slkinsey

This article by Tony Cecchini in today's NY Times magazine had some interesting information about maraschino cherries: So, it appears that the real think is simply sour cherries marinated in maraschino liqueur. The author used frozen Cascadian Farms whole organic sweet cherries (which apparently actually contains sour cherries) and marinated them for several days in maraschino with delicious results. Anyone with access to a farmer's market could probably do even better with fresh sour cherries.

I've discussed this a number of times on eG. Yes, real Italian pizza flour is lower in protein than American bread flour. It's also perhaps a bit lower than American AP flour as well. In addition, "00" flour is more highly refined. That said, not all "00" flour is the same (the "00" refers to the level of refinement, not the protein level). "00" flour for pizza is higher in protein than "00" flour for pasta. Still not as high as American AP flour, though. A lower protein, more refined American flour might work well, such as the biscuit flours from the Southeast. I personally find that a lower protein flour gives a crust that is more to my liking. But I make what are fundamentally Italian-style pizze. American style pizze have a lot more stuff on top of them, and it is likely the case that a stronger dough is required in order to support those toppings.

Last night I had a bunch of friends over for one of my pizza-making marathons. These are fundamentally Italian style pizze, but in a larger size so everyone can have a piece of each one. I don't have any pictures of the dough or anything like that, but here are the finished products: Here are all the ingredients. I use a fairly wet dough that fermented for around 12 hours (I usually go 24 hours, but realized last night that I was out of flour). Fat Guy and I traveled up to Arthur Avenue for some of their amazing best-of-class fresh mozzarella -- as good as any fior di latte mozzarella I've had in Italy. We started with a margarita. Shitake mushrooms and cubes of pancetta. Fresh artichoke and filetti di pomodoro. Red peppers with eggs "fried" right on the crust. Here is a picture of an egg slice. Spicy broccoli rabe. Shrimp and chives. Sausage and ramps. A "pizza nonna" -- a tomato/mozzarella pizza topped with a dressed salad (upland cress, in this instance) with prosciutto draped over the top. Littleneck clams baked right on he crust. Gorgonzola picante and asparagus. You can see that the stones in the oven were beginning to lose heat by this point. Here's my oven setup. As you can see, it's a crappy residential stove -- actually pretty good for a Manhattan apartment. There are two levels of stones, with the stone on the bottom being a slab of slate from docsconz's back yard. I only baked on the two lower stones, sometimes transferring a pizza from the bottom stone to the middle stone if we weren't quite ready for the next pizza. Especially in the beginning, the slate stone was throwing up some serious oven spring and baking the pizze in around 5 minutes. I estimate that the slate weighs around ten times more than the conventional baking stones. Here is a view of the bottom of the crust towards the end of the run. Still getting good thermal performance from the slate, although the baking time increased to around ten minutes by the last pizza.

THERE we go. Thank you, thank you. That is a classic martini at least by the history I've read. . . Well, to pick a nit, I love the formula (2:1 or 1:1 with a dash of orange bitters), but I always stir my martini as I don't like it to be cloudy. Besides, I am given to understand that, if you use cracked ice, the drink actually comes out colder if you stir rather than shake.

Actually, when using bitters on the finished drink, one is usually adding a drop or two rather than a dash or two. A classic example is the Pisco Sour, where pisco is shaken up with sugar, lemon juice and raw egg white, strained in to a cocktail glass and then garnished with several drops of Angostura bitters. Looks cool and produces an entirely different effect than adding it to the shaker would.

