slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Despite my amusement, I think this is really a nomenclature issue:. . . (b)y 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). . .
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.
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-If you need zest, I don't care how great you are with a grater, spend $10-12 for a microplane zester.
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).
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If I want to try a big, junipery gin - what should it be?
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.
What is your favorite gin for a G&T?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.
What is your favorite for a martini?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.
What is your favorite for a gimlet?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).
What do you like for Aviations?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.
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Perhaps cracked ice would chill the drink faster than large, whole cubes?
Absolutely. Dave Wondrich's experiments indicated that stirring with cracked ice results in the coldest drink.
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So glass it is, at least for what's likely to be a week just chock-full of distractions. But is the glass cup supposed to be bigger than the metal one, or vice-versa?
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.
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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.
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You are? D'oh!
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. . . and, let me tell you Dave, if you've never had a duck blood Mojito, you haven't lived.
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I guess that was the real point of this post. The garnish in most cases is truely an ingredient. Many times it is left out or the wrong garnish is used, but the aroma that comes from the garnish can truly change the way the cocktail tastes.
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.
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. . . if you're bringing a high-quality blender anyway, you'll find that a good blender crushes ice very well. If you pulse it you will get actual crushed ice, not a slush. . .
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 strongly suggest you do use the glass version of the Boston shaker. It's especially convenient if you can get one with the ounces marked on the outside. But either way, being able to see what you're doing is very helpful for beginners. I have also never managed to break or even chip one.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.
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. . . I've been into this cocktail thing for about a month now. . .
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?
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Sam, is yours the Amco brand?
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.
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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.
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If a drink needs citrus oils to be right, I already have a lifetime-and-a-half's supply of Boyajian oils (back when they sold them in 4 oz bottles)... a chopstick tip dipped in the oil and then dipped in the drink does the trick quicker and more easily than molesting a lemon or lime zest in effort to make a pretty twist.
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.
Maraschino cherries are kinda gross, and I gladly omit them when making manhattans.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.
What garnishes really make the cocktail? Besides the Martini/Gibson/Buckeye thing, what other drinks are truly dependent on their garnishes?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.
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- A blender that can actually crush ice: This one is bugging me. I've been into this cocktail thing for about a month now, and I've yet to use a blender. On the other hand, I'll be in uncharted terrirory, and if we suddenly get a jones for mint juleps, I don't want to embarrass myself.
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.
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The lever design is like a hundred times better than the one where you press the fruit down on a bump. For no particular reason, I like the enameled ones the best. I don't actually own one, but I like the way they look -- especially the Amco ones where the lemon squeezer is bright yellow -- and I figure the enamel must be a good non-reactive surface.
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.
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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.
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Awesome. If you get a picture to John Stage, I'll be interested to hear his reaction.
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of course you can't
where is it available?
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).
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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.
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It's been quite a while since I've been called a lightweight. Despite that the ability to metabolize large amounts of alcohol at this stage in my probably life isn't something to feel pride in, I'm amused to find the urge to rebut. However the point here is a good one and goes back to your orginal take, Sam, which is that each of us has a certain tolerance and if a certain degree of clearheadedness is desired, one ought to pay attention to that tolerance when the martini cart comes round.
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. -
We each had a generous one of those before heading out to the restaurant, a good hour before actually eating.
To this day I regret that before dinner drink. As a result of it, I wasn't as fully present as I could have been.
"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.
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It would be interesting to come up with a list of the lowest priced "very high quality for mixing" spirits.
Boiling Water...
in Cooking
Posted
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.