pairing

[by john]

the flavor bible is my kind of non-cookbook cookbook - it's an encyclopedia of flavors and flavors that go well with them. so under 'pumpkin seeds', you'll find caramel, chile peppers, coriander, cumin... (who knew! well, apparently, a ton of chefs they interviewed.) i was showing off this early xmas present to naveen when he remarked how useful this would be for making up new cocktails. well, uh, yeah....but i hadn't thought of that.

of course we had to put this to the test. to start, i wanted to attempt a friend's challenge - balsamic in a cocktail. browsing to 'vinegar, balsamic', i found a bunch of ingredients more non-drinkable than balsamic, plus cherry and apricot. i decided on the apricot, and after a couple iterations, settled on a 3:1:1:1 rye:balsamic:apricot brandy:lillet blanc. the apricot wasn't forward at all, but it did sweeten up the balsamic enough to make its bitter ending beguilingly light. the drink, by the way, is evil black. cool. not perfected yet by any means - i really need a good apricot eau de vie - but it's a promising start.

next, another challenge, this time self-imposed. i stole some of a friend's amazing raw cranberry sauce (literally just blended cranberries, whole orange, and whole lemon) from thanksgiving. could i take a passage from the flavor bible to make it into a well composed drink? it suggested apples and (more) orange - so i thought armagnac, cider syrup, the cranberry sauce, orange bitters, and some bitter truth decanter bitters, which have big cinnamony notes. an average drink, in the end, but a good direction.

reading the flavor bible will require a lot of culinary exegesis. jesuit education, don't fail me now.

fall comfort

[by john]

i associate some great smells with fall. root vegetables roasting in the oven, dead leaves, whiskey...

this autumn, i finally got to avail myself of a new england taste/smell tradition: apple cider donuts. warm, sugary, cinnamony, crispy outsides covering cakey, slightly appley comfort inside. i mean, wow. kevin, mike and i trekked to cider hill farm for some of those ambrosial delicacies, and i happened to pick up four gallons of raw apple cider as well.

i've already started a few batches of cider fermenting (another post if i achieve any modicum of success), but i still found myself left with a lot of the raw stuff. so i made two kinds of cider syrup - one i simmered with cinnamon sticks and sugar until it reduced by half, and one that i just shook cold with sugar until it all dissolved.

there're some foodie camps out there who claim that heating destroys the good, natural flavors in the cider. well, they're wrong. the heated syrup is something amazing. the apple flavors have intensified and rounded out, and come delayed after the initial sweetness.

the syrup worked great in an old fashioned. but to amp up the fall-itude, i tried a brandy old fashioned:

2 oz brandy (e&j xo, the cheap stuff)

1/2 oz cinnamon cider syrup

1 dash whiskey barrel bitters

build in a glass, add ice, and gently stir.

this one really nailed it. the apple and cinnamon were superb and autumnal on the nose, the brandy gave just the right edge (without sharp vapors), and the bitters recovered the complexity of a whiskey that the brandy couldn't provide.

to fall!