Kitchen Failures

[by Naveen]

After a dearth of posts due to final projects and moving into a new apartment, I'm once again ready to report the latest from my personal culinary frontiers. I've been having lots of fun experimenting in the kitchen, since I no longer need to carry all my cooking supplies down a hallway whenever I want to make something. Along with these experiments have been quite a few failures, which I've decided to share.

From left to right, top to bottom: I dropped the thermometer into my homemade yogurt, which may have contaminated it with some interesting microorganisms (we'll see in six hours). The no-knead bread barely rose, but it did have a nice crust. I spilled most of the muffin batter all over the inside of the oven after nearly burning myself, so the yield was rather small. The photo of the cauliflower flatbread (Mark Bittman's recipe) speaks for itself. The almond butter-thickened tempeh stew (inspired by another Bittman recipe) clearly demonstrates why I'm not a food stylist.

local news in drink

[by john]

• alcohol in massachusetts may be subject to a rising sales tax on top of the obscene excise tax (already forcing poor students like us to zipcar up to new hampshire).
• bittermens bitters are finally for sale! the cocktail world exploded at this announcement, but it was already old news to me (and my cohorts) by 8 am yesterday due to my google reader addiction. the bitters are made by a local couple, and the varieties (including the truly intoxicating chocolate-mole bitters) have been getting heavy rotation behind boston bars for a while.
• the observational gastrophysics cocktail crew is awaiting the advent of tales of the cocktail a month from now in new orleans with conflicted feelings. it means that our favorite bartenders (*cough* tom *cough* all of drink *cough*) will be out of town, but then they'll also be bringing new ideas back to boston.
• judging by quick glimpses on my bike commute, the new b-side lounge construction is moving forward. the entire place is gutted. no new name plastered on the wall, or signs of hard boiled eggs on the bar, for that matter.

restocking

[by john]

finishing a bottle is one happy, recurring consequence of stocking a bar. it affords the opportunity to try a new spirit, and congratulate oneself on beating the system of expensive drinks at a bar.

our collection has recently seen the demise of some french vermouth, benedictine, and two kinds of rye. all three of these are essential to my bar. french vermouth and rye are featured in nearly every classic cocktail (though rarely together in one drink), while benedictine has become indispensable to my herb-loving palate.

i'm anxious to pick up some dolin vermouth, which is even more delicate than the noilly prat we finished. as for the rye, i think i'll stick with the cheap-and-good-as-hell rittenhouse 100. the restocking will hit my bar-going habits a bit, but that's fine since i'll have new toys to play with.

speaking of budgeting, i hit april and may right on the nose. taken together, i spent about $397 of the allotted $400. solid.

Cougars

[by Mike]

While I missed out last night's adventure, I was able to convince John, Andy, and a few more friends to join me for a cocktail at Drink before a showing of Pixar's new pleasure "Up".

Having not been to Drink in months, I took advantage of the opportunity to partake in some of the tequila recipes developed recently.  I started with a spicy little number,

Hot Damn

1.75 oz Milagro Silver Tequila

0.25 oz Maguey Mezcal

0.25 oz Agave Nectar

?.?? oz Punt e Mes

Mexican Smoked Salt

Dash Chipotle Tabasco

Neither the heat nor the smoke overpowered the agave, instead complementing the flavors of the tequila and the mezcal.

While enjoying our drinks the conversation with our bartender, Scott, flowed swiftly and easily.  The most informative discussion focused on the standard procedure for syrups at Drink.  Instead of steeping any flavorings in the syrup itself, everything is steeped in water which is cooled before incorporating the sugar.  The reason?  Well common table sugar, or sucrose, is a disaccharide composed of two smaller sugars (glucose and fructose) bound together, and when heated that bond is quickly broken and the syrup breaks down into a myriad of smaller sugars and various by products.  Consistently reproducing the exact same by products, and hence same texture and flavor, is near impossible in a laboratory settings, let alone in a kitchen.  By keeping the sugar away from the heat, the clever bartenders at Drink are able to produce a consistent product each and every night.  It's an interesting concept, but I can't help wondering on what textures and deeper flavors they might be missing out.

Deep thoughts were quickly brushed aside, however, when some ladies down the bar recommended an intriguing drink.  I heard tequila, cocoa, and chipotle and had to place an order.  

Heather's (Mexican) Love Affair

2 oz Milagro Silver Tequial

1 oz Marie Brizzard (sp?) Creme de Cacao

6-7 Sichuan Peppercorns

Mexican Smoked Salt

Dash Chipotle Tabasco

The succulent cocktail was eerily reminiscent of a good Mexican hot chocolate (maybe a touch of cinnamon or almond to perfect the analogy) with all of the refreshment necessary for a summer drink.