The effect of a dash of something like curacao, maraschino or grenadine depends greatly on the other ingredients and how the dash is deployed (dashes on the top of a finished drink have a different effect, for example, being more noticable in the nose). And, of course, on the hand of the person who is doing the dashing. In a drink formula like the Savoy's Aviation, we have 2 ounces of gin, 1 ounce of lemon juice and two (presumably fairly heavy compared to a dash of, say, Angostura bitters) dashes of maraschino. I wouldn't say that the maraschino in this drink is being used "just for color adjustment" (not least because maraschino is colorless). But, of course, a single dash of maraschino is unlikely to make a difference in the taste of, say, a Negroni. Some liquors are, of course, used in dash quantities for coloration purposes (the odious blue curacao comes to mind), but I'm not sure it's fair to suggest that this is typical of all or even most such uses. On the contrary, I would suggest that a dash or two of kummel or curacao or maraschino or strega (etc.) could absolutely cause a different and unique impression depending on the context. Whether the addition of a dash of X or two dashes of Y makes for a new drink is a subject that's up for debate. It is absolutely the case that, back in the old days, there were differently named drinks that had the exact same ingredients for all intents and purposes. Sometimes the name of the drink might change simply based on the brand of liquor. But, then again, it's also the case that some drinks with radically different formulations shared the same name. No need for any apology. I think it's just the case that some people find gin more challenging than others, and some people only like the flavor in certain contexts. Hey, some people don't like foie gras. I happen to hate everything in the squash family, but a lot of people love squash. And don't even get me started on the discussions I've had with people here about okra. PS. For a gin and cream drink, try a Ramos Fizz (shake it hard for at least a minute).

Interesting. To my eye, those drinks do not appear to be using gin as a diluting agent. They are gin cocktails (1, 3 and 5) and cocktails where gin is being used as a flavoring agent (2). The most unusual cocktail is #4, the Bunny Hug cocktail, with equal parts gin, pastis and bourbon. A case could be made that part of the function of the gin is to dilute the flavor of the pastis. But, at the same time, it still brings the unique gin flavor to the drink. In fact, I have to disagree with the assertion that gin can "dilute existing flavors without adding many strong flavors of its own." One of the reasons you and others may have difficulty with gin is precisely because it most often does contribute strong and distinctive flavors when it is used in a cocktail. Is Tanqueray or Gordon's less assertive than, say, Old Overholt rye or Bacardi silver rum? I wouldn't say so.

That's more or less my feeling as well. Vodka doesn't bring any flavor to the game, so I don't like to use it except in certain drinks where one can take advantage of its usefulness as a dilutant. Audrey's Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini is a good example of this, as is Paul Harrington's "Drink Without a Name," which dilutes 1/4 ounce of Cointreau and 1/8 ounce of Green Chartreuse with 1.5 ounces of vodka. In both drinks the vodka is used to "spread out" otherwise intensely flavored indredients (Laphroaig 10 and Green Chartreuse, respectively), and in so doing to expose flavors that might otherwise have been obscured either by combination with other strong flavors or the inherrently concentrated flavors of the products themselves. Most of the time, though, vodka only brings alcohol to the game. To my mind, if I am drinking something that tastes like orange juice mixed with lime juice and cranberry juice, I feel no need to add any alcohol. In that case, you're only making a "cocktail" for the effect of the alcohol -- and that's not the reason I drink cocktails.

Do we have any reliable evidence that Mitchell's is closed? Or is it all rumor at this point?

If you preheat for a long time, it means that everything in your stove -- not just the air inside the oven -- will come up to temperature. This is important in terms of radiant heat, and its important in terms of temperature recovery when you open and close the door of the oven. Also, if you have a gas oven and the stones are on the floor of the oven, the burner is more or less firing directly into the stone. With careful manipulation of the oven, or simply turning it to "broil," you can easily get the stones over 550F. If you're making thin crust pizza, this is a good thing.

