slkinsey

asso = "ace"

Very interesting article, entitled No longer forgotten, this drink is gaining on vodka and rekindling interest in the cocktails of yesteryear and mostly focusing on the growing popularity of gin rather than the choice of base liquor in a martini. Here's a little excerpt: Gin has long been the white liquor of choice for most cocktail afficianados. And I welcome any increase in popularity that might bring with it an increase in interesting new selections and imports.

That sounds like a good way of proceeding. Let us know when the lab results are in? Tried a Reverse Manhattan last night. 2 ounces Vya sweet vermouth, 1 ounce Bookers, 3 dashes Fee bitters, stir with cracked ice. It was pretty good. Bookers is just assertive enough to make an impact in both flavor and alcoholic strength. Not likely to take the place of Audrey's Bookers/Punt e Mes Manhattan in my heart, though.

Interesting, I was just talking with some of the gang about this not too long ago. Raw egg whites have, of course, been used in cocktails for a long, long time. Some classics (the Pisco Sour comes immediately to mind) have raw egg white as an essential ingredient. CocktailDB has about a zillion recipes with raw whole egg or raw egg white or raw egg yolk as an ingredient. Anyway, I was given to understand that cocktails-with-flavored-foam (as opposed to a foamy cocktail such as the aforementioned Pisco Sour) is by no means a new thing. For example, we have the Apple Core served at First, which is made with apple vodka, Berentzen Apfelkorn apple schnapps, lemon juice, a splash of cider and a top of apple foam. In terms of a relatively stable foam of alcohol... that might be difficult. Here is the bit on cocktail foam from Harold McGee's Q&A. From what I hear, the big downside to using gelatin is that it tends to look like vomit when the foam breaks down.

Two things here: 1. I'd recommend you look at the curved sauteuse evasée rather than the straight sided one at this size. I think the curved design works better when you're looking for something that will function mostly as a souped-up sauté pan. This also allows you to go with the Falk pan instead of the Bourgeat pan, which us usually a fairly substantial savings. The rolled lip, IMO, does not make a significant difference in the usefulness of this kind of pan, but if it's important to you, it is worthy of note that Falk's curved sauteuse evasée does have a rolled lip. 2. I'm not sure a sauteuse evasée, whether curved or not, makes a good replacement for a fry pan. They have entirely different designs and entirely different uses. This, of course, assumes that you have been using your fry pans as fry pans and not mostly as sauté pans with sides that are too low and too curved. Disk bottom is the way to go for a tall sauce pan, with a heavy stainless body and a thick aluminum base. I think something like 4 - 4.5 quarts is a good size. I have this one and like it very much. No reason to get rid of your existing saucepans, though, unless they're taking up too much room. Scanpan is pretty decent stuff (I like their new Scanpan Steel line) and even the crappiest thin stainless pan is just fine for boiling water or steaming vegetables. Is the Scanpan 2001+ nonstick? That would be too bad, and a reason I'd think about getting rid of it. No, you really don't want to be working with one quart of liquid in a 4.4 quart pan. So your instincts are right there. It all depends on how much you are willing to spend. Amazon often has deals on All-Clad pans. You could get this 1 quart All-Clad LTD saucepan for 30 bucks. Or, if you're willing to go through one of the Amazon resellers, you could get this 1 quart All-Clad Stainless saucepan for as little as 18 bucks. Or you could get something bigger, like this 2.5 quart Calphalon Commercial Hard-Anodized saucepan for $20. Most likely, one of these pans will be good enough for your uses. After that, it's a big jump up to the big boys. It'll run you $115 or so for a 1.6 quart saucepan or a 105 for a 1 quart sauteuse evasée from Falk. Perhaps this graphic will help explain: Here we have two disk bottom designs and one straight gauge design. On the regular disk pan, as you can see, the layer of thermal material doesn't quite cover the entire bottom of the pan. The area where the stainless steel body curves up from the bottom of the pan to the sides of the pan is exposed. Now, normally this won't make much difference. All it means is that there is a small ring around the outside of the base that isn't quite as hot as the rest of the pan. No big deal -- it won't affect your cooking. However, when the flame is bigger than the pan, heat comes directly from the flame onto the exposed curved stainless steel area. This means there is a small ring around the outside of the base that is a lot hotter than the rest of the pan. Not good. This can mean scorching. The encapsulated disk pan attempts to solve this problem by making the disk as large as the diameter of the pan. As you can see, this leaves some voids underneath the curved part, and as a result these disks have to be encapsulated in a thin layer of stainless steel. There is still a a small ring around the outside of the base that isn't quite as hot as the rest of the pan, but because it protects the curved part, it eliminates the situation where there is a small ring around the outside of the base that is a lot hotter than the rest of the pan. This is a step up, but it is not without its troubles. If the flame is sufficiently large, it can travel up the thin sides of the pan to cause overheating and scorching there. In addition, encapsulated disk pans are significantly more expensive than regular disk pans. The straight gauge pan, on the other hand, doesn't suffer from any of these problems. No matter how large the flame is, the heat is always coming into the pan through an even layer of thermal material. No hot spots, no scorching. Straight gauge pans tend to be more expensive, but since we're talking about small pans a reasonably priced one can usually be found. This is one of those "how much is it worth it to you" questions that only you can answer. To my mind, the All-Clad pans I referenced are cheap enough that there is no reason not to get one (I have several). For melting butter and warming milk (two things that I almost always do in the microwave anyway), there is no reason to spend any more money. Now, I also have a 1.3 quart stainless lined heavy copper sauteuse evasée which I use to do things like making intense reductions and delicate emulsified sauces, and very dark caramels. If you don't do this sort of thing, there probably is no reason to spend that kind of money.

