Madden's Prayer

A perfect heat wave cocktail: the Remsen Cooler

2010-07-07T16:44:00.001-07:00

I was trying to think of a good, cold, wet cocktail that wasn't a mojito and I remembered the Remsen Cooler, in particular, David Wondrich's version I read about in Esquire magazine on an airplane years ago. I even managed to find a link to it, with the photo, here (don't we live in marvelous times).

This is basically a glorified scotch and soda but what I like about it is that it's a rare instance where a flashy presentation—peeling an entire lemon in a single coil—really transforms the flavor of the drink. It's more lemon oil than lemon juice. And it looks really elegant, don't you think?

Remsen Cooler (based on David Wondrich's recipe)

.5tsp powdered sugar (I often skip it)
soda (I use seltzer—one of these days I need to figure out if club soda is really good for something)
2 oz scotch
long lemon spiral

Dissolve sugar in some soda, add spiral, add rocks and liquor, top with soda.

***

PS The wife had a Do Be Careful, which solved the conundrum of the peeled-yet-unjuiced lemon. I also read somewhere that it's good for breastfeeding. Isn't it?

1 1/2 oz. Gin
1/2 oz. Cointreau
1/2 oz. Lemon Juice (or to taste)
splash of Grenadine

Shake with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a maraschino cherry.

Matt's bitters in Edible Brooklyn

2010-07-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

photo by Daniel Krieger

I am one of several cocktail enthusiasts whose brains were picked for an article on homemade bitters in the latest (summer) issue of Edible Brooklyn.
The article starts on page 19 and there's a nice photo of me and an old bottle of my bitters on the bottom of page 20. If you can't find it around Brooklyn, check out the digital edition (the link actually takes you to the spring edition but if you click on "Archives" you'll find the summer issue there, assuming they haven't fixed this).

Two Excellent Tequila Cocktails

2010-05-15T10:57:00.001-07:00

Long time no post. And even less frequent posting to come, I'm afraid. But I haven't given up yet! The other day I had a bunch of bitter oranges (above) lying around so I I made a tequila invention of mine I'd forgotten how good it is. In fact I have two tequila cocktail recipes to share after the jump, both mexicanizaciones of classic cocktails.

Bitter Orange Margarita
Some of you faithful readers may know that I am a fan of bitters and have made my own on occasion, leading to a certain small yet nonetheless outsized fame (I'll be featured in the summer 2010 issue of Edible Brooklyn, by the way—will post here when it's out.). One by-product of gathering bitter orange peel for making orange bitters is a lot of juice. Bitter orange juice is used for marinading meat in the Carribean, for example the simple and tasty Mayan pork chop preparation, poc chuc (pork chops or steaks marinaded with bitter orange juice, salt and pepper and not much more--unlike the recipes I'm finding online. It's also mixed with recado de achiote to make the marinade for the sublime cochinita pibil.
I've also found that it makes an excellent substitution for lime in a margarita. In fact, I'll make a stand and say that I like it as much if not more. Give it a try.

3 oz of tequila blanco (silver)
2 oz bitter orange juice
1 oz Cointreau
dash of orange bitters (optional)

Shake with ice and serve up or on the rocks, salted rim optional. I hadn't thought of a good garnish to go with this--bitter orange peel is pretty ruddy-looking--but I grabbed a spearmint sprig from our front stoop just so the photo wouldn't look too dull. Turns out it's a good choice, the little hint of mint complements the margarita nicely.

(BTW I suppose you can't mexicanize a Mexican cocktail. What this is is a yucatanización, ¡sí señor!)

Manjatitlán
This is a straight adaptation of a Manhattan, hence the name (I also like Manjatan). It's a simple switcheroo of tequila for rye but the result is a completely different drink. The quality and kind of tequila makes a big difference here. A reposado (gold) will be very good but I find it works even with a cheap white tequila like Viuda de Romero.

3 oz. tequila blanco
1 oz. sweet vermouth
2 dashes orange or angostura bitters

Shake with ice and serve up.

Home-made crème de cassis, part two

2009-10-04T09:46:00.001-07:00

Back in July I put a jar of blackcurrants and grain alcohol. Yesterday, I got the jar out of the cupboard to do the last steps to make it crème de cassis, with the help of my devoted assistant, Aldara.

