slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Looks like they have some serious consistency problems.
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Named rather indelicatly after the rose and cucumber aspects of this cocktail.
The Juliet & Romeo
2.0 oz. Hendrix
.75 oz. lime
.75 oz. simple (1x1)
6 mint sprigs
3 slices cuke
pinch of salt (or in a pinch 1/2 barspoon of olive brine)
3 drops of rose water
serve up, garnish with a floating mint leaf, then spank the rest of the sprig.
On the LTH Forums posted a few weeks later it's given by Toby as:
Juliet & Romeo2 oz Beefeater
.75 oz Fresh Lime Juice
.75 oz Simple Syrup
3 drops Rose Water
3 drops Angostura
3 slices Cucumber
3 sprigs Mint
Tiny pinch of salt
Glass: Coupe
Garnish: Mint leaf and 1 drop rose water/3 drops of Angostura Bitters.
Ice: None
Muddle cucumber, mint and pinch of salt. Add rest of ingredients. Let sit for 30 seconds (time allowing). Shake. Strain. Garnish with 1 floating mint leaf and 1 drop rose water on top of leaf, and 3 more drops of angostura on the surface of the drink.
You can buy rose water at Sultans Market on North Ave. I would get an eye dropper at the container store as well as a couple of extra drops will make this drink way to much like the jewerly box of a very old southern belle.
The pinch of salt is really, really small. It should be muddled with the cuke to bring out it's freshness
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I've done this very well with shrimp. First I cooked the shells in the butter to infuse the butter with shrimp flavor, then I bagged the butter with the shrimp and cooked it sous vide (which, in this context, is simply a way to poach the shrimp without using a ton of butter). Worked great.
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I'll be interested to do some experiments with texture. I will say that I have been frustrated a time or two with beans that should be creamy but came out mealy no matter how long they were cooked. I wonder if salt was the culprit.
Could be that the beans were old and/or not stored under optimal conditions. And maybe some varieties just never attain that creaminess that you're looking for?
Possible, certainly. Although these were pretty reliable beans I had made other times with good results. I'm just wondering about McGee's statement that cooking with salt can result in a mealy texure. Thinking back, the times I've had a resolutely mealy texture were times I was cooking the beans with salty meat (confit, Spanish chorizo, etc.) from the beginning using the no-soak method.
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I'll be interested to do some experiments with texture. I will say that I have been frustrated a time or two with beans that should be creamy but came out mealy no matter how long they were cooked. I wonder if salt was the culprit.
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It depends on how you understand the cooking process and how salt contributes.
First, there is the oft-repeated but incorrect notion that adding salt raises the boiling point of water. Yes, this is true, but to such an infinitesimal degree that it is meaningless in the context of cooking.
Salt can "speed up the cooking process" in conditions where the food already contains plenty of water. It does this by hastening the breakdown of that food item. For example, if you cook chopped fresh tomatoes without salt, the pieces can retain most of their integrity even when fully cooked. If you add salt at the beginning, the tomato pieces will break down because he salt helps to draw the water out, etc.
Legumes, even when fresh and certainly when dried, are dry and full of starch that needs to be softened. This is the opposite from cooking a tomato. Beans are also finicky because the only way for water to get inside and soften the starch is through the skin of the bean. If you add certain things to the cooking water (acid, sugar) this can reinforce the structural stability of certain substances in the bean and slow or prevent them from softening entirely. As for salt, adding salt to the cooking liquid slows the rate at which legumes are able to absorb water and therefore leads to longer cooking times. The solution to this is to add the salt at the end, after the beans have fully softened. Interestingly, McGee says that adding salt at 1% to the soaking liquid can greatly speed cooking times by increasing the solubility of cell wall pectins. However, he also points out that salt reduces the swelling and gelation of starch granules within the beans and will produce a mealy texture rather than a creamy one.
