Bookshelf: Modernist Cuisine

I’ve cast, on occasion, disparaging remarks about modern food and drink. Meant every word, too. As a drinks judge, I’ve been served badly executed drinks by aspiring molecular cocktologists hellbent on deploying foams and smoke in places they did not belong (once, horribly, with Diet Dr Pepper and black tapioca pearls). Cooks are not immune to the desire to foist upon us novel creations. A few months back, the San Diego Tribune asked me to suggest places with great modern desserts. “I’ve had it with modern desserts,” I responded.

Few things depress me more than the freakish curiosities of pastry chefs who’ve abandoned familiar forms in a misguided rush for the sublime. Deconstructed this and re-imagined that...Just make a cake and make it delicious. I don’t need to crack open an egg shell (“Oh, look! It’s really the frosting, frozen with liquid nitrogen! And ambergris angel food cake with a colloidal Meyer-lemon center!”) to get genuine, unalloyed pleasure. Keep your modern desserts. I’ve got ice cream and brownies. 

Yet as hamfisted as some of the executions are, modernist cuisine — what some have dubbed molecular gastronomy — is creeping into wider acceptance, understanding, and successful use. Even by home cooks. And so I’ve been boning up on modernist cooking. Like it or not, the approach will grow more widespread in upcoming years as ingredients and techniques once thought exotic or uber-geeky become commonplace. It behooves us to understand what we're facing when we're presented with such things.

Click to embiggen

Different cooks have different takes on what modernist cooking is, but if there were one common thread, it is an earnest questioning of received kitchen knowledge and a desire to discover through experimental inquiry how best (defined variously) to prepare certain dishes.

Quite famously, for instance, in On Food and Cooking, science writer Harold McGee debunked the widely held notion that searing a steak “sealed in” its juices, making it juicier and more succulent than without the customary brown crust. As adamantly as even some professional chefs insist on this practice, it has no basis in truth. In fact, searing steak demonstrably causes it to lose moisture. That sizzle you hear when a steak is slapped on the grill? Those are juices vaporizing. If the surface were sealed, you wouldn’t hear that sound. Any steak eater can attest, however, that a degree of sear on a steak is good — not for any juice-sealing, but because of a browning process that helps makes food from cookies to dry-aged rib-eyes taste delicious. The process is called the Maillard reaction. Merely knowing that will earn you a degree of respect among cooks who dig this sort of thing.

The go-to book of the moment — and undoubtedly for decades to come — is Nathan Myhrvold’s six-volume Modernist Cuisine. Sure, you could (and should) read Harold McGee’s books if you want to get a grip on why modern cookery at times seems to have become unmoored from its classical foundations. You should also read those edited or written by and about Hervé This, Ferran Adrià, Nicholas Kurti, Heston Blumenthal, and others at the fore of what Jeffrey Steingarten has dubbed “hypermodern” cooking. Modernist Cuisine, though, is where the vacuum-packed, sous-vide meat of the matter lies.

Order up: The Mushroom Swiss Burger

At a breath-taking $625, this isn’t a purchase for the casual cook. The recipes can seem daunting with their calls for esoteric equipment and occasionally obscure ingredients. I’ve been working my way through it on and off for the last month. Quite simply, I cannot afford many of the kitchen tools, toys, and ingredients described in its pages. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting a hamburger as prepared following Myhrvold’s method: wrapped (a la Laura Palmer) in plastic, warmed in circulating water for about thirty minutes to 56°C/133°F, frozen in liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds, then deep-fried in 232°C/450°F oil for one minute to brown the crust. In volume five, Myhrvold gives the recipe for a mushroom Swiss cheese burger. Despite the 30-hour preparation, I want, as Liz Lemon says, to go to there.

Like the very best manuals, Modernist Cuisine is one to revisit time and time again. The photography is a joy and the writing is easy to understand even if the concepts are not at first intuitive. I didn’t absorb it all on the first reading, nor will I on the second. But having plowed through it feels a bit like I’ve survived a postgraduate seminar on anatomy and organic chemistry — and I’m hungry for more.

