slkinsey

What exactly does "toothy" texture mean? I tend to cook my porridge so that it's firm and chewy, not mushy. That's how I prepared this. Exactly. When I think "porridge" I tend to think of grains that have been cooked to the point of a (hopefully) pleasant mushiness. For example, rice in a well cooked ricotto still has a bit of an "al dente" quality to it, whereas the rice in congee has been cooked far beyond that stage. I also tend to think of things in the porridge/gruel family as having a fairly soupy texture. One thing with oats is that they relase a lot of thickeners into the cooking water. So, if you use a lot of water, you end up with something that is more or less little bits of cooked oats suspended in an equal amount of thickened liquid. That's what your picture looks like to me, although of course that may not be what it really turned out to me. My thought in using a risotto-like technique is that it might create an appropriately creamy texture, but that using smaller amounts of liquid might limit the "pudding like" quality that oatmeal can have.

Okay... so I just scored three bottles of Torani Amer. Now, as you may well imagine, I have a serious itch for Amer-ish cocktails. Any suggestions are appreciated. I will naturally try a facsimile of Picon Punch and a Brooklyn Cocltail. And I'm dying to try Hoskins Cocktail. After that, I'm open so suggestions.

Did you hold it up in the air and shout: "avenoooooooooooooooooottooooooooooooo!" (For the perplexed: see Roots.) It might be interesting to cook the oats risotto style, by adding simmering stock bit by bit and stirring. I'd think you would want the oats a bit more toothy for avenotto than you would for porridge.

I love the way The Dude orders a White Russian in "The Big Lebowski."

Good luck, Scott! Really. Although I won't need any Torani Amer in the forseeable future, having just bought three bottles over the internet from California (shhhhhhh!), I'd love to see this product available in NYC. Seems strange that all the other Torani products except Amer are widely available. I guess because Amer is the only one with alcohol...

Probably because it is commonly consumed somewhat sweetened. And perhaps also because rolled oats -- the kind with most people are familiar -- wouldn't have a very appealing texture as a savory side. You're right, though, there's no reason some "parmesan steel cut oats" wouldn't make an interesting part of a savory meal. Probably have to call it something silly like "avenotto" to get people to make the nexessary paradigm shift.

Cocktail flights are cool. They're been doing them at Flatiron Lounge here in NYC for some time now. It's especially an interesting way for newcomers to the game to have a taste of several classics with which they might not be familiar.

Interesting idea. I think just about any cocktail would work in this size, although obviously the context of the other cocktails around it will influence the success. Questions: What is the size of the miniature cocktails? How many do you normally serve together at once? How do you keep them cold? Presumably they are not all mixed a la minute to order?

Scott, is this a commercial customer? Can't you sell to whichever distributors she already uses? Out of curiosity, are you talking about Torani Amer or Amer Picon?

I wonder if there's some way to make okra-crusted fried chicken... Use maybe 50% dried okra flour. Just a thought.

One crucial thing about frying chicken is working with your ingredients and oil temperature so the outside isn't too dark before the inside is cooked through. An oil temperature of 350 seems to work best for me. Where I've come into trouble isiwh the ingredients in my coating. For a while there I was trying to make a fried chicken coating that included either cornflake crumbs or cornmeal. This always turned out way too dark. Eventually I came to understand that corn is simply too high in sugar, and this is what was making the coating too dark. Patti, your thigh was probably too dark because of the hot sauce for similar reasons. If you had put a coating of flour on the outside, you probably wouldn't have had that problem.

Without seeing the vegetables, it's hard to say how they were prepared exactly. But I have some ideas. Given the delicacy of what you're talking about, it's highly unlikely that they were sauteed at all. Sauteing is a high heat technique where the ingredients are jumped around in the pan (the French verb sauter means "to jump") until evenly cooked on all sides. Matchstick vegetables would totally fall apart if they were cooked this way. (FWIW, I think "saute" is the most incorrectly used term in cooking.) Most likely, the vegetables were blanched in salted water, shocked in ice water and then gently warmed with butter and perhaps a little stock. For the best control, you would want to blanch each vegetable separately (each one will cook at a slightly different rate). Presumably, you want each piece to still have a little "bite." Almost any firm vegetable can be cooked this way. You could include matchsticks of red or green pepper, onion, potato, asparagus stems, broccoli stems, turnip, parsnip... whatever. For harder vegetables (potato, carrot, etc.) a mandolin is the easiest way to go. For things like onions and peppers, you're better off going by hand. I would recommend using at least some butter as the fat, because it will emulsify and coat the vegetables well. Garlic... I'm not so sure about. Mixtures like this tend to be relatively delicate in flavor, and you'd have to have a very careful hand with the garlic to avoid making the whole thing taste mostly of garlic. It would be a real shame to go to all the trouble of selecting an interesting mixture of vegetables only to have the whole thing turn out as "garlic flavor with some other stuff." Same thing with herbs. Thyme and parsley are the first ones that come to mind, but in very small amounts. Anyway... that's my two cents.