Hmm. I guess we'll just have to chalk this one up to a radical difference in taste, then. If I had to give up one liquor and never use it in cocktails again, I would choose vodka without hesitation. I daresay most cocktail enthusiasts would say the same. Gin is a remarkably complex liquor. Although juniper is the key note, it varies in prominence from producer to producer. And, while certain cocktail recipes and certain cocktail ingredients allow the juniper quality to shine through more than others, I don't agree that any successful cocktail "cancels out the juniper flavors" -- or indeed any of the flavor components of gin. It is often said that a truly successful cocktail has a flavor that isn't entirely identifiable as belonging to any of the constiuents of the drink. Dave makes a similar point upthread in saying that "a proper gin Martini . . . tastes neither of gin nor of vermouth, but of Martini." Think of it as adding that tiny grinding of nutmeg to a ragu Bolognese. The end result doesn't taste of nutmeg, but a ragu Bolognese made with nutmeg does taste different from one made without. Gin can do the same thing. So, while some gin cocktails may not feature up-front juniper flavors as a key note, this does not mean that the juniper (and other flavors of the gin) aren't making a difference in the overall impression of the cocktail. As I said earlier with respect to the Pegu Club cocktail, it is quite easy to prove this point by tasting two examples of the drink side-by-side, one with gin as the base liquor and one with vodka. Try it. See if you don't think that they taste different. If they do taste different, then this means that the flavor of the gin has not been "canceled out" -- even if you can't definitively say "I taste juniper." I absolutely prefer the version with gin, and I think most cocktail enthusiasts would be in the same camp. But if you prefer the version with vodka, there's nothing wrong with that. It just means that you don't like gin all that much. except in certain limited contexts -- which, like it or not, seems to be what you've been saying. I go in the other direction. It's hard for me to think of a vodka cocktail that I wouldn't rather have made with gin.

As Dave implied above, a drink doesn't necessarily have to smack of juniper in order for the gin to make an impact. Try it for yourself: make a Pegu Club with gin and make the same drink with vodka. The difference in flavor will be inescapable. Now, you may prefer the vodka version. All this tells me is that you don't care for gin all that much. I guess it's in the eye of the beholder (tongue of the taster?). My family has been making goose braised in orange juice and gin longer than I've been alive. To my taste, gin and orange go together like... well, gin and orange. I think a more perfect match is hard to find. There are about a zillion classic cocktails that include gin and either tciple sec or orange curacao. If I'm not mistaken, orange peel is a fairly standard botanical used in gin formulae. Again, I suppose this is a matter of taste. Gin is certainly a natural for sour fruit, but I've made or consumed any number of cocktails where gin is married with apricot, pear, cherry, all manner of berries, cassis, etc. In addition, I've had successful cocktails with gin and sherry, gin and nut liqueur, etc. I don't see what you're saying here, except that you don't care for juniper. That's fine, of course. But that makes it hard for to recommend anything. cocktailDB, a database of cocktails from the golden age, lists 1381 gin cocktails. This compares to 531 aged brandy recipes, 595 bourbon and rye recipes, 497 rum recipes and 59 tequilla recipes. This, to my mind, speaks loudly about the mixability of gin.

Sounds good, Janet! But... isn't Damrak an "international style Dutch gin" rather than a London dry gin (which is to say, more of an updated genever)?

From what I have been able to gather, they are similar. The Magnum Pro has a more "consumer friendly" handle.

Look no further. Strait gauge doesn't make much sense for a saute pan unless it is heavy copper -- and even then it's mostly because the straight gauge pans have thicker copper than you can get with a disk-bottom design. I'd take this Sitram Magnum Pro saute pan over an All-Clad Stainless saute pan any day.

Yes, I hate them too, but a little brush with bon ami or barkeeper's friend and they're clean again. It's a lot easier if you use oven cleaner.

