slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Anyone tried a ceramic blade peeler?
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Acid does promote curdling of egg whites, but eggs actually become more alkaline as they age.
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Boy, it's hard to find a decent peeler, though, that doesn't take too much pith along with the zest.
Yea. For big peels I prefer to use a very sharp paring knife, and then I flip it over and trim off the pith from the back. That's impractical on a volume scale, of course.
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There are all kinds of garnishes we use that aren't really meant to be eaten. Things like single floated mint leaves, flowers, pineapple leaves and umbrellas come immediately to mind.
I find all of those things morally, and perhaps spiritually, objectionable.
To each his own, of course. Garniture for visual presentation is something I've always felt distinguished a professional cocktail from a homemade iteration. I'm unlikely to spend time floating a leaf on the surface of the drink when I'm just making one for the wife and me, but I do like to see it when I'm at a bar.
Anyway, I do think there are plenty of good reasons to have many of these garnishes. A single floated mint leaf on the surface of a Juniperotivo, for example, serves as a visual reminder that there is mint in the drink, and thus harmonizes the experience. A pineapple leaf sticking up from a glass of Pineapple Pisco Punch has a similar effect with respect to the pineapple element of that drink.
Furthermore, signature garnishes -- whether edible, aromatic or neither -- serve as a way of differentiating one drink from another. Otherwise, you're serving an awful lot of "glasses of brown" (etc.) without a way of easily distinguishing your Manhattan from your friend's Brooklyn.
Also... sometimes it's cool to go old-school with the baroque garnish. I vastly prefer a Julep like this (wheels of citrus, berries in season, etc.) to one with a paltry garnish.
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There can be any number of reasons to put the twist in the glass. Certainly one of them can be in order to extract a bit more of the bitter citrus oils into the drink (although I should hasten to add that you don't want bitterness from the pith). Or, as Andy points out, simply to indicate to your customer that the twist has been deployed.
Otherwise, yea, it's mostly there for visual appeal and, I suppose, as a visual reminder of the aromatic garnish from the lemon oil. But what's wrong with that? There are all kinds of garnishes we use that aren't really meant to be eaten. Things like single floated mint leaves, flowers, pineapple leaves and umbrellas come immediately to mind. With that in mind, it probably would help to pay more attention to the strictly visual element of the twist in the glass. When I want to get a lot of lemon presence, like my lemon twists in a long, broad strip which I bend and roll between my fingers all the way down its length to express maximum oils. Once this is done, the twist is flexible and slick with oil, and I twist it up in a tight roll to make a kind of "lemon twist rose" before putting it in the glass (or, sometimes, I might put a cocktail pick through the rolled up twist and perch it on the side of the glass).
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I am pretty much stunned by the suggestion that the time folks eat Thanksgiving dinner has deep sociological roots. In most cases I think the time has to do with several things with travel plans and the amount of kids involved being high up on the list.
Really? I'm shocked by the suggestion that most any aspect of a national cultural tradition like Thanksgiving Dinner doesn't have interesting sociological and historical reasons. The timing of the dinner seems like one such aspect to me. You're suggesting that it's a purely logistical consideration. Maybe so. I think it's an open question.
I'd be interested to know if an "early" family or a "late" family changed traditions from one to the other based solely upon logistical considerations (and not, for example, because the family came from different customs and chose one or the other).
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If I seem to you to be saying that "only Flyover Rubes eat their holiday meals in the middle of the afternoon," I can't really do much about that except point out that I haven't actually said anything of the sort.
As for the timing of the meal, I thought this article had some interesting things overall to say about the timing of dinner (although not specifically about Thanksgiving dinner) and seems to support my supposition that earlier dinner times are connected to agrarian culture and practices (or, more broadly, the recentness of moving away from them).
Having grown up and currently residing on the East coast but having all of my family in Texas, having lived a half-decade in Wisconsin and being married to a woman from Kansas, it's my observation that everyday dinner times are earlier in the central parts of the country than they are on the edges. I imagine -- and I am by no means the first or only person to make this suggestion -- that these earlier dinner times reflect a more recent connection to agrarian culture and practices compared to the edges where most of the older/larger urban centers are. This doesn't make anyone a rube. My in-laws in Manhattan, Kansas are every bit as sophisticated as anyone I know on the island of Manhattan where I live. But they do prefer to eat dinner several hours earlier than I would ordinarily even think of dining.