This summer, Jessica made some jelly from the other currants we harvested—redcurrants and gooseberry. She ordered a jelly strainer on-line so I set it up to strain the currant-infused grain alcohol into a pot:

Assistant Aldara enthusiastically spooned out the first few scoops of currants, dropping only a small handful into the pot. I then poured the rest of the mixture into the strainer and we waited a half hour or so for it to strain out all the alcohol:

I ended up with a little over 2 cups. Most of the recipes I found on-line call for an equal amount of water and an enormous amount of sugar: over a pound for 4 cups of liquid. I decided to underdo both other quantities so I added a cup and a half of water and started with 8 oz. of sugar. I brought it to a boil and cooked the mixture for 2 minutes (I don't know how rigorous a timing that is in terms of sterilization, but after all there's a hell of a lot of booze in there!). I let it cool and after tasting it, decided it was a little too bitter. Not bad, but the crème's role is partly as sweetener after all. I added another 4 oz. or so of sugar and heated the pot enough to melt it.

I poured it (once more through a strainer (and funnel, of course)) into this pretty bottle I have that used to contain Los Danzantes mezcal (there's also some in a less pretty bottle):

Since our household is awaiting a second baby there's not a lot of drinking going on these days, but I think I'll hazard a little kir for me and th'wife at lunch today.

Home-made crème de cassis

2009-07-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I put up my annual batch of crème de cassis using the bounty from this year's garden. Here's the black currant bush, already denuded:

And here's a colander full of fresh black currants:

The first time I made this, a few years ago, I found just one recipe on line (in French) after a considerable amount of searching. I tried to search again and now, of course, there are tons of different recipes (still almost all in French) on a variety of websites and message boards. The most interesting departure from what I did before was on where you macerate the currants in burgundy wine. Mm, I think I'll try that next year! Another interesting detail a lot of recipes featured was to put in a few leaves from the plant as well. To me they had a spice, slightly anisey taste:

The recipe is straightforward. Measurements vary but basically you clean the currants and cover them with grain alcohol (I'm all out, good thing it's legal in NY, now—at least that's what I've heard).

Now the currants need to macerate. The biggest change to my method this time around is that whereas previously I have steeped the currants for three days, I found that most recipes recommend something more like three months, so I'm giving it a try.

The jar is sitting in a cupboard and come September I'll strain out the alcohol, boil it, and add some water and sugar—a bit less of both than is called for with the aim of getting a less-sweet and more "currant-forward" liqueur. I'll post photos when the time comes.

Some Favorite Cocktails: The Sidecar

2009-06-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

I made some new friends recently and had them over for drinks for the first time. I didn't know much about them but I knew exactly which cocktail to make for them: the Sidecar. It's the perfect cocktail when you want to make something fancy but you're not sure what kind of drinkers your friends are (of course you're assuming you're friends are drinkers; if not I guess you can have a double for yourself). The Sidecar is sweet (but not too sweet) and lemony enough to appeal to most palates but the the cognac (or cheap brandy...) makes it sharp and complex enough to keep it interesting. In this sense it's actually quite similar to a well-made Margarita.

When I was living in Chicago briefly, in the fall of 1997, Jessica and I went to the opening of a new bar (name and location since forgotten) that was one of my first encounters with the classic cocktail revival. In celebration of the new establishment they were serving free Sidecars and their own very tasty take on a Gimlet (which maybe I'll describe in a later post). Both were made with fresh citrus and served in cocktail glasses laced with confectioner's sugar. That's more sweet than I tend to like things these days but at the time it was a revelation and the evening as a while was one of the key events that set me on the path to being the cocktail-obsessive I am today.

Making a Sidecar is easy. My version is something like:

2 oz cognac (or decent but cheaper brandy... I use Raynal's sometimes)
1 oz fresh-squeezed lemon juice
1/2-3/4 oz Cointreau

Shake with ice, strain into cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist. (Confectioner sugar rim optional but fun once in a while.)
Incidentally this is the same ratio I use for a Margarita, obviously replacing cognac with tequila blanco.

If I haven't already written it elsewhere, I think the key to good "sweet" cocktails is to underdo it a bit with the sugary liqueurs like Cointreau.

