slkinsey
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Posts posted by slkinsey
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Hack off the knuckle end of chicken drumsticks to turn a sinewy, stringy, hopeless piece of protein into a chubby, succulent morsel of meat. (I do wish I could remember the name of the eG member who first posted this one.)
With modestly downcast last, I must admit it was a posting of my own.
... You then have boneless/skinless chicken breasts to sauté, skinless thighs to sauté or braise and skinless drumsticks to braise (cut off the knuckle first, as this improves the texture of the meat) and bones you can freeze for later stockmaking....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.
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I buy the occasional case of Libbey coupes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Oh, I don't know about that... What is a Mojito, after all, but a white rum Julep with some lime juice and a little soda? Or, depending on how you make it, a kind of Swizzle?
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And to think that only 5 years ago the Mojito was a pretty hip drink.
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Death & Co has a single vodka behind the bar, and I believe PDT has one as well. While I agree wholeheartedly that if that's what people want, they should be served it without attitude, my point is simply that vodka sodas are not the reason to go to these places. If that's what you order, you can go anywhere, you don't need Pegu, and you are missing a potentially new and thrilling experience. Look, when I went to Pegu for the first time I told Phil I liked vodka gimlets - because I had no idea what the possibilities were. Someone had to show me. If this article is for newcomers, it's not going to be obvious and I would mention it. That's all I'm saying.That said, there are vodka drinks and there are vodka drinks.
Whereas it's true that the staff at D&C will serve you a vodka tonic without attitude, it breaks my heart whenever I see it done. I think about all the multitude of times I've gotten turned away, and reflect on the space wasted by people who have zero appreciation whatsoever of what the place is doing.
I think people like that should be discouraged from going, just because of undercapacity.
The point is, I think, that for the purposes of such an article, it should be understood that the bar staff won't look down on you or treat you like a rube if you want a Ketel One Dirty Martini. You'll probably get one of the best Dirty Vodka Martinis you've ever had. I think that we cocktailians talk a lot of smack about vodka and vodka cocktails, and a newcomer who likes vodka might reasonably think after hearing us carry on that he'd be treated like a jerk at one of these places. But the reality is that he wouldn't.
hate to say it, but M&H has long had a reputation as a great "closer bar"....a reputation almost as high as its reputation for cocktails (the secret number thing only adds to this reputation). (and there's plenty of heavy making out in those booths...)It's one thing to bring your date to M&H and do a little nuzzling before paying the check and heading out the door to someone's place. It's yet another to get blitzed and explore the inner world of one another's tonsils (perfectly acceptable behavior in plenty of bars) in front of everyone, and yet another to go to the bar thinking you'll pick someone up.
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Here's a variant of the question, which is more relevant to what I'd actually write in a mainstream magazine or newspaper:
What's the short list of places (5 is a rough guide, but 6 or 7 could be acceptable -- bearing in mind that, in the world of print, the more places one writes about the fewer words can be devoted to each) that you'd send someone to assuming that person is totally unaware of the current cocktail renaissance and has never heard the words "cocktailian" or "mixologist"?
Really, if you're sending a person who is a cocktail neophyte and totally unaware of the current cocktail renaissance, the list dwindles to Pegu Club and Julie's places (with the slight edge going to Pegu, IMO).
I might take a cocktail newb to PDT, but I wouldn't send a pair of them to PDT by themselves.
And I'd be unlikely to take one to D&C or to M&H (the former because I think it's too advanced/challenging overall for a complete beginner, and the latter because it's too expensive for a beginner, there's no menu and bartender interaction is limited).
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If you're writing this for people who know nothing about cocktails, it's probably helpful to let them know that these places barely even have vodka, and if they're looking for vodka martinis, they're not going to be impressed.
While these places don't carry many different vodkas, don't tend to serve flavored vodkas, and don't feature vodka cocktails, all of them do, in fact, have vodka behind the bar. And, more to the point, all of them will be perfectly happy to prepare you a vodka cocktail or a vodka soda or a vodka on the rocks with not an iota of attitude. I remember talking with Audrey about this back when we were talking about how she was going to stock Pegu Club, and she said that she would only carry two or three brands of vodka and no flavored vodka. "Why not just carry no vodka at all," I asked. And she replied that, while they weren't "about" vodka drinks (although one of her signature cocktails, the Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini, is a vodka cocktail), if someone asked for a vodka on the rocks, they would have a good vodka and would endeavor to make them the best vodka on the rocks they could offer. At the end of the day, its about service.
