dun dun dun dun

This post mentions some free stuff. Check out the free stuff policy here.

The Mozart Distillery in Salzburg has given me a bottle (well, two bottles, and a glass, and a neck extender, and a list of cocktail recipes) of their new Mozart Dry to play around with, and the first thing you want to note is that this chocolate spirit is 80 proof -- the same as most base liquors -- and unsweetened.

Let's back up and talk about cocktail structure so that you get why that's a big deal.

There are plenty of drinks, and some of them are even good, that are just "let me dump this alcoholic thing into this non-alcoholic mixer."  Rum and Coke, gin and tonic, the Screwdriver, the Mimosa, the Dark and Stormy (Goslings Black Seal rum and ginger beer).  These are generally highballs, like a one-time favorite of Yrs Truly, Scotch and soda.  But I don't want to get too much into the "this is a flip, this is a highball, this is a cobbler" cocktail nomenclature, because I don't find it very instructive or useful except in looking at historical context, which is way beyond our scope right now.

Cocktails, if they involve more than a shot of something alcoholic in a glass of something that isn't, are generally built around a base liquor (or "base spirit").  What base liquors have in common is that they are unsweetened or minimally sweetened (they may retain some sweetness from the ingredients fermented to make them, as in the case of brandy), and they're around 80-100 proof (40-50% alcohol).  Some whiskeys come stronger than that; a number of rums come at 151 proof, but are used in combination with other lower-proof ingredients (or for fratboy horseshit).  

Typical base liquors include whiskey, brandy, tequila, rum, gin, and vodka.  Recent years have added new options to the American bar -- mezcal, shochu, cachaca -- and there are some subtypes within the categories (applejack is "apple brandy," for instance).  Many cocktail bar menus will be divided into categories according to base liquor, rather than other criteria (sours etc).

The other major alcoholic ingredients in cocktails are bitters -- which may be the same proof as base liquors or higher, but which are (by law) considered "non-potable," meaning they're too damn bitter and strong-tasting to drink, so you use them a few drops at a time, the vanilla extract of the bar -- and liqueurs.  Liqueurs include potable bitters like Campari and Aperol, fruit liqueurs like creme de cassis, and things like Kahlua, maraschino, amaretto, creme de violette, etc etc.  They're sweetened -- usually too sweet to drink straight; I can get through a glass of Campari because of the bitterness, but most people wouldn't want to -- and they're usually about half the proof of a base liquor.  (Absinthe is a notable exception.)

You need a base liquor, or something like juice or soda water, in order to create a cocktail -- you can't just mix a bunch of liqueurs together, or the result will be too sweet and syrupy.  Good liqueurs are fantastic and transformative -- people who turn their noses up at cocktails because they're hardline about drinking their liquor straight up are really missing out.  While a Boulevardier may cover up the whiskey more than they'd like, a whiskey sour just accentuates good whiskey, and an Old-Fashioned or Sazerac is almost entirely whiskey with a little sprinkle of something else, like cooking your steak with a little herb butter.

So that's the really, really interesting thing about Mozart Dry: it's a base liquor.

Base liquors give you a shit ton of options.

Think about it, every other chocolate-flavored alcohol product I can think of is sweetened, oftenly highly so -- a lot of the creme de cacao on the shelves is like Hershey's syrup mixed with cheap hooch.  You may as well make that at home.  There are some good cream liqueurs -- I've got nothing against cream liqueur -- but for me, those are dessert drinks, I don't particularly use them in cocktails.

Mozart makes a number of chocolate liquor products, and Mozart Dry is the first item of its kind that I'm aware of: an unsweetened chocolate spirit, a chocolate distillate as they call it.  Cocoa beans are mixed with high-proof alcohol (the higher the proof, the more flavor the alcohol extracts) and barreled for two months while the sediment settles out.  The final product is perfectly clear -- which makes it all the more surprising when you open the bottle and smell premium chocolate.  

That's when things get a little ... unusual: Mozart "sound-mills" their products by storing them in stainless steel tanks affixed with loudspeakers that play Mozart's music for 24 hours before the liquor is bottled.  Hey, whatever works.  The company has a page devoted to their sound milling, but you may have to go through the front page and enter your birthyear and whatnot.

