the days can't be like the nights

It's in the 90s here. I've been making iced coffee a different way.

My Bialetti Moka (on the left; the contraption on the right is my coffee grinder) makes just enough coffee to fill an ice cube tray.  If you aren't familiar with the Moka, it's a stove-top espresso pot: you fill the bottom compartment with water, fill a cone with finely ground coffee, put it on the stove, and pressure pushes the water up through the coffee into the upper compartment.  It's not espresso.  It's not regular brewed coffee.  It's somewhere in between.

I sweeten that coffee with Steen's cane syrup, freeze it in the tray, fill a glass with frozen sweetened coffee cubes, and pour milk and cold unsweetened tea over.  The tea is very strong -- three times as many tea bags as the Luzianne box recommends.

followups

When you're an English major, you meet a lot of assholes.  There's always somebody in the classroom because they want to know The Rules, they want to know how to identify what other people are doing wrong.  They love made-up idiotic rules like whether or not to split an infinitive, end a sentence with a preposition, or use a serial comma, and if they're really rotten they love William Safire too.  They want to be able to pick apart somebody's post on the internet.  They want to memorize lists of mistakes, because if someone violates some made-up rule of grammar concocted by some 19th century hobbyist or God help us Strunk & White, nothing they say needs to be listened to, and nobody need ever be the boss of us.

When you're in religious studies, you meet a lot of assholes.  There's always somebody there who wants to shore up their beliefs or find the errors in others'.  There's always somebody there who just wants a leg up on everybody else morally, who's scared of any authority they don't own a piece of.  They memorize a lot of lists of mistakes.

When you're a professional writer, you meet a lot of assholes.  Small-minded busybodies who don't understand the difference between a style guide and actual rules of language, who crow about some imagined error they've found in a published book as though that failure, real or imagined, can somehow be turned into their victory.  They love mistakes.

When you're a cook ...

I've met a lot of assholes.

There's always somebody eager to thrash somebody else for putting ketchup on a hot dog, which is a good litmus test for people who actually know anything about food vs people who just love the idea that there's always a one-right-way to do a thing.  There's always somebody who'll recoil at the idea of using Maker's Mark to make a cocktail -- "that's a sipping whiskey" -- which usually means they don't know anything about cocktails and probably not a lot about whiskey.  Or worse, what they do know is just rote lists of What Other People Do Wrong, an imagined grammar that, because it can be imagined, is then treated as though it's real, as though it's something no one has any control over -- some law of physics recently discovered in the Oscar Mayer Frankfurter Laboratory, where innate incompatibilities between ketchup and hot dogs have just been observed.

For any pursuit, for any body of knowledge, there are people whose desire to understand extends no further than their love of finding fault with others.  All they want is to attain a point where, no matter what they do, at least they know that somewhere out there, they can identify someone who's doing it worse -- even if they have to invent the metric to prove it.

That sort of nonsense is one of many reasons I don't read cooking message boards or very many blogs.  The pursuit of expertise is flypaper for assholes, it's just how it works.  There will always be people motivated not by the thing itself, but by some imagined value possessed by the authority that expertise confers -- the preacher who loves the pulpit more than he loves God.  I want to never be that; I want to never pretend to tolerate it.

Point being, hopefully this blog never does that.  I'm particular about definitions: barbecue is not cooked on a grill, simply because that's not what the word barbecue means.  A slider is a small thin hamburger on a small bun, with onions -- that's what the word means, that's why the word exists.  You can't use "slider" to mean "a lobster tail on a medium-sized bun," not because there is anything wrong with a lobster sandwich but because it infringes on the usefulness of the word slider.  A martini is a gin drink, in a cocktail glass -- not any old drink that happens to be poured in such a glass.  That doesn't mean you can't have your sour apple drinks.  It does mean an appletini is a dumb name for a drink, and part of a larger trend of dissolving the semantic edges of the martini.  I see a clear difference between the things I get grumpy about and that other asshole behavior -- hopefully I'm not just rationalizing it.  I'm less concerned with preventing people from doing things I find unpalatable and more concerned with the way good things die off: when "barbecue" is appropriated to mean "grilled," it becomes harder to find barbecue restaurants outside of the Triangle and the South because the customer base isn't likely to appreciate what exactly a barbecue restaurant is or why it's more expensive than a burger joint; the trends which culminated in the appletini destroyed a lot of good drinks along the way, and made it very difficult or impossible to find their ingredients.  That last part is the key: my cocktails do not prevent you from having your appletini, but your appletini prevented me from having my cocktails for a long time.  There is a difference between your right to take a nap and your right to take a nap in my driveway.