Just keep those foaming, smoking, glow-in-the-dark, hot-gel cocktails at arm’s length.

Nathan Myhrvold et al (2011)
Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking 
2438 pages (hardback)
The Cooking Lab
ISBN: 0982761007
$625.00

Goes well with:

• A more approachable (and affordable) manual comes from British bacon-curer Maynard Davies. Manual of a Traditional Bacon Curer  may be smaller and cheaper than Modernist Cuisine, but it too is very good indeed.
• Speaking of cocktologists, don't forget this guy when you're deciding what to drink.

American Apple Spirits

In the airless, nearly gluey July night, black-suited pallbearers hoist aloft a plain wooden coffin and begin their walk. In their wake, solemn mourners march slowly, thick humidity muffling their every footstep. Musicians follow, their low, brassy dirge echoing off damp stones as they move toward the Vieux Carré. The somber mood doesn’t last; this is, after all, New Orleans, where funerals are as much a cause for celebration as they are for sadness. Within blocks, the band strikes up a familiar Dixieland tune. Smiles and whoops break out as the celebrants form a dancing, singing, handkerchief-waving “second line.” Hallelujah! The saints, those reliable old saints, go marching in once again. Once it reaches the French Quarter, the line spills into a Decatur Street café where liquor flows freely and the party begins in earnest. No one — not a soul — sheds a tear for the deceased.

How could they? It was the Appletini.

* * *

My piece on American apple spirits runs in the Summer 2012 Distiller magazine  — part thumbnail history of apple distillates, part overview of some of today's producers. The bit above is the original intro. Fun to write, but it took too long to get to the point, so I cut it. Ah, well. What's the point of having a blog if I can't occasionally post sweepings from the cutting room floor?

Some of the distilleries covered are Laird & Company, Germain-Robin, Osocalis, Harvest Spirits, Clear Creek Distillery, San Juan Island Distillery, and more. Applejack and apple brandy are the same thing (except, obviously, when they're not), but they're hardly the only apple spirits available. As much as we adore Laird's apple brandy — and make no mistake: we sincerely do — it's not the only option for those who hanker for a bit of the old apple palsy.

Here's a PDF of the piece from Distiller with interviews, historic and modern cocktail recipes, and a look at some of what's available for American consumers.

Brown Cubes of Joy: Coffee Ice Cubes in New Mexico

Yo, dawg; I heard you like coffee in your coffee.

Even though I don't drink coffee, I guzzle tea and prefer local to corporate coffee shops for my caffeine fixes. This isn't strictly a buy-local sentiment (though that plays into it). Rather, I like the attention to details the small players often show. Something as simple as a bottle of simple syrup put out next to the granulated stuff lets me know there's an iced tea drinker in-house who dislikes gritty undissolved sugar as much as I do. Individual glasses of iced tea brewed to order are a nice touch. Then there's coffee ice cubes, something I'd never seen done at Starbucks.*

When we were in Santa Fe this weekend, the sidekicks and I stopped for our morning doses at Station Coffee & Tea in an old railyard now repurposed for restaurants and shopping. Station offers iced coffee. Nothing new there; nearly every American corporate shop does. The difference is that Station keeps two buckets of coffee ice cubes in its ice cream case. When an order for iced coffee comes in, barristas simply use these cubes rather than plain water iced cubes. The boys marveled at the goodness of the coffee and the fact that as the cube melted, their coffees stayed strong.

The recipe is simple; it's coffee. What? You...you need more? Ok. Freeze it in ice cube trays. Use those cubes rather than plain water ice cubes when making iced coffee or coffee cocktails. At home, you could store them in a sealed plastic bag or other container that won't pick up freezer odors (or impart their own to the freezer's contents; coffee-flavored butter, anyone?). My mom used to do the same thing with orange juice in the summer when I was a kid for my morning juice. Nice to see it back in play.