Interestingly, I have once upon a time in the wee hours of the morning, sat in a booth of Mlik & Honey with Audrey and Sasha, drinking Moscow Mules -- vodka drinks.
I wonder if Clover Club should replace Flatiron on that list as much of the experience and talent have migrated to the former. I also think Julie's vision is being better realized at Clover.The last time I was at Flatiron Lounge, the talent behind the bar was as good as it gets.
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Milk & Honey, for example, might not be on that list. From a journalistic perspective, the whole private number thing makes it hard to list. But it's also -- to me -- an uncomfortably rule-oriented establishment and I'd hate to send someone there only to have that person scolded for ordering a vodka drink (meanwhile, recently at Death & Co. I saw vodka martini orders handled with aplomb) or violating the code of conduct. So while I can readily accept Milk & Honey as top 5, I'm not sure I'd feature it in a general-interest article.
You can order anything you want at Milk & Honey, and if they can make it, they will serve it to you with respect. Due to the space constraints, they can't make everything (they don't stock Lillet, for example). I would also suggest that the code-of-conduct stuff at Milk & Honey is not particularly burdensome, even for a general-interest place. The problem for you in writing about Milk & Honey for a general interest piece is avoiding the douchebag factor of publishing the number -- and without the number, it loses some general interest. If I were writing the piece, I'd probably write the piece mostly about M&H or Sasha's aesthetic in general, explain the semi-private number bit about M&H, and give contact and location information for Little Branch (which is, more or less, "general admission Milk & Honey").
Getting back to the code-of-conduct issue... One thing I would hope that such an article would point out is that cocktailian bars have an aesthetic and a purpose that is different from most other bars. Expectations as to modes of conduct, etc. are as different in these places compared to most bars as they are in Gramercy Tavern compared to Dinosaur Barbecue. None of these bars is the place to go if you want to pick up chicks or cruise guys, hoot and hollar, show off your nouveau riche broker money, wear shorts and a dirty t-shirt, groove to the music, dance on the bar (or anywhere), pound shots and get drunk, drink beer, see and be seen, snort coke in the bathroom, fight or make out. This is important, because the reality is that 95% of people who go to bars value things other than the culinary quality of the cocktails. And any "general-interest" article about cocktail bars will be read mostly by these people. So, if it were me, at least half the article would be explaining what a cocktailian bar is, and how it is different from a regular bar.
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Again, I avail myself of off-menu and themed drinks all the time. What I take issue with are the ideas that (1) "off-menu" is the game and not a sideshow; and (2) that this is where the "true cocktailian's" interests lie. Both ideas, to me, represent a certain amount of poseurism along the lines of the internet foodie's fetishization of bacon (there was a time when anyone wanting to be taken seriously as a foodie had to prove his baconophile bona fides).
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Heh. And, as chance would have it, I was editing in my parenthetical comments at the same time. That, to me, is where the poseurism comes in. It's people who get the idea that "going off-menu" is the end-all/be-all of a cocktail bar, that going off-menu is what the real cocktailians do, so thats how they demonstrate their cocktailian chops.
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I guess the point I'm making is that one reads a lot of things that go like this: "I went to such-and-such bar. They had 28 drinks on the menu. They all looked awesome. I had the delicious Such-And-Such Cocktail, then I went off-menu for the next three drinks (implication: because I'm such a cocktailian, and everyone knows that's the real game). Great bar!"
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That's the value of a Serious Cocktail Bar. And that's why there's all this mania about going off-menu. It's like an omakase at a first-class sushi bar, where the chef makes the meal up as he goes along, based on your reactions to each dish.
I'm going to take a slightly contrarian position and say that I think "going off-menu" is far over-rated, and the "mania" for it smacks just a bit of the poseurism of the internet foodie fetishization of bacon. "Of menu" is the cockailian's "bacon tasting."
