loo loo loo

A note on pizza, first: though I think flavored doughs should be approached with caution and reluctance, I made a nice one today with Pecorino Romano, grated sweet Italian pepper, and large amounts of ground black pepper.

Onward:

You must both forgive and get used to the terrible lighting (and my dirty thumbnail).  It's rainy and dark out, and there are no good places in my house with good lighting for food photographs. This situation will not improve until spring brings better light, so you will have to just deal with it through the seasons of braising and pumpkin-pecan pie and duck confit and roast beast and eggnog and Reubens, until we come at last to radishes and pea shoots and the last of the frozen cherries.

Apples.  There's so much to say about apples.  First, because it's the easiest place to start, this apple crisp: sliced Cortland apples, tossed with Grade B maple syrup, sorghum, wheat whiskey, and cinnamon; a topping of equal parts sugar (I used white sugar and sorghum) and flour, with butter and oats.  I often use crushed pretzels in apple crisp (and in general I cook with pretzels more than anyone I know; the pretzel-crusted pig tails predate this blog, but I'll do that again sometime), but today was an oat day.

Let's digress and talk maple syrup and circle back therefrom to apples.

From age 2 to 15, I lived on a splash of old-school New Hampshire land -- a Colonial farmhouse built in 1743, with a chicken coop (complete with chickens), wild and domesticated grapes, wild and domesticated raspberries, a little creek where I caught "crayfish" too small to eat, horse stables (no horses; we kept the gas generator in one, the riding lawn mower in the other), and, well, a gravel tennis court.  New Hampshire in the 70s and 80s was a place in transition, obviously.

One of the owners back in the day when this place's farm elements were more practical than decorative had planted sugar maples, and we tapped them for sap.  Maple sap has two active seasons: spring and fall, when the days are significantly warmer than the nights, causing the watery sap to run back and forth through the tree.  Hammer a spigot into the trunk, hang a bucket from the spigot, and every day the bucket will collect some barely sweet water.  Dump the buckets into a kettle, cook the sap down, and the water cooks off until you have maple syrup.

Naturally, when I was 8, I preferred Vermont Maid "maple-flavored syrup," but by my teens I had come back around.  Real maple syrup tastes like what it is -- something from a tree.  It has a flavor that's more developed than just "sweet."  Most of the pancake syrups on the shelf offer nothing beyond their texture -- they're just sugar in pourable form, either next to flavorless or packed with artificial flavor.  Ugh.

Real maple syrup is offered in various grades, depending on where you live.  Grade B is the "cooking" grade, while various Grades A are "table" grades.  Grade A is lighter in color and flavor, see, while Grade B is stout enough that if you add it to coffee, the maple flavor won't be overpowered.  The idea that Grade B is too strong for people to use as a condiment ... well, it's fucking ridiculous, frankly.  We're not talking about molasses here.  I understand that not everyone can handle straight-up molasses -- shoo-fly pie's a lot for me to handle.  But maple syrup never gets that strong, and it can be tough to make a gingerbread, for instance, with a strong maple note, without resorting to flavor extracts (which I try to avoid).

Anyway.  I use Grade B.  Even up here, you can't find it in the supermarket.  You buy it from the producer or from a farmstand that carries somebody's maple products.  It often sells out when maple season is over, unlike the large amounts of Grade A which are available year-round, so I pick up a big jug in the spring, a big jug in the fall (which I ought to do next month, come to think of it).

The other thing plentiful up here?  Apples.  Told you we'd be back round.  There is an equivalent divide in apples to the Grade A/Grade B issue in maple syrup.  People who aren't from apple-growing regions, and some of those who are, don't always realize the vast array of apple varieties, but they tend to be divided into "eating apples" and "cooking apples" (or "pie apples" or "cider apples"), the second category being those that are widely considered too tart for eating.

Now, this, again, is nonsense.  Yes, such apples are tarter than Granny Smiths, but apart from crabapples I have yet to encounter an apple that's unpalatable when it's ripe, and when I lived in Indiana a great many of the local orchards made their cooking/pie/cider apples available for the public to purchase ... always noting carefully that they weren't intended for eating out of hand, I guess out of fear that somebody would complain the apple was too sour.

