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Like a Picnic In Your Mouth

In last week's Fine Cooking post, I listed a simple and easy recipe for a watermelon drink from H. Joseph Ehrmann of Elixir. 

The recipe is just cucumber vodka, St. Germain, watermelon, mint, lime, and agave nectar. It's pretty easy for you to make, and even easier for me to make. I can just walk 400 feet or so from my front door and have a bartender at Elixir make one for me.  

Also easy are the ways to adapt it. The post contains a non-alcoholic version and lists several spirit substitutions. Please go read it. 

A Ride-Along for the Bombay Sapphire/GQ Most Inspired Bartender Contest

On Thursday, I rode around to a bunch of bars in San Francisco with Nick Kosevich, co-owner of Bittercube and Bombay Sapphire ambassador. He was judging bartenders for the San Francisco leg of the Bombay Sapphire and GQ Most Inspired Bartender competition.

I figured I should see how it went as I am juding the national competition in Las Vegas on September 11-13. 

The competing bartenders were Victoria D' Amato-Moran, Matt Gunderson, Rosalind Holm, Michelle Lester, Joe Wyre, Brandon Clements, Evans Horn, Ronaldo Colli, Edgar Tamayo, Priscilla Young, H. Joseph Ehrmann (represented by Shea), Brandon Reim, Trip Hosley, Carlo Splendorini, Yael Amyra, Bill Kelley, Allison Webber, Daniel Dombrowski, and Andrew Marks. They represented bars Belden Taverna Restaurant, Thirsty Bear, Blue Muse, Waterbar, Spruce, Ozumo, Americano, Sheba Piano Lounge, Mandarin Oriental, Elixir, The Café, Sauce, Michael Mina, Circolo Ultralounge, Barndiva Restaurant, Jaspers Corner Tap and Kitchen, Solage, and Argus Lounge. 

I joined for just one day of the competition. I saw Shea at Elixir make a drink with black pepper, watermelon, honey, and Bombay Sapphire. 

I saw Evans Horn at Ozumo produce a spicy drink with Sapphire, Canton, Hum, Carpano, and cranberry bitters. 

At Waterbar, Joe Wyre made a drink with gin, Lillet, St. Germain, gin, and lemon juice to pair with a giant platter of oysters. 

Victoria D'amato-Moran at Belden Taverna made a cocktail with saffron-infused Bombay Sapphire, falernum, orange juice, lemon juice, and egg white. 

Brandon Reim at The Cafe made a drink with gin, maraschino liqueur, black cherry jam, gum syrup, and lemon; garnished with a thick slice of peel with orange blossom water in it to remove the egg white smell. 

And Yael Amyra whipped up one with Bombay Sapphire, vanilla bean-infused Dolin Blanc vermouth, yuzu, grapefruit, lemon, lavender and verbena-infused honey, egg white, lavender bitters, sage, and lemon verbena. 

But none of these delicious drinks won the contest. Naturally, it was the bar/bartender they visited just before I joined them:

Brandon Clements from Spruce won the contest and will be representing San Francisco in the Bombay Sapphire and GQ Most Inspired Bartender Contest in Las Vegas in September. 

Congratulations Brandon and see you in Vegas!

Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in the Oven

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

In today's post we'll look at using the oven. Following the suggestion of Don Lee on this eGullet thread, I purchased silicone cupcake cups to experiment with. They can be used in the microwave or oven and are easy to clean.

In all of my oven experiments, the procedure was the same. I filled the cupcake cup with 2 ounces of Campari, put it on a cookie sheet, and put it in the oven. Most of the time I cooked the liquid for 12-24 hours.

Dehydrating Campari at 140F and 170F (in separate trials), the liqueur would dehydrate and get clumpy. I'd then squeeze the cupcake cup a bit to break up the clumps and expose any wet spots so that it would dry completely. In the end I had a combination of powder and pebble-sized clumps of dehydrated Campari.

At 200F I had clearly reach some sort of candying state with the sugar. It looked like it was still watery with liquid, but on further inspection it was closer to a melted lollipop- very brilliant liquid sugar. On removal from the oven it formed a hard puck shaped like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

At 250F the sugar burns a bit, becoming brown in color and smelling more like molasses. It also stays liquid and forms a hard puck in the bottom of the cupcake cup.

On tasting after grinding these with a mortar and pestle, I found that the 250F Campari tasted like brown sugar or molasses with a bitter Campari twinge to it. It wasn't nearly as bad as I expected but I am not sure how I'd use it. Campari gingerbread cookies, perhaps?

(Campari cooked at 200F vs 250F)

The 200F powdered Campari had a distinctly sharp bitterness to it. The 170F Campari powder had the best and most Campari-esque flavor of all, with that great Campari brightness still present and a balance of sweetness from sugar with the heavy bitterness there too. The 140F powder was also very good, but I prefer the 170 at least on this first experiment.

Another reason to use the lower-temperature Campari powder is that the others were harder to crush up (like crushing a lollipop instead of granola). They also seem to want to stick together. After crushing, they get clumpy. (I tried reheating at a lower temperature to see if it would stop clumping, but it just formed back into a blog and I had to re-crush it again!) Clumpy clusters are probably be fine for baking purposes, but not practical for rimming cocktail glasses. 

Long story short: Oven at 170F worked best for me.

In the next post, we'll look at using the microwave to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

Solid Liquids: Dehydrating Liqueurs in a Food Dehydrator

In the process of making powdered liqueurs for future use, I've been trying to figure out the best method to get liquids into solids. I'll be comparing the microwave to the oven to the food dehydrator, using Campari as my first liqueur in all of them.