Onward.  I actually opened the blog to post two quick follow-ups:

1: Corned beef.  I finally got a chance to compare the pink corned beef (salt + curing salt) and the grey corned beef (just salt).  The main difference is that the grey corned beef is much much saltier.  I mean, it's saltier than bacon.  It's like country ham, maybe saltier.  I probably should have soaked it longer to get some of the salt out, but either way -- it's much much saltier than the pink.

2: Creme fraiche, and thus creme fraiche ice cream.  Unfortunately I have discovered there is a pronounced drop in quality when you use ultrapasteurized heavy cream (such as is sold in supermarkets) instead of pasteurized cream to make the creme fraiche.  It took longer to thicken, it never became quite as thick, and the flavor, texture, and tanginess were all ... inferior.  This is a particular pain in the ass because even though I live in a former dairy town, I can only get pasteurized cream at Whole Foods in another state, and it isn't the sort of thing you can stock up on and keep in the pantry.

you idiot, we've all got swords

I have a lot of work backed up, but if I don't update the blog even when I'm busy, the blogs I have in mind back up indefinitely ... I have blogs on white whiskey, pistachio oil, and camelina oil that I've been meaning to get to all year, for instance.  And ramps and rhubarb will be at the end of their seasons by the time I tell you about them!

I really want to talk about bitter components of cocktails, so let's see if I can get that written.

First of all: bitterness is one of the most important elements of cocktails, as a class of beverages (I'm not saying it's the most important element of each cocktail individually).  The earliest cocktails were a spirit with the addition of a little sweetness and a little bit of bitters, and you can think of this as being like a steak seasoned with a little salt and pepper -- as opposed to a more elaborately prepared and sauced steak such as develops later, or a sandwich of processed reformed texturized meat product and Velveeta such as you're getting from that bottle of "margarita mix."

You can take any base spirit and make an Old-Fashioned, for instance.  Modern bars tend to make these wrongly, very wrongly, if they're not cocktail revival bars -- they add a bunch of fruit garnish and soda water.  Wisconsin has its own weird Old-Fashioned tradition using brandy (and again, I think soda water), which is probably best thought of as like the "biscuit" divide between England and the US, where one word is used for two very different things.

A real Old-Fashioned, without further descriptor, should start with a little sugar dissolved in a few dashes of bitters at the bottom of a rocks glass.  The bitters shouldn't be quite enough to dissolve the sugar; add a little ice water (a spoonful or less) to help out.  Follow that with a shot or two of bourbon.  That's it.  You can add an ice cube, but one way or the other it's going to be a small-looking drink.  That's because it's mostly whiskey, for heaven's sake.  You don't need a big glass full of whiskey.  I add a cherry sometimes -- a Montmorency or Balaton cherry that I've jarred with whiskey, sugar, absinthe, or maraschino.  No orange slices with plastic swords.

