slkinsey

For those who may be curious, Lisa is talking about this new product from Le Creuset. I don't have any experience in cooking with a doufeau, but the principle seems interesting. Needless to say, this will only work with stovetop cooking and isn't much use for oven braising. I have cooked with the Staub cocotte, which has "basting spikes" on the underside of the extra heavy lid that serve as condensation/dripping points. My somewhat unscientific observation is that foods braised in the Staub cocotte were more tender and moist than those braised in the equivalent Le Creuset. But the Staub design differs from the Le Creuset design in a number of ways (heavier, matte black interior, etc.) so it is impossible to say how much of this was due to the basting action of the lid. All that said, if you can get the 7 1/4 Le Creused doufeu at a great price, and if your kitchen could use a 7 1/4 oval enameled cast iron cooking vessel, I think you're crazy not to get it. At the very least, it will be just as good as a regular 7 1/4 oval Le Creuset. And it might be better. Let us know what you think if you end up buying it. Yes. Acetone (aka nail polish remover, but available for less money at your local hardware store) is best, but 93% rubbing alcohol from the drug store will do the trick as well.

Don't forget Flatiron Lounge, one of the top spots in the City for a drink. And there are also Sasha Petraske's two other places besides Milk & Honey. There's Little Branch on the West side, with the same meny as M&H but no reservations policy, and there's The East Side Company at Essex and Grand, also with no reservations policy plus a more informal setting and a uniquely different take on the cocktail lounge (all citrus is muddled, focus is on rocks drinks, there are usually several bowls of punch, etc.).

There are several ways that proof effects the flavor of a cocktail. You just have to understand a little bit about the way the liquor is made. When liquor is distilled, it comes out of the still at a certain percentage of alcohol by volume. The higher the % abv, the greater the percentage of straight ethanol and the smaller the percentage of fusel oils, aromatic compounds and all that sort of thing ("congeners"). These congeners are largely responsible for giving the unaged distillate flavor, aroma, mouthfeel, etc. On the other hand, not all of these flavors are very good and some congeners are actively bad for you. So, we know that an alcohol distilled to a lower % abv is likely to have more flavor/aroma/etc. compared to an alcohol distilled at higher % abv. We also know that the alcohol distilled to the lower % abv might have flavors and other substances in there that we would like to get rid of. One way of getting rid of these unwanted substances is by aging in wood, which absorbs certain undesirable substances and reacts with others to create desirable substances. The wood, of course, adds its own flavors to the distillate. Different distillers (and different spirits) will use different methods of distillation and distill their spirits to different percentages of alcohol. For aged spirits, a lower distillation % is often a good thing. But when we say "lower distillation %" we're still talking about something north of 50% abv. Some spirits (aka "neutral spirits") are distilled to more than 95% abv and retain very little flavor from the distillation process. This is why very few overproof proof spirits are particularly flavorful. Unless the overproof spirit spends a lot of time in wood, or is otherwise flavored, it doesn't bring much flavor or its own to the table. Even if it spends a lot of time in wood, it's fundamentally getting just about all of its flavor from the wood. People reasonably assert that vodka derrives more flavor from the water used to dillute it to bottle proof (more on this below) than it does from the actual raw ingredients. In the case of certain spirits (gin, aquavit, etc.) we start with high % abv neutral spirits and flavor them with various substances. Sometimes this will be a straight infusion, sometimes it will be infusion followed by redistillation, sometimes it will be by placing baskets of spices in the neck of the still so the rising vapors are infused with flavor, etc. But the point is that we're taking something that has little flavor and putting flavor into it. At this point, we have an overproof spirit with plenty of flavor. The final step is to dilute the spirit to bottle proof by adding water. Needless to say, adding water has the additional effect of diluting the flavor of the spirit. If we start off with freshly-infused gin at 97% alcohol and dilute it down to 80 proof (40% alcohol) we are adding a lot of water. In fact, we have diluted the spirit by more than 50%. That's going to "water down" the flavor of the gin quite a bit. As you may imagine, if we start off with freshly-infused gin at 97% alcohol and dilute it down to 92 proof (46% alcohol) we aren't watering the flavor down as much. In general, the 93 proof gin will have a more emphatic flavor than the 80 proof gin. Similarly, 100 proof whiskey will have more flavor than 80 proof whiskey. This is all verifiable by science, by the way. 101 proof Wild Turkey has a higher concentration of flavor components than 80 proof Wild Turkey. So, in general, we would like aged spirits like whiskey, brandy and rum to be distilled at low proof, we would like unaged spirits like white rum and silver tequilla to be distilled at medium proof and we would like unaged spirits like vodka and gin to be distilled at high proof. We would like for all of these to be bottled at high proof, because that means that they will have the most flavor (i.e., the least dilution by water). Since we're going to be diluting the spirit with water from melting ice and other nonalcoholic flavorings when making cocktails anyway, we would rather go for the maximum flavor. Also, if you use a higher proof base spirit, it can spend more time with the ice getting colder without watering down. I prefer base spirits at around 100 proof. One other thing that may not be clear: 50% abv is "proof" -- aka "100 proof." "High proof" generally means "near 100 proof." Spirits that are substantially above 100 proof (e.g., 151 proof) are often referred to as "overproof." While mixing with 151 proof gin might be interesting (keeping that it gets all its flavor by infusion at high proof), noninfused overproof liquors are typically not as flavorful because the most flavorful components have been distilled out of them.

