slkinsey

http://www.thedrinkshop.com/products/nlpde...php?prodid=1046 Nice to see some attention for this product from Padua -- which, I am given to understand, is a great place to go if you want to wive it wealthily (with apologies to Cole Porter).

Interesting. . . I was just thinking about starting a thread on the possibility of cocktails using good aged balsamic vinegar. "Drinking vinegar," by the way is a fairly common term for vinegar fermented to less than 6% acidity (usually around 3% or less) and intended for consumption as a beverage (usually as a digestif) in addition to use as a condiment. I don't know why this seems strange, since aceto balsamico tradizionale has long been consumed as a beverage. twodogs: How do you think the walnut oil worked in the drink? Seemed like an interesting variation on the lemon oil that one often expels onto the surface of a cocktail by twisting. How much did you use, and how did you deploy it? I could see using an atomizer to mist a tiny bit of oil onto the surface of a drink.

I'm not sure lightweight is what I was getting at, because I'm sure your head wasn't spinning. I've always seemed to be able to absorb larger-than-average amounts of alcohol without feeling the effects of intoxication, but I believe that is different than "building up a tolerance," which I think has more to do with learning to compensate for the intoxication than not feeling the effects. Anyway, depending on the size of your before-dinner gin drink, I don't think anyone would be able to go through a meal like that without some intoxication effects. I hardly, if ever, have a cocktail at a high end restaurant precisely because they're too big. I've never thought to ask for the drink split between two (or even three), but I might do that next time around.

"A generous one" (presumably on an empty stomach) says it all. Here, we're not talking about the effect of a cocktail on your palate, we're talking about the effect of alcohol intoxication on your senses. I would also suggest, based on your recounting, that the primary effect of the alcohol was not to make you "less present" during the dinner but rather to interfere with your storage of those experiences in long term memory. I'm not saying that this isn't important, just that it's not the same thing. Again, we get down to the effect of having too much alcohol. A reasonably-sized cocktail contains no more alcohol than the standard pour of wine. Do you think you would have had a similarly attenuated experience had it been a glass of chardonnay or a bottle of beer instead of the gin cocktail? Or if the gin cocktail had been half the size? People differ widely in their ability to tolerate alcohol. This has to do with many things (sex, weight, age, the body's ability to manufacture alcohol dehydrogenase, etc.). It could be that, for you, drinking that much alcohol in any form on an empty stomach is too much for you to have a "peak attention restaurant eperience." For me, it wouldn't be much of a concern. Most people can metabolize about an ounce of pure alcohol per hour, and I know from experience that I can go higher. A three ounce martini contains right around 1.3 ounces of pure alcohol. So, for me, by the time I got to the restaurant my blood alcohol would be lower than it would have been if I had a glass of champagne at the table waiting for the first course to arrive. Now, if it was a 6 ounce martini. . . different story. But no one is advocating 6 ounce martinis -- quite the opposite. I'm just pointing out that no one asks whether a before-dinner glass of champagne dulls the palate.

It would be interesting to come up with a list of the lowest priced "very high quality for mixing" spirits.

Nothing odd about that. Different brands/bottlings of a spirit work better in different kinds of cocktail. I almost never use an expensive "boutique" gin when making a drink with a lot of ingredients, because the delicate notes tend to get lost and they often don't have a strong enough juniper note to sing through. It's not clear to me, for example, that there would be much point to making a Pegu Club with Hendrick's gin. Hey, Gordon's is a really good quality gin. I love Tanqueray and consider it probably the best "all around" gin, but in terms of a good quality traditional gin with an emphatic juniper note it's hard to beat Gordon's. Since it's around half the price of Tanqueray, I use it often in drinks with a lot of flavors going on. Gordon's juniper really cuts through. This is an important point, and ties in with what I wrote above in response to jbewley. You won't often hurt the drink by defaulting to your top shelf mixer, but it's wise to consider whether the drink you're mixing might be more suitable to a less expensive bottling. Sometimes (e.g., a Pegu Club made with Gordon's versus Hendrick's) you're probably going to get a better drink with the less expensive brand. Most of the time I don't see much point in using an expensive spirit in a highball.

