slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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THE market in NYC is the Greenmarket in Union Square. Try to arrive bright and early on Saturday morning.
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If the diameter of the pot is the same, there should be no difference. The only difference will be that the larger pot will offer greater versatility.
Question: What's wrong with the "perfect" 6-quart pot you already have that you need to buy a new one?
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Actually, I don't think that Plymouth gin is supposed to be botanically potent. Plymouth is not only a brand of gin, but also a style of gin that is similar to, but not quite the same as London dry gin. As far as I am aware, it's been more or less the same recipe for some 200+ years, producing a softer, sweeter, less botanically intensive product.
I agree about the price, however. It's getting far too expensive. And I have to say that I disagree with Lan4Dawg that raising the price a couple of dollars a year is reasonable. For example, if we're seeing Plymouth at $30 today and assume a two-dollar rise every year, that would mean that the price rose twenty five percent since 2005 and thirty three percent since 2004. Not reasonable, and not likely to put Plymouth on too many shelves IMO.
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i think i know a couple places in south boston that have really old bottles of it on the bottom shelf... i should probably go and buy them as gifts but to be honest i never really liked the stuff.
Heh. Seriously, is there any spirit "generally regarded as first-rate by the cocktailian community" that you like?
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My understanding is that the primary effect of forcing people to wear gloves is to protect against insufficient post-bathroom hand-washing. And it works quite well at this. A good example is the Hepatitis A outbreak in Onondaga County in the 1980s, where a county of around 500,000 was getting 40% of the Hep A cases in New York State (~19 millon people -- you do the math). They cracked down on enforcing the gloves policy and the outbreak went away. And Hepatitis A is spread by? Everyone? That's right: feces.
One would assume (hope?) that, in higher-end establishments, this is not an issue and therefore perhaps bare hands would be better.
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Speaking of my wedding (which was more like 80 people), we had Phil's "Jersey Lightning" punch, and several batched cocktails served by the venue bartenders. I think they were the Tantris Sidecar (shaken/up), Vieux Carree (stirred, rocks), two champagne-topped drinks (Champagne Apricato and Prince of Wales), Last Word (shaken/up), and maybe something else I can't remember, plus wine, etc.
One thing we found that worked very well, especially at the beginning of the party (which was a cocktail party with passed hot and cold hors d'oeuvres rather than a sit-down or buffet dinner) was having the bartenders shake and pour multiple iterations of one cocktail, which would then be circulated on trays around the room by the waitstaff.
Is there going to be any staff? Who is going to be picking up empties and making sure you have enough clean glassware, etc?
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HA!! Perfect!
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It's hard to go wrong with Fish House punch.
Phil gave us an amazing Applejack-based punch for my wedding party. Included tea-infused vermouth, as I recall.
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One non-professional bartender for 125 people? Yikes.
Did he say that he wasn't a professional bartender?
Well... the time I met Kent for drinks and we talked about what he did for work, professional bartending didn't come up. So took that as a reasonable indication that he's not a professional bartender.
Regardless, shaking out specialty cocktails in an open bar for 125 people by yourself wouldn't be easy even for an experienced professional bartender.
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For people who are considering All-Clad (and are willing to pay those prices), consider the new M'Cook line by Mauviel. It's constucted in the same style as traditional heavy copper pots, but is a thermal core fully clad in stainless steel. I'm not sure of the composition of the thermal material or the thickness of the layers, but the whole piece is 2.6 mm thick. Good prices can be found at JB Prince.
(Full disclosure: I am writing some material for the JB Prince web site.)
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One non-professional bartender for 125 people? Yikes.
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It depends on what you want to do with the saucepan.
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Have I done a scientifically controlled experiment where I cooked identical food side-by-side? No. Does my personal experience in using cookware from both lines confirm my thinking? Yes.
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I've had the Airbag! The ingredient list looks crazy, but it's quite good. :smile"
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Phil's got some nice cocktails at D&C that use Baravia Arrack as the base spirit, if you can believe that. One that I tried, the "Arraquiri" (get it?) was more or less a Juniperotivo made with van Oosten instead of Junipero. It's interesting and approachable.
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Yea. You shouldn't experience significant evaporation at that temperature and that volume of water. If you cover the top of the pot with foil or plastic wrap, you shouldn't lose more than 1 liter in 12 hours . This rate of evaporation should not be a problem, and you should be able to sleep through the night with no worries.
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To the best of my knowledge it's a gin Old Fashioned sweetened with St. Germain (thus the name). Something like: 2 ounces of gin, 1/2 ounce of St. Germain and a dash of orange bitters stirred and strained onto big ice in a rocks glass and garnished with a grapefruit twist. Simple and delicious. It doesn't contain any lemon juice, although Kent's elderflower sour sounds pretty good too. I tend to find 1/2 ounce of St. Germain needs 3 ounces of gin to balance at my preferred level of sweetness for this kind of drink, so balancing 1/2 ounce of St. Germain with 1/2 ounce of lemon juice sounds like a pretty good idea.
