slkinsey

They sound really interesting. Of course, at $97.35/bottle plus shipping, they had better be!

Here's an article by Gary Regan that appeared in today's San Francisco Chronicle about a drink created by David Nepove at Enrico's Sidewalk Cafe in San Francisco. The article is written as an amusing dialogue between "The Professor" and "Doc." You may draw your own conclusions. To make the Spanish Rose you need: 1 sprig : rosemary 1.5 oz : gin (Plymouth is specified) .75 oz : Licor 43 .75 oz : fresh lemon juice .50 oz : cranberry juice Strip the leaves from the bottom half of the rosemary sprig and muddle with the lemon juice. Reserve sprig for garnish. Add gin and Licor 43. Shake with ice and strain into ice-filled wine glass. Top with cranberry juice and garnish with rosemary sprig. Sounds interesting. I've never made a cocktail with rosemary.

From an article in today's Times: Isn't there already commercial production of Absinthe in Switzerland? Anyway, the article makes it sound like the new law will pave the way for more "historical" absinthes with higher thujone concentrations.

If the tin is fresh and in good condition, there's no reason not to use them. The main problem with tin is that it does wear out eventually. It's also a problem because tin melts at around 450F/232C. That's not very high, and it's quite easy to get a pan above this temperature -- especially if you are sautéing. Once that happens, you've got a retinning on your hands. So, as long as you use moderate heat and are careful to use soft "teflon-friendly" tools, you should go ahead and use them. There's no reason not to use tin-lined copper you already own. I just think that, since we now have the ability to buy significantly more durable stainless lined copper, there are plenty of reasons not to buy new tin-lined copper.

You'd be surprised at how easy the ingredients are to find. Pear eau de vie (aka pear brandy and poire william) can be found in most decent liquor stores, as can riesling wine and orange curaçao. The only one that might be difficult to get your hands on is Peychaud's bitters. But even that can be had via the internet (and should be a part of any cocktail enthusiast's pantry anyway). Honey syrup is simply honey mixed 1:1 with water. You can make it at home. Click the link over to NY Metro for the full recipe, BTW. Although she has been very generous with recipes in the past, I didn't want to post the recipe without Audrey's permission.

Isn't it a specialty of Locke Ober?

I'm not sure what temperature is required for retrogradation, but I assume it is refrigerator temperature. That's where I keep my leftover rice anyway. Not sure I'd want to eat cooked rice that had sat out at room temperature for 24 hours.

Well... not exactly every time I want to. Luckily for her (and for my liver, no doubt) I can't get over there nearly as often as I'd like -- otherwise she'd never be able to get rid of me. Probably have to take out a restraining order, etc. And really... cocktail stalking is so uncouth.

That sort of thing is perfect when you want to serve individual portions of something like mussels. I also find that it's good to have several ~1 quart pots around for warming sauces, doing individual portions of vegetables, etc.

Re day-old versus fresh rice: It's not necessarily a fresh versus not-fresh question, it's a warm versus cold guestion. When rice is cooked, it releases starch. There are two kinds of starch in rice: amylose and amylopectin. Short grain rice has more amylopectin and long grain rice has more amlyose. Amylopectin is stickier than amylose, which is why short grain rice is said to be "sticky rice." But amlyose is also pretty sticky, and well-cooked long or medium grain rice will still stick together when the rice is fresh. When cooked rice cools to refrigerator temperature, the starch undergoes a process called retrogradation. This means, among other things, that the starch cells collapse, the starch crystalizes and the starch molecules realign within each grain of rice. The result is that the rice gets hard and individual grains of rice no longer stick together. Since one would like separate grains of rice rather than clumps of rice stuck together when making fried rice, it makes sense to use refrigerated cooked rice. This usually means day-old rice. The hardness imparted by retrogradation also works to the cook's advantage in making fried rice, because it means that the rice will not break apart while it is tossed in the wok. Luckily, when the rice is reheated, the hardening effect of retrogradation is reversed.

New York Metro just ran a blurb on one of Audrey "Libation Goddess" Saunders' new cocktails at Bemelmans: Falling Leaves. I'm pretty sure Clear Creek Distillery is in Oregon and not upstate NY, but I quibble... The recipe includes pear eau de vie, reisling, honey syrup, orange curaçao, Peychaud's bitters and a star anise garnish. I was able to try one of these a few weeks ago when I visited Bemelman's with JAZ, Fat Guy, Splificator, Eric_Malson and bergerka to be dazzled by Audrey's mixology. It's a very interesting drink. In many ways it's a cocktail unlike any other with which I am familiar. More subtly flavored and, since the base "liquor" is reisling, with less alcoholic kick than most cocktails (substantially less kick than a Manhattan or Martini). It also needed to spend some time in the glass and warm up slightly for the flavors to have full impact. So, it's a drink that one can have two ways -- taken straight from the shaker it's a light and subtle quencher, after a minute or two it's a more complex and full flavored drink for sipping and thinking. I'm not aware of any other cocktails (which is to say, short strong drinks chilled with ice and served "up") that have wine as the base alcohol. One thing I have always noted about any of Audrey's recipes, unlike those from certain other notables in the cocktail world, is that they always turn out just right if you follow the recipe. So if you can't drop in to Bemelmans, mix one up and see what you think.

I've read this a number of times, but metalurgists and other scientific types say that it isn't true, that the cracks/pores/etc. don't close as the metal heats up.