For those who would like to explore the possibilities of Gin, I can think of no better flight of cocktails than the five Audrey prepared at the Discus event. Make these, and you'll know what gin can do as a mixer. Corpse Reviver #2 An old-school classic 0.75 oz : Gin 0.75 oz : Cointreau 0.75 oz : Lillet Blanc 0.75 oz : Fresh lemon juice 2 drops : Absinthe, absinthe substitute or pastis Shake with cracked ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Earl Grey MarTEAni An Audrey Saunders original 1.5 oz : Earl Grey tea–infused gin* 1.0 oz : Simple syrup (1:1) 0.75 oz : Fresh lemon juice 1 : Raw egg white (Infuse 1 tbsp of Earl Grey tea into 8 oz of gin for 2 hours, then filter off tea leaves.) Shake hard with cracked ice to emulsify the egg white, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist. Half-sugar the rim of the glass, if you like. Gin-Gin Mule An Audrey Saunders original 1.5 oz : Gin 0.75 oz : Lime juice 1.0 oz : Simple syrup (1:1) 2.0 oz : Ginger beer* 8 to 10 mint leaves (Good with store-bought ginger beer but best with homemade: steep 1 pound of chopped ginger together with 1/4 cup of light brown sugar and the juice of two limes in one gallon of hot water for one hour, then strain off and cool.) Muddle the lime juice, simple syrup, and mint leaves together. Add gin and shake well with ice. Strain into a highball glass filled with ice, top with ginger beer and garnish with a sprig of mint. Jasmine A Paul Harrington original 1.5 oz : Gin 1.0 oz : Cointreau 0.75 oz : Campari 0.5 oz : Fresh lemon juice Shake with cracked ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Pegu Club An old-school classic, for which there are many ratios you can use -- here's one formulation 2 oz : Gin 0.75 oz : Orange curacao 0.75 oz : Fresh lime juice 1 dash: Angostura bitters 1 dash : Orange bitters Shake with cracked ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Gin is definitely the favored spirit for most "new old school" mixologists, I'd say. It's a white spirit that brings a lot of flavor to the table. Personally, I think gin is a very easy mixer. At a recent gin tasting sponsored by DISCUS, Audrey Saunders mixed up 5 great gin cocktails, both new and old, that showed gin's versatility. They were: a Corpse Reviver #2 (gin, Lillet Blanc, Cointreau, lemon juice and a drop of absinthe), an Earl Grey MarTEAni (Earl Grey-infused gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and egg white), a Pegu Club (gin, orange curacao, lime juice, orange bitters and Angostura bitters), a Gin-Gin Mule (gin, lime juice, mint, simple syrup and home made ginger beer) and a Jasmine (gin, Cointreau, Campari and lemon juice). These drinks span a very wide variety of flavor profiles -- from sweet to sour to herbal to spicy -- and the gin worked brilliantly in each one. For me, there is practically no drink that isn't good if you substitute gin for the standard base liquor. Gin muddled with mint and lime over ice with a splash of fizz water ("gin mojito")? Delicious. Gin with Cointreau, lime juice and splash of cranberry ("gin cosmopolitan")? Delicious. Gin, simple syrup and lightly bruised mint over finely crushed ice with a big mint garnish (gin julep)? Delicious. Gin with sweet vermouth and a dash of bitters ("gin manhattan")? Delicious. The list goes on. In fact, many of hypothetical "gin substitution drinks" are real gin drinks. Needless to say, it's easier to fit gin into a cocktail if you like gin. But I'd rather use gin than vodka in just about any cocktail there is. Gin, at least, brings flavor to the game instead of just alcohol. While I'd say this is generally true, I'm not sure it's universally true. There are some good drinks, for example, with gin and rum. That said, by and large it is not advisable to mix with two or more base spirits. It makes for a muddled presentation of flavors. This is where we part ways. I think gin and orange juice (an Orange Blossom) is infinitely superior to vodka and orange juice (a Screwdriver). In fact, the Orange Blossom was one of my drinks of preference in my early (i.e., underage) drinking years. A Screwdriver doesn't taste like anything but alcoholic orange juice. It may be the case that you haven't acquired a fondness for gin. Gin does have a tendcy to "dry out" drinks with its botanicals. I regard that as a positive thing, but many people nowadays do have a preference for sweet drinks. Many people nowadays also don't particularly enjoy the taste of alcohol, which is one reason there are so many "sweet flavored liqueur and 3 difference juices mixed with vodka" drinks out there. With gin, it's always clear that you are drinking booze, because nothing else tastes like gin. It might help to understand your relationshiup with gin if you gave a few more examples of gin drinks you find difficult to like.