Manly drinks with Rachel Maddow

2009-05-23T19:52:00.001-07:00

From Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (who by the way does a fantastic Barry Gibb (I'm sure everyone else in the world already knows this but I'm catching up on my SNL skits on hulu.com (Justin Timberlake is my new favorite celebrity))), Rachel Maddow (with whom I predict I shall someday make cocktails) shows how to make a Bijou.

back in the white

2009-04-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

After reading about Blackle and the ecological savings of white text on black screen, I made this blog with a black background template. However, the problem is I HATE reading white text on black, it's very headache-inducing. So until someone comes up with a better solution to the energy usage of the glaring-yet-legible white screen, I'm switching to the same basic template I use on my other blog.

some favorite cocktails: The Preview

2009-04-21T05:52:00.000-07:00

From the cocktail I drink the most to perhaps the favorite cocktail I drink the least. You have to be in the right mood for the slightly odd Preview and it requires a delicate ratio of ingredients not to make it too sweet. (I find this is always the case with cocktails that involve Cointreau.) It shares with my martini recipe that classic proportion of main ingredient plus small amount of secondary ingredient plus accent.

I read about this in Terry Sullivan's "Mixology" column in GQ, which I liked a lot the occasional times I would find myself reading that magazine (on airplanes primarily). Sullivan claims this cocktail was a favorite of "that other guy in the Rat Pack", Peter Lawford. This link appears to be an unattributed copy of the recipe (and anecdote) as it appeared in Sullivan's column.

Two unusual things about this cocktail are that it features Cointreau without its usual citrus juice accompaniment and that it is accented with a splash of anise liqueur. What made me want to try this one out—aside from the gin, of course—is that I had enjoyed the combination of orange juice (Cointreau's underlying flavor) and anise liqueur in the embarassingly-named Monkey Gland.

When I get this one right—and I confess I often put in too much Cointreau—this is a rather exotic-tasting drink, the sweetness of triple sec countered by the anisey herbiness of the liqueur. The louching of the anise also creates a beautiful pearlescent glow, like a martini with some plutonium in it.

Here's how I make it:
about 3oz. gin
scant 1/2 oz. cointreau
a few drops of absinthe or pastis

You can lace the inside of the cocktail glass with the anise liqueur but I usually just dump it all in the cocktail shaker, shake it not-too-hard (it's nice to keep this one as clear as possible), and pour. I'll sometimes garnish it with orange peel if I have some handy.

some favorite cocktails: The Martini

2009-04-16T17:43:00.000-07:00

With this post I'm starting a new feature where I'll talk a bit about some of my favorite cocktails and give my recipes for them.

I might as well kick it off with the classic gin Martini. It's a perennial and it never disappoints. The word "bracing" seems to have been invented for that thrilling shock to the system of the first sip of a very cold Martini. I never get tired of its icy, herbaceous, astringent effect—it really is as much of an "effect" as a taste.

©the wonderful Virgil Partch

An advantage of the Martini is that despite its mystique it is actually quite easy to make--it's like a soufflé in that sense. There's no real trick, just choice of gin (I like Bombay Sapphire and Plymouth the best, Junipero's also good...), the ratio of vermouth (I like mine relatively wet; I've never measured but I don't use a mister or "glance at the bottle", I give a generous pour), and making it good and cold. Since it's made of stuff-in-a-bottle it's actually a much safer thing to order at a bar than a sidecar or margarita, where you never know (even if you ask, sometimes) if you're going to end up with sour mix.

I'm agnostic on the shaken versus stirred debate. The best argument for stirring I've seen is that it gives you a limpid transparency; at the same time, I actually like the little floes of ice chips that float in the slightly clouded liquid of a cocktail than's been shaken very hard.

All that said, the one thing that is never discussed in Martini-making is the role of the vermouth. If you've ever tasted two dry vermouths together you'll find that they differ quite radically in taste. Noilly-Pratt tastes to me (I find I'm terrible at describing flavors--whenever I describe something as sweet everyone else in the room will insist it's sour) dry and tangy while Martini & Rossi is sweeter and more floral. It makes a difference in how the Martini turns out. I'm currently leaning towards the Martini & Rossi.

Over time I've made a more-or-less permanent conversion to adding bitters to my Martinis, to the point where if I don't it's because I'm looking for a change of pace—something exotic! Apparently many traditional "Martinis" from the evolutionary miasma that led to the current reigning recipe featured bitters. To me the essential, almost irreducible formula for a great cocktail is something like three parts primary ingredient, one part secondary ingredient, plus accent, and a Martini with bitters may be its finest expression.

So here's my typical Martini:

a goodly amount (3oz?) of gin
a generous splash of dry vermouth
several dashes of whatever bitters strikes my fancy: most often Angostura but also orange, grapefruit (from Fee Bros.), or my 5 Spice bitters.

