slkinsey

Don't worry too much. If you get grease on the inside of the bag near where you want to seal it, just wipe it off with a paper towel.

So, do it like they do it at the deli: Put a square of wax paper on your scale; start cutting slices of bacon; lay them out on the wax paper side-by-side; when you cover one sheet, put another sheet on top and continue; when you reach twelve ounces, set that stack aside and put a new sheet on the scale; continue until you have used up all the bacon. Mainly, though, I think you'd save yourself a lot of time by cutting out all the extra hand-washing. Start with clean hands and have a fresh, clean kitchen towel handy to wipe grease off your fingers. After all, this stuff has been preserved with salt and smoke, and you're going to be cooking it through anyway.

I don't understand why you're making this so complicated. Just wash your hands once; slice all the bacon, put the bacon slices onto roughly square sheets of wax paper, stacking one sheet on top of another until you have the amount of bacon you want to seal in one package; continue this until you have stacked up all the bacon in wax paper-separated bundles; then fold a bundle in half, slide it into a pre-made FoodSaver bag and seal; repeat until all bacon is sealed. If your hands are incredibly greasy after the bacon stacks are completed, then wash then. Otherwise, a swipe with a clean kitchen towel should suffice. You're not doing open heart surgery, for Pete's sake. Your hands don't need to be sterile. If you cut the bag long enough, you shouldn't have any problems with bacon fat fouling the seal.

This is a really, really good point. Not for nothing did I post upthread that all the top-level cocktail spots (and even most of the second tier spots) come from the Julie/Audrey/Sasha tree. It's because these are the places that have really done the lion's share of the work in developing, mentoring and training cocktailian bartender talent in the City. Julie's and Audrey's places, in particular, have their additional challenges due to their significantly larger size. But it's hard to think of any bars that have turned out more "rock star" bartenders than these.

I wonder how much cooking with absinthe will happen while the available examples in the US are North of 50 bucks for a bottle.

Made this one again last night, and it was met with approval.

This most likely indicates that the HFCS version is manufactured in the US, where economies favor HFCS over sugar. The non-HFCS version would therefore not be manufactured in the US. This may account for the observation some people have made that the Cordial version is often darker colored than the Juice version -- if the Cordial is imported, it's likely quite a bit older. My understanding (and this is mentioned upthread) is that there is a special version of Rose's formulated with a nominal amount of alcohol so that it can be sold in liquor stores in states that would otherwise prohibit its sale in liquor stores. This would be purely a legal thing. It sounds like I'm wrong about the US-based differentiation of Juice versus Cordial -- but I'm pretty sure that there is a Rose's Lime Something sold in liquor stores in certain states with around 1% alcohol. This is my thinking as well, and reinforces my suspicion that any "Cordial" we see in the US is imported and not originally intended for sale in the US.

Here is the dictionary definition: The OED has "cordial" as: a medicine, food or beverage which invigorates the heart and stimulates the circulation; a comforting or exhilarating drink. Comm. Aromatized and sweetened spirit, used as a beverage. Here is the legal definition for the US: § 5.22(h) defines "cordials and liqueurs" as: products obtained by mixing or redistilling distilled spirits with or over fruits, flowers, plants, or pure juices therefrom, or other natural flavoring materials, or with extracts derived from infusions, percolation, or maceration of such materials, and containing sugar, dextrose, or levulose, or a combination thereof, in an amount not less than 21/2 percent by weight of the finished product. This is why, I think, the Rose's Lime Cordial sold in the US has some alcohol in it (also necessary for it to be sold in liquor stores in some states). This is also why the US seems to be the only country where it is mainly known as Rose's Lime Juice (minus "cordial"), with Rose's Lime Cordial being most common internationally. If we are seeing the "cordial" version in the US with no alcohol, perhaps these are imports? From a practical standpoint, when I hear "lime syrup" I think of just that: a lime-flavored sugar syrup. When I hear "lime cordial" I think of sweetened preserved lime juice, with acidity and some of that preserved funk that lime syrup doesn't have.

I think you have to look at the cocktail and decide whether the pastis was used as an absinthe-substitute or not. Generally, this can be discerned from the date of the cocktail and the amount used. If it's a dash or a rinse, you're probably okay-to-better if you use absinthe. If it's a quarter ounce or more, you should probably figure out the date of the formula you are using. The French Pearl, for example, dates to the "modern absinthe era" in the US. Clearly it was designed with Pernod in mind, and absinthe probably would not be an improvement.

The sides of All-Clad's "French Skillet" are approximately 20% as tall as the diameter of the pan (e.g., the 11-inch pan has 2.2-inch sides, the 9.5 inch pan has 2-inch sides, etc.). This means that the sides are lower than those of a traditional sauté pan, which would be 25% as tall as the diameter of the pan. At 20%, these pans have more or less the same arrangement between diameter and sides as a traditional cast iron skillet, which usually measure out to between 20% and 14%. I haven't found this configuration particularly useful (the sides are a touch too low for truly easy tossing of food, and too high for easy spatula access) and therefore tend to use my cast iron skillets only for tasks where iron's special thermal properties are useful. Otherwise, I'd rather use a frypan or a real sauté pan. This All-Clad pan is kind of a "tweener" -- neither frypan nor quite sauté pan. Some people might like it.

One can hope that the Pegu Club cocktail recipe will be revised in the new edition.

What? You don't want a First Edition?

