Blog

On FineCooking.com: Homemade Grenadine and the Jack Rose Cocktail

Please check out my latest blog entry on FineCooking.com. It's about making your own grenadine and the Jack Rose cocktail.

Read it here, and feel free to comment (over there) on your own grenadine or Jack Rose recipe improvements.

November 8, 2010
Cognac Cocktails in the Los Angeles Times Magazine

My first story for the LA Times Magazine is now online. It is in the Sunday, December 7, 2010 print edition.

(Photo by Bartholomew Cooke)

The story is a brief airing of a pet peeve: Why are there so few cognac cocktails being served when we're supposedly in the midst of a classic cocktail renaissance?

The article also includes four recipes from Damian Windsor of the Roger Room.

Read and enjoy!

November 7, 2010
Does Refreezing Clear Air-Free Ice Result In a Large Clear Block?
This is an experiment in my ongoing project to make clear ice. I've figured out a way to do it using an Igloo cooler. This experiment is an attempt to make clear ice without one.

A long time ago, I tested the theory that freezing, thawing, and refreezing water makes clear ice blocks. After 13 tries I determined that it refreezing water does not make clearer ice.

However, it recently occurred to me that I could test out something else. If we take just the clear part of ice (leaving behind the cloudy, air-rich stuff), melt it and refreeze it, will the new ice be clear?

A bar in San Francisco refreezes their Kold-Draft cubes. One bartender told me he thought it makes clearer ice than with just tap water, but still not completely clear.

If this experiment works, then someone anyone could refreeze small bits of clear ice into large blocks. Efficient? Nope. But interesting.

(Oh, and long story short: this experiment was inconclusive. Don't want to make you read if you're not into it.)

Anyway, step one was to make clear ice, as I do using the Igloo cooler method. I made two partial blocks of ice. I let the water freeze in the cooler, then knock off the thin skin that forms around the bottom of the cooler (full of water).

Then I took these two clear slabs, broke them into large chunks, and put them into the cooler to melt.

After it melted, I refroze it.

The ice in the picture above is upside-down from how it was in the cooler. Here's a closeup.

At first view, it looks a little cloudy in the middle of the bloc- but I think that's because I had to move my refrigerator a couple of times during this process and jostling the container does seem to make cloudier ice.

Looking just at the cloudy part at the bottom end (top in the picture above), I can't really say whether it's less cloudy than it is with regular tap water. This experiment is inconclusive.

My theory is that as the water cools down or warms up to room temperature it reabsorbs a standard amount of air, and this experiment won't work. However:

If I repeat this experiment (and I probably will), I should:
- Make the clear ice as normal, but not break up the slab into chunks. This saved time but probably adds air.
- Use more refrozen water in the cooler when refreezing. Here is was a little too hard to tell what percentage of ice was cloudy, so I could not compare it with the time I did this experiment with regular water.
The icesperiments continue!

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
November 5, 2010
Cutting Blocks of Ice with an Icepick

update 2021 Better ice cutting pictures are on this post.

To cut the large blocks of clear ice that I make at home using and Igloo cooler (methodology here), I have always busted out the saw I bought for that reason.

However, last week I gave a talk on ice at Portland Cocktail Week with Evan Zimmerman and Jim Romdall. During the talk one of them (Evan I think) mentioned how you use an ice pick to cut apart a block of ice the easy way.

I cringed thinking of all the time I'd spent sawing when this way is like 1000 times easier. I hope I can save you from the same fate.

1. Start with your slab of ice. The one in this picture is about 5 inches thick.

2. Tap a line across the top where you want the ice to break. The ice will chip off and form a little groove.

3. Tap in one point in the center. Poke hard. Poke poke poke.

4. The ice should break in two roughly along the line. Hooray!

5. Repeat the process to break it into smaller pieces.

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

November 1, 2010
More Fun with Ice: The Time Bomb

The fun with ice continues! In ongoing experiments freezing things in ice, I decided to try freezing food coloring in the middle of an ice cube. Then when the ice melts, the coloring will release and change the drink.

Click on the link below to see how I did it and what happened.

(more…)

October 28, 2010
Using Salt Walter as an Insulator to Make Clear Ice

This blog post is a continuation of this experiment.

In this experiment, I wanted to test out another way to insulate an ice cube tray to make clear ice. Inspired by a comment from another blog entry by a reader named Gael, I decided to try salt water as an insulator rather than just plain water as in the last experiment. If it worked, this would be a way to make clear ice at home without taking up too much freezer space.