Shake hard and strain into a cocktail glass.

I always garnish it with a lemon twist—or nothing at all (particularly if I'm using bitters, which after all plays a similar accentual role).

¡No Patxaran!

2009-03-01T17:10:00.000-08:00

Patxaran or Pacharán is a Basque liqueur that I discovered in Spain a few years ago. I had it first in Gijón or maybe in La Coruña outside the País Vasco and later tried some in Bilbao and San Sebastián, where I also bought a bottle to bring home. The ingredients are simple: it's anise liqueur infused with "endrinas" which are apparently sloe berries. There's also a bit of coffee bean and, according to this pretty detailed Wikipedia article, vanilla. It's often home-made or at least regionally produced (the bottle I brought home was made by the store where I bought it). People drink it on the rocks and it's a wonderful lazy summer afternoon drink when you want to sit in an outdoor bar watching people go by.

I made my own bottle—after a fashion—this summer and it was a passable success, though I don't know that I would serve it to a Spaniard!

It came about because Jessica had a bunch of different currants from our garden. We'd already made some jelly, some very good crème de cassis and some pretty but fairly inedible spiked red currants and were trying to think of something new. Then I remembered a bottle of Cristal aguardiente from Colombia that someone had left after a party at our house. When I finally got around to sampling it I was surprised to find that it was anise-flavored (aguardiente is usually unflavored unless otherwise labeled; not so in Colombia it turns out). I dedided to make a variation on patxaran, replacing the "endrinas" with a mixture of black and red currants and gooseberries. I steeped the currants in the aguardiente for a few weeks and also threw in a a teaspoon of coffee grounds. That turned out to be a mistake as it was a bit too much and it was really hard to filter out effectively. Next time I'll just throw in a couple of whole coffee beans.

I filtered it a few times and bottled it in the unattractive Cristal bottle (it says something about how rushed and between-other-projects this was that I didin't even remove the label). As I said, I wouldn't enter it into a competition but it turned out all right, just a little tart and with the coffee undertone a little too pronounced. Since it's not made with sloe berries I decided to call it ¡No Patxaran!

I'm sorry about not having taken photos of process but this blog can't be a high priority project, and there's a limit to my wife's tolerance of this kind of time-frittering:
[cartoon by Virgil Partch, from Bottle Fatigue]

Five Spice Bitters Follow-Up Report

2009-03-01T15:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a photo of a little eye-dropper bottle full of my finished Five Spice Bitters. I'm happy to say it turned out quite well. The anise flavor of the star anise definitely dominates. the first thing I did was to have about an ounce of the bitters on the rocks with some water and it tasted more or less like pastis--which is why I like it so much. If I make it again, however, I'll try to balance out the flavors some more. I'm particular curious about how far you can go with the szechuan pepper. A mildly spicy bitters sounds intriguing although a little iffy (I've never tried it, but I've heard that some bartenders add a dash of tabasco sauce to their martinis—I think it may be a fad that's come and gone in NYC).

I didn't end up adding any coloring. The natural color is a pale blonde, like tequila reposado, and it looks nice. In any case, I looked around for Jamaican burnt sugar, as I had seen in it local supermarkets here in Sunset Park, which has a big Carribean community. As it turns out, I seem to have missed the swan song of this particular minor ethnic food ingredient. I even asked the manager at Key Foods, a South Asian looking man who is probably from Trinidad or French Guyana and he scratched his had and said, "no, I don't think we've carried that for years." I could swear I'd seen it on the shelves--in fact, at least two different brands--in the last year or so. It's too bad because I was curious as to whether burnt sugar would truly add only color as promised or if it wouldn't sweeten the bitters just a bit as well. If I track some down in one of the smaller grocery stores I'll give it a try and report back.

As for recipes, I've tried adding my Five Spice Bitters as a replacement for angostura/orange bitters in martinis and manhattans with great success. I even made a sazerac and used Five Spice Bitters in place of absinthe and it was quite good. So what I've found is that you can use these bitters for an anise-y replacement of the usual bitters, or you can use it in place of absinthe/pastis when it's called for in very small amounts as in two favorites of mine, The Preview and the "New Standard" Manhattan (skip the "gum syrup" though).