Perhaps I was not clear. Hamilton's chapter was about the Vesper as served as Pravda, but the passage I quoted was about Bond's drinking habits in general. In the material I quoted, I think it's fairly easy to see that Hamilton is talking about the Bond movies, not the books. He's also talking about Bond's drinking preferences in the movies after the advent of the Vesper, and not implying that the Vesper was a product of the Smirnoff relationship. This seems fairly evident from his writing: ". . . the Vesper was a gin drink. The now familiar Bond martini . . . is the love child of an early deal with Smirnoff vodka when the Bond movies became popular." The emphasis is mine, but I think the distinction is clear between the Vesper and the vodka martinis that followed. In addition, since he says that the Smirnoff relationship happened "when the Bond movies became popular," it seems clear that this would not include Casino Royale. If we look at the Vesper, it's fundamentally a gin drink. This supports Hamilton's assertion that Bond was "originally a gin drinker " when taking Martini-like drinks. After the Bond movies became popular, and the 007 series struck a deal with Smirnoff, the movie Bond tended to drink a lot of vodka martinis "shaken and not stirred." This is supported by the guy you linked to, who says: In Hamilton's defense, he continues in the article with the following:

I have had the pleasure of tasting a bit of American-produced absinthe distilled as an experiment by a boutique distiller whose name for obvious reasons I will not reveal. Needless to say, it is not for sale. It was delicious.

IMO All-Clad Stainless is ridiculously overpriced. Better performance may be had for similar money, and similar performance may be had for less money. At the risk of self promotion, you may find my eGCI class on cookware and accompanying ongoing Q&A thread of some use. All-Clad is discussed and analyzed with some detail.

