slkinsey
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In any spontaneous fermentation like this, there is going to be some fungal activity and some bacterial activity.
true, but one takes over and snuffs out the other. i know there are health nuts that are into lacto baccilus fermentation and they talk about minimizing the activity of other types like alcoholic to get the results they want.
I used to have a keen interest in the microbiology of sourdough breads, which involves fermentation with both wild yeast and various lactobacilli. So I can tell you for sure that this is not correct. Are there certain conditions one could establish that minimize either yeast or lactobacillus conditions? Sure. But this isn't, generally speaking, one of them.
You also have to understand that, in a spontaneous fermentation like this, there are going to be plenty of microorganisms in there fermenting away in addition to yeast and lactobacilli. Think of lambic beers, for example, or any of the many potential contaminant organisms of homebrewed beers.
is there any literature that might explain clearly what exactly the lacto type eats up and spits out? i think acidity would be increased like in certain sausage's fermentation. when pectin is metabolized (by which yeast type i don't know) it spits out methanol too but probably even a lower content than a wine.In a sugar-rich environment like this, the lactobacilli eat sugars and excrete acid. For sure, fermentation by lactobacilli will increase acidity (I should also point out that their activity is also largely halted beyond a certain pH). But, you know... all the microorganisms in there will eat a little bit of most things in the mash.
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"How many rums do I need?" is not really a question that can be answered. Or rather, the answer is: as many different ones as there different drinks and styles of drinks that you want to make, depending on how picky you are about specificity.
Here are a pair of posts I made in a similar thread a while back:
Gold rum to me says just that: Rum that is right around the same color as a lager beer. This will, then, be lighter in color and less intense in flavor/wood than an amber rum, which I see as being right around the same color as a good bitter ale.Ultimately, though, it's not clear that these are great distinctions to make. All you're really doing is describing the color and approximate degree of wood aging. You could describe Flor de Caña Extra Dry as a "white rum" but you could also describe La Favorite or, for that matter, Wray & Nephew Overproof as "white rums." I think we will all agree that these three are radically different products. Rather, Flor de Caña Extra Dry is a Cuban-style white rum and La Favorite is a white rhum agricole.
Going back to your earlier questions about Dave's description of a certain rum as "Barbados-style" -- that has to do with the fact that different areas have different traditions associated with rum distilling. A Cuban amber rum by Havana Club or a Cuban-style amber rum by Flor de Caña is not going to be the same as a Guyanese amber rum by Lemon Hart or a Jamaican amber rum by Appleton. If you're making a Queen's Park Swizzle, it's just not going to turn out right with the Cuban rum or the Jamaican rum. This is why it's possible to make the full range of stylistically appropriate rye drinks with one or two different brands of rye, but in order to make the full range of rum drinks you need to have around a dozen bottlings of rum or be comfortable with a good bit of stylistic approximation.
I remember going to an rum event maybe 3-4 years ago and running into Dave there. We just so happened to be standing together when we were called in to a side-room to offer some comments on rum for a video they were shooting (which for me involved keeping my mouth as shut as is constitutionally possible for me and looking at Dave). Among the many interesting things he said for the tape was one that stuck with me: He said that rum has by far the widest range of all other spirits. You can go from rums that are so light and subtly flavored that they are practically vodka to rums that are so dark, thick and full flavored that they're practically still molasses -- and ever imaginable variation between those two extremes (this is all the more true when you consider that cachaça could be considered rum as well). So it make a certain amount of sense that we'd need a lot more bottles of rum to cover the available ground than we'd need whiskey, gin or tequila.
The varieties of rum you can have are almost infinite. It all depends on the level of specificity you want in your cocktails, and whether you make cocktails that call for certain kinds of rum. No need to have a rhum agricole, for example, if you don't like to make rhum agricole drinks (e.g., Ti Punch).As a very general statement -- and I'm no Ed Hamilton when it comes to rum expertise -- I'd say that at most any color/aging level there are two broad styles of rum: refined and funky. So, for example, in the mid-amber range you have the funky Lemon Hart demerara rum from Guyana and the refined Appleton Estate Reserve rum from Jamaica. If you were to have one funky and one refined rum at most every color level, you would be able to make appropriate versions of just about every rum drink. Perhaps at the very lightest color you'd only need the refined (Cuban) style, unless you like rhum agricole. And at the very darkest color you might be able to get by with only one example -- again, depending on what drinks you like to make.