A tequila Old-Fashioned, brandy Old-Fashioned, applejack Old-Fashioned, even a gin Old-Fashioned, those all work just fine.  What's nice is that you can play around with what type of bitters you use, and these days you have a lot of options:

In a lot of ways, Chartreuse's Elixir Vegetal is the oldest form of bitters.  It dates from the early 1600s, and even the modified recipe in 1737 is older than any other bitters out there.  Elixir Vegetal is 142 proof (71% alcohol) and extremely fragrant -- a few drops make themselves known in your drink, and will even alter the character of a drink already containing Chartreuse.  It's wonderful stuff.  Elixir Vegetal served as the basis for Chartreuse liqueur later in the 18th century, which is weaker, lower in alcohol, and sweeter, and therefore suited to drinking in larger amounts.  This is essentially the relationship between bitters and potable bitters or amari (plural of amaro), which I'll work my way towards in a little minute.

Later bitters developed in the same commercial niche as Elixir Vegetal -- as the spice trade and the Age of Discovery/Colonial Era brought new ingredients to the market in quantity, making tinctures was a way to preserve and combine their flavors, while appealing to the Medieval mindset that said everything wrong with you could be cured with the right combination of roots and leaves.  Bitters were sold as nerve tonics, pep tonics, snake oil, and because most combinations of spices heavily concentrated in alcohol will help with hangovers and nausea, and because the placebo effect is assisted by sensory data like strong flavors, they worked well enough to stay in business before bartenders coopted the medicine show.  This is the same scene out of which sodapop developed, except that soda was also able to take advantage of refined sugar, which at the time was new, cheap, and revolutionary.  (The appearance of cheap refined sugar is as important to the story of how today's world of food originated as the appearance of the guitar and the radio are to the story of today's music.)

Today, bitters are, by law, considered too bitter to drink straight -- if the FDA rules that they're too palatable, they can't be sold as bitters and must be classed as liquor.  This is why in many states you can buy bitters at places without liquor licenses, like supermarkets.  Bitters are basically tinctures, using a high-proof spirit to extract flavors from herbs, spices, citrus rind, and some bittering agent or other (such as gentian, which is also used as the flavoring for Moxie; or cinchona bark, the source of quinine, which flavors tonic water and vermouth).  The default sort of bitters, when someone just says "add a dash of bitters," is Angostura aromatic bitters.  For a long, long time, Angostura was the only kind of bitters you could get if you didn't live in a part of the country where Peychaud's was distributed.

And to be honest, Angostura is fantastic.  If you had to pick only one bitters, it would be the one to pick, unless you make a shitload of Sazeracs.  Angostura is spicy and complex, and attempts to make homemade aromatic bitters ("aromatic bitters" is the generic term for bitters like Angostura) rarely live up to Angostura.  Furthermore, the bitters market exploded in the second half of the last decade, and is continuing to explode as we speak, but the aromatic bitters offered by small companies are in my experience never better than Angostura, and always more expensive.  Now, that doesn't mean they're not worth buying.  They may have a distinct difference that makes them handy, or may simply appeal to you more -- Fee Brothers makes an aromatic bitters that is aged in whiskey barrels, which is VERY nice, though pricey (and the quality has varied from year to year).  But for my bar, I go to those small companies not for their takes on aromatic bitters, but for bitters no one else offers.

But first, Peychaud's.  

When Prohibition hit, few bitters survived.  Imagine trying to keep A1 going during a worldwide decade-long ban on meat.  Cocktails as we know them have never caught on significantly outside of the United States, and the few 20th century cocktails of international origin tend to originate at expatriate bars -- or in the case of the Negroni and the Americano, they come out of the Italian tradition of drinking amari with wine or vermouth, which overlaps with but is not the same as the American cocktail genre.  So the one market for them suddenly closed down for ten years, and everybody had to find other jobs.  

There was plenty of demand for bootlegged whiskey and bathtub gin, but keeping bitters alive during Prohibition was just too hard.  Angostura made it, Peychaud's made it, and a couple of others might have but didn't make it much further -- because American drinking culture started to change, and before long bars were keeping a dusty bottle of Angostura on the shelf just for bartenders' stomachaches and the occasional Manhattan.