Sufficiently lubricated, we headed back to the Common to be enamored with Pixar's latest offering.  Even the pretentious movie snob was sold, and it can't have been entirely due to his Mamie Taylor.

rum, in all its forms

[by john]

andy and i stopped by the latest sip & shop to taste some elderflower drinks and inquire with adam of the boston shaker about what bitters he'll be stocking next. as a very unexpected bonus, he told us about an event at the intercontinental celebrating their 100th rum at the bar.

not ones to pass up free/cheap alcohol, we put on fancy summer duds and headed downtown. we were greeted with free pernod absinthe and crêpes, and a gorgeous sunset view of the fort point channel.

there were about a dozen tables being set up around the posh lobby for rum tasting while we chatted up the guys from ragged mountain rum (including, again, adam, who is their boston rep). this is the same local distillery that made my new bottle of greylock. chris, the founder, was eager to tell us about forthcoming batches of bourbon, corn whiskey, and 'scotch'. i'm rather excited for those. oh, and their rum was nice - a surprisingly flavorful nose, with butterscotch and sharper spices, which belied the thinner flavors on the tongue (the burn of alcohol hit too quickly, but that'll change as they release more aged barrels).

far too many other brands to mention them all, but there were some standouts. i liked the oronoco, a light rum good for daiquiris, since it was a smoother version of the 10 cane in my own bar. gosling's old rum (23 y.o.?) tasted like bermudan nectar. their rep told us about their new product, dark and stormy in a can, which, apparently drinkhacker has gotten ahold of. the rhum clément products tasted entirely like brandy.

overall, the wide spectrum surprised me, a rum novitiate, the most. from light to dark, from cocktail-worthy to sipping, from whiskey wannabes to cognac wannabes, from brazil to nicaragua... other spirits just don't have that kind of spread.

talking to the reps was also enjoyable, since it's their job to be gregarious. one woman, at the pyrat table, was especially awesome. she complimented us on being the most sociable mit students she'd met (not hard), we talked about med school and surfing, then parted with some swag bags (featuring the folkloric hotei character [think laughing fat buddha], which immediately transported me back to japanese art history class).

well, random alcohol outing, until next time...

a different (red)neck of the woods

[by john]

the regular drinking companions finally made it to deep ellum together on tuesday night. a combination of subway-inacessability and oversight had left this bar the last unchecked must-try cocktail destination on our list. but we rallied together for their redneck luau.

they mixed up four original tiki drinks to go along with the enormous pile of meat they were serving up. (the menu warned that several animals were harmed in the making of this event.) my favorite, a tasty mix of dewars, honey-ginger syrup, lime, apricot, and ginger beer, was the grass kilt. (great name, too.) the suffering hillbilly was also notable: the allspice dram in it really took control to make sure that the grenadine and pineapple juice didn't run away and over-sweeten the drink. the only other time i had a cocktail with allspice dram, it tasted like christmas, and not in a good way.

[by Michael]

John's description of his two drinks are dead on.  I was a little afraid that the pineapple juice in the Hillbilly would be overpowering but the dram really kept it in check.  My only dissent is regarding his previous allspice dram cocktail: it screamed Christmas in all the right ways.  Andy, another friend, and I completed the menu.  I started with a Volcano (rum, Cherry Heering, citrus, and bitters), which featured an intriguing house made tiki bitters, while Andy took on a Shipwreck (rum, Picon, and Swedish Punsch).  

The highlight of the evening, however, was the meat!  Roast pig and brisket were served under the glare of a roasted pig head, complete with an apple clenched in its jaw.  While the pork was juicy and the skin was great, the brisket quietly usurped the meal with its intense smoke flavor, crisp exterior, succulent pockets of fat, and fall apart texture.  

A close second to the meat?  John's leaving early to meet up with friends, only to end up on the same bus as Andy and I.  You just can't rush the consumption of barbecue.

The cocktail: a flow-chart

[by Naveen]

"Distilled alcohols are some of the most intensely flavored foods we have." - Harold McGee



I know far less about cocktails than my fellow bloggers, but I do enjoy making flow charts. I decided it was finally time to try to make sense of the language of mixology. The whole field is due to the inability of yeast to survive in alcohol concentrations higher than about 20%. To get around this biological limitation, people figured out how to heat up a fermented liquid to extract the components with a lower boiling point (especially ethanol). There's some danger involved, since methanol, a poison, has an even lower boiling point. Longer-chain molecules can give the final product an oily consistency. However, there are numerous substances with similar boiling points that give each distilled spirit its characteristic flavor.

What about flavor components with very different boiling points than the ethanol? It turns out that ethanol is a great solvent, so adding herbs, sugars, or other flavorings gives rise to the diversity of flavored alcohols, liqueurs, and bitters that go into making a cocktail.

I realize that this diagram is far from complete, since there is much more to add about the sources for the various base alcohols (e.g. corn, wheat, potato) and the psychology of balancing flavors. Any suggestions for future visualizations are welcome.