The tartness of apples comes from malic acid, while that of citrus fruit comes from citric acid.  (Grapes have both malic acid and tartaric acid, though the tartaric is present mostly in the vines.)  This is one reason that even a very tart apple isn't tart in the same way as a somewhat tart orange or grapefruit, for instance.

The idea that cooking apples are too tart to eat must stem from the timidity of the British and New England palate, I guess.  That's my theory.

Now, apples are one of the few fruits that travels well all on its own, without needing all the flavor and interest bred out of it the way supermarket tomatoes do -- so if you don't live somewhere with apple orchards, there are plenty of perfectly good apples in your supermarket, for eating or cooking.  The real appeal (ha) of local apples is the sheer variety of them: Ginger Golds, Cortlands, Braeburns, Golden Russets, Winesaps, Northern Spies, and crab apples, for instance, are all excellent user-friendly apples which lack the marketing power and supermarket presence of Granny Smith, Red Delicious, McIntosh, and Fuji -- to say nothing of the hyperbranded varieties like Jazz and Zestar.

One of the nice things about having lived both here and in Indiana is that both areas had plentiful orchards -- Indiana had far, far more, New Hampshire having been largely paved over to put up an office park -- which led to my discovering that the same variety of apple can taste different when grown in different areas.  Arkansas Black, in Indiana, was a spectacular apple -- not just crisp but crunchy, with full flavor.  Up here... meh.  This has held true for tomatoes, too -- the Cherokee Purples I've had in New Hampshire have been fairly watery and bland, compared to the deep tomato flavor of those in Indiana.

Not that New Hampshire lacks good tomatoes and apples, obviously -- but the "hey, this was great there, why isn't it here?" varieties are the ones that have stood out.

So get out there, see what they carry in your neck of the woods.  There's a huge spectrum of flavor, texture, and acidity.

There's a lot more to say about apples -- apple varieties, crab apples, apple cider, apple butter, my remixed appletini -- in the future, but I'll leave that until later.

you're never returning to the usa

We've talked about whiskey, we've talked some about vodka: let's talk about gin.

Gin is great.

... okay, I'll say more than that.

There are several kinds of gin, all of which have juniper in common as one of the primary botanicals -- though, just as Coca-Cola led to a spice-citrus combination's association with "cola" more than kola nuts themselves had, there are certain taste expectations that surround the idea of gin, and at least one spirit which is reputed to be very gin-like but doesn't actually contain juniper (and therefore can't be labeled as gin; I'm referring to Square One's rye-based Botanical Spirit), just as Coca-Cola and Pepsi no longer use real kola nuts.

Almost every gin you've ever heard of, almost every gin in your local bar or liquor store, is London dry gin, which starts with neutral grain spirits (vodka), infuses them with the juniper and other botanicals (citrus, spices, and anise-like flavorings are all common), and then distills the result.  Distilling smooths out and removes flavor, which is why vodka has so little of it -- it starts with something that has little flavor to begin with, and distills it multiple times, with most premium vodkas distilling at least three times.  In gin's case, because the infused mixture is strongly flavored, distillation acts more like a remastering, a graphic equalizing, chopping off highs and lows and smearing everything together.  Beefeater, Seagram's, Bombay, Tanqueray -- these are all London dry gins or London gins.  London and London dry are the same style -- the "dry" just means nothing, except in some cases a small amount of sugar, was added after distillation.  Not all ingredients survive distillation, so for example, a gin tinted with saffron is London rather than London dry.

The googlewhack of the gin world is another British style: Plymouth gin refers both to a distinct style of gin and to the only brand currently producing that style (which by law must be made in Plymouth, England).  The difference between Plymouth and London is not significant: Plymouth's botanicals are more pronounced, and it is the traditional gin used in cocktails, especially those associated with the British Empire and her Navy, such as Pink Gin, Gin and Tonic, and the Gimlet.

