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The Children's Wine List

I was researching some cocktail bars and came across the website for Scoma's, an old San Francisco seafood restaurant near Fisherman's Wharf. Looking for the cocktail menu I found the page below (click to enlarge).

 

And I saw the Children's Wine List. 

"CHILDREN'S WINE LIST? THAT'S FANTASTIC!" I said to myself. (I always talk to myself in capslock.)

But it turns out that those are two different links for the children's menu and the wine list. Oh well. 

Still I love the idea of having a children's wine list (purple grape juice, white grape juice), a kids' beer list (root beer, ginger beer), or a children's cocktail menu with pictures and descriptions of non-alcoholic juice and fizzy drinks served in wacky vessels with elaborate garnishes.

It would be a bit like the Friendly's sundae menu or a tiki bar menu. Or it could even work as a modern day soda fountain. 

But for now we should start with a children's drink menu at a kid-friendly restaurant. Who's in? 

Molecular Garnish Fail

For some reason I thought it would be fun and interesting to make dehydrated olives. 

It turns out that not only are they ugly, they also taste disgusting, like a savory salt lick. 

And they don't get any prettier when you put them in a drink.

I also dehydrated some maraschino cherries and they came out sort of okay. 

They taste like candy, basically, and are very sticky.

So now I just have to figure out what to do with them. Ideas? 

The Olive Centipede: The Frightening New Release in the Torture Garnish Genre

(this post is a joke about this movie)

The Olive Centipede was created by Dr. Heiner, a disturbed German bartender formerly famous for his flair garnishing techniques. The evil Dr. Heiner decided to create a garnish centipede, made from sewing three olives together along the olives' digestive tracts, pit-to-pimento.

Unfortunately for the olives, the surgery was a success. A hideous, hideous success.

The poor olives tried to escape Dr. Heiner's laboratory/ultra-lounge.

But were unsuccessful.

And now Dr. Heiner wants to create an even more hideous centipede garnish made from twelve olives.

Curing Olives at Home, Part II

This post is a continuation of this one on how to brine olives at home.

My olives went from this:

To this:

To see the process, keep reading by selecting the link below.

Brining Olives at Home

For the past couple years I've been wanting to try curing my own olives after reading about it on a food blogger's website. Then when Karen Solomon's awesome book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It came out I had instructions.

I carefully searched the news for ripe olive time, and noticed that the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival runs in December through February. So I planned to hunt for olives in December at the farmer's markets.

But it turns out there was a problem with that logic. Smartly they throw an olive festival after all the olives have ripened and had weeks or months to cure in brine solution. So when I started looking around at farmer's markets in December the olives were already all gone. Curses!

But wait!

Bartenders Hitting Their Hoes

For some reason, the San Francisco Chronicle didn't choose the above title for my story that comes out Sunday August 30th. I can't think of why.

More bars growing own cocktail ingredients

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, August 28, 2009

 Victoria D'Amato-Moran grows tomatoes, Asian pears, Fuji apples, blackberries, roses and many herbs in her South San Francisco garden. Sooner or later, everything in it winds up in her cocktails.

"Except the zucchinis," she says. "I haven't figured out how to use those yet."

The Bay Area has long been home to the farm-forward cocktail movement - initially personified by Scott Beattie, then of Cyrus restaurant, who sourced produce from neighbors' fruit trees for his bar. Lately, more bartenders are doing the gardening work themselves, for the same reason that backyard gardeners seem to have appeared everywhere.

The extra effort may not save money, and the drinks may not taste noticeably fresher to the customer, but you can bet they do to the proud garden tender who grew part of your gimlet from seed.

Read the rest of my story in this Sunday's Chronicle about bartenders who also tend to gardens, including Duggan McDonnell, H. Joseph Ehrmann, Daniel Hyatt, Scott Stewart, Thad Vogler, and Lane Ford, and the bars Fairway Cocktail Lounge, Cyrus, Elixir, Alembic, Cantina, Fifth Floor, Bar Agricole, Starbelly, Sprcue, Brix, and Etoile. Gosh I'm thorough.

Also: there's a recipe for Jacques Bezuidenhout's Sagerac, a version of the Sazerac made with fresh picked sage, and Scott Stewart's Lonsdale No. 3 made with fresh basil.

Salty Drinks

Recently my book club chose the book Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. Naturally I read it with an eye toward any reference to booze.

Items of interest:

• The Celts invented the barrel. I'd always heard that it was the Romans, but the Romans conquered the Gauls, who were a Celtic tribe. I'm going to wait for confirmation on this one.
• Before corks, the Romans salted their wine to preserve it in a mixture called defrutum.
• Peat, as we know, is still used to impart smoke flavors to whisky. In northern Holland and southern Denmark it was also used to make salt. They took wet peat indoors, and dried and burned it. Then they'd add saltwater, which would absorb the salt in the peat ashes, while leaving behind the actual ash. then they'd evaporate the brine to get peat salt. I wonder if it was smoky salt.
• Ketchup has its roots as a salt-cured fish sauce. Later in America Ketchup became tomato ketchup. The first known recipe for it was from a New Jersey resident sometime before 1782.
• Great Salt Lake (as in Salt Lake City) was chosen by the Mormons as a place to settle. Salt became a big revenue generator. Mormons are terrible drinkers; I just thought this was interesting.
• The Ohlone Indians made salt just south of San Francisco Bay. After the Comstock lode was discovered, they needed a ton of salt, lots of it taken from the Bay, to use in separating the silver ore. Chinese laborers largely worked the salt ponds then. 
• Cargill is the only salt producer left in San Francisco Bay.
  
• In some cultures (not sure if this is a modern cooking thing, as I know nothing about that art) salt and sweet are considered flavors that counterbalance each other. If food is very salty, you balance it with honey or something sweet. This makes me wonder if salt rims always go on sweet cocktails. Margaritas, yes. Bloody Mary, no. Michelada, no. Salty Dog, not really. Hmm, I don't know. Feel free to add your input on this one. Maybe I should be carrying packets of salt in my wallet in case of too-sweet cocktail emergencies.

Not Every Experiment is a Success

Sometimes creative garnish experiments are a success. Sometimes, not so much.