Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

On Wings of Chickens

Time for something a little different.

For a while now, I’ve been a member of the website Food52, a collaborative site created by food writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs that highlights the recipes of home cooks. The idea is this: every week, the site runs two contests, each featuring a different dish or ingredient. Any site member can submit an original recipe. Hesser and Stubbs choose two finalists from the list of recipes; voting opens at this point. Any member can vote for one finalist. The winner receives a spot in the Food52 cookbook, which will be published by HarperCollins.

A recent contest called for Your Best Chicken Wings, and it was pretty open-ended: Korean-style, Buffalo-style, you name it. As part of the Food52 process, and to help foster a sense of community, Hesser and Stubbs invite members to test certain Editors Pick recipes. One of the chicken-wing recipes up for testing was for scrumptious sounding Longhorn Tequila Wings, by a home cook and small farm owner named Tom Hirshfeld.

The process is a little involved, but man, the results are worth it. First you brine the wings in a mix of tequila, lime zest, salt, and water. After the wings brine for about 90 minutes, you remove them from the brine and dry them on a rack in the fridge. Dredge them in a mix of flour, masa harina, chili powder, and other spices. Fry, and then toss in a dressing of tequila, onions and garlic, peppers, cilantro, and lime.

When I saw the recipe, I knew I wanted to make it, so I called dibs to test it for an Editors Pick. So I whipped them up as a Sunday app, and paired them with shots of tequila and sangrita. Oh my yum.

photo by Jennifer Hess

The wings were great. I chose not to make them overly hot because frankly, I’m kind of a wimp with spicy-hot foods. I like just enough spice to know I’m alive, but not enough to wish I weren’t. Tom calls for them to be served with home-fried tortilla strips, which were addictive. The wings themselves carried the earthy sweetness of the agave juice, well balanced with the heat of the pepper, tang from the lemon, and piquancy of the onion and garlic. The masa gave the coating a nice tenderness, and it’s a grace note I’ll want to play with the next time I fry chicken.

Hirshfeld recommends pairing the wings with a Shiner Bock, in keeping with their Lone Star State inspiration, but I went with the classic tequila/sangrita pairing, and it was fabulous. I want to do this for a cocktail party some time.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Raising a glass in thanks

With Thanksgiving approaching, it’s time to plan for festive cocktailing! Mrs. Bitters has already started prepping our locavore Thanksgiving (there’s a story behind it being locavore, but you’ll have to wait for it), so now’s the time for me to plan my approach. I haven’t quite figured it all out yet. I know I want to get some Calvados and make a batch of sage simple syrup, so that I can mix up the Apple Sage Old Fashioned I created for the autumn issue of Edible Rhody (still on the stands, so if you’re local, grab a copy–it’s the one with the cranberry bog on front).

For my second drink, I’m still working my brain on it. In Friday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, Malt Adovocate editor John Hansell edited a small advertising supplement on whiskeys. Included was a piece on cocktails by Gary Regan, or gaz regan as he apparently prefers to be called these days. Old gaz included four cocktails in the piece, one of which I think I’ll adapt for Thanksgiving. Here’s the gaz version:

Babbling Brook

• 1-1/2 oz. scotch
• 3/4 oz. B&B liqueur
• 1/4 oz. absinthe
• 1 lemon twist, for garnish

Stir over ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add garnish.

As gaz discusses in his piece, scotch marries well with anise flavors, and we definitely found that to be the case here.

Earlier this year, I picked up a bunch of anise hyssop from a local herbalist. Back then, I used it in a variation of the New Orleans classic cocktail, the Vieux Carre. On Saturday, when we were at the market, we stopped by the Farmacy table to pick up some local honey for Thanksgiving baking. They happened to have as well some small jars of honey infused with the anise hyssop. I immediately started thinking about cocktail applications and eagerly bought a jar. I might do a variation on the Babbling Brook. Or, I might do a scotch Sazerac instead, with a syrup made from the hyssop honey. I don’t think I’ll go wrong either way.

How about you? What Thanksgiving-themed drinks are you planning to mix this year? Do you have special Thanksgiving snacks that pair well with cocktails? Sound off in the comments!