Peychaud's survived in New Orleans, though, because they're necessary for the Sazerac.  Peychaud's bitters are deep purplish-red, a little more viscous than Angostura, and taste more medicinal than spicy.  The bitterness is like when an uncoated aspirin starts to dissolve on your tongue.  But a little sugar dissolved in Peychaud's, in the bottom of a glass that's been "rinsed" with absinthe or Herbsaint (add a few drops of absinthe to the glass, swirl it around until it's coated the whole of the surface), becomes a Sazerac with the addition of a shot of rye whiskey and a twist of lemon, and the complexity of the rye with the huge number of botanicals in the Peychaud's and absinthe leads to an incredible drink.

Again, this is not your frozen margarita mix.  This is a strong drink with deep complicated flavor.  You do not do shots of this, just like dry-aged steak doesn't come in a paper bag from Krystal.  Quality drinking, drinking for big boys and girls, grown-up tippling, is not about hiding the liquor.

Peychaud's are generally difficult, next to impossible, to find outside of the United States, and because the cocktail revival has been a global phenomenon, there's been a demand for continental Sazeracs -- for which purpose the Bitter Truth has developed Creole Bitters, a Peychaud's riff.  Naturally, right now Creole Bitters aren't available in the US.  Wouldn't you know it.

Before Prohibition, there were all sorts of other kinds of bitters.  Celery bitters.  Peach bitters.  Orange bitters -- in fact, the Martini was originally a bittered drink, not this ridiculous bullshit "gin with a whisper of vermouth" that the 1960s popularized.  The Martini, using two to four parts gin to one part dry vermouth and a splash of orange bitters, is a descendant of the Martinez, which used equal parts Old Tom gin and sweet vermouth, with bitters and maraschino.  The Martini has wandered like some ragabond immortal through cocktail history, pushed around and blown back and forth by whatever the prevailing trends have been -- first a vermouth drink with maraschino and bitters, later a gin drink with just the bitters, soon enough a gin drink with damn near nothing else, and the next thing you know a goddamn glass of vodka tipsying some leisure suited car salesman at a fern bar, and eventually appletinis, chocolate martinis, and that damn margarita mix again, in a cocktail glass without salt, calling itself a cowboytini.  But then slowly it came back, and two of the important drinks of the cocktail revival have been the 50-50 (half gin, half vermouth) and the Earl Grey MarTEAni, using Earl Grey infused gin.

Orange bitters were the first bitters to be revived, by Gary Regan, who was doing this cocktail revival thing long before your local had that Aperol Flip with locally sourced rosemary syrup.  You can get them now from Fee's, from The Bitter Truth, from a lot of the smaller companies, and notably, from Angostura.  I like Regan's (which I'm used to, having had them for years before others were available) and Angostura's the best, but I've yet to have a bad bottle of orange bitters.

The bitters revival has led to all sorts of flavors of bitters -- mint bitters you could add to a julep or mojito (I don't know what else you'd do with them, mint is tricky), other citrus bitters (lemon, grapefruit, lime), chocolate-chile bitters (from multiple companies, at that), the celery bitters I've already talked about, lavender bitters, maple bitters, you name it.  I have some green walnut bitters I made myself, and have experimented with kola bitters (without notable success so far), and infused absinthe with Sichuan peppercorns and bitter orange peel to make an absinthe/bitters amalgam for absinthe-rinsed drinks.  The best way to try any of these out, I think, is in an Old-Fashioned -- though if you really want to experience a new bitters, using it as the base liquor is the way to go (in some variation of 1 oz bitters, 1 oz syrup, 1/2 to 3/4 oz lemon juice, 1/2 oz other liquor, the proportions of the Trinidad Sour).  This will definitely bring to light any flaws in the bitters' balance, however -- it's a testament to Angostura and Peychaud's that they can stand up to being consumed in that sort of quantity, despite not being formulated to do so.

But when you add that much syrup to bitters, you're basically making an amaro a la minute.  And that's a good transition ...