This whole "no pork" thing is really putting a damper on my potential recommendations. Here's a good one using chicken where I would normally use pork or lamb: make a sauce with crumbled chicken sausage, sautéed onions, lots of mushrooms and a touch of tomato paste (brown the sausage and reserve, get the onions good and brown, then add the tomato paste and get that kind of browned over on the side of the pan, add quartered mushrooms and get those going, add the sausage back in along with a touch of whatever wine you have around, put in some rosemary if you have any -- the sauce should be very thick). Get some good penne, get that to "not quite al dente" stage and cook it together with the ragù, thinning the sauce as needed with pasta water. Then, when you serve it at the table, put a knob of soft goat cheese on top of the pasta in every bowl. The hot savory pasta with the occasional bit of cold, creamy chevre is very cool.

Another easy one is just "in bianco." Simply pasta glazed with some reduced chicken stock and butter, with some grated parm-reg on top. It helps if you have really primo pasta for this, of course.

This is actually a staple of Italian sauce cookery: cooking something in the sauce for the flavor it imparts, but then taking it out. It's actually fairly rare, for example, that a sauce or a sauté of spinach will actually be full of little slivers of garlic. More likely than not, the garlic will be put in whole for the flavor and then fished out later. Same thing with celery. My mother told me that her family's cook when they were living in Rome would make a sauce that included whole stalks of celery that were removed and discarded once the sauce was finished. There are a lot of things you can do to teach yourself the minutiae of basic pasta sauces. Try the tomato and butter sauce. Then try one where you soften the onion in the butter first. Then try softening the onion in evoo instead of butter. Then try onion and celery. Then try onion, celery and carrot. It's very interesting to see how the flavor, depth and intensity of the sauce changes just due to these minute variations. I once tried splitting a can of San Marzano's in half, and did the cold pan tomato/onion sauce I described above using butter as the fat in one pan and evoo as the fat in the other pan. That was the only difference. Then I cooked up a big batch of spaghetti and tried the two different sauces side-by-side. The differences were huge. So huge that I've been meaning to write it up (haven't got around to it yet).