Strictly speaking, this is not actually true. Any time you cook something in a pan with hot fat where you are largely letting the ingredient sit still in the pan, you are "frying." "Sauteing" is when you constantly agitate the pan to keep the ingredients in motion -- not something one normally wants to do with fish. "Pan frying" is kind of a deceptive term. I prefer the term "shallow frying" which seems to be used only to describe a fried chicken cooking technique that is not deep frying. The way I see it, you have "frying," which is cooking in a fairly limited amount of hot fat, you have "deep frying," which is cooking entirely covered in hot fat, and you have "shallow frying," which is in between the two. Although, if one is going to be entirely precise about it, shallow frying and deep frying are fundamentally different from "regular frying" because they are actually boiling the ingredients in oil. This is good advice, but one needs to understand that it only applies to sauteing and high heat frying. For moderate heat frying, it is often advisable to bring the pan and the fat up to temperature together because the appearance of the fat will often tell you when it has reached the appropriate temperature (there is also no fear of burning the fat in moderate heat frying). For shallow and deep frying you also want to heat the pan and the fat together since what you care about is the temperature of the fat, not the temperature of the pan (the fat is what does all the cooking in deep/shallow frying). If you heated up a pan, dumped in an inch of cold oil and then attempted to shallow fry, you'd get nothing but a big mess. JJ: For cooking fish, the best thing to do is get yourself a large high-end nonstick frypan (like Calphalon Commercial Nonstick). You wouldn't use this for shallow frying (i.e., cooking in around an inch of hot fat) but it works great for regular frying.

This is an especially good point. Stainless lined heavy copper cookware is expensive, although it's not all that expensive compared to brands like All-Clad and Demeyere -- but it is expensive. However, the cost needs to be put into perspective: An 11 inch sauciere (aka curved sauteuse evasee) from Falk will run you 235 bucks. If you keep it for 20 years, thats a cost of around 12 bucks a year. For one of the very best pans made. It's like being able to drive around a Ferrari for a hundred bucks a year. What else can you get for 235 bucks? Well... you can get a good DVD player. That might last you around 5 years if you're lucky. Or, hey... it might get you one-fifth of an okay laptop. That might last you three years. Now, I happen to use my copper pans a lot more often than I use my DVD player and I'll still be using them when DVDs are as obsolete as Betamax. So, in my opinion, the money was better spent on the pans.

I imagine it comes down, in many ways, to the fact that FOH is usually not a career choice and BOH often is. I'm sure it's also much more likely to be seen in larger, more corporate and/or busy restaurants not owned/operated by family. I've never seen any signs of this conflict in small family owned/operated restaurants that serve at a leisurely pace.

Spec's out of Houston, TX sells both Fee Brothers Falernum ($2.39 for 4 oz) and Taylor Velvet Falernum ($13.67 for 750 ml). Spec's is actually one of the best liquor stores in the country. Whenever I'm in Houston I always stock up on booze I can't get easily (or inexpensively) in NYC.

Interesting. Almost everyone I know who makes dulce de leche simply boils an unopened can of condensed milk.

There is the John D. Taylor "Velvet Falernum" bottling to which Jason refers at 11% alcohol. Fee Brothers also makes a "West Indies Style Falernum" which is nonalcoholic. Da Vinci Gourmet makes a "Caribbean Falernum Classic Syrup" that is also nonalcoholic. The Sazerac company used to import a falernum from Barbados, and I think Goslings makes a falernum -- neither one of which seems to be available in the US. Since falernum is typically used in very small amounts, it shouldn't make any difference which one is used. I, too, would like to experiment with falernum. Most of the recipes one sees that include falernum are rum-based drinks. I like rum as much as the next guy, but it would be interesting to use it with other base spirits.

Was just there for lunch today. The double cheeseburger was, as always, superlative. Also had to try the Shacktoberfest wild elk sausage. Didn't do much for me.

Kumquat, along with lemonquat, sunquat and all the other members of the -quat family, has the advantage of having an edible rind, though.

What is scum-like about it? Are you sure it isn't oil?

No idea where to buy tokens. I have several subway tokens (from several different cities) in a large dish I use whenever I have to empty my pockets of loose change in foreign currencies. The subway token garnish, while kind of fun, is a little problematic actually. Since the drink includes citrus and is shaken rather hard, it's not exactly see-through. So it's hard to see the token sitting on the bottom of the glass. One possible solution might be to use a spiral of lemon zest cut with a channel knife and thread the token onto the peel.

In order for Franny's to be doable for an NY Pizza Survey-sized group, I would have to negotiate something special with the owners. One assumes they wouldn't agree to accomodate us if they weren't comfortable with it -- and that would be fine, as they really aren't set up to handle larger groups.

So, I had some time to tweak mine: 1.5 oz : applejack 1.0 oz : straight rye whiskey (101 proof is what I've been using) 0.5 tsp : yellow Chartreuse 0.25 oz : fresh lemon juice 0.25 oz : 1:1 simple syrup dash : Fee Bros. aromatic bitters Shake hard with cracked ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon and a clean NYC subway token.

I am a fan of Falk, as many people here know, for the quality of their product, for their prices (I believe Falk is largely responsible for rationalizing the stainless lined heavy copper cookware market), and not least because I like doing business with their US distributor -- aka, Michael "mharpo" Harp. I'll probably weigh in more extensively on this thread a little later on, but for now I'll humbly recommend my eGCI class on Stovetop Cookware and its associated Q&A thread for those who are interested in learning about how different materials impact the performance of a piece of cookware.