Exactly. A jigger is a metal measuring device shaped like two cones stuck together at the pointy end. Usually the big side is twice the size of the small side. Thus you get a 2 ounce/1 ounce jigger, a 1.5 ounce/0.75 ounce jigger and a 1 ounce/0.5 ounce jigger. Presumably, if you want to do a quarter ounce, you fill the 0.5 ounce jigger half way or you use 1.5 teaspoons. Jiggers are very useful when you are mixing drinks in a situation where speed is a major consideration (e.g., a busy cocktail bar). When you want two ounces, for example, you just pick up the 2/1 ounce jigger, fill the big side all the way to the top and dump it into the mixing glass. "Free pouring," in which the bartender measures the liquid by sight or by counting while pouring, is an even faster method of measurement, but in my opinion not accurate enough for fruly exacting formulae (I note that the bars I visit that prepare drinks with any real complexity of formula do not free pour and use jiggers as a matter of course). Personally, at home I am very rarely in a situation where speed is a major consideration, and I find that I like the Oxo cups better. That way I can use one liquid measure for the whole drink.

That's the great thing about the Oxo cups. The angled measure makes it very easy to read.

Interesting question. I'm glad you brought this back up. I think it depends greatly on the size of the cocktail (and they are way too big these days). A properly sized cocktail contains no more than 3 ounces of strong spirits which, as it turns out, contains right around the same amount of alcohol as the average pour of wine. So, fundamentally, from the "senses befuddled by alcohol" perspective, there is little difference between preceding dinner with a martini or a glass of wine. A proper cocktail should be short, cold, bracing and stimulating of the appetite. Unfortunately, when you take that formula and blow up a three ounce drink into a 9 ounce drink, intoxication starts to become an issue. I think people would be best off ordering a cocktail split between two people and served in two glasses.

Very nice, Doc. My main difference is that I don't use jiggers. I find it much more convenient for home use to use the Oxo 2 ounce angled measuring cups. That way I can make the whole drink using one liquid measuring device. I can see the utility of a jigger for professional volume mixing, but personally not for home use.

Do you buy those? I remember hearing a story about an upland Thai village, where there was according to the report a misguided aid program that promoted strong pesticides that ended up making people sick, so the villagers bought only the insect-eaten vegetables at the market and refused to touch the ones that looked perfect. Now, I don't think we're dealing with anything that drastic in these parts, but still, I'm interested to know what you do with that information. I buy on gustatory criteria, not dogmatic or health-related criteria. If the greens look good and taste good, I buy them. If not, I don't. These, to my eye, don't look very good. Given all the other things I am doing to my body (breathing NYC air, drinking too much alcohol, eating too much fat and too many calories, etc.) I am not overly concerned about whatever minute trace amounts of synthesized pesticides I may be getting from greenmarket produce (especially since, as I point out upthread, some of the common naturally-occurring and derrived-from-naturally-occurring-sources pest control substances organic farmers may use are far more toxic).

I completely agree. I just don't think two wrongs make a right.

I should qualify my post upthread -- in case it is not clear -- to point out that I am not necessarily "pro-pesticides." What I am is "pro-good science" and "anti-sensationalistic fearmongering." This is to say that the EWG may have some points to make, but I think the dishonest way in which they do it obscures the message to an unacceptable point. JohnL also makes some interesting and valid points. It's never been clear to me that there is a reasonable alternative to some form of chemical pest control (be that with naturally-occurring chemicals or manufactured chemicals). When I go to the greenmarket I can always tell which farmer doesn't use any pesticides, because the leaves of his lettuce are always full of tiny holes where they have been eaten by insects. "Organic," it should be pointed out, does not necessarily equal "no pesticides." For example, organic farmers may use things like oil, Bacillus thuringiensis, copper sulfate, pyrethrum, rotenone, etc. for pest control. Many of these natural substances have far greater toxicity and environmental impact than the manufactured pesticides (copper sulfate, for example, has been banned in Europe because it is a permanent soil contaminant that has high toxicity for both humans and fish). I can tell you right now, I would much rather eat a vegetable with a high score on the EWG's list than an organic tomato from the field of a farmer who uses copper sulfate. I'd be interested to hear what some people in a position to know think are reasonable and realistic alternatives to (naturally occurring or manufactured) chemical pest control. (As an aside on the discussion fork re mushroom washing: I believe both Frank McGee and Alton Brown have conclusively shown that mushrooms do not absorb a significant amount of water from a brief rinsing -- or even a lengthy soaking.)

