slkinsey

Freeze away. I don't see how it would make a difference. Although it may not freeze (too much sugar content). I can't say that I remember, exactly. But we've unearthed some pretty old bottles of natural grenadine among my grandparents' belongings (where I also found a 50 year old bottle of Strega, etc.) and it had a vanilla note.

Both reasons. I don't think that grenadine is simply pomegranate syrup. That would be "sirop de grenade" (much the same way we have "sirop de citron" and so on). Rather, I think that minor amounts of other flavorings such as orange flower water and vanilla are traditional. It also tastes better and works better in cocktails.

The vodka is overkill, really, when you consider how saturated the syrup turns out. Also, one thing to consider: If you are bottling a pint of grenadine and you're floating no more than a half-ounce of 100 proof vodka over the top1, the alcoholic content of the grenadine is too low to be meaningful. And, considering that one is unlikely to use more than perhaps a half-ounce of grenadine in a serving, the alcohol content of any drink made with it is too small to be meaningful to anyone who doesn't have strict dogmatic reasons for avoiding even a molecule of ethanol. Think about it this way: vanilla extract has far more alcohol in it, so if you would use a teaspoon of vanilla extract in a nonalcoholic drink, you should feel fine about using a half-ounce of grenadine. 1. the trick is to fill the bottle until the grenadine starts to come up the neck of the bottle, that way there is very little exposed surface area.

I usually use light cane sugar for a little added roundness, but have done well with refined white sugar as well. IMO you don't want molasses flavors from less refined sugar to muddy the purity of the grenadine. My usual procedure is something like this: First I'll make a 1:1 sweetened pomegranate juice with 1 cup each of sugar and juice, which goes into the refrigerator to chill; then I'll reduce down 5-6 cups of pomegranate juice to 1 cup; then I'll put in a touch of gum arabic; then I'll melt in 4 cups of sugar; then I'll set that aside to cool a bit; as the hot product cools and thickens, I'll start to mix in the chilled sweetened pomegranate juice little by little just in the minimum amounts required to prevent the cooked mixture from solidifying as it cools; I try to hold back around half of the chilled mixture until after the cooked mixture has come to room temperature, then I mix in the remainder of the chilled mixture; after this I add orange flower water and vanilla extract to taste; then I decant the grenadine into washed bottles that I have rinsed out with high proof alcohol and, for the bottles I don't plan to use right away, I float around a half-inch of vodka on top of the syrup (it stays stratified until you shake up the bottle due to the thickness of the syrup).

Some further thoughts on grenadine: I have tasted just about all the commercially made grenadines out there, and none compares to a well-constucted homemade grenadine. I do not care for the thin 1:1 sugar-to-pomegranate juice "grenadine" that many bars use. It doesn't have the right intensity of flavor or saturation to my taste. There are several grenadine cocktails (e.g., Monkey Gland) that my wife loves at home but abhors every time she has had it in a bar -- and we're talking about the very best cocktail bars out there. Eventually it came down to the fact that the ones made with 1:1 "grenadine" were not very good, and my homemade grenadine represented a major step up. Sorry guys! I do not think that pomegranate molasses, either full strength, diluted or combined with pomegranate juice makes a good substitute for grenadine -- and that's what it is: a substitute, not the real thing. Pomegranate molasses is too "cooked," it has too much molasses character, it has far too much acidity, and it doesn't have that slight tannic backbone. I'm not saying that drinks made with pomegranate molasses aren't good -- they are good. But if you taste them side-by-side against a drink made with a good grenadine, they're different. More to the point, pomegranate molasses doesn't work well in many of the iconic grenadine drinks (again, see the Monkey Gland). The best grenadine, in my opinion, has a touch of orange flower water and a touch of vanilla. The best grenadine, in my opinion, is both cooked and fresh. It should include 4- or 6-fold reduced pomegranate juice for intensity of flavor and jammy savor; and it should be thinned out to around 3:1 or 2:1 (sugar-to-liquid by volume) with uncooked pomegranate juice for the top note of fresh brighness. I do think it's best to do the reduction yourself. For my last batch of grenadine I started off with a bottle of some fancy organic "pomegranate juice concentrate." It's not as good as when I do the reduction myself. I include some gum arabic in my grenadine because it's usually a touch north of 2:1, and the gum arabic prevents recrystalization of the sugar. The extra silkyness, emulsification and head retention doesn't hurt either. There is no such thing, in my book, as a "mixed berry grenadine." That's like calling something a "mixed fruit apple pie."

Why don't we have 19th century themed bars? Maybe Clover Club is more along those lines with their copper roof that was lifted from a bar in a mining town turned ghost town (which was probably late 19th century). They do exist. Probably the NYC bar most evocative of the late 19th Century with respect to decor, equipment (hand-chipped block ice, etc.) and mixology (although they do make drinks from later eras) would be Dutch Kills in Long Island City.