Very nice work, JJ! Here's a small excerpt for posterity:

My go-to quick pasta sauce is simply one large can of San Marzano tomatoes (or the best quality you can find); a medium onion, peeled and cut in half; and 4 nice tablespoons of butter. Start all the ingredients together in a cold pan, bring it up to temperature slowly over medium-low heat, barely simmer until the butter emulsifies into the tomato and the onion is soft. Toss out the onion (it has given its flavor to the sauce) and use the sauce. Good with dry pasta, amazing with fresh pasta, and mind blowing with gnocchi (I have a very quick/easy recipe for ricotta gnocchi, if you're interested). This is what it looks like when it's ready: Puttanesca is a quick and easy sauce for dry pasta: lots of evoo; slowly cook a whole lot of best quality anchovies until they liquify; toss in some onion and garlic to soften; throw in some good canned tomatoes and plenty of good capers; bring it up to a slow simmer; toss in some olives and you're ready to go. Another good one is smoked salmon and cream. Soften some onion. Add slivers of smoked salmon and the cream. Bring up to temp. Ready to go. Almost any seafood (scallops, clams, shrimp, calamari) is good just "bianco di scoglio" -- simply and quickly cooked at the last possible minute with a touch of garlic and tossed with the pasta together with chopped herbs and plenty of evoo.

The Lillet Cocktail recipe in cocktailDB calls for three parts Lillet Blanc to two parts gin, so your ingredient list sounds like a more modern invention with the same name. I'm guessing the place that makes your cocktail is Parkside in Vancouver? What you describe sounds to me almost like a "Reverse Sidecar" with Lillet serving as the reversing ingredient (a Sidecar is brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice). As chance would have it, reverse cocktails is something we're discussing right now in another thread.

The folks at Bullfrog & Baum sent around an interesting Sidecar-related release about some variations their clients are doing: I'm not sure I'd call these all Sidecars, but they show the interesting things you can do riffing on a classic.

All these things quoted by halloweencat are interesting, but the people quoted are either talking about fish (an entirely different kind of organism) or are speculating and anthropomorphizing whereas the Norwegian scientists actually set out deliberately to answer the question about pain. First of all, it helps to understand what pain is. Pain is a perception, not an objective neurological phenomenon or physical state. Advanced animals, like human beings, have specialized nerves called nociceptors that respond to high levels of mechanical, thermal or chemical stimuli. The activation of these nerves combines with other sencory stimuli and is processed inside our complex brains into the perception we know as pain. The perception and processing part is the important part, not the stimulus part. There is an entire theory of how pain works called "gate control" which asserts that pain happens only in the brain. No brain, no pain. Lobsters do not have a brain so much as they have some grouped ganglions. Lobsters have an extremely rudimentary nervous system -- several orders of magintude less complex than vertabrates (10^3 versus 10^9). Lobsters do not react to many situations we would ordinarily think of as causing pain (losing a leg, for example) in a way that indicates the perception of pain. Lobsters do not "think" in a way we would recognize as "thinking." And as a result, we can say fairly definitively that lobsters do not experience anything akin to what we would call "pain." Now, does this mean that they don't react to certain stimuli with avoidance behaviors (and other behaviors)? Of course not. So to oysters. Are we going to start saying that we shouldn't eat raw oystrers because it hurts them? For those with some understanding of neurophysiology, this page may be of some interest. Here's some text dealing directly with the subject of pain: Presumably (although one can't say for sure without reading the paper) the Norwegian scientists did tests specifically to determine about pain, and those tests came up negative. If you've ever done this yourself, you've noticed that some movements and actions remain active. As the abovereferenced site says, this may be due to the fact that the lobster's "brain" is so rudimentary that some higher functions actually happen in a different area:

Kathy, that's a cost question only you can answer. There's nothing other than the price that would rule out Blantons for mixing. I've occasionally used Bookers in a cocktail, and that sells for around the same price as Blantons. But Bookers has some natural advantages for certain cocktails due to its intensity of flavor and high proof. I wouldn't use Bookers often in a cocktail, I use it sparingly and only in cocktails where I think it will make a big difference. Similarly, I have a few bottles of fancy rye I only use for Sazeracs, whereas I use Old Overholt and Wild Turkey Rye (both very good products all on their own, but significantly less expensive than, e.g., Michter's). So... would Blantons be good in a Manhattan? I'm sure it would. But I wouldn't use it to make a Whiskey Sour.