In a strict dollar model, I think it probably goes something like this: But there are many reasons why this is so. On the cheap end of the curve, you're dealing with ingredients that fundamentally don't taste very good to begin with. This speaks to Dave's rule to "never mix a drink with anything you can't choke down straight (although I suppose this doesn't account for bitters). In the middle part of the curve, you're getting a lot of ingredients that not only taste good and have a refined flavor profile, but also often have good intensity of flavor. I don't think anyone would argue, for example, that Booker's doesn't have a more intense flavor than Jim Beam White Label, or that Cointreau doesn't have a more refined flavor than Hiram Walker triple sec. In the middle point of the curve, you're going to find more liquors bottled at higher proof, and you're going to find liquors with some age on them, but not so much that they begin to become less assertive or overly mellow in character. In the expensive part of the curve, you're going to find two categories of ingredient. The most obvious example is an ingredient that is simply too expensive to be consumed in anything other than its pure, unadulterated form. This is where you find your $300 bottles of XO cognac, etc. As Dave pointed out, it's unclear that his "Paradis Sidecar," which would retail for around $120, actually tastes all that much better than a still very expensive "XO Sidecar" that would retail at around 35 or 40 bucks. All the stuff you pay for in a $300 bottle of cognac would be obscured by the other ingredients in the cocktail. The less obvious example is an expensive ingredient that actually doesn't work as well in a cocktail compared to the less expensive one. Many liquors come to be dominated by wood flavors after a certain amount of aging and to lose some interesting characteristics that are present at a younger (aka, less expensive) age. A perfect example is apple brandy. A younger calvados still tastes strongly of apples, whereas one with more age often tastes more of "aged spirit." Other expensive spirits are too subtly flavored to be employed to good use in a cocktail. If you're going to obscure all the subtle floral character of a boutique grappa di moscato by mixing with it, you might as well be using vodka. So, looking at the curve we can think about something like the Jack Rose, a simple cocktail composed of applejack, lemon juice and grenadine. At the lowest end of the scale is regular 80 proof blended applejack, 30% apple brandy blended with 70% neutral spirits. This is actually pretty good. More expensive is Laird's bonded applejack, 100% apple brandy at 100 proof. This has a stronger apple flavor due to the increased percentage of apple brandy, and has more intensity of flavor due to the higher proof and is even better at making its presence felt through the lemon and grenadine. The Jack Rose is better made with the bonded applejack. More expensive still is Laird's 12 year old apple brandy. A Jack Rose made with this wouldn't be very good, because it doesn't taste all that much like apples. Lemon and grenadine would also obscure much of the delicate character.

I, of course, agree with Charles about going to a farmer's market to buy produce. There are many reasons to do this, and pesticides may be one of them. Of course, people in many areas of the US don't have access to a wide variety of fruits and vegetables from farmer's markets, but that is another subject. Here's the thing that I immediately noted upon reading the report: It doesn't really give us any useful information as to the nature and amount of the pesticides found on these various fruits and vegetables. Somehow they arrive at a composite score that supposedly accounts for these factors, but given that the EWG is rabidly anti-pesticide, I think their presentation is somewhat suspect. This isn't the first time the EWG and similar groups have come out with alarmist public releases about pesticides. Here is an interesting article addressing a similar release by the Consumers Union several years ago: This is not to say that we shouldn't strive for ways to use lower levels of pesticides and to develop more targeted and friendly pesticides as well as aggressively exploring non-pesticide methods of pest control in agriculture.

That little "food processor" is part of the Braun Turbo stick blender combo. That particular immersion blender is 400 watt. Very cool. Are you able to add oil while the blade is in motion? My method is (more or less) just to get the yolk going with some acid and salt (and garlic, etc. where appropriate) in the minibowl of my KA and slowly drizzle in the oil.

Nice class! As chance would have it, I'll be making mayonnaise this evening to use on the panini I'm taking to The Metropolitan Opera in Central Park picnic tomorrow. I was happy to see the food processor used in your pictures. From my own experience, I can't endorse the utility of a small food processor bowl (either a 3-4 cup "mini processor" or the minibowl of a KA processor) strongly enough. This is by far the best machine for making mayonnaise I've found.

As far as I could tell, the major difference was that Salt lick was cooking and serving the whole brisket, including the deckel, and Elgin seemed to be only serving (and perhaps only cooking) the first cut.

Dude, are you sure you're not remembering this the wrong way around? I distinctly remember sharing some Elgin brisket and sausage with you and the Psaltises, and my memory is that we found the Elgin brisket unpalatably dry. What I really liked about Salt Lick's brisket is that it was juicy, most likely because they used not only the first cut but also the second cut (aka deckel) of the brisket. Ellen and I got some good video with one of the Salt Lick pitmasters demonstrating the difference between slices from the first and second cuts of the brisket. IMO, the deckel is absolute necessary in a brisket sandwich or plate for the juicy moisture it provides.

