slkinsey
-
Posts
11,151 -
Joined
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by slkinsey
-
-
Yep, according this article with tasting notes, at least as recently as 1940 they were bottling Old Overholt bonded and five years old.
Interesting history of Old Overholt and the Overholt family here.
Really, I just. don't. understand. why they wouldn't make a bonded version.
-
For an aging project. Any ideas how to go about getting one? Sources?
-
-
Where would they have to come from? It can't be anywhere near season for wild mushrooms in the Northeast.
-
D'oh! I forgot about the currency exchange. Yea, that's a pretty good price. $598 Canadian = around $485 US today according to the OANDA Currency Converter.
-
No, that is not a good price. You can buy the Vita-Mix 5200 with dry blade canister directly from Vita-Mix for $549. Your local Costco is selling the same combination for $598.
Also, look on eBay and you will find even better prices.
-
So wait, is Bonded Old Overholt no longer being produced? My local stores have quite a bit, so I'd consider grabbing a few bottles.
There never has been bonded Old Overholt. It's sold at 80 proof. We're saying that we'd like to see it at 100 proof ("bottled in bond"). And, as Andy points out, it's literally a matter of changing the labeling and reconfiguring the process to add less water (I'm sure there are also some minor legal hoops to jump through with respect to introducing a "new" product).
In my opinion, if they brought out Overholt at 100 proof, it would take the place of Rittenhouse as the mixing rye of preference. I've been thinking of ways to make a 100 proof version out of the 80 proof stuff, either by fractional freezing or using a rotavap.
-
Two questions:
1. Were the two boxes for the same square feet of foil?
2. If they were for the same number of square feet, was there any difference in the weight of the two boxes?
-
I wish there'd be a simple home test kit for botulism...
There is. Unfortunately, it requires a live rat.
-
You may be right that the number of mixing ryes is proportional the number of total ryes. Although I don't get the impression that the vast majority of bourbons are in the high-priced category. Perhaps the opposite. With bourbon, I get the impression that many of them are "extra aged" or "premium" versions of lower priced bourbons that the distiller already makes, rather than being designed from the ground up as higher priced/extra aged spirits.
In NYC at $30 or under in retail and at reasonable quality for mixing we have Jim Beam, Wild Turkey, Maker's Mark, Four Roses, Buffalo Trace, Knob Creek, Woodford Reserve, Bulleit, Old Grand Dad, Elijah Craig, Elmer T. Lee, Old Forester, Evan Williams, W. L. Weller, etc.
-
Interesting lists. In the sub-$25/bottle range that is appropriate for mixology, we have something like:
Jim Beam
Old Overholt
Pikesville
Wild Turkey
Rittenhouse
I only count Rittenhouse once, since the two proofs are the same product with different amounts of water. Discounting Jim Beam rye, which I don't think is very good, that leaves us with 4. In NYC, it's three since we can't get Pikesville (which doesn't seem to be distributed very widely),
Just above that at around $30/bottle are:
Sazerac
Michter's US1
I sure wish we had a couple more quality ryes at around 20 bucks a fifth.
-
-
What you're talking about is bottarga, the salted/pressed/dried roe of the grey mullet or tuna. It's the mullet that you want (bottarga di mugine, from Sardinia).
I hope you got a whole piece that you can grate for yourself, because the pre-grated stuff can taste a bit like cat food.
Anyway, I love its funky fishiness. Just grate it over pasta as you would a cheese. It can be delicious over pasta dressed with something as simple as oil, garlic, a few chili flakes and a handful of minced parsley.
For something more involved, here is a recipe of mine that was run in Saveur a while back:
http://www.saveur.com/article/Food/Spaghet...amelized-Fennel
-
Give it a try. Duck ragù is a classic condiment.
-
Google for zucchini sott'olio or zucchini under oil and you will find things like this.
-
You can make a kind of bigoli using a meat grinder, yes.
Keep in mind that this is not the same thing as factory-made dry pasta. You're making a certain shape of fresh pasta, is all.
-
I'm currently on a quest to find the whiskey bars in the US with the largest rye selections. At Seven Grand we now have 23 different bottlings, and we are always looking for new ones.
What's your list? I admit to being somewhat surprised that there are as many as 23 different bottlings of rye whiskey. I assume most of these are of the high-end expensive sipping variety?
Really, what we lack is more variety in mixing ryes.