As you can see from the level of the bottle, I've played around with Mozart Dry a bit.  The lack of sweetener gives you a lot of flexibility, and as the company notes, it takes well to acidity.  I had a few very nice drinks using Mozart Dry and unsweetened cranberry juice and a little liqueur of one or another type to balance out the cranberry, but you have to be careful to keep the cranberry from overwhelming the rest (this is true of using unsweetened cranberry juice in general).  A couple of the recipes on the web and included by the company pair Mozart Dry with Campari, which leapt out at me, so this was the first real home run I came up with:

1 oz Mozart Dry
1/2 oz Campari
1/2 oz Canton ginger liqueur
1/2 oz Sazerac 18 year old rye whiskey

Rye and ginger of course go well together, and the ginger and Campari provide the sweetener here.  It's a nice, nice drink.  It's very cool to see chocolate acting as a participant.  I'm sure many people will come up with "chocolate-covered cherries" and "chocolate truffle" cocktails with this, sure, but the chocolate flavor of Mozart Dry is layered enough, developed enough, that it is much more interesting when you let it play with other flavors instead of just being accented by them.

Other successful combinations, without photos:

A Mozart Dry Sazerac: Mozart Dry, a dash of absinthe, a dash of Peychaud's bitters, a little lemon juice and sugar;

Mozart Dry, Wasmund's single-malt whiskey, Creole Shrubb orange liqueur, and St Germain elderflower liqueur.

This is a go-to bottle.  This could definitely become a staple in my bar.

and the white knight is talking backwards

This post involves free stuff.  Read the free stuff policy here.

Speaking of free stuff -- Marx Foods sent me a sampler of various dried mushrooms: shiitake, porcini, lobster (the most colorful but least flavorful, I found), black trumpet, chanterelle, and maitake.  They carry a number of other varieties as well.  (I want to point out that Marx has added more product categories since the last time I mentioned them, including the ones most appealing to me, exotic fruit and exotic citrus.  Though I admit, I wish nonperishable items like the yuzu juice had a cheaper shipping option -- at least I assume a large part of that price is shipping.)

Forgive the usual lighting/photo issues.

I've never used dried mushrooms much.  I've primarily used them in tomato sauces, if you don't count the dried white truffles in my truffle salt, so I wanted to toy around with other things here.  While I ground some up and used them to coat a steak, what really brought out the character of the mushrooms was using them in vegetable soup.  There's a more intense mushroom flavor from these dried mushrooms than I'm used to getting from fresh, as they reconstitute in the broth, and it goes so well with many fall vegetables.  After a couple trial runs with small servings of soup with just a couple ingredients, I wound up with this mushroom vegetable soup:

There's a whole bunch of dried mushrooms there, along with cranberry beans, parsnips, turnips, carrots, and celery.  These were the vegetables the mushrooms seemed to complement best -- particularly turnips and parsnips (the parsnip is related to the carrot, and is a little firmer and starchier, less sweet, and with more of that "rooty" sort of flavor that carrots tend to lose when they cook).  It's that simple -- just those ingredients, a little broth, a little salt and pepper.  Very tasty and harder, a rainy November sort of lunch -- or dinner, with a salad or a buttered piece of fresh bread.

But interestingly, the mushrooms -- that is, the mushroom solids -- were my least favorite part.  That's often the case with mushrooms, their texture isn't like other vegetables.  So I also made a soup in which the mushrooms were ground up while still dry, and a vegetable stock that used the mushrooms but then discarded them with the other solids, after they'd given up all their flavor.  This felt wasteful at first, but you know, it's like making beef stock and throwing out the bones -- you just make sure all the flavor came out first.

And in fact, it led to my most successful soup, because of an ingredient I didn't have on hand when I made the previous soup:

Celery root, or celeriac, is a member of the celery family that's grown for the root instead of the stalk.  The root is, as you can see, big and gnarly and a pain in the ass to wash.  You should shop for them the same way you do potatoes, yucca, or any other root vegetable -- it should feel heavy, not light and spongy.  (Melissa's celery roots often feel spongy to me -- this may simply be the result of low turnover in my local supermarket -- so I tend to only buy celery root in the fall, when I can get it at the farmstand.)

It's a fantastic vegetable.  When you peel it, feel free to use a knife and be liberal in your peeling, rather than relying on a peeler and trying to deal with all those nooks and crannies.  You can always dump the peels into a vegetable stock, after all.

The taste is celery-like but not quite the same.  Grated and baked with a ton of salt before being ground up, it forms Fergus Henderson's celery salt, which is terrific on -- well, anything, but especially boiled eggs.  It's often served with remoulade.  But here, it formed a fantastic soup:

Remember the crabs I bought in Little Cambodia?  I had made a strong crab stock with them which I then froze in portions.  I reheated a portion of that crab stock with some diluted roasted tomato puree and the rest of the dried mushrooms, let it simmer for a couple hours, and then strained the solids out.  In that resulting mushroom-crab-tomato stock, I cooked cubes of celery root, carrot, salt, and a tiny bit of ground red chile for kick.  I added celery leaves and stalk right towards the end.