So, it really depends on what you want to make. If you like tiki drinks, there are certain rums that you're probably going to want for that, and those won't be the same rums you want if you mostly like things like Daiquiris, and those won't be the same rums you want if you want mostly to make Swizzles, etc.
I would say that you can probably get by with a Cuban-style white; a cognac-style light amber rum (Appleton?); a darker, funkier rum like Lemon Hart (get the 75.5% one for greater flexibility); and a dark rum of moderate funkiness like Myers. This would allow you to at least approximate most styles of drinks using rum. Later on, if you find yourself increasing interest in a certain style, then you can increase your collection almost infinitely in that direction.
(Edited to fix typos)
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To clarify, I don't think that Inner Circle is so much lamented because it is demised, rather that it is lamented because it is no longer imported into the US. This is because, I am given to understand, the Inner Circle people were such pricks that the importers got tired of dealing with them.
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demerara: Lemon Hart (not 151) or El Dorado 5yr.
Interesting about this one. I happened to run into a cache of LH 151 bottles the other day, and bought them all. My impression is that the only difference between Lemon Hart 40% and Lemon Hart 75.5% is that the lower proof stuff has a lot more water added. I've made cocktails using the overproof stuff as the base liquor, you just have to make sure that you get a lot more dilution. Ultimately, however, if you bought the 75.5% and watered it down to 40% yourself with spring water, you'd save quite a bit of money I imagine. Simply add 665 ml of spring water to each 750 ml of Lemon Hart 151, and you end up with 1415 ml of 40% Lemon Hart (that's almost two bottles of 40% for the price of one bottle of 754.5%!).
(Edited to fix percentages)
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In any spontaneous fermentation like this, there is going to be some fungal activity and some bacterial activity.
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Very cool. Looking forward to more!
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I'd say that's more an indictment of the bars than the bartenders. But bartenders in a shot-and-a-beer joint aren't the same thing as civil servants whose job is to determine which spirits may be sold in a state and how they will be classified.
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How can it be that people whose very jobs necessarily require familiarity and expertise in spirits are so clueless?
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She was on the Martha Stewart show today making a cocktail.
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FWIW, I've mostly heard her mentioning Pegu Club (maybe it's an easy commute from the MSNBC studios?). But, if you read above, Katie says that she ran into her at D&C.
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I don't think your point is very well made here, Janet.
First of all, you can't compare Rachel Maddow to Katie Couric, et al. when it comes to cocktails. Rachel is someone who is a major cocktail enthusiast, who has mentioned her love of cocktails and NYC top cocktail spots many times in the media, and who is known to pass the time at NYC top cocktail spots such as Pegu Club and D&C with some frequency. She is a political pundit by trade, and one who is known for her casual, irreverent persona. So, as far as that sort of thing goes, a more relevant point of comparison might be any number of the people who post in this very forum.
Second, recommending Calvados if one cannot find Laird's bonded applejack is not in any way analogous to recommending mezcal if one cannot find 100% agave tequila. Her recommendation is apt for any number of reasons. It is a simple fact that the majority of New Yorkers can't find Laird's bonded on a regular basis, never mind people in Peoria and Knoxville. It's also a fact that Laird's blended applejack simply doesn't have sufficient strength of flavor to work particularly well in a Jack Rose (in contrast, there are plenty of mixto tequilas out there with sufficient strength and quality to work in a Margarita). Clearly, in my opinion, an inexpensive Calvados is the right choice over Laird's blended if one is making a Jack Rose. Importantly, she does go to the trouble of mentioning what applejack is, and that bonded applejack is the correct spirit for the drink. (She also uses my favorite way of explaining the difference between whiskey-like applejack and cognac-like apple brandy, Calvados, etc.)
Third... yea, she uses crap grenadine. Given an impromptu 2.5 minute throw-together in a radio studio, I am willing to forgive her for not working in the time for a lecture on the evils of bottled grenadine and how to make your own at home (never mond the fact that she probably couldn't get her hands on any).
So to sum up...
On the plus side:
1. She tells us that bonded applejack is the historically correct spirit of preference
2. She recommends the best alternative spirit if one cannot find bonded applejack
3. She tells us what "bonded" is (mostly)
4. She mentions the importance of measuring*
5. She talks about the importance of fresh juice
6. She talks about putting some real energy in to shaking
7. She gives good advice about shaking until it's "too cold to hold"
8. Her formulation seems reasonable
* I dispute that she didn't measure the lime. She uses half of a lime, and it seems likely that mention of this was edited out since they do a jump-cut right there.