There are sales sometimes. Or, if you want the commercial version, you can get a new Vita-Prep 3 1005 (the 1005 has the highest horsepower, there is also a 1003 and a 1002, which have the same HP but different sized containers) for around 500 bucks new on eBay. That's where I got mine. The Vita-Prep doesn't come with all the extra canisters and all that stuff. The combination of the blade design and power is designed to do everything. Beyond smoothies, I've found that it does a lot of remarkable things the home-model blenders can't do (e.g., make a thick, pass-right-through-a-fine-strainer-smooth, vibrantly green puree of just about any herb or green vegetable). Have you tried cinderblock? OK. I googled 'cinderblock food' and got nothing food oriented. Is this a joke or just another term for some food which I have never heard of. See here.

No advice as to the smell, but do you need any help hunting down and beating the person who unplugged the refrigerator?

You can try mine out sometime. I have the Vita-Prep 3 1005, which is something like a 4 horsepower commercial version of the Vita-Mix (who knew they even measured blenders in horsepower?). I have used mine to turn ice cubes into snow, and have found that it can make just about anything perfectly smooth (I liquified a Spanish chorizo once). When not making cinderblock sorbet or owl bisque, I like to use it as a wood chipper and lawn mower.

My problem with the Tuthilltown products is that they are ridiculously overpriced for the level of quality. 40 bucks for just 375 ml? Really?! This stuff prices out similar to spirits like Vintage Rye 21 Year and Michter's 10 Year. It is more than triple the price of Wild Turkey 101 Proof!! If this stuff were the absolute elixir of the Gods, it might be worth the money. But who is going to pick up two bottles of Hudson Baby Bourbon over a bottle of Michter's 10 Year, Van Winkle 15 Year, etc? I guess the advantage is that it comes in a half-sized bottle so the outlay isn't as much. But I just can't bring myself to spend that money on Tuthilltown versus what I could spend the same money on.

Right. They're not interchangable. Or, rather, they're only interchangable to the same extent that different brands of clove-forward aromatic bitters are interchangable. My impressions of the two are much like your own (Fee's = more forthrightly chocolatey but less spicey and complex, Bittermens = more complex and spicey, but less chocolatey). They both point up the chocolate notes of Carpano Antica Formula, albeit in different ways. [Moderator note: This topic continues in Drinks! (2009–2011)]

Lately I've been playing around with a formula that I have to assume someone already came up with. 2 ounces rye or bourbon (Woodford seems to work especially well) 3/4 ounce Carpano Antica Formula 1/4 ounce St. Germain 2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters or Fee Bros. Aztec Chocolate Bitters Stir/strain/up/flamed orange twist

Ideally, I suppose you'd want to develop some kind of standardized shaking machine to separate out that potential variable. Perhaps a tweaked paint can shaker? Then you'd want some way to quickly and precisely dump the drink and separate the ice from the liquid. I would think that some kind of hinged bottom on the shaker that would immediately dump the entire shaker contents into a large (chilled) sieve of the appropriate porosity (you would have to decide whether to let through ice chips or not) that would separate the liquid from the ice more or less instantly. I think you'd also want to start with a mixture at no more than about 33% ABV, and you'd want to do some perceptual experiments beforehand to determine boundary conditions for "watered down" %ABV. At this point, I would think you could fairly quickly run up very large sample sizes testing different weights and sizes of ice. I'd be interested to know what the difference in weight is between a full tin of shell ice and a full tin of Kold-Draft ice. I'd also be interested to scale the experiment all the way down to pellet ice and all the way up to fist-sized lumps of block ice, not to mention different kinds of shell ice.

One should note that there is a difference between "natural source of free glutamates" and "refined MSG." One person's perfectly natural "kombu broth" is another person's "MSG."

But why? How would the dish benefit from the extra precision and PITA of using sous vide equipment when a pot on the stove gets you to the same place? I can't believe that there's a meaningful benefit to be gained at regulating the temperature to whatever degree it could be controlled by a SVM unit when the temperature is >90C. I mean, it's not rocket science to take a pan up to a gentle almost-simmer on the stove and then turn down the burner and leave the pot on the stove with a cover for 3-5 hours.

So long as you are happy to cook your veal cheeks at 98-100C (i.e., a very low bubble simmer) I don't see why you couldn't maintain this for the requisite number of hours using a heavy pan with a good lid and perhaps a flame-tamer.