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Stretch a sheet of plastic wrap over the top of the pot. There will be a little open area over where the circulator goes in, but this is not a big deal. You can top-up the water by pouring into that same little open area.
Questions: How large is your water bath? And what temperatures are you using?
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The one drink that needs the Plymouth is the Fifty Fifty.
The Fitty Fitty at Pegu is made with Tanqueray and Noilly Prat, as far as I know.
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As discussed here, among other places, I just don't use enough olive oil to make it worth my while to buy any brand of lesser quality than Frantoia Barbera. At the amounts I'm using (less than a liter per month) the price difference between $19/liter Frantoia Barbera and some cheapo Costco olive oil isn't enough to make me buy anything other than the Barbera stuff, which I pour straight out of the bottle. If I were to buy a gallon tin of oilve oil, it would have been open too long by the time I finished it.
As for the Red Breast... totally with you on that one. Already sent many an empty to the recycler. Been drinking it since 2004.
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Prices for Plymouth seem to vary from region to region and city to city far more than other brands. The price of Plymouth Sloe differs by as much as $13 for a fifth depending on the city.
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Unless you buy your olive oil in a container that is too large to be convenient for pouring (e.g., if you buy a one-gallon metal container of oil), you should simply use the bottle that the oil comes in and store the oil in a cool and dark space in between uses. Anything else will simply increase the oxidation of the oil, which is bad. Indeed, the simple act of pouring oil from one container into another will oxidize the oil.
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Astor Wines and Spirits's web site currently lists a liter of Plymouth for $30 versus $27 for a liter of Tanqueray and $25 for a liter of Beefeater.
This puts Plymouth right at the boundary price point between high quality "workhorse mixing gins" one is likely to use in lots of cocktails and boutique gins one is likely to use rarely in Martinis and a few cocktails designed to highlight their special qualities. For example, this is the same price point as Bombay Sapphire.
This is a real shame, in my opinion. Plymouth's softness makes it a nice all-around mixing gin to use in applications where a lighter gin character is desired. But, when it's selling for the same price as Sapphire, I don't see using it in things like a gin sour, etc. In general, as the price has crept up over the last few years, I've found myself using it less and less frequently, and most of the time I use bottles I've received as swag rather than purchased myself. I'd use a lot more of it if it were $25 a liter instead of $30.
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Edible and palatable are not the same thing.
Edible means "can be used as food." It has no connotations as to whether the food tastes good.
Palatable means "agreeable to taste." Diverse cultures (not to mention individuals within a given culture) differ as to what is considered palatable. As with all things, this is a function of both nature and nurture.
Is there a name for "slow sauteing"
in Cooking
Posted · Edited by slkinsey (log)
Sauté is so often misapplied that even the common American restaurant-industry BOH usage is incorrect, such that "sauté" has come to be more or less synonymous with "fry in a small amount of fat" and "fry" has come to be associated with cooking partially or entirely submerged in fat (which I would call "boiling in oil"). I believe this misapplication, at least in restaurants, comes from the fact that the so-called "sauté station" probably does more frying than it does sautéing and also the ubiquity of deep "frying." In the popular imagination, again due to the association with "deep frying" I think "sauté" has been used in place of "fry" because it seems lighter and less greasy. I'd be interested to see when the transition started happening from "fry" to "sauté." Anyway, the point is that you can't sauté a trout fillet, and there's a reason we don't call it a "sautéed egg."
Anyway... what I would call something that sits in the pan for an extended period, then gets tossed, then sits in the pan for an extended period (repeat as needed until browned) is: "frying." Technically, one could call the act of tossing the ingredients by shaking the pan "sautéing," at which point the process would go back to frying until the next shake... but that's splitting hairs. This is not to say that the pan has to be in constant movement. At some point, one is tossing the ingredients frequently enough that it becomes "sautéing." I'm not sure it's possible to put a number on this (or that anyone would agree on that number anyway), but I'd say that you can't walk away from the stove for very long and still call it "sautéing" -- perhaps 60 seconds or less between shakes? Another way to think of sautéing is "stir-frying, but shaking the pan instead of using a utensil to move the ingredients."
Basically what you are doing in your mushroom example is frying, and using a shake of the pan to flip the mushrooms instead of tongs or a spatula. Clearly, if you had turned the mushrooms with tongs, you wouldn't be asking the question. Most likely, and this is a reason I think most home cooks rarely if ever sauté, on a high-powered restaurant stove and in single-portion amounts such as are prepared at restaurants, you wouldn't need to let the ingredients sit in the pan in order to brown -- you would be doing a true sauté.