"Plastic Lumps?"

Channel knives are useful for certain decorative garnishes, such as a horse's neck, but not very good for actual twists. One reason is that they generally take too much pith, but more importantly, they don't tend to carry much citrus oil, and even more importantly, they're almost impossible to actually twist over the cocktail. The twisting action is important to express the citrus oils. A twist of lemon or orange is more than just a visual adornment. The oils that are expressed onto the surface of the drink (and often also rubbed around the rim of the glass) can make a huge impact on the aroma and flavor of the drink. I used to use the channel cutter part of my zester to make cocktail garnishes, but ended up switching to a peeler because it not only results in a better twist but also is easier to use.

Think about it for a minute: You have two otherwise equal gallons of water sitting on the stove, one of them is 50 degrees F and the other is 100 degrees F. You turn on the fire below to bring them both up to the boil. Now, before the 50 degree water reaches the boiling point, it will also at some point along the way be 100 degrees F, right? So, how is the previously 50 degree and now 100 degree water any different from the water that started out at 100 degrees? The answer is that it they aren't different. They are equal. In order for the two volumes of 100 F water to be different there would have to be some kind of momentum effect in heat transfer whereby the colder water "builds up greater heat absorbing speed" compared to the warmer water. It's a nice idea, but thermal energy doesn't quite work that way. The same applies in reverse with respect to freezing although, as Patrick points out, there are certain conditions that can cause warmer water to freeze more rapidly. I think that the old saw about hot water freezing faster probably has its roots in two observations: Back in the days of metal ice trays freezers built up a thick layer of frost. If you filled the ice tray with hot water, it would melt through the frost, be closer to the cooling coil and therefore freeze more rapidly. Also, it's often the case in older buildings that uninsulated hot water pipes would be near a foundation wall and freeze in the winter whereas the cold water pipe, being further away from the frozen foundation, would not. This is what happened in our house when I was growing up in Boston. These are the kinds of things that made people think that hot water freezes faster, and I think that the notion that cold water boils faster just came about because it is the inverse.

What Steven is calling zest, the rest of us are calling a twist. You're probably right, but you can't make a twist with a zester (unless there is a zester/peeler confusion as well). This is a zester and this is a peeler. What you want is a peeler.

Hmm. I'm not sure where the idea came up that a zester is needed for cocktail making. By and large, what you want to use is a twist that contains mostly zest with minimal pith (my experience is that some amount of pith is really required for the twist to have any strength and not break apart when twisted). This is most easily obtained by running a vegetable peeler over the skin of a fresh lemon. Occasionally, you may want other shapes/kinds of citrus peel garnishes. A horse's neck spiral is most easily done with a channel knife, and if you want to flame the twist it's easier to have a smaller disk-shaped piece, which is easily done with a knife. The kind of whispy threads of zest that are produced with a zester, and the little shreds produced with a microplane grater aren't really useful in cocktail making (except for making infusions).