On the minus side:
1. She doesn't say much about blended applejack
2. She doesn't devote time to grenadine and making at home, and uses bottled crap
3. She doesn't mention the possibility of using lemon instead of lime
All in all, I call this a clear win. If Katie Couric did something this good, we'd be dancing in the streets. Hell, if Mark Bittman had done something this good, we wouldn't have complained about him so much.
Honestly, I don't know how we could possibly want something more from a clearly off-the-cuff little segment like this.
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Seems sweet enough to me that it I would consider it a liqueur. Certainly you're not going to use it as the base spirit in a cocktail.
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See here.
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From what I have been able to glean, Monel is actually better described as a copper-nickel alloy, being comprised of up to 67% nickel). It is extremely hard and durable, but has terrible thermal conductivity, somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.26 W/cm/K compared to around 4.01 for copper. Better than stainless steel, but barely.
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Is anyone making cookware out of this material?
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It should be noted that cooking the tomato paste by itself until it browns a bit and then adding liquid produces a flavor entirely different from putting tomato paste into the liquid and then cooking the liquid sufficiently to cook out the raw flavor from the tomato paste.
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Actually, tomatoes (generalized) contain around 2.6 grams of sugars and 1 gram or protein per 100 grams. So, we're talking about maillard reactions.
Probably a rant for another thread, but is anyone else annoyed by the rampant wrong use of "caramelized?"
It wouldn't be so bad, except,
1) the biggest offenders are chefs, who should know better, and
2) it's a whole lot easier to just say "browned."
I think this probably stems from the fact that the Maillard reaction has really only come to common culinary parlance in relatively recent times. Also because most cooks are familiar with caramelization from, well, making caramel. You take the observed browning (just like making caramel!) and the fact that Maillardization often produces some sweetness (hey! caramel is sweet too!), and it's easy to see how this got started. Then, once one person said "caramelized onions" it was off to the races.
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Pince is french, should have the little accent mark on the e. And now I'm questioning my vocabulary, but I'm pretty sure it's correct.
Hmm. Pincé means "stiff" in French; pincée is the past participle of pincer ("to pinch"), meaning "pinched."
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If I remember my underused culinary terms correctly, the technique is called "pince" (peen-say).
What language is this, out of curiosity? I've never heard this term. Italians might call this rosolare ("to brown").
And you are looking mostly to caramalize sugars in the tomato product and to also create fond. You don't have protein in the tomato, so there is no maillard.Actually, tomatoes (generalized) contain around 2.6 grams of sugars and 1 gram or protein per 100 grams. So, we're talking about maillard reactions.
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The old ricotta vs cottage cheese controversy. . .
The fundamental difference between ricotta and cottage cheese is that ricotta is produced from the second curdling of whey from which curds have already been extracted, whereas cottage cheese is from the primary curdling of milk. Homemade "ricotta" is actually homemade cottage cheese.
A salient practical difference is the fact that you can get much better quality ricotta than you can get cottage cheese.
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I think that copper or aluminum disks make some sense as flame-tamers or ways to even out the heat for low/slow cooking with cookware that might not have perfectly even heat. For example, I always use an aluminum disk underneath my Le Creuset enameled cast iron casseroles.
Whether it could be used as the "thermal layer" with cheap, thin stainless cookware. I don't think it would work very well. Once you put down the metal disk over the burner, essentially what you have is not that different from one of those flat electric cooktops.
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From The Microbiological Safety and Quality of Food By Barbara M. Lund, Tony C. Baird-Parker, Grahame Warwick Gould:
During air drying of sausages, molds growing on the surface also hydrolyze proteins and catabolize amino acids. This is easily recognized by the ammonia smell of ripening rooms and the resulting products. The intensity of flavor of such sausages was found to be proportional to the degree of proteolysis. -
I get my extra virgin olive oil for between 16 and 21 a liter, depending on how it's being priced at the market. It usually takes us around 2 months to burn through a liter. So, I don't consider this expensive enough to bother with keeping a big bottle of something cheaper around for frequent use (especially with limited space in a NYC apartment kitchen). I keep some highly refined grapeseed oil around for the few times when I'm concerned about off flavors from heating the oil.
I should probably amend my previous remarks to say that, if there are times I'm concerned about burning extra virgin olive oil in a high-heat sauté but still want to use olive oil, I find it easy to throw the vegetables in the pan first, followed by the oil.
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Cocktail Funk
in Spirits & Cocktails
Posted
I tried the arrack/genevieve drink several days ago. I found it an interesting quaff, but not one for the ages.