Several styles of gin are derived from British gins: sloe gin and damson gin are British-style gins infused after distillation with sloes or damsons; both are members of the Prunus family, aka the stone fruits, the same family as plums, peaches, cherries, apricots, almonds, and the Japanese ume.  Both are considerably difficult to find: several brands make sloe gin with artificial flavoring, but Plymouth (the brand) is the only manufacturer of actual sloe-infused gin widely distributed in the United States, and even it isn't that easy to find yet (not available in NH, so feel free to send me some).

Britain -- like the rest of Europe -- never developed the extensive cocktail culture that the US did, though contrary to what you're likely to hear on the Discovery Channel or some shit like that, this has nothing to do with Prohibition, American cocktail culture having been well-established in the 19th century.  Old school British gin drinks tend to have two or three ingredients, and often some practical purpose: the Gimlet, which must be made with Rose's lime cordial and not fresh lime juice (fresh lime juice is a Rickey), helped sailors combat scurvy; the Gin and Tonic made quinine-containing, malaria-fighting tonic water palatable.

Anyway, because of the lack of, for instance, a Gin Old-Fashioned in the British repertoire, Old Tom gin became popular.  Another member of the British gin family, Old Tom is sweetened more than London styles (the sweetness of which is barely noticeable) and is more palatable to many people straight.  The original Tom Collins -- gin, sweetener, and lemon juice -- used Old Tom.  Old Tom isn't in general production now; Hayman's is available in the US, but ... again, not in NH.

You think we're done, don't you?  WE'RE NOT DONE, BONKER.

Allll of these gins descend from Dutch gin, aka Holland gin, aka genever, the name under which it is most likely to be found in the 21st century.  While everything we've discussed so far starts the same way -- add things to neutral grain spirits and then distill them -- genever does not.  The Dutch popularized genever in Britain when Dutch prince William of Orange overthrew his uncle James II and became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in the 17th century.  They lost a king, gained gin ... it all worked out.

Genever is made with malted grains, like whiskey.  There are, today, two styles of genever: oude, the original genever, and jonge, which is oude genever diluted with neutral spirits (like "blended whiskey" in the US and Canada).  Both are flavored with juniper, but the use of a non-neutral base spirit makes for a very different final product.  Genever has not been commonly available in the US; Bols, the leading importer of genever, discontinued importing it for several years before a highly publicized cocktailian-friendly relaunch.

Either genever or British gin can be aged.  Citadelle, a French gin producer of London style gins, produces Citadelle Reserve, which is aged briefly in oak; as far as I know, this is the only aged British style gin on the market.  Boomsma ages its Oude genever for "at least" a year.

There is an additional style, maybe two or three, that doesn't have a name yet -- I've seen suggestions, but none of them have caught on.  The 21st century has seen a revival of interest in gin, and a number of new gins have been introduced, often playing with new botanical blends (incorporating grape flowers, lychees, or spruce, for instance); some of them reduce the juniper to an afterthought, some of them play it up big and bold, and the most common complaint from old-school gin drinkers who don't dig this is that the botanicals lack the balance of older tried-and-true formulas.  Because so much of that action is on the west coast, few of the brands are carried in the US, so I can't really comment.  I've tried some of them, mostly before moving here, and few of them seemed worth paying an extra $5, $10, or more for, especially when my go-to brands (Plymouth, Bombay, and Citadelle) do so well.

Okay.  So.  Here's the gin I have in the house at the moment:

The aforementioned Citadelle Reserve, which doesn't taste drastically different from regular Citadelle but is certainly worth trying.  The effects of oak aging are pretty predictable -- there's a smoothness and the familiar vanillin presence from the oak -- but the aging is brief enough that much of that disappears in cocktails with strong supporting casts.

Plymouth is the cocktail standard, with good reason.