Tanqueray is pretty much the gold standard for a "ginny gin." I also think Gordon's does pretty well in this regard, and was susprised to see that you thought it had a less emphatic flavor than Bombay Sapphire. My impressions run entirely counter to yours, but that's why they play the game. I have two criteria for G&T gin: 1. emphatic juniper character that cuts through the tonic water; and, 2. not too expensive, as I don't think one can appreciate subtle distinctions between superpremium gins when mixing a proper G&T. This leads me directly to Gordon's. Whew. That's a big question. I don't have one favorite. Plymouth and Tanqueray strike me as the classics. I also appreciate Hendrick's (garnished with a paper thin slice of cucumber) and Boodle's. All depends on what you're looking for. These days I'm mixing my martinis at no more than 2:1 or 3:1. I wish we could get Plymouth Navy Strength. That would be my default Gimlet gin. For a variety of reasons, it's good to have a higher proof gin for Gimlets. Junipero is high proof, and a good gin. But it seems a bit of a waste to use something that costs that much in a Gimlet. These days I'm making "Gimlets" with lime zest-infused simple syrup and lime juice rather than Rose's (I use quotation marks because Rose's is a required ingredient for a real gimlet). I'm not sure that an Aviation has any requirements that especially lend it to one brand of gin or another -- although Kurt's comments make me want to try it with Broker's. Tanqueray or Gordon's would be my first thought, depending on how much money I felt like pouring into the glass and which was at the front of the liquor closet. But I'm just as likely to make it with Plymouth or Boodle's or any of the usual suspects. I'd probably stay away from the unusually flavored gins or more subtly flavored gins such as Hendrick's, Tanqueray 10, Bombay Sapphire, etc.

Absolutely. Dave Wondrich's experiments indicated that stirring with cracked ice results in the coldest drink.

Nope. It's the other way around: the glass cup is supposed to be smaller than the metal cup. You measure out your liquids into the mixing glass, fill the glass to the top with ice, place the larger metal cup over the top and give it a little slap to set the seal, shake, turn the whole works upside down so the large metal cup is on the bottom, give it a slap on the side to break the seal and remove the small mixing cup, put the hawthorne strainer over the top of the metal cup and pour from there (some people also like to pour back from the large cup into the small cup and pour from the small cup using a julep strainer). If I may suggest: why not try one glass mixing cup and one metal mixing cup? The hardest part of using a Boston shaker to learn is separating the two pieces. They can form a pretty tenacious seal, and it takes a little experience to learn how to separate them with ease and confidence (especially if you don't want to send the mixing glass flying across the room). Of course, you can just let the shaker sit for 30-60 seconds after you've finished shaking to loosen the seal, but then you are running the risk of overdiluting the drink and you also lose some of the desirable aeration. Needless to say, certain drinks, such as the Pisco Sour we've been discussing in another thread, need to be poured promptly after they have been shaken. If you have to wait for the seal to soften on your Boston shaker, your Pisco Sour won't really be right. Metal seems to separate much more easily than glass. You could easily get both a metal and a glass 16 ounce mixing cup, plus a 26 ounce metal cup from these guys and have the best of both worlds.

Why not contact the North American distributor?

The four things that increase shelf stability seem to be: 1. You can't keep the lavender in the syrup for two weeks. If it's a flavored/infused simple syrup, strain out the flavoring agent after no more than a day or two. It shouldn't take more than a day or so to infuse simple syrup. If it's taking substantially longer, consider infusing the flavoring agent into an ounce or so of high proof alcohol for several hours and then mixing the flavoring agent and the alcohol into the (cooled) simple syrup for maybe a day more of infusion. 2. Increase the saturation. For example, 2:1 simple syrup is more stable than 1:1 simple syrup. Don't go below 1:1. 3. Dose your (cooled) simple syrup with a bit of high proof spirits. 4. Keep the simple syrup under refrigeration. Especially for a commercial operation, two week old simple syrup strikes me as too old, unless you're using the last few drops. Many sugar infusions will begin to lose their bright flavors after around a week. Better to make in small batches and plan on making a new batch on a biweekly basis.