Keep in mind that it has to be the right kind of meat. You don't want to cook a ribeye or a pork chop or a chicken breast for 24 hours or more. Tender meats you cook until they reach the target temperature and then serve. The other thing to keep in mind is that the effect of cooking a tough cut of meat LT/LT will not be the same as cooking it via traditional means. If what you want out of your beef short ribs is a traditional braised texture, then I would suggest that braising them traditionally is the best way to go. The experience of LT/LT medium-rare short ribs (etc.) is quite different from what is possible via any other cooking methods. Some people like it, some people don't. It's always a question of time and temperature. Some temperatures, for all practical purposes, will never result in a "falling off the bone" shredable texture (54C on beef, for example). You won't be able to do what you want and have a medium-rare level of "doneness." In my experience, the higher temperatures that result in a "falling off the bone" shredable texture typically neither require nor do particularly well with >24 hours of cooking. If you're not getting the texture you want, and you're going for a "falling off the bone" shredable texture, I suggest raising the temperature and lowering the cooking time. You'll have to do some experimenting to see which time/temperature gives you the effect you want. After you shred out the meat and pick out the fat and connective tissue, how do you propose getting it to hold together in a log? Activa? I've never used transglutaminase with fully cooked meat, so I'm not sure how well that would work. Others may have better experience with that. If you're starting with a piece of meat that has pockets of hard fat and connective tissues that you don't want in the final product (e.g., a chuckeye roast), I suggest removing the fat and sinew while the meat is still raw, then binding it into a log with transglutaminase and cooking SV as normal.

No. 60.5C is not sufficient to cook onions. I cook the onions down in a sauté pan, add some stock, herbs, whatever, add in the sliced chicken (either raw or SV cooked, depending on what I have) and the cheese, bring it to a light simmer for a minute or so, then spoon it out into a toasted roll of sufficient porosity to absorb the juices.

One thing you can do is cook the meat for a long time at the low temperature, and then raise the heat just before serving to cook it through. For example, you could do LT/LT for 48 hours, then ice the bag down and refrigerate it. At this point you have the "medium rare braise" meat. But then you can open the bag, scrape off the liquid, boil it and strain off the coagulant, and then use that liquid along with other ingredients to build a sauce. At the end, you return the "medium rare braise" meat to the sauce, bring it up to a simmer and serve immediately. I've found that low-temperature sous vide meat retains many of the desirable characteristics of this technique even when subsequently heated to higher temperature.* This would give you many of the desirable LT/LT characteristics along with the "doneness" of a traditional braise (the meat might still have some pinkness, though). * One thing I've been doing lately is buying "value packs" of chicken breast, cooking them to 60.5C, then chilling them in an ice bath and freezing them. This allows me to thaw an individual, perfectly-cooked chicken breast by throwing a pack in a sink full of tepid water for around 15 minutes, and I can then use the cooked chicken meat in salads, sandwiches, etc. One thing my wife likes is a hot sandwich made with lots of cooked-down onions, a little cheese and slices of chicken breast. I've noticed that the reheated SV chicken breast is more moist and tender than fresh chicken breast in the same recipe, despite the fact that they are cooked together with the onions for the same amount of time.

It really depends on what I'm making. My style of cooking rarely involves to many ingredients that must be cooked at the same time that I can't prep as I go. For example, if I'm doing a braise I can prep the meat and brown that off in the pan. While I'm browning the meat, I can dice the onion; once the meat is done I can toss in the onion and start sweating that down; then I'll do the carrots and add them; then some celery; then some garlic -- all in sequence. My board is always empty and I'm not using any bowls. If it's something where a lot of prepped ingredients need to be added in a short time period (stir-frying, for example) or where there is simply a large number of prepped ingredients (spring rolls), I'm likely to use bowls or small plates.

I've been given to understand that tahini and Chinese sesame paste are rather different.