Boomsma Oude genever is one of the few genevers available in this country.  In addition to it and the (much more expensive) Bols, there is Anchor Distilling's Genevieve, but I've read that it's more "genever-like" than a genuine genever, so I decided that shouldn't be my first experience with this liquor.  The Boomsma ... it smells a lot like tequila when you open the bottle ... or more to the point, it smells like "tequila and...", where something uniquely genever follows the ellipsis.  The taste is a lot like whiskey.  British gins have a thickness to their texture, almost an oiliness, which is lacking here.  This is very very good, both familiar and new.

And the green stuff?  Because of the juniper, people who don't get gin say it tastes like a pine tree.  That doesn't taste like a pine tree, man.  Clear Creek's Douglas Fir eau de vie, which infuses an eau de vie with young fir buds?  That tastes like a pine tree. It's crazy expensive (eau de vie is resource-intensive to produce) and from what I understand, the proprietor of Clear Creek doesn't like his products being used in cocktails, so this probably shouldn't be here at all.  It's good, good stuff, and saying it "tastes like a pine tree" is a little misleading; this is no Pine-Sol.  It tastes a little like being in the woods in the morning.

Also pictured: Fever Tree bitter lemon, which is like tonic water combined with lemon juice.  I used to say tonic water was the best way to experience a new gin, but I'm no longer sure of that, because of the syrupiness of most tonic waters.  Fever Tree's product, however, while not widely distributed, is now carried on Amazon, and I have Amazon Prime so I get free shipping.

Postscript: I should make a real pizza post sometime, but in lieu this was lunch today: I used tipo 00 flour from Naples for the dough, very ripe tomatoes, cheap pepperoni, and a combination of fresh and dry mozzarella and Pecorino Romano. The danger of fresh mozzarella in home pizza -- the fresher, the more dangerous -- is the extraordinarily high moisture content and the inability of a home oven to reach the temperatures that real pizzerias rely on in order to dry that moisture out without interfering with the crust.  This pizza cooked for over fifteen minutes, which is ridiculous, but the mozz made me do it; you can see that the tomatoes are more cooked as a result.  I promise, I really will make an actual pizza post at some point, probably this month -- it may be later, because I realized I would probably be pretty good at developing and curing a sausage specifically designed for sausage pizza, which would take a little while and a little money that'd have to come out of my next paycheck, in October. Like hamburgers, cola, and oranges, it's a food I care a lot about: to eat great pizza is to sit in God's lap, hands on the wheel and eyes on the divine road while He works the pedals.

(Yes that sounds all fancy, "oooh you bought flour from Italy for your fancy schmancy pizza," but pizza is CHEAP, and the per-pizza cost of this flour is under a dollar.  It's made specifically for pizza, with up to thirty different wheats blended to achieve the desired results: dough that is extensible, not elastic.  Elastic means it will snap back when you stretch it; extensible means it'll stay put without either snapping back or breaking.  That said, this is my first time using the flour, and I don't have the dough where I want it yet, though the flavor is fantastic.  This is one of those pizzas with a crust -- cornicione -- that you will want to eat.)

mahna mahna

This is muhammara, a Middle Eastern red pepper dip.  More or less.

I didn't have all the traditional ingredients in the house, and even if I did, making authentic muhammara involves more quantum smearing than cooking -- as a dish made slightly differently in different countries, it is subject to the same debate as any other regional dish (pizza, barbecue), in which every version is wrong by someone else's standards and few things are universal and yet somehow all are still recognizably the thing in question.

In this case, I didn't have any walnuts in the house, nor olive oil.  For the walnuts, I substituted Brazil nuts; the nuts are not used in great quantities in this dish anyway.  For the olive oil ... look, every Mediterranean recipe that calls for oil will call for olive oil, unless some gourmet food vendor is trying to sell you some argan oil.  This isn't because of olive oil's superiority.  It's because of its convenience in the Mediterranean.  There are times when substituting will significantly change the dish, times when it won't, and times when a change does not mean the dish will be any worse.

I didn't have olive oil.  I used pecan oil and a little corn oil.

Some versions of muhammara call for bulghur wheat; many recipes in English cookbooks will call for breadcrumbs.  I used cooked wheat berries, which are pretty close to bulghur.