Amari traditionally come from Italy, where there are dozens of popular brands, most of which are rarely or never exported.  Campari is the best-known amaro, even though it isn't really one.  I don't know why it isn't one, I've just been told it isn't one.  I don't really care that it isn't one, for that matter: "potable bitters" is an unwieldy term, and so is "amari plus Campari," so I'm going to use "amaro" to mean "any bitter liqueur."  So there.

The amari can be consumed straight, unlike non-potable bitters.  They're generally -- generally! -- weaker than bitters, lower-proof, and have quite a lot of added sugar.  They're still too bitter for most people to drink straight, and for that matter too sweet to drink straight except in small sips.  The simplest way to drink them would be with club soda or white wine -- Campari with white wine is a Bicyclette, Campari with vermouth is an Americano.  Campari with Buffalo Rock southern spice ginger ale is just flat-out delicious, whatever you call it.

The Negroni, though, is better known: equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin.  It's an excellent drink, the one that introduced me to Campari, and it works pretty well for other amari -- certainly with Cynar and Aperol it works, with Averna somewhat less so.  It's one of the drinks I try out when I make homemade amari, to test the balance and flavors.  (To date I've made two amari: walnut-kola and rhubarb-orange.  I have a raspberry-grape idea in mind, but we'll see, we'll see.  It needs fox grapes and black raspberries, and maybe port.  Okay that's basically the idea, if you want to try it on your ownsome -- steep black raspberries and fox grapes in vodka, bitter the result with gentian or cinchona, season with spices and violets, add sugar and ruby port to taste.)

Now, if you look at the Negroni, you notice after a while that it is similarly proportioned to the Corpse Reviver #2, which is equal parts gin, Lillet Blanc, orange liqueur, and lemon juice, in an absinthe-rinsed glass.  The resemblance isn't immediately apparent, but if you want to craft your own balanced cocktails, you should think of things not only in their specifics but according to their class.  Gin isn't just gin, it's a base liquor.  That doesn't mean every gin drink will work as a rum drink, but it does mean that subbing rum for gin makes more sense than subbing vermouth for gin.

Amari are as sweet as liqueurs, and you can use them as the sweet element in drinks -- my many many drinks based around the proportions of the Shaddock (equal parts genever, Chartreuse, Aperol, lemon) rely on the potential interchangeability of amari and liqueurs, for instance.  Some liqueurs blend in well -- St Germain, Canton -- while others have a pronounced enough flavor that you want to be sure of compatibility (maraschino, creme de violette), and others are strong enough to take over subtler elements of the drink (Campari, allspice dram).

I don't like Cointreau, the go-to orange liqueur for most people, very much.  I suppose it's my general indifference to brandy again.  I use Creole Shrubb for the orange element in drinks calling for Cointreau, but lately I've run out of it and have been using Aperol -- which adds bitterness along with the sweet, but not an overwhelming amount of it.

But my point is, if you think of the Cointreau in a Corpse Reviver not just as Cointreau, not just as orange, but as sweet -- then the resemblance to a Negroni becomes clearer, and clearer still when you realize that Lillet Blanc and sweet vermouth are in the same class:

"Fortified wines" are wines to which distilled liquor has been added in order to slow down aging by bringing up the alcohol content.  That description would include sherry, port, and marsala, but for cocktail purposes we're generally talking about the bittered fortified wines, of which vermouth (named for wormwood) is best known.  Vermouth isn't just fortified with alcohol, it's flavored with herbs and spices, including bittering agents.  There are multiple kinds of vermouth, but you're nearly always dealing with dry or French vermouth, and sweet or Italian vermouth.  You can certainly switch them out to create new drinks -- the Martinez becomes the Martini -- but they're not otherwise interchangeable.

They are in the same class, though, you dig, and they're not alone.

And by the way, fortified wines should be kept in your refrigerator.  Vermouth will go bad.  Everyone thinks it won't, but it's like the rancid nut conundrum: most Americans are so used to the taste of rancid nuts that they don't recognize them as rancid, and people are so used to the taste of vermouth that's been sitting in a cabinet for three years that they don't recognize that it doesn't taste the way it did when it was fresh.