I've been meaning to post about this for several weeks, ever since I had a chance to see a pre-release copy of Killer Cocktails : An Intoxicating Guide to Sophisticated Drinking. Now I finally have a few minutes, so here goes. When Dave and I first talked about Killer Cocktails, he described it as a "beginner's book." And while this is a great book for the beginner (more on this later), I think that description sells it a little short. It's a good cocktail book period, and the experienced cocktail enthusiast can easily skip over the "how to mix a cocktail" section and find a list of a little more than 70 well-made cocktails, including quite a few Wondrich originals that you won't find elsewhere in print. In design, the book comes spiral bound at the top with laminated cardboard covers at the front and back, the idea being that you can configure it into a little book stand for easy reading while you mix. Kind of a cute idea, but ultimately a little annoying when you're trying to read it. The book begins with the "beginner" part. This includes the now ubiquitous advice on assembling a working collection of cocktail hardware, a description of the various families of spirits and modifiers used in cocktails, and recommendations on a basic battery of ingredients for a home bar, including recommendations of specific brands in a chart I wish the editor had titled "Dave's Faves." Following is some of the best advice in print on using basic formulae to create your own cocktails, and step-by-step directions on how to mix a cocktail, from chilling the glasses and cracking the ice to snapping a twist over the finished drink. All of this is accompanied by colorful modern illustrations and narrated in Dave's signature prose -- professorial at one turn and self-consciously hip at the other, always fun and easy to read. Following the "Getting Started" chapter are twelve chapters consisting of one "master drink" followed by several others loosely related to them. As he explains, "it's not that the Master Drinks are necessarily superior to the others, mind you -- it's just that they're more educational." Included are chapters on "The Daiquiri, or The Song of the Citrus," "Gin Fizz, or Tiny Bubbles in the Booze," The Old-Fashioned, or Old, Short and Mostly On The Rocks" and others in this style. Again, serious education in hip, fun clothing. That's what the book is all about. As I've talked about this book with various cocktail enthusiasts and professionals who have had a chance to give it a read, everyone seems to think it's probably the best book out there for someone who isn't yet a cocktail connoisseur but would like to become one. The format is fun and approachable, and the list of recipes is just the right length. At just over 70 recipes, it's entirely possible to start with zero knowledge, mix your way through every recipe in the book that sounds appealing (let's say 50 or so, depending on one's tastes), and come out the other end with a true appreciation of a well made cocktail and not a small amount of knowledge as to history and the classics. There aren't any other books about which that can be said. And what about the recipes? Dave is well known in the cocktails crowd as a historian and antiquarian, so it comes as no surprise that many of the cocktails in this new book are serious old-school classics. Indeed, all the recipes are either true old-school drinks or "new old-school" drinks built on the classic model. You won't find a recipe calling for flavored vodka, Hypnotiq, Pucker and 4 different fruit juices in Killer Cocktails. And, as Martha Stewart would say, "that's a good thing." The education is furthered when he demonstrates how certain new cocktails are related to/derived from old classics, and offers suggestions on how we can twist existing successful formulae into new drinks. Among the recipes in Killer Cocktails is Dave's Weeski, a drink in regular rotation at the slkinsey household that has been described elsewhere in these forums. Here are a few Wondrich originals from Killer Cocktails I have enjoyed, reproduced here with permission of the author. Gansevoort Fizz 2 oz : Appleton VX rum (or other medium-bodied, aged rum) 1 oz : Drambuie 1 oz : Lemon juice 2 dash : Peychaud's bitters Shake well and strain into a chilled highball class. Top with 2-3 ounces fizz water. Pearlescent 2.5 oz : Vodka 2 tsp : Oregat syrup 1 tsp : Luxardo maraschino liqueur 1 : lemon peel Shake visciously (with the peel in the shaker) and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Whitehall 2 oz : Gin 1 oz : Dry sherry 0.5 oz : Ruby port 2 dashes : Angostura bitters Stir with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Twist lemon peel over the top. Killer Cocktails also includes quite a few "forgotten classics" deserving of better attention. Here's one that always makes me think of Dave, because I first tried it when he got Audrey to make one at Bemelman's. San Martín 2 oz : Gin 1 oz : Red vermouth 1 tsp : Yellow Chartreuse Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Twist lemon peel over the top. I'm sure others will have more to say once they have read it, so I am going to shut up now. It comes out in print on May 3rd. Click here and pre-order a copy today.

I've been leafing through a copy of William L. Hamilton's Shaken and Stirred : Through the Martini Glass and Other Drinking Adventures that came in a package of literature I got at a recent gin tasting. It's a collection of his "Shaken and Stirred" columns in the NY Times, and there is a chapter on the Vesper as served at Pravda, a Russian-themed bar in NYC. Pravda turns the Bond formula on its head, as it might have been mixed by Bond's cold war counterparts on the other side of the Iron Curtain. It's 3 ounces of Stolichnaya Gold vodka, 1 ounce Beefeater gin, 1/4 ounce Lillet Blanc and a lemon twist. What was really interesting, though, is what Hamilton had to say about Bond's supposedly preferred "vodka martini." It's interesting, isn't it, how every time the popularity of vodka comes up the words "Smirnoff" and "marketing campaign" are soon to be heard.

This from The Martini Companion: A Connoisseur's Guide by Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan: This, I think, gives the lie to the rumor that the botanicals were selected during the Raj to remind Englishmen of Indian cooking. First, even a cursory taste of Bombay gin reveals that there is no such relationship of flavor. More important is the fact that this idea undoubtedly arose due to the name "Bombay," which brand name was apparently not used until some time in the late 1950s. Also, if the formula for Bombay does, in fact, substantially date from the mid 18th century, it predated the British Raj by some hundred years (the Raj generally supposed to date from from 1858, when the rule of the British East India Company was transferred to the Crown, until independence in 1947).

I believe Gary Regan said at a recent DISCUS gin tasting event that Bombay was developed at the request or under the direction of an American and relatively recently. Can't remember exactly, though, so I might be wrong.