-
Well, I think it's interesting that these things are all coming on top of each other, such as Albert Adrià leaving elBulli, and some talk that the restaurant may not persist for more than a few more years, etc.
It seems clear to me that certain elements of these techniques and approaches will persist. Things that seemed completely novel at first, such as foams, to make the easy example, have become part of standard cookery to such an extent that the neighborhood "American casual bistro" in my neighborhood has had some dishes with a foam. Similarly, sous vide techniques and the use of Activa and similar products will no doubt become increasingly standard.
What I wonder (and perhaps what Achatz is wondering) is whether the "gee wiz" and "shock and awe" transformative/whimsical aspects of this new scientifically informed cooking will persist for much longer, or whether this will begin to seem a bit trite after a while.
To make a very broad and hypothetical example, 5 years ago if I were to have a dish of rice and beans where the "rice" was actually made out of beans and the "beans" were made out of rice, I would have thought it was one of the most amazing and interesting things I'd ever had. Now? <Shrug> Not so much.
A comparison might be to the introduction of ubiquitous and affordable synthesizers into popular music. In those days, there were any number of groups out there that were 90% synthesizer, which did many interesting things exploring the opportunities afforded by this technology and which were very up-front about wanting to surprise the listeners with new sounds and wanting to make clear to listeners that these sounds were not made by the traditional instruments of pop music. One might equate this musical movement with where we are now with technology- and science-driven cuisine. After a while, though, the practical boundaries of synthesizer-driven popular music had been explored sufficiently and for a long enough period of time that it started to lose some of its appeal and ceded the cutting edge to other kinds of popular music. Synthesizers are still around in popular music today, as are many of the same ideas and techniques that came out of that early flowering of synthesizer-driven pop. But they have more or less been integrated into the various kinds of popular music that we have today. There really is no overtly synthesizer-driven pop music today like there was in 1984. It strikes me that this could also happen with today's elBulli/Alinea style of cooking. This wouldn't take away any of the validity of what they're doing or have done. But, of course, today's popular music doesn't take away any of the validity of what Devo was doing in the early 1980s.
-
The Taisin ice ball maker (I hesitate to call it a "mold" since it creates the sphere by melting already-frozen ice) won't make a clear sphere unless the ice you start with is already clear. Right now, I'm not aware of any practical ice maker that makes clear ice in the size required to make a fist-sized ice sphere.
-
Interesting. I've been thinking of ways I could use my recirculating waterbath heater to rig up a kind of RIMS system.
-
Grant Achatz has apparently been writing some columns for The Atlantic about his experiences in and reactions as he attended Madrid Fusión 2009.
So far there are three articles. Part 1 is here, and part 2 is here.
These have some interest, but part 3, entitled "The Thrill of the Gel Is Gone" is the most interesting and provocative. Among other things (I note that he uses the term "molecular gastronomy" unapologetically) he decries what he perceived as a "lack of inspiration" and even muses on whether we might be seeing the beginnings of the end of this wave of cooking.
Some interesting quotes for consideration:
Historically, it has always been the scholars, the public, and the media who have had the responsibility to describe the precise meaning, characteristics, and bookends of a period, whether it is in the arts, politics, industry or otherwise.When I look closely at the creative paths that have catapulted modern cooking into popularity and controversy in recent times, a few seem to have become the defining elements. The most popular seems to be looking to industrial mass food production for inspiration.Most provocatively:
My passion is cooking and food. Everything I experience I relates back to those two things. So when I buy a pack of gum at the supermarket that has a liquid center of gel, I wonder how it was produced and if I can create a similar sensation at Alinea. I am certainly not the only one who thinks this way, and it is obvious to me that this is how the use of hydrocolloids, modified starches, gums, pectin, and other such ingredients found their way into the professional chef's kitchen.This was a revelation for the modern chef. Suddenly we had a seemingly endless source of inspiration at our disposal. We had a pantry of ingredients that could do the impossible, transforming ingredients in ways never before possible.
It was difficult to see this at the time, but the breadth of this wave was quite narrow. When you really look at the techniques critically, the results are all versions of textural transformation involving liquids.
But what happens when the wow factor of a hot gelatin wears off? Or the mystery of how a liquid creates a wrapper from itself, its walls gelling to hold the still aqueous center inside? We roll into variations of themes.
