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Ginger Beer Gives a Buck more Bang

My latest story in the San Francisco Chronicle (from Sunday's paper) went online today. Read it here.

Ginger beer gives a buck more bang

Camper English, Special to The Chronicle

Friday, July 24, 2009

When ginger ale or beer is mixed with citrus in a drink, it is - or more accurately, was - known as a buck.

Early cocktail books list recipes for the gin buck or London buck cocktail, and variations of rum bucks were called the Shanghai buck, Jamaica buck or Barbados buck, depending on the type of rum used. If you squeeze your lime garnish into a Dark 'n' Stormy, you've got a rum buck.

"The buck is one of those cocktails that works with every base spirit," says Erick Castro, beverage director at Rickhouse, the new Financial District bar. "Most cocktails don't work with gin and scotch and vodka and rum."

Read more about bucks and mules and get the recipe for Erick Castro's Kentucky Buck here.

Still Creamy?

This site features expiration information for food and more importantly, beverages.

StillTasty.com will tell you how long that Amarula cream liqueur will last once it's opened. Also, lime cordial, Margarita mix, mescal, port, sake schnapps, tonic water, and vermouth.

In Peru, They Just Call it Punch

With Pisco Sours all the rage these days, people have been seeking out real Peruvian bitters to dash atop the foam of their drinks instead of Angostura. I found them available for sale in the US at PeruCooking.com.

The Amargo Chuncho bitters have the cinnamon/allspice flavors of Angostura, but with some bright cherry notes to them as well.

I also got some instant Pisco Sour and Pisco Punch mix from the site. Both mixes are made with freeze-dried ingredients: sugar, lemon juice, and egg whites in the sour mix, and pineapple, orange, and lemon juices in the punch mix. (The online description says it contains sugar and gum Arabic as well, but the package does not.)

The advantage to these mixes is that all you need is booze to make them. The disadvantage is that they don't taste like fresh juices because you're not using fresh juices. But both of them taste just fine.

 

I made the Pisco Sour first. The directions specify a blender, so I used it. Blending the mix with pisco and ice/water creates a nice foamy head on the drink, but it does lack the gooey mouthfeel of fresh egg whites. The foam on top of the drink stays in foam form rather than sinking into the drink- at least at the rate at which I consumed it.

Then I made the Pisco Punch. For this one, you just blend it with water and pisco (so you could shake it if you have a gigantic shaker) and then add it to an ice-filled glass. The drink has an oddly interesting flavor that I can't quite identify, but that I do quite like.

 

For both of the mixes, both of which are imported from Peru, it's funny that they don't actually say "Pisco Sour" or "Pisco Punch" mix- instead the word "Pisco" is just stuck on a sticker. I guess that's because in Peru, they just call it punch.

Glossy Booze: Early March Edition

Glossy Booze is an occasional round-up of cocktails and spirits stories in magazines.

Imbibe Magazine (March/April) has features on smoked cocktails, "coffee happenings across the globe," moonshine, beer and food pairing, drinking in Philadelphia, and Riesling.

7X7 (February) has a story on pizza-pairing with wine.

Bon Appetit (March) is full o' booze this month, with a recipe for Toby Maloney's cocktail Maloney's Irish Cream, the difference between mixologist and bartender, songs for a cocktail party, recommended absinthes, a feature on vodka, and a recipe for the Orange Aperol Sun.

GQ (March) has a quick mention of Averna and Riedel stemless wineglasses. In the February issue there's a brief mention of winter white wines, Red Bull's soda, and a recommended $11 bottle of wine.

Esquire has a story on box wine.

Details' Rob Willey writes about investing in wine.

Playboy (March) has a mention of Snake & Jake's Christmas Club Lounge, a dive bar in New Orleans.

Sunset Magazine (March) has a story on five sake standouts and pairings with it, a weekend in Dry Creek Valley, and bargain wines to bring to parties.

Better than Heroin

I generally call bulls**t on all hangover cures and preventatives but this is a hangover preventer (okay technically it prepares the body to process the toxins it is about to receive on a night out) that helps heroin growers not grow heroin.

Okay what? There is a beverage called Alibi "Active Pretox Drink" (granted, an awesome name) that has milk thistle and ginkgo and "herbal extracts" and citrus stuff. It is sold in England.

But for the new pomegranate flavor the company donates money from each can sold to the POM354 program, which helps replace heroin-producing opium poppies in Afghanistan with pomegranate plants. Each can you drink prevents one heroin injection, so the more you pretox the more addicts you save.

Or something.

Wounds, Rimmed with Salt

Can't get elected to the senate? Luckily you can always fall back on margarita mix! At least that's what Bob Schaffer is doing in Colorado. [link via Gawker via The Atlantic]

Watch the video here.

Fancy Finds

I checked out the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco this weekend, so see what was new and fancy. The huge exhibition took over both the North and South halls of the Moscone Center. There were hundreds and hundreds of tables, the majority of which seemed to be hawking olive oil and vinegar, with a lot of mustard, jam, specialty salts, cheeses, honey, and barbecue sauces.

Since there were so many sauces, it was difficult to spot the booze products but I did my best. Here are some things I found:

• Aloe juice and water- there were many stands selling this. I think I've only had one cocktail with aloe juice in it before, a couple years ago at a Chopin Vodka event. I think they sell it at my local Latin grocery, so I'm not sure if this is something new at all.
• The Volcano vaporizing kit was a big attraction at the end of an aisle. They were promoting it as a way to vaporize things like herbs and essential oils and infuse them into things like fruit. We talked about potential cocktail applications, like bubbling orange flower water into a Ramos Gin Fizz. Then we pretty much realized that it's a vaporizer for smoking weed. Further confirmation is found here. 
• This company has a series of reduction sauces like blueberry merlot, mission fig, and pomegranate- also known as grenadine. Consider the possibilities...
• There were a couple of brands of cherries in sauce or maraschino style cherries that I would definitely like to see as alternatives to the typical low-end cocktail cherries and super expensive Luxardo ones.
• ModMix makes organic cocktail mixers, including a Bloody Mary Mix with real wasabi. Then you could use soy-wasabe pickled green beans as garnish.
• Lemon ginger beer sounds intriguing. As does prickly pear and mesquite syrups. 
• I got to try to Dry Soda juniper berry flavor. It was delicious.

Queen of the Syrups

My interview with Jennifer Colliau of Small Hand Foods was published in the San Francisco Chronicle today. She makes pineapple gum syrup for the Pisco Punch served all around town, plus orgeat and other syrups. Some highlights:

Q: Do you have a lot of experience cooking at home?

A: Oh yeah, with my style of cooking, I consider myself a confectioner. When I was a kid I made every recipe in the "Joy of Cooking" Candies and Confections chapter. I was like 9 years old going to drugstores looking for glycerin to make saltwater taffy. I was totally committed.

Q: Why do you think bartenders are seeking out these ingredients?

A: There are all these super-geeky bartenders, myself included, and the drinks we drink are so dry and not juicy and so austere. And we drink like old men. So you really start to pay attention to these tiny little things, like texture. There's this resurgence in egg white cocktails and gum syrup and paying attention to weight and body in the mouth.

Q: Are there any cocktail trends you're sick of?

A: Having variations of the same drink just by muddling different fruit in them. Some people are like, "What kind of mojitos do you have?" and we say, "Just the one - the mojito."

Read the story here.