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Good touch, bad touch

So, I get a lot of PR pitches. Most cocktail, wine, and food bloggers do. Some of them are smartly targeted and personalized, but many of them are just kind of dumb. I opened my Gmail account one day to see an email that started “Dear Dash.” An amusing nickname, true, and I suppose that’s better than the “Dear <vname>” message I got one day. And, frankly, I can’t even begin to imagine what the PR folks for Women’s Health magazine are thinking in sending me information on dieting, women’s nutrition, and Madonna’s organic lifestyle.

Now you’ll understand why it was a delight to read a PR email that started this way:

Hey Michael,

Hope all is well. I couldn’t help but notice, from reading your blog, that you have a thing for ginger.

Pitch-perfect PR. By my rough count, there are… let’s see… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 posts that feature or mention something gingery as a drink ingredient. So thank you, Yun Yu, from Fox Greenberg Public Relations, for actually paying attention to what I do and what this blog’s about–not specifically ginger, but about creatively pairing strong flavors and fresh ingredients with spirits.

Thank you, too, for sending up a bottle of Xanté pear and cognac liqueur while all my pals were at Tales of the Cocktail. This stuff is tasty. It’s hard to balance the flavor in a product like this, to keep it from being cloying, but the distillers did a fine job on this one. Morgenthaler describes it well, in a piece where he rightly and humorously sends up its marketing (Xanté’s PR firm is great, but its marketers are insane):

The opening nose is reminiscent of pears poached in cinnamon and wine. The first sip reveals a moderate amount of heat, which dissipates quickly leaving behind an extended finish of basic sugars, pear, light caramel, vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg and banana.

I find it just a little too sweet to sip neat or on the rocks, but it blends beautifully into cocktails. I think my favorite use for it is in a sidecar variation, with lime juice instead of lemon, and the triple sec reduced just a smidge.

I also find that it pairs well with rum, in an old-fashioned, with Fee’s Whiskey Barrel Aged Bitters. In fact, the marriage of pear, vanilla, and Fee’s warm Christmas spices reminds me so much of Yuletide that I’m going to tuck some of the Xanté away for the holiday season.

photograph by Jennifer Hess.

Now, what’s this to do with ginger? Well, Yun, in contacting me, suggested the Xanté Ginger Martini cocktail. I know, I know, I know; I’m not crazy about the name either. A martini is strictly a drink with gin and vermouth and maybe some orange bitters. It’s not a drink with cognac liqueur and anything else. But call it what you may, it’s a damn fine drink. Here’s the recipe as Yun sent it.

Xanté Ginger Martini

• 1-1/2 ounces Xanté
• 1-1/2 ounces lemon juice
• 1 ounce simple syrup (I’d cut this back to 1/2 ounce, personally, but I was using a rich 2:1 syrup made with Turbinado sugar)
• 1 piece of fresh ginger
• 1 thin slice of fresh ginger, for garnish

In a mixing glass, muddle the ginger. Add Xanté, lemon juice, and simple syrup. Shake over ice, strain into a cocktail glass, and float garnish on top.

Tell you what. Not only is this a fine drink, where all of the elements play well together, but the ginger really helps to bring the pear to the fore. And as we found out last night, Spanish Marcona almonds make a perfect accompaniment to this cocktail. I almost didn’t want to have dinner.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Jen on the radio

Two Jens, in fact! A couple of Wednesdays ago, Jen Huntley-Corbin and Jen Hess got to talking on the radio about food, blogging, and Jen’s inspirations in starting Last Night’s Dinner. Check it out here.

Since I was in the studio, Jen H-C prevailed on me to make a couple of comments too, but I tried to keep from stealing the focus from the Jen Party. She asked first about my use of vodka in making pie crusts, and then later, we talked briefly about pairing cocktails with food.

Oh, and I babbled pretty incoherently when Jen H-C asked me about the tip about the vodka in the pie crust. Jen (Hess, that is) had pointed me to a post on Smitten Kitchen about it way back when, and that’s where the idea originated. Deb explains it much, much better than I did on the radio, so if the idea intrigues you, go read Deb’s post for a better explanation.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Repast

Port, cheese, and walnuts

Sandeman’s Founders Reserve Port, Stichelton blue cheese, and walnuts. Photograph by Jennifer Hess.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

MxMo Double X: Pairings

So, yeah, the overtime is still kicking my ass. I leave home at 8, I get home 12 hours later, and I don’t feel like much other than the classics–aviation, martini, old fashioned, Manhattan, etc. Not much creativity these days. I do have a pretty bottle of Canton ginger liqueur that I’m playing with (more on that later this week, I hope), but that’s it.