-
bmdaniel, it has to do with a lot of things. It's not possible to do a direct comparison of a server's income in 1957 to 2007, because that's not exactly what we're talking about. What we can do is extrapolate the server's income based upon some reasonable assumptions and tipping conventions, and then we can compare that income across the two years. I have used one sandwich in making my example, but we could just as easily make that 100 sandwiches or a thousand.
Consumer bundle is not just related to consumer prices -- that would be "purchase power." A dollar in 1957 is equal to about $7.37 in 2007 in terms of purchase power. But whether or not you can buy a chicken salad sandwich today for $7.37 isn't the point. The consumer bundle is reflective of what it actually takes to run a household, which includes costs of more things than simple prices of goods. It includes the cost of services, education, clothing, utilities, etc. Some of these things have increased astronomically in price (shoes!), and there are lots of things that cost families money today that didn't even exist back in 1957 (for example, televisions, cable TV, computers and a high speed internet connection rae considered more or less standard for the middle class nowadays). In order to run the 2007 equivalent of that 1957 household, you would need to earn $9.78 in 2008 dollars for every $1 earned in 1957. So, for example, a family earning $5,000 a year in 1957 would be able to have right around a "same level of standard of living" as a family living today with an annual income of $49,000. Or at least that's how I'm reading it.
Going back to my example, if we assume that both waiters sell a similar number of chicken salad sandwiches, the 2007 waiter would need to make $9.78 in tips for every dollar the 1957 waiter made. Looking at the cost of a chicken salad sandwich today and in 1957, a higher tipping percentage is needed in 2007 for that waiter to maintain a similar standard of living.
-
I can't help but reflect on the fact that for most of my 60+ decades on this earth, 10% was the hard and fast rule. Somehow, that escalated to 15% and now 20% seems to be the rock-bottom minimum, left only by miserly cheapskates.
It would be interesting to do an adjusted-dollar analysis that compares the earning power of a restaurant waiter relative to cost-of-living today and in 1958. I'd be willing to bet that standard of living based on an assumption of a 10% "standard tip" in 1958 would be about equal to a standard of living based on an assumption of a 20% "standard tip" today.
Why? Not that long ago, I never paid more for my lunch than $5. Now it's easily $10 and up.
So assuming that I had kept to the 10% standard, and the cost of my lunch has doubled, and even tripled, so would the size of my tip.
Well... let's do some math.
I looked in the historical menu archives and found a NY meny from 1957. A chicken salad sandwich cost one dollar. As chance would have it, I routinely buy a chicken salad sandwich for lunch at the price of $5.50. So, let's assume a "standard tip" on those sandwiches.
For the 1957 sandwich, it's a ten cent tip at ten percent. For the 2007 sandwich, it's a $1.10 tip at twenty percent. Big difference! But there's more math to come. Let's go over to this handy online calculator where we can do a "consumer bundle" comparison (the comparison that is most relevant to the value of income relative to running a household). That ten cents in 1958 would have a consumer bundle value in 2007 of 98 cents. So... not quite as much as the $1.10 tip on that modern day chicken salad sandwich. It's more like getting an eleven cent tip back in 1957. Pretty close, though.
(edited to fix a number I typed incorrectly)
-
The Jack Rose is a great cocktail. But it's also easy to make one that results in a sound "meh." Much discussion here. Without bonded applejack, it's pretty hit-or-miss in my opinion. One easy cocktail to hit with grenadine is a Monkey Gland.
On the general topic of grenadine, as stated above I like to do a reduced hot and cold grenadine in order to get the concentration, jammy cooked flavors and saturation of the reduced hot version along with the brighter, "fresh" flavors of the cold version. This time around, rather than reducing the pomegranate juice myself, I'm starting with organic pomegranate concentrate. I'll melt sugar into that at around 4:1, and then dilute that back out with an equal volume of fresh pomegranate juice (most likely in two stages: one "warm" and one "cold") to end up with grenadine at approximately 2:1 concentration.
Sous Vide: Recipes, Techniques & Equipment (Part 5)
in Cooking
Posted
Keep in mind that, if a device (e.g., an aquarium heater) includes a thermostat, just plugging it in to a PID will not be enough to override the thermostat. You have to actually remove the built in thermostat.
Another way of putting it is that the PID won't work unless the thermostat of the device being controlled is either removed or set to a temperature higher than the set-point on the PID.
So, if you have an aquarium heater designed to cut off at 90F, and you hook it up to a PID with a 130F set-point. . . I have some bad news: That water bath ain't getting any higher than 90F.