The amazing thing is that, as a general rule of thumb, there is an inverse relationship between the "hautness" of the restaurant and the quality of the web site. Cases in point: Daniel's horrible web site versus Landmarc's pretty good web site.

I did something smiliar not long ago. Bagged chicken thighs with buttermilk and seasonings. Cooked SV. Cooled. Added the bag liquid to some additional buttermilk (why not get the extra chicken flavor, right?), coated and fried. As you point out, one of the major advantages of this technique is that it goes much faster. And, of course, you don't have to worry that it might be overcooked. Since I like my fried chicken closer to room temperature, it doesn't even need to be heated all the way through when it is fried.

Isn't there some kind of rule that all restaurant web sites have to suck?

Nowadays I don't usually cut off the whole knuckle end. I'm more likely to run my knife around the knuckle end of the drumstick, severing all the tendons and removing the skin from the knuckle end, but leading the actual bone intact. I don't have any good pictures of it, but you can sort of see the effect on the drumstick below on the left.

With modestly downcast last, I must admit it was a posting of my own. What is the "knuckle" and how does removing it improve the texture of the flesh? The knuckle is the joint at the skinny end of the drumstick (the end not connected to the thigh). If you cut this off (chop the end of the bone off at that end), it allows the meat to naturally contract a little as it cooks. If you braise it, you end up with something like a little chicken "ossobuco." This seems to have the effect of making the texture of drumstick meat more thigh-like rather than that characteristic (and unpleasant, to me) drumstick texture I think it may have to do with the way the muscles and tendons are arranged, kind of stretched out over the length of the drumstick. If you don't cut the tendons down by the knuckle, the meat stays stretched out and is not able to contract (which is meat's natural reaction to heat), with the result being that slightly dry, mealy texture. Try it some time. Make a braised chicken dish using just drumsticks where you leave some drumsticks whole and chop the knuckle off others. I bet you'll notice a difference.

I buy the occasional case of Libbey coupes.

You want to layer liquids, it's going to be tedious and complicated. The trick is that you need to know the specific gravities of the liquids you want to layer, you have to layer them extremely carefully, usually by slowly trickling the liquid down a spoon onto the previous layer, in order of specific gravity with the higher gravities on the bottom. Once you've done that, you must be extremely careful about moving the glass or the bowl or whatever. If you agitate the liquids, they will mix and ruin the effect.

Right. Most of the expensive, fancy cocktail glassware around (Riedel, Spieglau, etc.) is too fragile for bar use -- all the moreso because it is more expensive to replace. Everyone I know who started out with this stuff eventually switched to a less expensive, sturdier glass.

I think there is a distinction to be made between a diner-style omelet made on a griddle and a French-stlyle omelet made in a pan. In the diner style, the eggs are spread out over a very large area of the griddle so that they form a very thin sheet of cooked egg. Then the fillings are sprinkled on and the omelet is quickly folded up. You really can't do this without a griddle unless you make a two-egg omelet in a 12-inch or larger nonstick pan -- although even that is tricky, because the spatula access is much better on a griddle than it is in a frypan.

Ths short answer is that either Keller doesn't know what he is talking about, or he was misquoted. The most pressure you can get on the watermelon is atmospheric pressure (14.7 PSI) unless you do something to increase the pressure.

The dash is a perfectly good measure, so long as you have some kind of consistency with how your dashes are made. The problem with the dash measurement is that no two people dash the same way, that some dasher bottles dash more than others, and that some things are "dashed" out of actual bottles rather than dasher bottles. This makes it somewhat complicated to figure out someone else's recipe. For example, if an old recipe calls for two dashes of bitters and also for two dashes of curacao to balance out a half-ounce of lemon juice, it is reasonable to assume that the two dashes of curacao are significantly larger in volume than the two dashes of bitters. Perhaps this was a particular bartenders way of saying what some people might today call a "splash"; or perhaps the bartender "dashed" in his curacao with short shakes of the curacao bottle with his thumb restricting the flow. Who knows? There is no way of knowing, most of the time. All the modern mixologist can do in these situation is try to understand how the drink is probably have supposed to have balanced, and adjust the amount or curacao accordingly. Those "two dashes" of curacao might turn out to be as much as a quarter ounce, or even more. These days, just about any time someone says "dash" they mean a short dash out of a bitters bottle with a dasher top. It doesn't seem worthwhile to specify amounts to any greater degree of specificity than, at the very smallest, a half-teaspoon per drink.

You learn something new every day. I didn't know the tannin was mostly in the skin. Actually, I'd never considered that pecans had a skin, although now that I think about it I guess they do. Not sure how you'd get it off, however. One normally doesn't or can't remove the skin from a nut with so many crevasses. Anyway, if I recall correctly, Brian's infused bourbon was made either with whole pecan halves or anyway with large pieces. This, of course, is a great way to infuse tannins out of the skins and not such a great way to infuse flavor out of the meat. In consideration of the tannins being mostly in the skins, I would think that grinding up the pecans would expose maximum surface area of the meat for infusion. Using a sufficiently large amount of pecans and a shorter infusion time should help to minimize the infusion of tannins in the the liquor.

Brian had a drink on the Pegu Club menu called the Holy Roller that was made with pecan-infused bourbon. My impression was that it was very difficult to get sufficient pecan flavor without also infusing significant tannins into the bourbon. The Holy Roller was interesting, but definitely had an astringent quality from the tannins.