Lillet is a French brand of bittered fortified wine, what the French call a quinquina -- meaning they use cinchona, aka quinine.  Until 1986, the Lillet to pay attention to was Kina Lillet, which is what James Bond used instead of vermouth in his "Vesper martini," and what the Corpse Reviver #2 used.  Kina Lillet was notably bitter.  Not like Campari, but more bitter than your standard vermouth.  Unfortunately, in 1986 -- the same year as New Coke -- Lillet reformulated its products for the "modern market" (which at the time was embracing margarita mix, "vodka martinis," etc), and Kina Lillet became Lillet Blanc.  Now, Lillet Blanc is still good.  But it's a lot less interesting than Kina apparently was.

You can't get Kina Lillet, but you can now get Cocchi Americano, which numerous people have compared to their stocks of original Kina Lillet.  It's available in the US as of this year.  It makes a noticeably better Corpse Reviver #2 than Lillet Blanc does.  The CR2 was already a great drink, but with Cocchi it's a fantastic drink.

Also in that photo?  Bonal, another new French offering as of 2010.  Bonal is gentian-based instead of quinine-based -- like Moxie wine.  Which brings us back to this "the Negroni looks like a Corpse Reviver #2" issue.

Ignore the absinthe in the CR2, and you're looking at equal parts gin, sweet, fortified wine, and lemon.  The Negroni is equal parts gin, sweet, and fortified wine.  Structurally, the difference is just the lemon and that absinthe rinse -- and while the absinthe rinse is critical for a CR2, we can ignore it for the purposes of building a new drink from the CR2's structure.

A drink of equal parts gin, Campari (sweet), Bonal (fortified wine), and lemon?  That's an excellent drink.  It's like a Negroni, but less sweet, since the Campari is now cut by a shot of lemon juice -- but because the Bonal brings more bitterness to the table than sweet vermouth does, you don't lose as much bitterness as you do sweetness, so you end up with something bracing, tart, very refreshing, great for summer.

All right.  I think that covers the basic layout of bitterness in cocktails.

followup

A note on the Fletcher Christian - out of St Germain tonight, I used maraschino instead, and thought I'd use gin instead of the genever.  At that point, all the ingredients but the celery bitters are things you already know work together.

It's a very good drink with maraschino and gin -- but it's definitely better with St Germain and genever.  What's missing in the gin version (because I think that's the more important substitution) is the maltiness of the genever, which really makes it sing.

But the important thing is: it's now slightly less difficult to come by the ingredients to make the drink (particularly if we consider the Elixir Vegetal to be optional).

that's what I want

This post is about stuff I got for free.  Check out the free stuff policy here.

If you follow developments in the cocktail world, then you're aware of the explosion of bitters, the revival of defunct or obscure ingredients like Creme Yvette and genever, and at long last the availability of non-rotgut unaged whiskeys.  I strongly suspect in the next couple years you'll be hearing about the creation of "distinctly American" spirits.  Cocktails have always been a Tex-Mex/Japanese pizza sort of fusion of European spirits (gin, liqueurs, etc), medicinal products (tonic water, bitters), and citrus, in a uniquely American combination.  Some of those spirits have settled down and relocated on our soil -- bourbon and American rye are certainly much more common in cocktails than Scotch or Irish whiskey, there are distinctly American styles of gin, and distilleries like Prichard's and Tuthilltown Spirits have reclaimed rum distilling, once the most common distilled product in the US.

But what we're going to see is spirits that aren't just "American gins" or "American whiskeys," they're new things altogether.  Some will be base spirits, some will be liqueurs, I don't know.  Some of them will probably target the frat boy market and position themselves as "the American Jagermeister" or "the American peachtree schnapps."

Thankfully, Root hasn't.

Root is inspired by root beer, and there's probably nothing more American than that -- a beverage made with American ingredients, popular in this country in one form or another for a few hundred years.  