Now... I like bacon and going off-menu at a cocktail bar as much as the next guy. But the reality is that the bartender is rarely actually "cooking up something brand new" for you. It's either a drink they already know, or something new they're working on. There are all kinds of tricks a bartender can use to convince a customer that something is being created all'improviso. I remember a conversation with a mixologist who shall remain nameless about the trick that goes something like this: mix the drink without the bitters, then do a straw tasting from the tin, look contemplatively upwards, glance at the bitters, choose one or two (the ones that you already know go in the drink) and dash them in, taste again, nod knowingly, proceed to finish drink. Customer has a "gee wiz" moment where he sees the Master Creating a Work of Cocktail Art for him. Pleasure enhancement ensues. Tips are increased.
I love having guys riff new things for me. Part of that, however, is because I have certain relationships with certain bartenders, and I also have an intellectual curiosity in tasting the as-yet incompletely formed ideas they're working on. But, in all honesty, it is rare that a truly "off-menu" drink (i.e., one that never was "on-menu" or isn't a neglected classic) is on the level of brilliance attained by the cocktails on the menu which were refined through a thousand different tweaks and iterations.
To me, the list is the thing. The riffs are gravy. I just think it often happens to be the case that we go to some places frequently enough that we've burned through everything on the menu and end up going off the menu so often for that reason that we start thinking the sauce is the meat. For me, when I go to a new-to-me place like Clover Club, I want to have everything on the menu that interests me before I start wandering off. With the size and breadth of the menu at D&C, if I didn't have the "let's see what you can pull out of your hat that's new and unusual" playful relationship with Phil of long standing, I'd probably never go off-menu there.
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The reality of the situation is that, as interest in cocktails grows, poseur cocktail bars will proliferate. That's bad, but not entirely bad. The reason it's not entirely bad is that one real cocktail bar comes along with every ten poseur cocktail bars. If there are a hundred poseur cocktail bars, that makes for ten real cocktail bars. Not only that, but plenty of drinkers and bartenders graduate from the poseur places to the real places. Percentage-wise not that many, perhaps, but enough so that real cocktailian bartenders can make a living and real cocktail bars can continue to be profitable.
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Right. These places tend by nature to be moving targets. Brian left Elettaria, and it immediately slips from second tier to third tier.
Whereas -- to state the obvious -- if Pegu has a temporary fallow period because of dilution of talent, you know it's going to bounce back, because unlike a place like Ellataria it has a genuine commitment to excellence in cocktails.
Indeed. And even if there is a momentary "fallow period" where you are unfamiliar with the new talent and they don't know what you like, or they are new enough to the bar that they're not comfortable (or allowed) to go deeply off-menu... at the very least you know that all of the house drinks are still going to be made at the highest level, and were created at the very highest level.
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Right. These places tend by nature to be moving targets. Brian left Elettaria, and it immediately slips from second tier to third tier. If, like me, you haven't kept up with the comings-and-goings at Elettaria, you can end up going there after the slide.
This is one of the things that has generally kept me away from the second tier places. I simply can't be bothered to keep track of things such as whether Naren is going to be at Bobo on a certain night. There were any number of times I tried to go to Freeman's on one of Toby's nights only to discover that he had traded with someone else or was out of town or otherwise not there on his regular night. Eventually I stopped trying.
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I like lperry's suggestion of a lazy susan but I caution you that when these become unbalanced (eg due to drinking some of your supplies) they don't turn particularly well. I think one would work great for lighter supplies though like bitters.
The problem with the lazy susan idea is that it creates incredibly inefficient use of space. I'm guessing you could fit at least 25% more liquor bottles into a cupboard without lazy susans. And, for most of us, that's the name of the game. I barely have enough room to cram in all the bottles I have in regular rotation, and that's not even accounting for the fact that I have at least ten bottles on my "need to buy" list -- some of which are real necessities (I'm out of Cuban-style white rum, for example).
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variable. Gin Lane was just awful. just awful. very much a "take the money and run"...some of the house drinks he made for Dell'Anima are better than decent. others aren't.
he's the grand-daddy of them all...and seen as such. but people have definitely moved to a point of obsessiveness that he didn't. but everyone reads his books.
the thing about "cocktail consulting" is that at most it means the original recipes given to the restaurant/bar were competent. it doesn't say anything about the execution.
I agree with your last paragraph, but take issue with the "take the money and run" characterization. Acting as a consultant doesn't mean you have control over decisions that management makes, including how to keep standards high and train staff.
Every consulting gig is a "take the money and run" gig. That's the nature of the beast. That's what they are. It's no different for a mixologist than it is for a chef.
The Quintessential eG Kitchen Tips/Trucs
in Cooking
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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.