In other circumstances, the lady of Last Night’s Dinner and I would have had great fun planning a pairings menu and then probably cross-blogging it, with her focusing on the food and me on the drink. Aaaaand, we’ll probably do that some time. But not now alas. We had a couple ideas for simple pairings we could put together, but time just ran out.

But then Death stepped in.

Death and Company, to be precise. For months now, Jen and I have planned to check out this top-notch cocktail lounge, but something always got in the way. After a nice e-mail from Death’s co-owner Dave Kaplan, though, we decided to finally check it out. Not only is Death’s cocktail menu well regarded, but its food gets respect, too. I have to say, the folks at Death deserve every accolade.

Since we were going anyway, and since I wanted to write about Death for the blog, I figured why not combine the two with MxMo?

I started with the Oaxaca Old Fashioned–tequila, mezcal, agave nectar, Angostura, and an orange twist. Smoky and smooth. Jen got a Seelbach, made masterfully in the traditional way. With round two, we started the food courses. First up were a Roquefort salad and crab cakes with a bouillabaisse shooter. We enjoyed both, but the crab cakes were especially good, and the bouillabaisse shooter was delightfully creative. We paired gin cocktails with that course. Jen choose the Big Ben (gin, dry vermouth, Grand Marnier, and orange bitters) and I, the Red Baron (gin, Carpano Antica vermouth, Ramozotti Amaro, and maraschino).

More food, more drink. We next had jalapeño short ribs, marinated in pomegranate molasses and bourbon, and mac and cheese. For that, we hit the whisk(e)ys–Jen had the Morning After Fizz (Asyla blended scotch, a hint of absinthe, lemon juice, an egg white, and Peychaud’s), while I had the Bushwick cocktail. Part of the Brooklyn borough of drinks, the Bushwick consists of rye, Carpano Antica vermouth, maraschino, and Amer Picon. (This Brooklyn family is worth a post of its own, so I won’t delve in here.)

Just squeezing in under the deadline (it’s seven minutes to Tuesday), so I’m going to post now and save further comments about Death & Co. until tomorrow or Wednesday.

Many thanks to Natalie for hosting!

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Cocktails ‘n’ ersters

What do you drink with oysters on the half shell? Jen and I usually have wine, normally a Muscadet, but we recently found ourselves with BeauSoleil oysters but no appropriate wine.

So Jen challenged me to come up with an appropriate cocktail to pair with oysters. We wanted something crisp, aromatic, and lightly briny. We had no olives for a martini, but I remembered a drink I had made some time ago and wanted to revisit: the Paez.

This drink originated at Little Branch in Manhattan, but I first heard of it through Paul Clarke’s blog, Cocktail Chronicles. A fine-grained sea salt is important here because it blends well with the liquids, and is subtle in the drink–almost unnoticeable, but present enough to marry drink and bivalve in a pleasing way.

Paez

• 2½ oz. gin
• ½ oz. dry vermouth
• 6 dashes Peychaud’s bitters
• pinch sea salt

Technique: Stir with ice, strain into chilled cocktail glass, garnish with lemon twist.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Chestnut, Brooklyn

Jen and I dine out a lot, and one thing I want to discuss in this space is the cocktail menus in the restaurants we frequent.

We’ve all been to eateries that don’t have a full bar; they’re beer and wine only or–horrors!–they have no liquor license at all.

Worse, in some ways, are the places that serve spirits but fail to train their staff on how to sell, mix, or serve cocktails. You ask for anything more complicated than a martini, cosmo, or gin-and-tonic, and the waitron squints at you and says, “We don’t serve that here.”

With that in mind, it’s always fun to find a place where the owners think as much about the bar as they do the kitchen. Over at the blog The Art of Drink, Darcy’s been writing about his experiences in managing the bar at a new restaurant, Mint. It’s fun and interesting to watch how Darcy has crafted a good cocktail menu for his customers.