So anyway.  All told, what do we have here?  Roasted red peppers, both sweet and hot; I dried the hot ones (cherry peppers) out in the oven and used them skin and all, while roasting the sweet ones conventionally and peeling them.  A total in volume equivalent to four medium-to-large bell peppers.  About a handful of cooked wheat berries, and an equal amount of roasted Brazil nuts.  A few tablespoons of pecan oil and a drizzle of corn oil.  A few tablespoons of pomegranate molasses.  Whir whir whir in the Cuisinart.

The result is sweet, peppery, tangy, with a little bite.  The flavor will keep developing for a few days, which is good cause I'm almost out of chips and the dip will develop until I pick up some more.

outlive all the septuagenarians

I don't like vodka. A quickie history of the deterioration of cocktails would go something like this: Prohibition puts some producers out of business and alters the availability of ingredients because of the different economics of the black market; the low quality of moonshine and increasing acceptability of drinking among women leads to favoring sweeter concoctions, a trend that takes off like a rocket in the 70s; faced with the difficulty of marketing an essentially odorless and tasteless product, vodka importers after WWII emphasize vodka's inherent mixability -- with no flavor, it won't clash with anything.  Before long, you have generations of drinkers who don't realize the vodka martini is a variant, not the default.  Horseshit fern bars popularize horseshit drinks designed to get you drunk without having to taste anything that might be unpalatable to a twelve year old, foreshadowing the twenty-first century's fruit punch flavored cigarettes, while horseshit sorority girls glug vodka and Diet Coke.

Vodka is more than a little ridiculous.

Good vodka is even less appropriate for cocktails, because the flavors are so subtle that almost any addition will cover them up.  It's like making a cocktail with mineral water.  This is something I'm struggling with in my remix of the appletini, which we will get to when we get to it.

I don't like tomato juice either.  Whether canned or fresh, it tastes like unseasoned soup to me, not like a beverage.  (And forget about Clamato -- although people always focus on hockey and poutine and the ou diphthong, the real divide between Canada and the US is that no one in the US has ever heard of a Bloody Caesar, which in Canada is so popular some bars will keep Clamato on the gun.)

So ... a Bloody Mary is really off my usual menu.

But from time to time I like to take a thing I don't like, and find a way I like it.  The tricky thing is to do this without violating the semantic boundaries that make the thing that thing.  If I didn't like steak, grinding it up to make a hamburger would be cheating.  If I didn't like pizza, putting pepperoni and mozzarella on a tomato sandwich would still be cheating.  Figuring out where those boundaries are is sometimes tricky.  Finding a way to make a lobster roll I liked was a challenge that took a long time, because if you do too much with a lobster roll -- if you make a bahn mi, if you season it too much, if you deep-fry lobster chunks and make a poboy -- it is simply no longer a lobster roll.

What is interesting and attractive about the Bloody Mary is that it is the only cocktail that encourages innovation and personal touches.  An Old-Fashioned with a bunch of other shit added to it isn't an Old-Fashioned anymore.  A Bloody Mary with a bunch of shit added to it is some guy's Bloody Mary.  You could argue this is true of the Pimm's Cup, I suppose, but it obtains only on the garnish level, whereas checking yes or no next to Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, bouillon, horseradish, and lemon juice is a common method of Bloody Mary personalization.

Clearly a Bloody Mary must have tomato as the principal flavor.  What is not clear is whether it must have vodka.  Yes, I know there are a million names for "a Bloody Mary made with bourbon instead of vodka" or the like, but I don't care about that.

I've had these issues in mind for a while.  You saw some Bloody Mary brainstorming on the August whiteboard.  A few days ago there was a post on Kaiser Penguin about making a Bloody Mary from tomato water -- made by pureeing tomato and straining it through a bag to get a clear liquid with strong tomato flavor, rather than the pulpy soup-like stuff -- and that solves the tomato juice texture issue for me.