For now let's talk about the food dehydrator. I have a Nesco food dehydrator, which has a heating element and a fan in the lid. The racks in it are perforated for drying solid material, so I purchased additional solid-bottom racks made for making fruit rolls.

I poured 8 oz of Campari in one rack and turned it on. After 24 hours it was still a bit sticky. Towards 36 hours I noticed some parts that were clumpy so I broke those up to expose still-liquid parts beneath. (It turns out this helps no matter which dehydration method you use.) It might not take 36 hours to dry next time.

You can see it formed some interesting crystal patterns as it dried.

I scraped off the Campari initially with my fingers, then found a flat plastic serving spoon turned upside down made a good scraper.

I then put everything into a mortar and pestle and ground it up.

From 8 ounces of liquid I got about 3 ounces of Campari sugar. (A little less than 50% of the liquid volume has proved consistent using other methods.) That means that Campari has a ton of sugar in it. So much for my all-Campari weight loss program!

The Campari that I couldn't scrape off the plastic sheet washed off surprisingly easily with hot water, so the mess isn't bad.

All told, this method was easy to execute but can take quite a while. The dehydrator doesn't generate a ton of external heat (a concern in the summer when its hot enough already) but enough to be noticeable. Also noticeable is the sound of the fan running. 

In the next post, we'll look at using the oven to dehydrate liqueur.

The Solid Liquids Project is sponsored by Skyy Spirits. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link.

The Spread of Sugarcane in the Old World

In the last post we looked at what sugarcane is. Now we'll see where it came from and how it traveled around the world.

 

Sugarcane is a tall grass native to the region of the India and Southeast Asia. It was first domesticated in New Guinea, perhaps independently in Indonesia.

 

In 325 BC Alexander the Great’s general Nearchus said, “A reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit.”

 

Around the same time, sugar was referred to as khanda, from which we probably derive the word candy.

 

In China there are references to sugar in 286 BC. Sugar spread with Buddhism and the Buddha was even referred to as the “King of Sugarcane.”

 

Sugar loaves were probably first produced in India 2000 years ago. Sugar loaves are hardened in ceramic molds or cones from which the more liquid molasses was drained, leaving behind the dark-brown, crystalline loaf.

 

Dioscorides (circa 40—90 AD) wrote, “There is a kind of concentrated honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins.” This shows he was familiar with the crystalline form of sugar. 

 

Sugar making in Egypt probably came before Arab conquest. The Arabs were experts at irrigation and used their skills to grow sugarcane and spread it to new places. Arabs spread it to the Mediterranean, Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, and Spain. 

 

During the First Crusade (1096-99) Christians discovered Arab cane farms. Soon they were growing and transferring sugar cane to new locations.  

 

From the Canary Islands it traveled to the New World. We'll pick up sugar's spread to the West in the next post. 

 

 

The Sugar Spirit Project is sponsored by Bacardi Rum. Content created and owned by Camper English for Alcademics. For the project index, click on the logo above or follow this link. 

 

Camper in Chinese

I wrote a story for Drink, a very cool high-gloss magazine published in China.  My story was on the history and categorization of liqueurs, published in a nice four-page spread. 

Though I wrote the story quite a while ago, it was published a few months later, and then I had to wait until I was in the same country with one of the staff to get a copy. I wound up running into pal Theo Watt at the World Class contest in India for the handoff. 

The magazine is written in English and Chinese, so my story was translated. Seeing your writing in another language is oddly awesome. This has been a good year. 

And between Drink and Mixology, I've now been published in three languages including English. Sweeeet. 

Bartending Techniques Seen at World Class 2011

In what should be my final post about the Diageo World Class Global Finals, I wanted to mention a few cool tricks I saw from bartenders that might be fun to experiment with. 

(A bubbling dry ice drink from Heinz Kaiser)

Henning Neufeld of Switzerland used vodka and ice, instead of water and ice, to cool his cocktail glasses. He said this was because vodka freezes at a lower temperature than water, you could get the glasses colder.

Other bartenders used dry ice for this same purpose, but there was a lot of dry ice around. 

Heinz Kaiser of Austria stirred one of his drinks with dry ice. Dry ice, as we know, is made of carbon dioxide and sublimates from the solid state to the gas state without turning liquid in between. In doing so, this cools the cocktail without dilution, but Heinz made the additional point that the releasing CO2 gas also carbonates the cocktail.

Manabu Ohtake did his bottle service pour through flaming cyprus wood chips. He did this not just to flavor it, but because both the flaming and the aeration from pouring softens the spirit.

Torsten Spuhn of Germany, seeking to recreate the flavors of brands of bitters that wouldn't be available at the contest (Indian customs forbid the importing of any alcohol and those brands weren't available), figured out how to use Angostura bitters as a base and flavor them with other ingredients on-site to approximate what he used back home. 

Good stuff.  

Items of Interest in The Tasting Panel Magazine

I learned lots of stuff in the August issue of the Tasting Panel Magazine. I write for this magazine but didn't have a story in the current issue. Anyway:

1. Isle of Jura has a 200th Anniversary Edition, a 21 year old single malt aged in an ex-sherry cask. 
2. The Don Julio Anejo Claro that someone gave me a sip of at Tales is a real thing. For the 70th anniversary of the Don Julio being in the tequila business, they are releasing an anejo tequila that is filtere to make it clear, which supposedly will "bring back the bold agave flavor typically found in a blanco." I don't understand how you can filter flavor into a spirit, nor the point of making clear aged tequilas in general, but we'll see.  
3. There is some strange new "botanical absinthe/ green tea liqueur" called Tempest that has suspended drops of absinthe in it. Sadly low ABV of 25% but goofy fun nonetheless. 
4. Phil Adler makes a flavored ice cube inside another flavored ice cube. (Page 114 of the digital edition. )