Station Fine Coffee and Tea
530 South Guadalupe Street
Santa Fe, NM 87501
505.988.2470
stationcoffeehouse.com

* I should say I've never seen coffee ice cubes done on purpose at Starbucks. There was always something vaguely unpleasant about their iced tea. I'd go, though, to visit with friends who liked the place. Not until I left a cup of iced tea sit untended for a long stretch and then reached to finish it did the unpleasantness hit me: the melted ice cubes taste of coffee. Maybe the ice absorbs ambient coffee molecules in the air. I don't know. That's my guess, anyway. This isn't a problem for — or even noticeable to — coffee drinkers, but for finicky-ass tea drinkers like me, it was a deal-killer. That was the last time I ever bought Starbucks iced tea.

Goes well with:

• Ever wonder why some vessels dribble liquids more readily than others? The teapot effect comes into play. Whether you're pouring from teapots, cocktail shakers, French presses, or coffee cups, there's a reason you want to go with narrow lipped vessels. Read on to learn why.
• Of course, I like hot tea, too. On chilly mornings I'll crank out a pot of masala chai — sweet hot tea spiced with cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and a few other odds and ends — to fuel the morning work.
• Rip it. Dip it. Sip it. Are you man enough for tea?

Mexican Pickled Carrots (o: zanahorias en escabeche)

The radishes that appear on the table at chips-and-salsa type Mexican restaurants appeal to some, but the more common pickled jalapenos and carrots are my own weakness. Give me that, a continuing supply of cold beers, and no particular place to be and I don't care how long it takes for lunch to come.

My regular eating buddies have dainty and tepid appreciations for chiles, so the bowl invariably is left to me alone — and it always gets emptied, leaving just a little pool of oregano-flecked juice at the bottom. Sometimes the chiles are shockingly hot; other times, they're duds, no hotter than a garden-variety bell pepper. Part of the fun is finding out which kind I just popped in my mouth. Whether you know them as pickled carrots, Mexican carrots, zanahorias en escabeche, or (upping the chile quotient) chiles encurditos, know this: they're simple to make and they go fast.

For the vinegar, you can use the plain white stuff or a mix of half white and half rice vinegar, Filipino cane vinegar, or homemade pineapple vinegar.

Mexican Pickled Carrots

24 oz/750ml water
24 oz/750ml vinegar (see above)
1/3 cup/80ml canola or corn oil
5 bay leaves
1 Tbl oregano
1 tsp crushed black pepper
1 head of garlic, halved across the equator
2 lbs/1kilo carrots, sliced diagonal
4-5 jalapeno chiles, sliced diagonally
1 small red onion, peeled and sliced thinly

Bring the carrots and enough water to cover them by a finger width or two to a boil in a large pot. Cook at a low boil for 5-8 minutes, until tender but still with a bite. Cooked them too long? They're mush now? Feed them to the dog and start over.

Drain the carrots and give the pot a quick rinse. Mix the remaining ingredients except chiles and onion slices in the pot and bring to a boil. Add the drained carrots, the onion slices, and the uncooked chiles. Return to a boil, then take the pot off off the heat, cover, and let it rest overnight.

Pack into clean jars and store in the fridge.

Makes about 1.25 liters/5 cups.

Goes well with:

• Pork tenderloin in peanut sauce. It comes as a surprise to some Americans and Europeans that not all Mexican food is hot (though it was with glee that I saw a Frenchman clamp his hand to his mouth in shock and pain after sampling what I considered a mild table salsa). The recipe in the link above for filete de cerdo en cacahuate is one I adapted from Larousse de la cocina Mexicana.
• I make watermelon pickles with lemon and ginger. You should, too.
• Small batch half-sour pickles, a quick and simple recipe for making New York-style pickles when you don't feel up to cranking out a whole barrel of them or traveling to the city to enjoy them in situ.