If you can get the Van Winkle Special Reserve 12 Year in the $25-30 range, you should definitely buy it.

Yea, I can see how that might not be the most interesting drink in the world. Obviously, a Reverse Martini or Reverse Manhattan depends highly on having a vermouth you really like and also on having a "reversed main ingredient" that is assertive enough to make its presence felt through the vermouth. If I were to make a Reverse Manhattan, I'd probably start with two parts Vya red vermouth (which I think it good enough to drink all on its own) to one part Bookers, and plenty of bitters. Would you say that, as a general trend, cocktails have increased in alcoholic strength over time? Clearly, for example, some of the old "loggerhead thickened" drinks weren't all that high in alcohol. It's interesting, because when I searched cocktailDB for "Rose," I found some interesting variations on the drink you describe. This one is 1:1 kirschwasser and gin, which is somewhat similar; and this one is a bit more similar to your recipe, being 5:4:1 kirschwasser to dry vermouth to grenadine. Both are substantially more alcoholic than the recipe you give, and I wonder if they are more recent formulas.

Really?! I haven't been there in an age. Perhaps this is telling me I need to go back.

Noilly Pratt is actually very good stuff. It's not in the same league as Vya, but would certainly make a good Reverse Martini. A drop (not a dash) of orange bitters is good in a RM, too.

I tend to find that charring imparts more of a bitter flavor than a sour flavor. The "sour tang" you describe probably has more to do with the fact that Mangieri uses a natural leaven and a very long fermentation. Those lactobacilli are doing their thing.

I was at a fun cocktail party with friends this past weekend at which a variety of Martini recipes was served, spanning the various historical formulations of this most famous cocktail. After Martini number four or five, several of us went over to "Reverse Martinis" made with two parts white vermouth to one part gin. These are highly dependent on the quality of the vermouth (we were using Vya) and are best when made with an assertive gin. We loved them, and I don't think it was just the liquor in our stomachs talking. This got me thinking about the whole concept of a reverse cocktail. I guess I'd define a reverse cocktail as one that is based on/inspired by a well understood cocktail formulation, but which turns the formula on its head by moving a lower alcohol modifier to the foreground and lightning the drink. Sometimes this is relatively straightforward. A Manhattan may be transformed into a Reverse Manhattan simply by mixing two/three parts sweet vermouth to one part rye or bourbon. Other times it can be more complicated, as the creation of The Mischief - an eGullet Drink (a kind of Reverse Margarita) is described by Gary Regan. Any other thoughts on reverse cocktails? I wonder if it would be possible to make a reverse Sidecar. . .

Didn't I say the the flat surface was 5.5"'s? Yep. What I can't find is the flat surface area in my original choice. If you're talking about the 11" sauciere, the diameter of the flat surface is 9.5 inches. See my post above: ←

This kind of straight talk is why I like to give my business to Falk. Has there ever been any thought of offering a stainless cover as a lower-priced option?

Not that I want to take money out of Michael's pocket , but I would like to point out that there is no reason you have to have a stainless/copper bimetal cover. In fact, I would advise against it. It's a pain to keep clean, and it doesn't really offer any performance benefits. Instead of spending $75 on a stainless/copper bimetal cover, you could, for example, spend $22 on this stainless cover from Paderno Grant Gourmet, or an eleven inch stainless cover from someone else (I recommend Paderno Grand Gourmet because I happen to own several Paderno pieces and noticed that their covers fit Falk particularly well).

Didn't I say the the flat surface was 5.5"'s? I think it's unclear to some people what the flat surface is on the sauciere (see my post above).

In comparing this pan to the current object of my desire, I can see that it is a bit deeper by 0.4" but what I can't tell is if there is less flat surface in the new pan. For my purposes, that would be a good thing. Please clarify. Yes, there is less flat surface in the new pan. The eleven inch "sauciere" (aka curved sauteuse evasee) has a 9.5 inch flat surface (70.9 square inches), whereas the new pan is described as having a 5.5 inch flat surface (23.8 square inches). So the new pan has right around one third the flat surface area compared to the sauciere.