This isn't a root beer schnapps: the sweetness is very low, and the proof is base-liquor-strength. 

Root beer was originally made with sassafras, which Root lacks because of an FDA ban.  Now, any southerner knows you can get around that ban -- the ban is because of safrole, a potentially carcinogenic component in sassafras, but Pappy's Sassafras Tea Concentrate is sold in supermarkets throughout the south, and is safrole-free.  Pour that into an empty two-liter bottle, add 3/4 cup of sugar and a little yeast, fill with water, and cap, and in a few days you have root beer.

But I assume Art in the Age has a reason for avoiding sassafras in Root -- maybe whatever Pappy's does to get rid of the safrole isn't an option for them, I don't know -- and in any case, the product doesn't suffer from the lack.  The botanicals they do use -- birch bark, lapsang souchong, orange and lemon peel, allspice, anise, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, wintergreen, and spearmint -- do an excellent job of creating a deep, complex root beer flavor.  I admit I was more than a little gratified to see that they're using lapsang souchong, a smoked black tea which has been an ingredient I've occasionally included in my homemade root beer and colas for five or six years now.  (I also use Szechuan peppercorns pretty often, Root folks, if you're reading this.)

The flavor is just unparalleled.  Nevermind the fact that there is no similar product on the market to compare this to -- there is very little out there that's this complex.  One of the things we like about gin, after all, is that it's not just juniper vodka: it has a flavor that emerges from a dozen other botanicals in support of that juniper.  It's more interesting.  It's a muffuletta instead of a bologna sandwich.  

As a result of the pure sugar cane juice they distill for the base, it has just a little sweetness -- like rum.

It's a challenge to mix, though.  The Root website has plenty of recipes from bartenders, and it mixes well with, say, ginger beer (though strong ginger covers up much of the spice in Root).  But it's easy to hit a misfire when you try something new with it.  Now, I expect with those "distinct American spirits" I mentioned we'll see, this is going to keep happening -- you can't slot this simply into an existing niche, the way you can take a new orange liqueur and make a Corpse Reviver #2 with it, or a new bitters and make an Old-Fashioned.  Because it's so strong, mixing it with another base liquor can make a pretty hot drink, if you don't bring something else in to balance it out (it does go well with rye or Bulleit, though).  

I'm looking forward to trying it with Bonal or Cocchi (see upcoming post on bitters).  For the moment, my biggest successes with it have been Hot Buttered Root -- just hot buttered rum with Root instead of rum, which is a fantastic winter drink -- and Root on the rocks with a little ginger liqueur.  I'm finding I'm not crazy about it with acidic flavors, so a Root sour didn't work for me, and I haven't tried it in variants of the Trinidad Sour or Shaddock, drinks that I try with most new things if I can make them fit.

It goes well with Malta sodas, but because Malta is so sweet, so's the resulting drink, and I keep feeling like that destroys the point of Root's low-sweetness.

I've toyed with a Manhattan variant, with various proportions of rye, Punt e Mes, and Root ... just haven't found a combination that sings yet, and I only have two ryes to choose from.

The Root site includes a cocktail by Phoebe Esmon at Chick's Cafe that uses fig puree, and that has me intrigued -- when figs come into season, I'm going to use some of the last of my Root playing around with those flavors, and then hope that Root is carried in New Hampshire soon ... because while it's challenging to play with, I like the challenge, and hell, there's nothing wrong with drinking it straight.

me and betty ross love green nuts

Green almonds.

Last year I picked up some green walnuts to tinker with, the notable end results of which were nocino, walnut bitters, and walnut-kola amaro.  The thing about green walnuts -- "green" with nuts means "immature, unripe, still developing," like with tomatoes -- is that you can't just eat them.  You have to either use them as a flavoring -- using them to infuse wine or liquor -- or laboriously process them to remove the inedible bits and the tannins.  This is, you know, basically why we leave them on the tree most of the time.