You are? D'oh!

. . . and, let me tell you Dave, if you've never had a duck blood Mojito, you haven't lived.

I think it depends a lot on how the garnish is used. A thin lemon slice floating on top of a cocktail or a flower or a maraschino cherry or a wedge of orange or a non-twisted twist. . . these things aren't often adding much more than visual appeal. And, on the other hand, we have drinks like the Sazerac where some purists hold with the practice of twisting the lemon peel over the drink but not using it as a garnish. I guess that, to the extent that a "garnish" contributes flavor to a cocktail I see it as a crucial ingredient. If it is merely a visual adornment, then it's "just a garnish" and I'll use it or not as the mood strikes me.

I think this greatly depends on the blender. For a conical blender (which I think is the best kind for most blender tasks) like a "beehive" Osterizer, you won't be able to crush ice. I have one, so I know whereof I speak. Other blenders with flatter/broader bottoms like the KA and Cuisinart models may be able to break up ice cubes, but I can see this being very tedious because the ice won't "turn over" in the blender unless it melts enough to get slushy (which we don't want). So, best-case scenario you're crushing maybe 5 or 6 cubes at a time in the blender. Not an optimal situation. Blenders are good at making blender drinks -- not crushing ice. If you want to crush ice, get yourself one of these babies (Rival Ice-O-Matic electric ice crusher with fine/coarse adjustment). That way you can shake with cracked ice whenever you want. I have one at home. I've actually come to believe that the ones with ounces marked on them are a bad idea. It's better to learn how to measure the right way with a jigger or measuring cup. The marked mixing glasses are really only helpful for the most simple cocktails. When you start making something like a Pegu Club with 2 ounces of gin, 3/4 ounce orange curaçao and 3/4 once of fresh lime juice, or anything that includes anything other than ounce and half-ounce measures, the marked mixing glass is useless because you can't measure with that kind of precision very well. The way to mix in a Boston shaker, IMO, is to measure out all the ingredients into the small mixing cup with jiggers or a small measuring cup like the Oxo, fill the small mixing cup with ice, put the big mixing cup on top, give it a whack, shake, flip it over so the big mixing cup is on the bottom, slap the side to loosen the seal, remove the small mixing cup and strain the drink. The precarious bit for the novice is loosening the seal to remove the small mixing cup. When it's glass, it can be a precarious situation. Turns out it's a lot easier with all metal, and you don't have to worry about breaking the glass.

This little sentence over in Dave's thread on putting together a portable bar for his family vacation got me wondering about what happened a month ago that got him interested in exploring cocktails. I thought it might make a pretty interesting thread. For me, I grew up in a family with a pretty strong cocktail tradition. My mother's father was a great fan of the Martini and cocktails in general. Being born in 1897, he had been just the right age to experience the last gasp of the great pre-prohibition age before prohibition as well as the brief resurgence of cocktail culture after its repeal. It was a tradition in the Kinsey household to have a cocktail and play a hand or two of cards before dinner, and that tradition continues today. I continue it in my household, albeit minus the cards. So it was a natural for me to believe that developing an affinity for a well made cocktail was all a part of growing up and learning to enjoy the better things in life. Since the opera business, and my repertoire in particular, involves a certain amount of historical exploration, it was also not surprising that I developed an interest in exploring the history of the craft. In many ways, the aesthetic of the current cocktail revival mirrors some of the elements of the revival in early 19th century Italian opera: Some things have changed, and there is no going back to "the way things used to be." But it's all about understanding the way things were done and doing something today that respects the spirit of the original times and that, to the extent possible given the times in which we live and the fact that we can't ignore the history that has passed and traditions that have evolved, presents the work in its original form. This is what sparked my interest in cocktails and continues to hold my interest. What about you?

Yep. The hinge snapped in half maybe the third time I used it. Now there are a few chips in the enamel around the holes as well. That said, I still use it on a near daily basis with a nail holding the hinge together and it works just fine. Without a doubt, it's a 100% improvement on the "fork and squeeze" method I had been using previously. For that I'll be eternally grateful to JAZ, who turned me on to the world of citrus squeezers for cocktails after seeing my pathetically inefficient and labor intensive citrus squeezing methods when we made a few drinks together. I'd still like to check out one of those Oxo squeezers, though.