As for the hour of Thanksgiving dinner specifically... there are plenty of people out here who eat this meal in the middle of the afternoon. But there are also plenty of people who eat Thanksgiving dinner in the evening. My observation is that the balance between "early" and "late" Thanksgiving dinners shifts considerably in favor of the former as one moves into the central parts of the country. It seems reasonable to suggest that this has something to do with the fact that the customary dinner hour also trends earlier in those areas, and furthermore to suggest that this may ultimately be traced back to agrarian culture and practices. Again, I am hardly the first person to make this suggestion. Of course, earlier times wherever they may be found may also have to do with the necessities of longer driving times, or any number of other factors. Just googling around the internet, it's surprising to note how many people have said that their Thanksgiving dinner is scheduled to account for the timing of televised football games.
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Depends on how much fennel you have, I suppose. If I were you, I might consider tossing the fennel with all the lemon and oil you're going to use, and then vacuuming out all the air. Add the salt, parsley, etc. tomorrow.
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Here's my question: can I slice the fennel up for the salad a day in advance?
How do you plan on serving it? Fennel will brown once you cut it. You can mitigate this with acid or by removing contact with oxygen. I've had good results by putting sliced fennel and olive oil into a vacuum bag and removing all the air (it scrunches down very small, which is nice from a storage perspective, and the oil coats all the pieces).
Otherwise, I'd say you were asking for brown fennel.
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Other people with different traditions and experiences can't understand eating a large meal in the evening.
Just to set the record straight, and speaking just for myself, I have no trouble whatsoever "understanding" why some folks prefer to eat their holiday meal in the evening.
Sigh. It wasn't written to convey belittlement or express a literal failure to comprehend, but rather figuratively in the same sense one might say, "I don't understand oatmeal without salt in it." Although I don't think it's particularly difficult to figure that out.
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One reason many people I know eat mid-afternoon is kids: you have a 3-4 hour event together and then the kids have to be poured into car seats and beds. If it were all adults that didn't need to worry about drinking and driving, living in a city with a terrific public transit system, I'd serve dinner at "dinner time."
There are lots of good reasons to do large holiday dinners at various times of the day. Tradition and custom, I think, probably have a lot to do with it. But I'm sure there are practical considerations as well. My parents are both only children, so I never had those gigantic extended family meals. For Thanksgiving, our family got together with a bunch of similarly situated families (many of them academics, like mine) in a group that could easily be 50 or more, including children of all ages. Everyone drove, and this was always an evening dinner.
I should hasten to point out, since there seems to be some misunderstanding on this count, that people should eat whenever they want to eat. I'm simply saying that my traditions and experience have brought me to a place where I personally can't understand eating a large holiday dinner in the middle of the afternoon. Other people with different traditions and experiences can't understand eating a large meal in the evening. It's not a question of one time being intrinsically "better" than another.
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I don't currently, nor have I ever worked on a farm. So having a huge meal in the middle of the afternoon has never made sense to me. We have never had Thanksgiving dinner in my family in the middle of the afternoon, nor any of the other large holiday meals.
Thanksgiving dinner (and Xmas eve dinner and Xmas dinner dinner, etc.) are all served at dinner time. Which is to say, around 7 o'clock.
Interesting theory.
I'm not sure I get your point. I'm even a little puzzled as to your reason for posting this. You seem inexplicably irritated and annoyed about the time that others choose to have their big holiday meals.
It seems pretty straightforward to me. As you say yourself, it's common in American agrarian families to have the largest meal in the middle of the day. It seems to me that this has influenced the timing of this dinner. And, in my experience anyway, it is much more common for large holiday meals to be served "early" in the central parts of the country, which still maintain many customs derived from American agrarian practices. Since I don't come from a tradition that has any connection to this, eating "dinner" in mid-afternoon doesn't make much sense to me.
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I don't currently, nor have I ever worked on a farm. So having a huge meal in the middle of the afternoon has never made sense to me. We have never had Thanksgiving dinner in my family in the middle of the afternoon, nor any of the other large holiday meals.
Thanksgiving dinner (and Xmas eve dinner and Xmas dinner dinner, etc.) are all served at dinner time. Which is to say, around 7 o'clock.