Interesting. I'll have to give that a try and see if it makes a noticable difference. My gut feeling is that it won't, because there have been a number of times when I have forgotten to add the salt at the beginning and threw it in towards the end -- and I don't remember thinking "wow! this is much creamier than last time." But, you never know. Now that I think about it, I do have a bunch of heavy one quart saucepans. I should make several batches in parallel (toasting with butter versus adding the same amount at the end, and adding salt at the beginning versus adding the same amount after 20 minutes). It will be interesting to see if there are any clearly noticable differences.

Interesting, my process is somewhat similar to the Cook's Illustrated method (see the recipe here) but much more simple. I toast the oats dry in the pan until they take just the tiniest bit of color and begin to smell fragrantly nutty. Then I add 2.5 times the volume of water plus a healthy pinch of salt and simmer on low for around 30 minutes, stirring occasionally with a heatproof rubber spatula. At the end, just as I'm getting ready to take it to the table, that's when I stir in some butter. I wonder what's the advantage of using butter at the beginning rather than at the end. I've always thought it was better to toast things like grains and bread crumbs dry. Usually when I'm using butter in cooking, I think it's better to add most of it at the end rather than cooking it for a long time. It seems to provide a more "buttery" flavor that way. It's also interesting to see how the butter emulsifies in the porridge and changes its texture when you add it at the end. Like most of their recipes, the Cook's Illustrated method seems overly fussy to me (don't add the salt until 20 minutes in to the cooking process?). I can't imagine using two separate pans to cook something as simple as oatmeal porridge. Do you really do all that stuff -- use two separate pans and all that -- or do you just toast the oats in the beginning? What do you think is the benefit of using water and milk as the cooking liquids? I've always thought that one of the miracles of steel cut oats is how creamy and rich it is just from the oat starch. Back when I used to eat rolled oats, I always poured on some milk at the table. After a while I realized that I don't do that any more with steel cut oats. I'll have to try the CI method next time to see if it makes any difference. I agree with you (and apparently with Cook's Illustrated, too) that it makes better sense to buy steel cut oats in bulk rather than buying the "brand name" varieties. Most of the time the stuff from the health food store is in better condition, and it's often around three times more expensive per pound.

Hi Matthew. If you're looking for non-potable bitters and you already have Fee Brothers, Peychaud's and Angostura in mind -- well, that's about it as far as I know. This is, sadly, how far the use of bitters has fallen. Although we've been hearing for what seems like a year that Gary Regan's Orange Bitters No. 6 will be on sale any minute now, I wouldn't hold my breath. When it does come on sale, however, you should definitely stock it. The other bitters available to the cocktail enthuisiast tend to be either vintage examples purchased on eBay or homemade reproductions of defunct brands.

Just to clarify a few points made here: 1. Silver has excellent thermal conductivity. This is one reason why the best Sterling tea and coffee services have a piece of ceramic or other insulating material between the body of the pot and the handle -- otherwise the handle would become too hot to hold. This excellent thermal conuctivity also means that heat is conducted out of the pot very efficiently. As a result, hot tea in a silver teapot will actually cool off more rapidly than hot tea in a ceramic teapot (ceramic has very low thermal conductivity). 2. Silver has relatively low reactivity to things like pure air and water, but it does react with sulfir and sulfides to create silver sulfide -- aka silver tarnish. Silver sulfide, while not very pretty, is actually highly insoluble in aqueous (watery) solutions, so it is probably good advice to not polish the inside of a silver teapot. 3. Most of the reactivity of sterling silver comes from the 7.5% of (highly reactive) copper that is usually the other metal in the mix. This is why silver tarnishes less as purity goes up. Any "metalic" taste is likely to come from the copper.