I took a small food container and put it into a slightly larger one. The smaller container held only water. The outer container held water with table salt. The theory is that the salt water would not freeze, so it would act as an insulator for the ice, and control the direction of freezing so that it would only freeze from the top-down (as with the cooler method).

I didn't use a ton of salt. As you can see, the outer container's water did freeze lightly,though it was soft. The bottom did not completely freeze, as you can sort of see here.

The inner container did seem to freeze toward the bottom.

In better-insulated containers, the cloudy part is only on the bottom of the container. Here, it is concentrated but raised slightly above the bottom of the container.

In this case the inner container sat directly on the bottom of the outer container, so it wasn't greatly insulated on the bottom. My theory is that this is why the cloudy part of the ice is raised above the bottom.

To improve this experiment, I would put raise the inner container off the bottom of the outer container, and probably use a greater amount of salt in the salt water.

As the outer container here is only slightly larger than the inner container, this system is more space-efficient than the Igloo cooler for many people without large freezers.

There's more work to do on this…

An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.

October 26, 2010
Welcome Back, Harvey Wallbanger

With the new formula of Galliano and a renewed interest in the fern bar, the Harvey Wallbanger is about due for a comeback.

In my latest post for Fine Cooking, I investigate the cocktail. Have a look, and remember that comments make me happy and keep me employed.

October 25, 2010
Making Clear Ice Without a Cooler
In a set of experiments, I showed that you can make clear ice by controling the direction of freezing. The container I've been using for this is an Igloo cooler. When using it, the ice freezes from the top-down and all the cloudiness in the ice forms at the bottom of the container rather than in the middle of the block.

I wanted to show that you can do this without a cooler as long as you have some sort of insultation that accomplishes the same thing as the cooler. In this case, I chose a bigger pool of water as an insulator.

As a control I froze a plastic take-out container of water in the freezer.

As usual, it is cloudy over a large area, mostly in the center. This is because the water freezes from the outside-in. The last part of the ice to freeze contains air and any impurities, and is cloudy.

So then I took the same container and put it into a larger container. The smaller container sits on cubes to keep it off the bottom of the larger container.

Both containers were filled with water to about the same level. The purpose of this is to use the outer container of water as an insulator. The water inside the smaller container would then freeze only from the top-down instead of outside-in, because the water surrounding it would freeze later (because it is so big).

The results show that this worked- the cloudy part of the ice was the last part to freeze at the bottom of the container.

What this means:
- Directional freezing works as long as there is an insulated jacket around the container. The ice freezes only from the top-down, pushing the cloudy part to the bottom.
- This property could be exploited to make an ice cube tray that makes cloudy-on-the-bottom ice. Picture, for example, an ice cube tray that was insulated with a jacket on the sides and bottom.
- So now I can do more experiments to make an insultated jacket that is practical.
An index of all of the ice experiments on Alcademics can be found here.
October 22, 2010
Germany, Ensslin, Aviation, and Blue Cocktails

My latest post on FineCooking.com is up. It's typical of my thought process: I was going to write about my time in Germany and ended up talking about a German bartender who wrote an American cocktail book in which the Aviation cocktail was first mentioned and later forgotten.

Read it here.

(I took this picture- not bad for me!)

October 19, 2010
The Tequila-Sherry Connection

Every time I look for sherry I find tequila there too. What is it with the tequila people and the sherry people being the same people?

Steven Olson aka Wine Geek is both a tequila and mezcal ambassador and also a sherry ambassador.

Jacques Bezuidenhout, Partida tequila brand ambassador and sometimes sherry ambassador, also created of the La Perla cocktail with both tequila and sherry.

George Sandeman of the Sandeman sherry and port family is a huge tequila fan.

On a recent trip to Spain with Steve Olsen were Phil Ward and Katie Stipe of Mayahuel, the tequila-and-mezcal bar in New York.

Gitane restaurant in San Francisco has a drink with tequila, PX, lime, and ginger beer.

And just the other day I got a recipe pitch from Espolon tequila with this recipe from H. Ehrmann of Elixir:

Ashes to Ashes

1.5 oz. Espolón Tequila Reposado
.5 oz. Pedro Ximenez Sherry
1 oz. Lemon Juice
1 tsp. Sweetened Cocoa Mix
.25 oz. Agave Nectar
1 pinch Ground Cinnamon

Place all ingredients in a mixing glass, fill with ice, cover and shake well for 10 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass. Garnish with cinnamon dust.

I also love both sherry and tequila, but I don't know what they have to do with each other.

What gives?

October 12, 2010