On Saturday, Jen and I went to a Brooklyn restaurant, Chestnut. (Check out New York‘s review, if you wanna know more.)

Chestnut knows food, but Chestnut also knows cocktails. Check out this list from their drinks menu:

Negroni – Campari, Damrak Gin and Punt e Mes
Dirty Martini – Ketel One Vodka, dry vermouth and olive juice
Fresh OJ Margarita – Silver Tequila, triple sec, fresh orange and lime juice
Bourbon Old Fashioned – Wild Turkey 101, dash Angostura Bitters
Rye Presbyterian – Michter’s “US 1″ Rye, Ginger Ale and Crystallized Ginger
Champagne Cocktail – Champagne, Angostura Bitters and a sugar cube
Phantom Tollbooth – Absente, fresh orange juice and Chartreux V.E.P.
Sparkling Sanlúcar – Gruet Brut and Manzanilla Sherry

Jen got the Sparkling Sanlúcar and I had an old fashioned, although in my case they used the Michter’s US 1 whiskey in place of Wild Turkey. I didn’t even ask them to forgo the fruit salad, but when the drink came out, I had whiskey and bitters–with a cherry floating in the glass and a slice of orange on the rim.

That’s a great damn way to do an old fashioned. (Myself, I dash in some Reagan’s Orange along with the Angostura, but I’m weird.) Jen was very pleased with the Sparkling Sanlúcar, as well.

I think it’s fair to say that Chestnut rocks the cocktail menu. Oh, the food? Well, I’m a drinks blogger, but we were delighted by the food, too. We’re both looking forward to returning.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Pickles-n-gin

For no good reason, I’ve absented this blog for a few days, but I wanted to point out this good article from the LA Times about boutique gins. (Be sure to check out the tasting notes while you’re there, too.) Among the gins reviewed are several that Jen and I have talked about sampling ourselves–most notably No. 209 and Citadelle.

We were at Nina Planck’s Real Food Market this weekend, in NYC’s Petrosino Square, where we met some friendly picklers from Wheelhouse Picks. Among their delights were some yummy turnips, pickled in Hendrick’s gin. We grabbed a jar of those turnips (along with a yummy bread and butter that’s not as sweet as the norm), thinking the Hendrick’s turnips would make a lovely martini garnish. Alas, I’ve not gotten around to mixing up martinis this week. Another project will be to pickle up some thinly sliced cukes in the Hendrick’s.

Mmmmmm.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

What’s pig got to do with it?

What’s pig, but a foodie-blog emotion?

I know, this ain’t a cooking blog, but one thing I do want to discuss here is using spirits in cooking. I’m just a novice here, but it should be fun to discuss what works well for us and what fails miserably.

One night last week, my lovely wife brought home a couple of nice pork chops from the Greenmarket. We had planned on grilling them over hard-wood charcoal, but the rains had other plans, so I started prepping them for the iron skillet. Jen recommended a bourbon reduction to glaze the chops, but as I seared the chops, I had another idea: pork chops and applesauce.

Now, it happens that we had no applesauce, but we do have Laird’s Applejack. What’s more, we had a small Mason jar in the fridge with fresh cherries steeping in Applejack. I meant them for cocktails, but Jen had also brought home more fresh cherries that night, so what the hell.

Here’s what I did:

1. I seared the chops on both sides in olive oil, salt, and pepper.
2. As the chops cooked, I pulled the jar of applejack-soaked cherries from the fridge. I removed six cherries and muddled them up with some of the applejack from the jar. I also added a splash of Angostura and a splash of rye.
3. I removed the chops to a platter and tented them with foil.
4. Then, I deglazed the skillet with the applejack-rye-cherry mixture. I stirred up all the crispy bits from the pan and let the alcohol reduce a bit.
5. With the alcohol reduced by about half, I added two teaspoons of butter and cooked until the pan sauce thickened. We served that over the chops.

Yum! The pan sauce captured all the flavors of the applejack, cherries, bitters, and rye, without any flavor overpowering the others. What made this work was that, in mixing drinks, I had already started thinking about blending applejack, cherries, and whiskey. The only question was, how would it play with pork? I think it worked out very well.