Five Spice Bitters in progress

2008-10-22T11:27:00.001-07:00

My five spice bitters have been steeping for a few weeks. Today I strained off the alcohol and put it back in a jar. I broke up the bigger spices and put them in a pan and simmered them in water for five minutes or so. (photo above) I put this water-spice mixture in a jar and will let it sit two days before straining it and combining it with the alcohol again. I'll decide at that point if I want to add burnt sugar for coloring or not.

Five Spice Bitters

2008-10-09T18:10:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about Chinese food recently and noticed that the ingredients of the typical "five spice" powder used to flavor Chinese and other Asian cuisines have a relationship with the base spices of many bitters recipes—things like clove, cinnamon, and anise. So I've decided to attempt a batch of "five spice bitters". There are apparently various ways to interpret the five spices you use to make the mixture. I admit I only researched the internet so if anyone has more detailed information I'd be grateful. Wikipedia notes that the basic principle is to combine "sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty". I found an example of one recipe here. After comparing that recipe to the ingredients listed on the jar I have in my kitchen (as far as I can tell the same one pictured on the Wikipedia site) and reviewing the helpful assortment of vintage bitters recipes in the book Imbibe!, I settled on the following combination:

2 star anise
1 tsp roasted szechuan pepper
4 cloves
2 inch-long sticks cinnamon
1 slice fresh ginger

I put these in a jar (photo above) with one cup of Everclear (check out the label below) grain alcohol (which I bought in Connecticut but which a local merchant has told me is now legal again in NY) and it is currently steeping for a few weeks. I shake it every day.

After two weeks or so, I'll strain this and add a cup of water and maybe some burnt sugar for coloring (this is a typical step for adding color to bitters though I haven't tried it on my batches of orange bitters) and we'll see how it turns out. The wild card is the szechuan pepper: I have no idea if this will make the bitters spicy hot or not.
I'll report back in a few months after I've had a chance to experiment with it a bit.

Spiked Red Currants

2008-10-03T17:22:00.000-07:00

Our garden being overfull of currants of various sorts this summer, I decided to try steeping some red currants in liqueur à la maraschino cherries. I cleaned up some red currants and left them on their branches because they are so small. I placed these in a jar and filled it with some crème de groseille (i.e. red currant) that I made last summer.

They've been steeping for about four months and I tried some this evening. They are not going to replace maraschino cherries any time soon. They have an initial burst of sweetness from the liqueur, but then they become quite tart and of course they have all those hard little seeds. (I was hoping they would somehow disolve or soften.)

Well, it looks pretty anyway:

I made two cocktails using my new garnish. The one pictured here is a gin martini with a generous splash of crème de cassis (made from last summer's black currants). I also made one for Jessica which featured Grey Goose vodka (since I ran out of gin), juice of one lemon, and another generous splash of cassis. Both cocktails were good if on the sweeter end of what we normally like.

La Perdida cocktail

2008-07-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 2005 Jessica held a release party for her graphic novel, La Perdida. Her father hosted a party for her and his wife asked me to create a Perdida-themed cocktail for them to serve. The obvious choice would have been to do a margarita type of thing but since this was a special occasion taking place in an apartment on the Upper West Side, I decided to go for something classier. The first thing that came to mind was to do a champagne cocktail and I quickly settled on a variation on one of Jessica's favorites, the French 75 (this is the closest to the version I usually make; I've never tried it with orange bitters but that of course sounds interesting). Kathleen printed up cocktail napkins with the recipe printed on it so I don't even need to type it up!

The party was a hit and everyone got really drunk. Classy.

The Happy Hooligan

2008-02-03T14:23:00.000-08:00

I've invented quite a few cocktails, some worth remembering, others just improvisations of the moment. I do have a few though that I'm happy enough with to want to share. One of those is the Happy Hooligan, named in honor of Frederick Burr Opper's wonderfully iconic tramp character from the Sunday papers (when is someone going to gather and reprint that stuff? It's past due!). I tried to come up with something that might have existed at the turn of the last century, so gin was the obvious choice for the base liquor (and in any case it's always the bottle I reach for first!). I tried to keep it simple and classic: some lemon juice, sugar, and a few dashes of Angostura Bitters to finish it off. I liked the cocktail so much I made a comic out of the recipe (click to enlarge for a legible version):

Feel free to print this out and take it to your local drinking establishment!

welcome to Madden's Prayer

2008-02-01T17:26:00.000-08:00

This blog will be devoted to very occasional posts about cocktails--making cocktails, finding and comparing ingredients, making your own ingredients, found and invented recipes--from a dedicated amateur mixologist.