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I'm going to take it all off the bone. Clean out all the scraps of tendon, etc. I'll take the larger and more attractive pieces and chunk them up into thumb-sized pieces. The rest of the dark meat will be triple-ground on the fine disk. I'll fold some egg and seasonings into the ground turkey. Then I'll mix that with the chunked dark meat, some chunked foie and some chestnuts with the forcemeat, pack it into a mold and cook it sv, then chill and reserve. For service, I'll slice out pieces, brown in butter and plate alongside a punched-out circle of potato galette and a few sauteed wild mushrooms. Drizzle of herb puree.
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I've scaled way back from my legendary (or notorious, depending on your perspective) ten-to-twelve course Thanksgiving dinners. Once I really nailed it, I sort of lost interest in keeping it up. It's a lot of work. I still, however, prefer to do multiple plated courses rather than the "platter everything and throw it on the table at the same time" tradition that holds sway in many homes.
This year it's something like this:
1. Admiral Russell's Punch & assorted nibbles
2. Sunchoke soup with arugula pudding and pickled vegetables
3. Composed salad of quick-pickled cucumber and citrus-cured scallop "carpaccio"
4. turkey breast with black truffle (62C sv), cornbread dressing, sauteed savoy cabbage
5. turkey leg meat with foie gras and chestnuts (80C sv), potato galette, wild mushroom
6. caramel bread pudding
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That looks like regular old Rittenhouse BIB to me, with a differently colored label.
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Whole Foods? Don't they have a custom sushi counter?
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That would probably be this: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/dining/28curious.html
How can water reduce one sensation and amplify another? Both alcohol and aroma molecules are volatile, meaning they evaporate from foods and drinks and are carried by the air to the odor receptors high up in the nasal cavity.Aroma molecules are also more chemically similar to alcohol molecules than they are to water, so they tend to cling to alcohol, and are quicker to evaporate out of a drink when there’s less alcohol to cling to.
This means that the more alcoholic a drink is, the more it cloisters its aroma molecules, and the less aroma it releases into the air. Add water and there’s less alcohol to irritate and burn, and more aroma release.
The same principle explains why stiff martinis and Manhattans can be less aromatic than lower-proof cocktails, as many bartenders know. Audrey Saunders of the Pegu Club in New York told me that realizing this led her to develop a series of what she calls “inverted drinks,” in which spirits play a supporting role to vermouth or other low-alcohol ingredients.
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There is a very interesting class coming up at Astor Center tomorrow about using aromas in cocktails as part of the Alchemy of Taste and Smell programs they're running right now.
In Audrey and Dave's class, they're going to focus on techniques and uses of infusion, aromatic distillation and essential oils in the mixological arts. This should be a very important and informative session, and really it's hard to imagine a better pair to give this class : Dave's full on technological geekery in these areas is known to many, but what fewer people may know is the extent to which Audrey has immersed herself in the science and art of aroma over the past several years. And so I expect the class to increase our understanding of the impact that aroma can have on a cocktail and to feature both high and low tech ways to explore and push the envelope of deliberately using aroma in cocktails.
Meanwhile, check out the calendar at Astor Center for other Alchemy of Taste and Smell events coming up this weekend.
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I've already read through it once. So many great stories and ideas.
Now I must go forth and lay in a supply of arrack before the rush.
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Are you sure you're not finding powdered or confectioner's sugar rather than superfine sugar? Powdered sugar has an even finer grain size than superfine, so fine that it appears to have a texture similar to AP flour. Most of the powdered sugar you might find in a US grocery store includes a good bit of cornstarch, although it's possible to get it without on a commercial basis. Regardless, superfine is the one you want, not powdered.
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Caster sugar and superfine sugar are the same thing, the former designation being preferred in Britain and the latter in the States.
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Here's a somewhat related question: Is there any reasonably inexpensive (costing no more than a few hundred dollars in equipment) to remove water from liquor? I don't mean removing all the water. I'm interested in starting with things that are no less than 40% ABV and ending up with something that is no more than 65% ABV (and usually only 50% ABV).
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The Online Etymological Dictionary says:
1610s, alteration of taddy (1611), tarrie (1609) "beverage made from fermented palm sap," from Hindi tari "palm sap" (in which the -r- sounds close to an English -d-), from tar "palm tree," from Skt. tala-s, probably from a Dravidian language (cf. Kannada tar, Telugu tadu). Meaning "beverage made of alcoholic liquor with hot water, sugar, and spices" first recorded 1786.
The Life & Times of Jerry Thomas
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
What I'd like to see is someone master the old-school technique of tossing the foaming cocktail of booze and shaved ice in a big arc between two tins.