So.  For my first Bloody Mary experiment, for Sunday brunch this fine Labor Day weekend: tomato water and Old Gristmill corn whiskey.  I'm not interested in all that maiden aunt horseshit with the seventeen garnishes and the skewer of blue-cheese-stuffed-olive-wrapped-in-prosciutto.  Is my name T.G.I. Chuckles McBennigans?  Do you see a bunch of shit on the walls?  Am I wearing any flair?  This is a goddamn drink.

The rim is celery root salt, from Fergus Henderson's recipe: you shred up celery root, mix it with salt, bake it until dry, and grind it back up.  It makes an amazing celery salt, great with eggs or potatoes.

4 1/2 oz tomato water

1 1/2 oz corn whiskey

squeeze of lemon juice

dash each of St Germain elderflower liqueur, Fee's whiskey barrel aged bitters, homemade cayenne vinegar

And the brunch to accompany this drink: Duck confit and fried egg, with tomato, roasted green chile (courtesy of Nikki and Bill's annual crosscontinental chile-apple exchange), and lactic corn.

I know.

You're thinking, Bill.  Bill.  Bill.  You're going on about this Bloody Mary, what in the name of the Great Gazoo is lactic corn?

Well, that's perfectly reasonable, because there's a greater than usual chance that I made it up.  You remember what we were talking about with the country ham.  What's the key chemical process in making country ham?  Right.  Lactic fermentation, the harnessing of friendly ambient wildlife in order to create and preserve flavor, which in addition to country ham is responsible for sourdough bread and sauerkraut.

Ah, there you go, you figured it out.

I immersed fresh corn from the cob in saltwater, left it on the counter for a few days until it turned sour, and boom.  Lactic corn -- crisp, tangy, deeeelightful.

As for the drink ... it's certainly better, to my tomato juice disliking palate, than the usual thing.  The ingredients I used in small amounts sort of boost and highlight aspects of tomato flavor, and unsurprisingly corn whiskey is a pretty good match for tomato water.  I don't know if we're there yet, though.

whiteboard

Whiteboard update, September.

What I want from salsa is good fresh flavor, a little bite, and for it to stick to a tortilla chip instead of forcing me to use one as a spoon.  The way I get that is by using both cooked and fresh tomatoes, which is why I usually only make homemade salsa -- for chips and salsa, anyway -- in the summer.

This particular salsa takes half of the tomatoes, by volume, and dices them; the other half is roasted in the oven, peeled, pureed, and strained to get the seeds out.  If you leave the skin on and proceed to puree and strain, you'll get a more noticeably roasted flavor -- I did that with some of the tomato puree I've frozen for the long tomato-less year.

While the tomatoes are roasting, the diced tomatoes are combined in a bowl with diced chiles (cherry bomb peppers and cayenne in this case), diced onion, a little garlic, a little Cuban oregano (it's more similar to Mexican oregano than Italian oregano, though it is a third plant altogether), and a little salt.  That's it, you're done (though it will taste much better after a night in the fridge).  Easy as pie.  The puree, thickened by roasting, binds the fresh ingredients together and gives you chip-stick-ability.

Sometimes I add an acid like lemon or lime juice.  I never add vinegar, though I know many people do.  I think the combination of tomato puree, vinegar, and corn syrup in so many commercial salsas has a lot to do with why it's been outselling ketchup for almost twenty years -- it brings the products closer together.  I want the thickness, but not ketchup-like qualities.

I add diced cucumber to salsa pretty often, but didn't in this case because it's a fairly large bowl of salsa, and if cucumbers sit in an acidic medium too long, they'll begin to pickle.  I'll add cucumbers to this when I have little enough left that I know I'll use it up in a day or two.  Also, the spicier your salsa, the better a combination the cucumbers will make.

damn thing gone wild

Cafe Brulot lamb ham.  Semi-boneless leg of lamb.  Cure: salt, pink salt, coffee, Seville orange peel, lemon peel, bourbon, sugar.

It's curing in the refrigerator.  Sometime in October it will be hung like the country ham, until sometime in the winter.  (This is a smaller cut of meat than a 30 pound ham, and doesn't need to cure all year.)