ree" pronunciation).
Note, by the way, that the Sly Honey Mojito above uses honey-infused vodka and ginger ale (and, based on the picture, mint).
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Well, iced tea is a natural for barbecue. The tannin cleans the fat and smokiness from the palate. I would suggest starting with a tea-infused light bourbon and go from there. This could easily be used at full strength in "up" cocktails, but also mixed with ginger beer or something like that in a highball, or shaken with some egg white, lemon and simple syrup for a fizz. Mint could fit in there somewhere, too.
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New York Magazine has an bit on Mojito variations in NYC.
Libation's O'jito uses orange-flavored rum and muddled tangerines; King Size's Negril Sunset uses 126-proof Ray & Nephew rum and grapefruit soda; Odea's Lychee, Strawberry, Raspberry, and Apple Mojito includes a fresh fruit puree; Sly's Sly Honey Mojito uses honey-infused vodka and ginger ale; Soho 323's Pineapple Mojito includes muddled pineapple and brown sugar; Sutra's Holy Moses has citrus juices and tequila; and Cabana at the Maritime Hotel has a Frozen Mojito.
Hmm. . . Is the Mojito going to become the next cocktail for which the name of the drink begins to lose all meaning?
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This was also mentioned in this week's NY Times Dining Section:
Eastern Noodles
28 Forsyth Street (Chinatown)
At Canal Street
(212) 941-7678
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Further to the discussion of things like bouillabaisse (which is not only a discussion about authenticity but also a discussion about nomenclature) is the restaurant practice of giving dishes what I will call "quotation mark names." This is to say, they're not giving you the dish, they're giving you something that they think is evocative of the dish. Thus Keller's salmon "chop" and things like Thai-style salmon "bouillabaisse."
Part of what happens, of course, is that too many quotation mark dishes begins to change the public's perception of the dish, and "bouillabaisse" comes to mean "fish soup."
Back to the nomenclature thing, I think a lot of this comes out of simply not understanding foreign languages. For example, this is how "bruschetta" is coming to be known in America as "any old thing with chopped fresh tomatoes, raw garlic and basil on it." Likewise, this is how "panini" and "biscotti" are coming to be known in America as names for single items, as in "give me a panini." In fact, there have been plenty of discussions in these forums with members forwarding the argument that this is okay and exactly how it should be -- that "panini" now means "single vaguely Italian-style grilled sandwich" in America.
This all seems to get away from the central question of what is "authentic," however. It may be inevitable, or okay in some minds, for "bouillabaisse" to mean "a vaguely French-style fish soup" in America, but there is no way a bouillabaisse made with salmon and without rascasse can be called "authentic" or (which I think is more useful) "traditional."
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I'm pretty sure that's the beef hanger steak, also known as the butcher's steak. Demand for those is so high now, though, and there's only a handful of real butchers left out there, so now it's just "hanger steak, $27" at your favorite restaurant.isn't this the one where the butcher usually keeps this richly marbled cut for himselfOr "onglet, $31."
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That would be Paula Wolfert, and I'm proud to have given her the seed of the idea here in the eG Forums. Her version is much more memorable than mine, of course.
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I agree with Adam that "traditional" is much more useful in this context than "authentic." I don't think it's possible to identify something as an example of "authentic boeuf bourguignon" the one can identify something as an "authentic Rossini manuscript" or an example of "authentic painting of the so-and-so school."
Vermouth
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
I like Noilly Prat, too. Although I think I slightly prefer Cinzano over M&R for the sweet/red style. I especially like that they're inexpensive enough to have around for guilt-free cooking purposes. The Vya products, which I love, have so much more flavor than the usual vermouths on the market that you really do have to scale the recipe accordingly. Whereas you get a good balance of gin flavor to vermouth flavor in a 1:1 Tanqueray-to-Noilly Prat Martini, I might go more 2:1 or 5:2 for a similar effect with Vya.
Do we consider Punt e Mes a vermouth? It's kind of right there between vermouth and amaro. Anyway, I've really been liking a Brooklyn-inspired cocktail they make at Milk & Honey called the Red Hook, made with rye, maraschino and Punt e Mes.