Really, really good -- the celery root and crab flavors really meld together, with the mushroom and tomato providing backbone.

I'm not gonna lie to you. This is gonna get kinda weird.

First: I'm watching Eric Ripert on Charlie Rose while eating lunch, and although it's not a very good interview, it reminded me to mention Ripert's PBS show, Avec Eric.  I don't like very much food television.  Most of it is either too recipe-oriented, too voyeuristic/foodpornish, or just straight-up reality show bullshit.  (I am addicted to Top Chef, but it took me four seasons to be talked into watching it.)  But Avec Eric is great stuff.  Worth finding.

Second: this post features more free stuff for me: dried wild mushrooms from Marx Foods.  Like I said, I'll always point out when I'm using free things.  I'll have a post specifically about the mushrooms later, though the short version is that after trying them in various ways, I think soup is far and away the best use for them.  But they did make a nice gravy here.

Third: I bought three turkeys.

"Bill," you're asking, "what the hell? How many Thanksgivings does one man need?"

None of these turkeys is my Thanksgiving turkey.  They're three turkeys ABOVE AND BEYOND Thanksgiving.

See, here's the deal.  I'm at the supermarket with a few bucks, I'm picking up some Pepsi Throwback and some pretzels, and I see the frozen turkeys.  Forty cents a pound.  Forty cents.  You know how much the cheapest chicken in the store is?  Three times that.  You know how much the ground beef is?  Twice as much as the chicken.  Forty cents a pound.  That's cheaper than soup bones.  You could drop the turkey in a lobster pot, simmer it all day, and throw it out -- keeping only the broth -- and you've still saved money.

Basically, I would be an irresponsible asshole if I didn't buy a bunch of turkeys.

So for twenty dollars, I got three turkeys, a blue bag of Pepperidge Farm stuffing mix, and a pound of Jimmy Dean sausage.  My family has always made Pepperidge Farm stuffing, with sausage.  Even when I shake it up and do my own Thanksgiving, in the ten years when I didn't live near my family, I still used Pepperidge Farm; that's just stuffing for me.  Traditionally, "my" stuffing has been Pepperidge Farm, shredded rabbit, lots of sage, and tart apples.  But the only place around here that I can buy rabbit is a store that I dislike enough that I don't want to give them my business.  So I compromised: Pepperidge Farm, sausage, tart apples (Roxbury Russet).

Why was I making stuffing if this isn't Thanksgiving?  Well, because turkey and stuffing is fucking awesome, and there's not going to be much leftover at Thanksgiving.  So I'll get my fix now, and let my brother have the leftovers next week.

But first I broke down all the turkeys -- cut off the leg quarters and the wings, sliced the meat off the breasts.  I have no need to roast a whole turkey -- I'm going to do all sorts of OTHER things with the turkey parts.  I used one of the carcasses as a stuffing roasting vessel -- packing the stuffing into it, roasting it until the stuffing was cooked, and then cleaning the carcass off and tossing it into the stockpot with the other two and the wingtips.

The thighs?  I used three of those to make turkey confit, cooking them at a low-temp covered in duck fat for hours.

After roasting the three turkey carcasses, I had plenty of fond in the pan, so that became my gravy.  I cooked a little flour in the drippings, deglazed the pan with one part apple cider to four parts turkey stock, and cooked it down until thick, with a healthy pinch of salt and a handful of Marx's dried mushrooms (chanterelles and oysters) ground up in the Cuisinart.

So that's our first (rather out of focus) meal from those turkeys: turkey confit, apple/sausage stuffing, mashed potatoes, and wild mushroom cider gravy:

The mushrooms add a nice, nice note to the traditional sage-and-apple flavors of the rest of the food.  Very satisfying.

from my head down to my legs

So those eggs.

Eggs are a good example of why I say to get to know your ingredients.  When you take the rote approach to cooking, just memorizing different methods, you don't really know what you're doing.  You're Berlitzing it, reciting phrases.  You know what you're saying, you know the meaning is getting across, but you don't apprehend the structures and grammar.

Everyone knows how to hard-boil an egg, most people know how to soft-boil an egg.  Everyone's got different tricks, you know, whether you start the eggs in the water before heating it, whether you let them cool in the water, how to peel the eggs, all that.  The thing to keep in mind is how sensitive eggs are to temperature, and how much the texture will differ between an egg cooked at a hard boil for thirty minutes and an egg simmered for 15.