But green almonds are a horse of a different color, or a ... some different animal ... of the same color.  They're another thing.  Almonds are a member of the prunus family, like apricots, cherries, peaches (and their naked siblings the nectarines), and plums.  If you open up an apricot, the pit is almond-shaped -- so is the kernel inside a peach pit.  Not a coincidence.

Green almonds are in season in April and May, generally.  Depending on where you live, you may be able to find them at Whole Foods or Trader Joes, farmers markets (in California, where nearly all American almonds are grown), or Middle Eastern markets.

You can see in this superlarge photo especially -- which you may need to click through to really see -- that in a green almond we have a crispy fruit surrounding the kernel that will eventually become the nut.  There are two stages of green almond: the gelatinous stage, when the kernel is wet and juicy inside and the surrounding fruit is edible; and the later stage, when the kernel is firmer and the fruit can no longer be eaten.  These are from towards the end of the gelatinous stage.

The fruit is firm and somewhat tart -- not enough to make you pucker or anything, but tart.  It tastes nothing like an almond -- it tastes a bit like grass or alfalfa sprouts, a lot like snap peas, but with that tartness.  It's a little mouth-drying, so the wet kernel in the middle is welcome.  Traditionally green almonds are eaten cut in half and dipped in salt or sugar, which rounds out the flavors.

You can cook 'em.  They're served braised with lamb sometimes, and I've frozen some for that purpose at some later date -- it may be lamb season right now, but it isn't braising weather (despite the dips back down into the cold lately), and besides, I've got that leftover turkey.

Cooked, the green color quickly turns a sort of khaki-olive, and the raw-vegetable taste naturally turns to cooked-vegetable.  

Again a big photo.  Trying to show you these close-up.  Those are fried green almonds with salt and a little sumac.  Just straight-up fried in a little hot oil, and man, they are pretty damn awesome.  Addictive like a bar snack.

I'm candying some of them -- whole, pieces, and just kernels -- to see what happens.  Might could pickle some.

And this happened too:

Malted creme fraiche ice cream, fried green almond kernels -- still warm, which is why the ice cream started melting while I grabbed the camera! -- a little Lyle's golden syrup, and a little sumac.  Terrific.

But I better tell you how to make the ice cream.

You remember I made creme fraiche to go on my homemade bagels.  That's real simple and much cheaper than buying creme fraiche at the store: bring a cup of heavy cream up to warm on the stove, dump it in a container with a spoonful of cultured buttermilk, and let them sit in a warm place (like the stovetop) for at least overnight, and maybe a day and a half.  The culture will thicken the cream, and you want it fairly thickened, like melted ice cream or thin yogurt.  Refrigerate it to bring it cool again.

Now, the thing about creme fraiche as opposed to most other cultured dairy products -- yogurt and buttermilk and all -- is that it still has all that butterfat, which means it's whippable, just like cream.  (Keep that in mind for frosting your carrot cakes and hummingbird cakes.)

Take equal amounts chilled creme fraiche and heavy cream -- this is my preferred ratio, taste-wise, but do whatever you like -- and whip them with sufficient sugar (it should taste a little sweeter than you want) and a few hefty spoonfuls of malted milk.  Freeze.  Super-simple.

cream pies and seltzer bottles

When I'm cooking for just me, any gravy I make tends to be pretty rustic.  There might be some shreds of meat in it, or displaced bits of stuffing that fell out of the bird while roasting.  And it's usually made the day after the bird cooked, which a) makes it easy to separate the fat out from the drippings and b) means I have some turkey stock to work with, which likely simmered all night.

Scoop the fat off the drippings and fond.  Make a roux with some of it and some flour in a pan.  Cook some thin sliced onions and ramps in the roux.  Add the drippings and turkey stock.  Simmer for five or six minutes.  Add a little cream.  Season with salt and summer savory.

Rustic, but ridiculously flavorful, and whatever's left will go into a pot pie.

Yeah, I said ramps.  More on ramps coming up, and fiddleheads, rhubarb, and green almonds.  It's spring!