This is all really interesting stuff, and a great first step. But I'm not sure I'm willing to all any of it definitive, and I do wonder about some of these results and their real-world applicability. For example, they compared similar weights of Kold-Draft and shell ice in the experiments. But who says that bartenders use similar weights of Kold-Draft and shell ice? They don't. In my experience, the bartender scoops the small end of the shaker full of ice and goes to town. This means that the shell ice shaker might have a larger amount of ice in it compared to the Kold Draft shaker, which might lead to faster dilution. I would have liked to see some experiments done comparing shakers-full of shell ice and Kold-Draft ice to see how they compared in this more real-world situation. Unless it's a Ramos Fizz, people also don't generally shake their drinks more than 10 to 20 seconds. So, while the data from after 15 seconds is interesting, I'm not sure that we should be extrapolating those results back into the real world timeframe of shaking. I also wonder about the sample size in some of these experiments. In particular, the dilution chart looks funny to me. When I see, for example, that the amount of ice melted in the shell ice drink at 9.5 seconds increased sharply compared to 8 seconds, but that the %ABV of the drink also had a sharp increase from 8 seconds to 9.5 seconds -- well, something just isn't right there. You can't melt more water into the booze and get a higher %ABV. Unless this was done with a very large sample size, I have to believe there was some kind of measurement error there. Unfortunately, dilution in real-world conditions is really the only variable that's all that interesting to me. And, in particular, the relationship of dilution to shaking time. I don't have any trouble understanding that shaking a drink for 40 seconds tends to end up at right around the same temperature and %ABV for equal weights of ice. I've never been one who believed that Kold-Draft was somehow magically colder or resulted in lower dilution no matter how long the drink was shaken. What I do believe, however, is that in real-world conditions where the shaker is simply filled with ice (which may be important and may not be -- but those tests need to be done) and shooting for somewhere around 20-25% dilution, larger pieces of ice allow the bartender to shake the cocktail for a longer period of time before the target %ABV is reached. This longer shaking period (i) gives the bartender better control over the target %ABV, and also allows for more aeration of the drink due to the longer shaking time. I was spending a lot of time in all the first NYC bars that went over to using Kold-Draft, and rather than talking about how the drinks were colder and whatnot, most of the bartenders talked about how they could now shake the drinks a lot longer without watering them down. The relationship of dilution to shaking time seems significant to me. And I think it's interesting to note a little quotation from the Pegu Club session: "From tests we have run earlier, we suspect that there are certain drops in ABV that register more than others. The difference in taste between a 21 and a 20% ABV drink isn’t as much as the difference between a 20 and a 19% ABV drink." It is important to keep this in mind looking at the earlier dilution chart, because those experiments were all done with 100 ml (about 3.4 ounces) of 40% ABV liquid. Very few shaken cocktails will start out with a %ABV anywhere near this high. Let's say, for example, that you're going to be making a Daiquiri with 2 ounces of 40% ABV rum, a half-ounce of simple and a half-ounce of lime juice. Before you start shaking the drink, it's already only at around 27% ABV. Assuming that 20% is a boundary condition below which the cocktail starts to taste watered-down, that doesn't leave very much time to chill and aerate the drink before you melt in an ounce of water and go below 20% ABV. This reality more accurately reflects what I was seeing around the time of the transition to Kold-Draft. At pre-KD Flatiron Lounge, for example, the bartenders had to give the drink perhaps 3-5 seconds of shaking and then go quickly to the glass, or the drinks would end up watered down. At post-KD Flatiron Lounge, they were shaking the drinks 10+ seconds, getting better aeration and less danger of watering the drinks. There has to be a reason for this. None of the foregoing should be taken as a harsh criticism or invalidation of the excellent work done in these sessions. It's important to keep in mind, however, that these are preliminary experiments rather than definitive results. And, as a result, they have the same effect that first experiments always have: they raise more questions than they answer. This is the way these things always work. I don't think that Dave, Eben, et al. would suggest that they have definitively closed the door on these questions.

This doesn't seem all that different from an Italian (Tuscan? I can't remember) technique where you pour boiling water over the flour, wait for that to cool down, and then add the yeast plus maybe some more flour. Or, for that matter, it's not all that different from using water leftover from boiling potatoes as the liquid.

To echo a bit of what Toby says, I do believe that artisans or artisan traditions who spend a lot of time coming up with or executing pseudomystical mumbojumbo around what it is that they're doing, as a general rule of thumb, tend to pay very close attention to the work they're doing and may add extra steps that serve to enhance quality (both usually as a result of jumping through whatever pseudomystical mumbojumbo hoops need to be jumped through). This quite often produces a superior result. The difficulty comes when the artisan or artisan tradition would like to attribute the superior result to the pseudomystical mumbojumbo rather than the extra attention and care, or some side-effect of the pseudomystical mumbojumbo. It is all the more difficult when the pseudomystical mumbojumbo may consist of 25 elements, but only 4 of those things are actually responsible for the increase in quality. And it is even more difficult when some of the things that contribute to higher quality are actually a side-effect of the pseudomystical mumbojumbo rather than part of the pseudomystical mumbojumbo dogma (e.g., holding the spoon at a certain angle and focusing ki on the bowl of the spoon might be the pseudomystical mumbojumbo dogma, but "unintentional side-effects" of this extra care such as a slower stirring speed or a precisely focused attention to dilution might be what really makes the drink better when the pseudomystical mumbojumbo technique is mastered).

If you're talking about quality, I couldn't disagree more about the relative merits of Flor de Caña and Bacardi. I don't think Flor de Caña is the greatest spirit in the whole wide world, but it is miles better than Bacardi (which I think is crap, and I wouldn't use). Havana Club 7 is great. The white rum, IMO, is nothing special. As chance would have it, I was peripherally part of a conversation at Pegu Club some weeks ago where the subject was "Cuban-style" white rums that are drinkable and delicious in their own right. We couldn't think of any. I'm beginning to think that Brugal white may be as good as there is for a non-agricole white rum.