According to McGee, the best way to sped legume cooking times outside of using a pressure cooker is to blanch the beans in boiling water for a minute or two to fully hydrate the seed coat and soak for 2-3 hours in cool water, after which time the beans will have absorbed approximately double their initial weight in water. Since fully hydrating the bean is the major hurdle in bean cookery, starting with fully hydrated beans makes a big difference.
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"Chef" (a boss of a professional kitchen and creative force behind a restaurant) has come to be as misused as "maestro" (a conductor of an orchestra or music teacher of great eminence).
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Five of us went through one recipe of Regent's Punch for Thanksgiving. It's a bona fide sensation among my friends. Fish House Punch is a 40+ year tradition in my family, so that's not new news for me. So now I'm wondering which punch I should make next...
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How many of us had pie for breakfast this morning?
We did.
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I have a Pro 2300 from these guys, and have not found bagging with a fair amount of liquid to be any problem. For Thanksgiving, I made several Keller dishes from Under Pressure (more on this anon) which included much larger amounts of liquid than I would ordinarily ever put into a SV bag. For various reasons, it proved impractical or unfeasible to pre-freeze the liquids. I figured I'd just keep my eye on the vacuum chamber and hit the "manual seal" button if a lot of liquid started coming out of the bag. I never actually had to do this. I held the bags so that there was always a clear "channel" for the air (no air pockets at the back of the bag). The air was always evacuated first, and while a small amount of liquid (perhaps 1/4 tsp) would typically come out of the end of the bag, the machine would always go over to sealing just at that moment -- before I had a chance to hit the manual seal button. The result was bags sealed with plenty of liquid and no residual air.
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Meh. Why? The reward isn't that great.
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It's going to be quite some time before Rittenhouse is ever in particularly good supply in places like Santa Fe. It takes a little over 6 years to make the stuff, and it seems quite clear that the popularity of Rittenhouse BIB took the good folks at Heaven Hill a bit by surprise. From what I have been able to gather, part of their strategy is to keep distribution mostly confined to a a few key areas of the country where there is critical mass of mixologists and spirits geeks to keep it in the collective consciousness until such time as they have enough to distribute more widely without shorting these important markets. Considering that we only started getting Rittenhouse in NYC sometime in Spring of 2005, at the very quickest I wouldn't expect to see significantly more widespread distribution until we're into the next presidential campaign season. Which all a way of saying that Rittenhouse was always going to be pretty hard to come by in New Mexico, and that's not likely to change for several years at best.
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Sam - very interesting - this is the first time I've done a SV turkey - what happens to the skin that you don't like? Do you find it similar to what happens to chicken skin?
Somewhat similar, yes. Except that turkey skin is overall considerably thicker and tougher than chicken skin. SV chicken skin can be reasonably crisped up with a blowtorch, or a very short trip in a blazing-hit frypan. Not so turkey skin, IMO, which takes considerably longer to render out (there is a layer of gelatinous subcutaneous fat under the skin). Either way, it seems to end up either tough as a board or flabby. either way, not the treat that chicken skin can be.
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How are you going to make the orange gin? I've occasionally tried to fake that up by microplaning an orange's worth of zest into several ounces of gin for a brief infusion.
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I've been doing turkey SV for years. Usually I butterfly the breasts and pound them out, then roll them into cylinders around a mousse made with additional breast meat plus herbs, etc. I typically braise the leg meat.
This year, I'm doing much the same thing. The only difference is that I'm shredding the braised leg meat and folding that into the mousse. I may also wrap the cylinder in chard leaves (makes a nice presentation). I don't care for the texture of turkey skin in general, especially after cooking SV. I do mine at 60.5C.
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To be clear, this a patent application for automated, by-machine sandwich making.
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Reading Thomas Keller's Under Pressure, a lot of the recipes, or probably most, DO NOT utilize the meat/poultry juices retained in the vacuum bag after cooking SV. Does anyone know the reason why?