Unfortunately, the word is that they are sold out of the Bubba Fast Pass for this year. Much more later when I awaken from my meat-induced coma. One perplexing question: if this is supposed to feature some of the best Q from around the country, why no McRib?

It isn't a calvados per se, since it isn't from France, but Clear Creek Distillery makes a spectacular "Eau de Vie de Pomme" using the traditional methods of Normandy's calvados makers. It's distilled from good old Granny Smith apples from Oregon and aged 8 years in old Limousin oak Cognac barrels. It's often been called "American calvados," and is rated higher than many examples of actual calvados. A 750 ml bottle will only set you back around 35 bucks.

Here is some calvados talk from the thread on the Sidecar cocktail (edited to include only discussion relevant to calvados. If you have a Calvados recommendation I'd appreciate that too. For Calvados, we use the Couer de Lion at Rouge for our Calvados Sidecars. It's about $25 in PA for a 750ml. Undoubtedly less wherever you live. The only other Calvados I have any extensive experience with is the Pere Magliore which is about $5 more. We used to serve that by itself and used the Couer de Lion for mixing. Boulard also makes an under-$30 Calvados that I'm certain would be fine for sidecars. My second and third favorite liquor stores have websites and here's what turned up: Coeur de Lion Pommeau Calvados, France 750ml $17.99/Bottle Coeur Lion Selection Calvados 750ML $24.99/btl Coeur de Lion Reserve Calvados, France 750ml $29.99/Bottle Coeur Lion Calvados Fine 750ML $34.99/btl Coeur de Lion "VSOP" Calvados 750ml $49.99/Bottle Do you know if one of these is the "at Rouge" under a different name? The Coeur de Lion homepage wasn't helpful. The photos aren't too clear but it appears the labels of the "Fine", the "Reserve" and the "VSOP" also say "Calvados du Pays d'Auge". My high school French is well beyond it's expiration date. Is "d'Auge" French for "at rouge"? One of the shops has the Pere Magliore Fine (750ml) at $27.99/Bottle. They also have a Boulard calvados but at $102 something tells me that's not the one you were referring to. I'm thinking the P.Magliore might be the best deal of the bunch. Apparently Chicago prices aren't significantly different from PA prices. Kurt, the "d'Auge" part means "from Auge." It's part of the regulation for calvados d'appellation contrôlée. A Calvados so named must be distilled form apples grown in the orchards of the Pays d'Auge. Very cool article, though. I agree with the authors that some of the younger, less expensive calvados bottlings can actually be better and taste more strongly of apples.

I've only recently begun exploring tequila. By and large I prefer the silver versions. With more wood and age, I just feel that it becomes less and less "tequila like" and more and more like just another aged spirit.

Here's the deal with bread knives: There is no point in spending a lot of money on a bread knife because 1) an expensive forged bread knife won't necessarily outperfom a cheap stamped bread knife, and 2) once the knife does go dull, it's next to impossible to sharpen it back to original condition -- then you have a sixty dollar knife that cuts worse than a ten dollar Ginsu. If I were you, I'd get something like this. It's an 8 inch serrated bread knife with an offset handle. It's made by F. Dick (one of the most respected manufacturers). It will cut bread as well as any knife on the market. It costs twelve bucks.

As a former owner of a Cuisinart and a current owner of a KitchenAid, I lean heavily towards the KA. It's easy to use and clean, the base is heavy, the motor is powerful and the utility of the minibowl cannot be underestimated. Of course, one will always be able to find one or the other manufacturer on a big sale. That's the nature of the beast. Comparing full retail prices, KA seems a clear winner to me. The standard 12 cup KA with 4 cup minibowl has a full retail price of $250 Cuisinart's most comparable model is the 11 cup "Prep 11 Plus" with a full retail price of $320. And, in order to match the KA's functionality, it's another $110 for the 3 cup "Handy Prep." Now, as Steven points out, you can buy an 11 cup "Custom Prep" (which I assume is either an earlier version or the "Prep 11 Plus" or a similar-looking model manufactured for Costco) at Costco for 170 bucks. That gives you another 80 bucks to find a 4 cup food processor for a full match with the KA's functionality at the KA's full retail price. A 5 minute search of the internet turned up a number of sites selling the KitchenAid 12 cup model for around 200 bucks, which narrows the gap considerably. It wouldn't be so easy to find a high quality 4 cup food processor for 30 bucks -- never mind all the extra room it would occupy on your countertop. Given the small ($30) difference in discounted retail price and the fact that KA has the 4 cup minibowl, I think it's crazy not to buy the KA.