Hmmmm... I'll have to whip up some fried chicken this week. My recipe is something like this: Marinade the chicken in Red Devil hot sauce in the morning, pour in buttermilk in the evening, fry the next afternoon. Remove the chicken pieces (usually mostly thighs) from the buttermilk and dredge in a simple mixture of flour, pepper and Old Bay seasoning. The Red Devil has plenty of salt, so additional is usually not needed. Let the dredged pieces sit for at least 30 minutes to adhere the coating to the chicken. Shallow fry at 350F in bacon fat and lard. Drain on cooling racks. Eat warm but not hot.

I've recently become aware of Kensington Gin, made by Liquid International Permium Spirits. It's interesting because, unlike any other gin of which I am aware, it is an aged product. It's an interesting concept. Anyone tried it?

I was searching around the 'net today and came across a very interesting web site called "Molecular Expressions - Exploring the World of Optics and Microscopy." Here's how they describe themselves: Among the many cool photographs they have is an entire gallery of liquor and cocktail photographs. Ever wonder what a Mint Julep looks like on a molecular level? How about Scotch on the Rocks?

Cala, this isn't really a question I can answer very well, unfortunately. When you begin a recipe, you have to have some understanding of what amount of food you are going to be making. In general, however, you will find that most any pot will do just fine when only half full. So, if you have a recipe that calls for two quarts of liquid plus some other stuff, you won't find that a 4 quart pot is too big. In general, you never want to fill a pot all the way. For example, if I want to make a quart of something bechamel, I'll do that in my 2.5 quart saucepan rather than my 1 quart saucepan. When it comes to purchasing cookware, this is where you have to really give some thought to the amounts you usually prepare. If, for example, you don't tend to make sauces (or melt chocolate, etc.) in the 0.5 - 0.75 quart range, there is probably little reason to have a fancy 1 quart saucepan. (A 1 quart saucepan is one of those pans that is used a lot on restaurants where dishes are prepared in individual portions, but most home cooking styles won't find it very useful.)

I always tip on the total bill and have always thought it was strange to care about this. Let's assume, for a moment, that the bill is for $250 per person before tax. NY State tax (8.625%) on that would be $21.56. So, assuming that you want to tip 20%, if you tip on the pre-tax amount, you're tipping 50 bucks. If you tip on the after-tax amount, you're tipping 54 bucks. For me, I don't think the difference between 300 bucks and 304 bucks is worth bothing about. It's also worthy of note that the difference between pre- and after-tax calculation on a $100 bill tipped at 20% is $1.70, and the difference gets smaller and smaller as the bill goes down.

Pisang Ambon is an Indonesian liqueur? I thought it was from the Netherlands. Green banana flavored... hmm... can't say that it will be high on my list. Anyway, as far as I know, it is not available in the States. Here is their web site.

This week's NY Times Food Section just so happened to have a bit on aquavit (the spirit) and Aquavit (the restaurant). Hakan Swan, an owner of the restaurant Aquavit and the guy who commissioned the Aquavit New York brand, says they wanted an aquavit with softer caraway to make the spirit more compatible with mixing in cocktails. That makes sense. He also says they made it low proof (only 70) to make it "easier to drink." That, I'm not so sure about. For mixing, I'd rather see a higher proof. What are some other aquavits out there and available? Here in NY, we have: Aalborg aquavit OP Anderson aquavit Lysholm Linie aquavit (which is aged in oak sherry casks) Aquavit New York Anyone mixed with these?

I've been thinking a bit about aquavit lately. Gin is my favorite cocktail liquor. And what is gin? It's more or less juniper-plus-other-stuff-flavored neutral spirits. Well, what is aquavit? It's more or less caraway-plus-other-stuff-flavored neutral spirits. So, I thought, why aren't we making lots of cool cocktails with aquavit? In fact, wouldn't a lot of gin formulae work fairly interestingly with aquavit? Say, for example, aquavit, maraschino and lemon juice. CocktailDB has a mere 18 cocktails with aquavit, which is a good place to start but we ought to be able to do better than that. I have to do some experimenting, but would love to hear other thoughts on this.

Here's a bottle of it here. What do you know... I've walked right by it and not recognized it as being the same thing. They apparently have it at Astor Wines for around $18/bottle. Funny... I was just getting ready to start a thread on Aquavit cocktails. Hope you can share a few secrets.