Here's another thought: How are you fixed for recipes? Another way of figuring out the bottles to bring would be to look through a good book (and for relative newcomers to mixology, you won't find one better than this book), find 5 cocktails that sound tasty and use more or less similar ingredients and buy those.

Hmm. I've never had a commercial citrus oil that tasted like something I'd want to use in a cocktail. I guess I also don't think it's any trouble to drag a vegetable peeler over the skin of a lemon to make a twist, either. I'm also becoming interested a bit in flaming citrus twists, having consumed a number of cocktails in recent days that were garnished this way. It really does make a difference, as the burnt citrus oils contribute a distinctive note. I'm with you with respect to Manhattans. I've always preferred them with an orange twist. When local sour cherries start coming out, I'm going to try making my own "old school" maraschino cherries by marinating them in maraschino liqueur. That's a hard one. At some point, if a garnish is integral to the success of the drink, it ceases to be a garnish and becomes an ingredient, no? For example, I would argue that the "aromatic garnish" of tipping a few drops of Angostura bitters into the foam on top of a Pisco Sour is essential. What about the profusion of mint on top of a Julep? Certainly a Ti Punch is not right without it's peculiar kind of lime twist. And a Whiskey Old Fashioned wouldn't be right without a twist. But, again, one could argue that these are ingredients rather than garnishes. If one takes the definition that a garnish is a purely decorative adornment, then none of them would be essential.

Forget this unless you want to make "blender drinks." Even most of those can be done very well by shaking the liquor with crushed ice and pouring the works into a glass. How do you get the crushed ice, you ask? Simple: Bar towel. Hammer. Place ice in bar towel (or get a small canvas bag). Whack with hammer until desired degree of crushification is desired. Use ice. Surely you have a meat mallet around the house. It's worth it to invest in a canvas bag for this, because cocktails really are better if stirred/shaken with roughly cracked ice rather than big pieces of refrigerator ice. You can get around 15 degrees F colder using the cracked stuff. BTW, if you are going to use a Boston-style shaker (a reasonable choice), I recommend going all-metal rather than using a glass mixing glass. The metal is more durable for traveling and, more importantly, the drinks will turn out colder with all metal (there is a sound thermodynamic reason for this, but it's probably beyond the scope of this discussion to get into it). I'd suggest using one each of the 15 ounce and 26 ounce stainless steel containers you can buy here to make your Boston shaker.

The problem with the enameled ones, in my experience, is that contrary to cdh's experiences of durability I found the hingepin to be especially weak. I think I snapped mine the third time I used it. It's been working fine for me ever since with a nail through the hinges, but I'd of course prefer that the hingepin had never broken. Perhaps the thing to do is buy one of the enameled ones and replace the weak hingepin right away with something stronger. I also wonder about the reactivity issue. Aluminum is, of course, highly reactive with acid, and citrus is acidic. One would think that this would make aluminum a very poor choice. However, it's possible that the contact period is simply too brief for the aluminum to taint the flavor of the citrus juice. I don't know. I've never used one of the heavy duty aluminum ones, although I have resolved to buy a few the next time I find some for sale in a NYC shop.

The latter style is definitely the way you want to go for home use. My only advice is to try to go for something with the most heavy-duty construction you can find. Look especially at the pin holding the hinge together. It has a real tendency to break. Of course, if that happens, you can slide a nail through the hinges (that's what I have done at home), but I'm sure you'd rather have one that doesn't break. That raw cast aluminum one looks like the stronger ones I've seen. The size also makes a difference. They usually come in "lime," "lemon" and "orange" sizes. Since one usually juices lemons and limes for cocktails, I recommend getting the lemon sized one, which works fione for limes. If you think you will want to juice a lot of oranges, it may make sense to get a larger one as well, but I don't think it will work very well for limes.

Awesome. If you get a picture to John Stage, I'll be interested to hear his reaction.