Many of the things he makes in UP are sealed individually and/or cooked only for a very short period of time, thus resulting in a minimal amount of juices on an individual basis. I'm guessing that it's not worth their while to save/reuse them. In a restaurant environment, there would be no time to incorporate these juices into any kind of sauce on an individual basis, of course, and anyway most of his dishes don't particularly feature any sauce... so it's hard to know how these juices might be employed.
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it's made by Beam, who also makes Old Overholt (and, of course, Beam Rye).
I hope this isn't the "premium Overholt" we've been hearing about.
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Anyone know where I can pick up a roll or two in NYC?
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Not to mention that McGee's solution is, more or less, "go ahead and let the breast dry out, then lubricate it with gravy."
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I believe the correct designation of the cocktail would be: the Mulato. From what I have been able to discover, this is a Daiquiri variation originating in Cuba (where the appellation may not carry the same disapprobation as it does in certain parts of the US) and is more or less a regular Daiquiri made with dark rum and a touch of creme de cacao.
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There is an interesting and delicious cocktail that's very similar: 2 oz gin, 1 oz vermouth bianco, 1 tsp maraschino and a few dashes of bitters.
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Sam, I suppose in the world of Laird's products, the bonded is still apple whiskey, albeit a strong one, whereas the aged stuff is more brandy-like/domestic Calvados in nature.
Technically it is all apple brandy, of course. I like to describe applejack as apple "whiskey" because I feel like it has a distinctively rough-around-the-edges, "whiskey-like" character whereas other styles of distilled apple product have a more rounded, smooth, "cognac-like" character. As a result, for example, applejack steps very well into the place of rye whiskey in a Tombstone but not so well into the place of cognac in a Sidecar. The reverse is true of Calvados.
This extends, in my experience, even to the longer-aged Laird's products. I just tasted some of the 12 year old Laird's I have in the cupboard. It still has a bit of fire in it and reminds me more of an aged whiskey than an aged cognac (it is not as smooth as, for example, the 13 year Van Winkle rye). Again, this is the opposite of what one gets out of Calvados, which becomes increasingly cognac-like as it ages. I should hasten to point out that this is one of the things I like about Laird's products.
I'd always thought of and heard an apple brandy or Calvados sidecar called an Applecart, but that might just be a case of "whisper-down-the-lane" misunderstanding.Yea, I thought that too... although something about it was always tickling at the back of my mind. From the best I have been able to uncover, the "Applecart" is exclusively an eGullet naming convention. Anything outside eG I've seen points to the Apple Car with applejack or the Royal Jubilee with Calvados. I do think it makes sense for these to have different names, considering how different these products are despite having a common raw ingredient.
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I figure when they say "apple brandy" they're not usually talking about applejack, but something smoother. Plus, whenever there are multiple historical naming traditions of essentially identical similar cocktails (viz. the Allen, Aviation, etc.) I think it makes the most sense to go with the one that has the most popular currency, which seems to be the Marconi Wireless in this case. For sure it's a much cooler name.
What I don't like, as a general rule, is calling something a [name of the different-than-usual ingredient as a prefix for the name of a famous and iconic cocktail].
"Poaching" fish in fats
in Cooking
Posted
This is where using at least a modified SV technique comes in handy. You could have put the shrimp and the butter into a large ziplock bag, sucked out as much air as you could and sealed the bag. Then you could have heated up a large stockpot of water to your target temperature (I like 47C/117F for cooked-through-but-not-hard shrimp) and dropped in the bag. The large thermal capacity of the water would keep the water bath temperature from dropping too much, amd your shrimp would cook in a few minutes. The easiest way to do this would be to overheat the waterbath by 5 degrees or so, drop in the bagged shrimp and then adjust the temperature downward with cold water. If the stockpot is fairly large, you shouldn't have to boost the temperature back up during the short cooking time.
If this is what you think people do when they cook sous vide, then it's clear you have no real understanding of the technique.
Leaving aside the fact that one is normally regulating the temperature automatically, it takes literally only a few moments to cook something like shrimp. The example I outlined above is more or less the same as using a large bain marie to heat the butter.