These eggs, what I call unctuous eggs, similar to hot spring eggs, are neither hard- nor soft-boiled.  They never come out exactly the same, because there are too many variables and my kitchen is not a laboratory of controlled conditions.  But the idea is that the white comes out set but not rubbery -- nor even as solid as that of a nice hard-boiled egg -- and that the yolk remains unctuous.  It's not liquid like a soft-boiled egg.  But it has none of the chalkiness of a hard-set yolk, and may in some cases -- we hope for these -- remain orange and custardy.  This is not a hard-boiled egg.  This is not a soft-boiled egg.  This is some other egg.

You bring the egg up to room temp, or let it sit in warm water a while.  You bring your pot of water to a simmer.  You put the egg in the water for 6-8 minutes and then immediately plunge it into ice water, for the same reason you do with blanched vegetables: you don't just want to remove it from the cooking environment, you want to halt the cooking.  Otherwise that egg's going to retain heat and keep cooking the yolk.  Once the egg has cooled down, you can peel it, and you can marinate the thing if you like -- soy sauce is good, hot sauce is good, in either case I'd dilute some with water.  Eggs can suck up a lot of marinade, as you know if you've ever et a pickled one.  I didn't marinate my eggs because I don't want the marinade to clash with my lima beans.

You really can't tell from looking at these how custardy and unctuous the eggs are, particularly the yolks.  A minute less of cooking and they might have been too soft; thirty seconds less would probably be just right to keep the yolks completely orange with none of that canary yellow.  With the eggs, I'm having a lima bean salad, which is just cooked limas marinated with pecan oil -- nut oils in general are terrific for this kind of thing -- with smoked paprika, salt, sage, and a little homemade pepper vinegar.  It's best at room temperature or slightly warm -- I microwaved it a bit, because it's cold lately and room temperature's not what it could be.

On the eggs: Hawaiian pink sea salt, and more of the green chile salt.  The Hawaiian pink sea salt is nice and crunchy -- maybe the sort of thing you'd usually have with French fries instead of egg, but I dig it here.

shaky city

Two things:

First, this post features stuff I got for free.  That'll happen, you know, people send stuff to bloggers, bloggers review it.  I'll always point out when that's the case, and I won't ever rave about something just because I got it for free.  

So this time, what I've got is a sampler of the many sea salts sold by online fine foods vendor Marx Foods, and even if I didn't dig the salt, I'd've mentioned them in an eventual post on "Bill, where do you get the unusual ingredients you sometimes mention, and why aren't they in my supermarket," aka the online mail order post.  Marx Foods isn't cheap, but if you want turtle meat, they're the place to go; and they're the only place I know of with such an extensive selection of wild produce (not just ramps and fiddleheads, but miner's lettuce and wood violets).

I can't review a dozen salts at once.  So as I use them, I will point them out.  For instance:

Potatoes and pork cracklins, with green chile sea salt and fine smoked sea salt.

The number one change most home cooks can make that will make their food taste more like it does in the restaurant?  Use more salt.  I don't know if it's health concerns driving people to undersalt their food, or if it's always been this way -- I'm just saying, half the time you ask yourself "why does their version of this taste so much better than mine, I know I'm doing everything right," it's because they used more salt than you did.

Potatoes, pork, and eggs are the foods that I think benefit the most from salt -- in fact, shit, I need to go start the eggs I was planning to have later, they take a long time.  Hang tight.

Okay, so anyway.  The green chile salt is great.  There's a pronounced green chile flavor, distinguishable as such, not just generic heat.  This would be nice on a hot dog, definitely on a hamburger.

The smoked sea salt has less pronounced smokiness.  I can't decide how to feel about that.  It's probably good, in that it keeps the smoke flavor from being overpowering, but it's also easy to lose it completely.  One way to use it that would keep the smoke flavor from being lost would be to use it as a rimming salt, so that you're getting a hit of the salt before you get anything that's going to overpower it.

The second thing: sometimes when I take a photo of some food, especially if I take a second one because I see on the camera screen that the first one isn't in focus, I feel a twinge of guilt.  I don't like photograph-centric food blogs, or blogs that toss a photo of some meal up onto the internet without any discussion of it, any information.  It's pointless.  It benefits no one and only creates noise.  I think the prevalence of cheap reliable digital photography has made the blogosphere significantly worse.  Everyone's posing their sandwiches, snapping pretty pictures of their rack of lamb ... but who gives a shit?  It doesn't make them taste any better.  It's just mindless food porn, as bad as the nonsense on the Food Network.  Food doesn't need or benefit from Myspace angles.  Learn how to cook, not how to pose.