Smith & Cross Pot-Stilled Marshmallows

We have discussed that great accompaniment to gin before, real marshmallow syrup, made with actual marshmallow plant, Althaea officinalis. Today, it's the more familiar, fluffy candy kind of marshmallow...with funky, old school, overproof rum.

The thing about marshmallows recipes is that they can seem long and intimidating, what with stand mixers and thermometers and whatnot. Know what else sounds intimidating? Detailed instructions for tying your shoes. Don't mistake precise, however, for difficult; these are in fact quite easy to make.  Once you know how to make marshmallows, you may wonder why you never tried them before now.

Perhaps you'll get a warmer reception than I did.

When I mentioned at home this morning that I'd made a batch of Smith & Cross marshmallows, the flash of stinkeye was instant. "I seem to remember," I was scolded, "that you sat on that couch a week and a half ago and said that you were going to start eating better." I didn't mention the multiple 1,200-calorie tiki drinks my accuser served me on that same couch not ten hours earlier. I did, however, explain that I hadn't said that I was going to eat them — only that I had made them.

It's true; I have been looking into joining a Crossfit cult gym and reading up on the so-called paleo diet (equal parts revisionist anthropology and sly marketing). It's also true that, like Jeff Goldblum's Mr. Frost, I enjoy making desserts more than I do eating them. For years, I've given away the bulk of the sweets I do make. Rum-spiked marshmallows, though, were too tempting to pass.

The idea for them came from Shauna Sever's recent book Marshmallow Madness! Sever recommends 80-proof Myer's dark rum for her Buttered Rum Marshmallows. Myer's is fine. I buy it by the handle for mixed drinks.  But I wanted something with a bit more funk, so switched at the last minute for the 114-proof Smith & Cross, a  Jamaican pot-stilled rum which New Orleans bartender Chris Hannah put to such good use one Mardi Gras in his cooler full of Chief Lapu Lapu cocktail. Drinks writer David Wondrich lumps it in his "pirate juice" category of recommended rums (see below). Except for that one improvement, the recipe below is Sever's. She notes:

These addictive confections have deep notes of brown sugar, a rich butter flavor, and just a hint of booziness. Perfect for adult s'mores or, freshly prepared and unset, this mallow batter makes for a dangerously delicious ice-cream topping.

These actually do make tasty s'mores, but be aware that homemade marshmallows get very gooey very fast over direct flame; if you want to make s'mores, I recommend ditching the sticks and instead heat them either with a kitchen torch or under a broiler. My biggest regret in making these came as I was pouring the whipped confection into the small baking pan to set up overnight. At that moment, I realized the sticky mass easily could have been the base for rummy Rice Krispie Treats. 

Smith & Cross Pot-Stilled Marshmallows

The Bloom
4 ½ tsp unflavored powdered gelatin
⅓ cup cold water
I Tbl Smith & Cross (or other dark rum)

The Syrup
½ cup lightly packed dark brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
½ cup light can syrup, divided
¼ cup water
3 Tbl Smith & Cross rum

½ tsp salt

The Mallowing
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
2 Tbl unsalted butter, soft and well-stirred

½ cup Classic Coating (below), plus more for dusting

Lightly coat an 8-by-8-inch bolting pan with cooking spray.

Whisk together the gelatin, cold water, and rum in a small bowl. Let it soften for 10 minutes.

Stir together the sugars, ¼ cup of the corn syrup, water, rum, and salt in a large saucepan over high heat. Boil, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 242°F to 245°F. Be prepared to monitor the heat: the syrup will bubble up suddenly around 190F as the alcohol starts to boil. Meanwhile, pour the remaining ¼ cup corn syrup into the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment. Place the softened butter in a medium bowl. Microwave the gelatin on high until completely melted, about 30 seconds, and pour it into the corn syrup. Set the mixer to low and keep it running.

When the syrup reaches 242°F to 245°F, slowly pour it into the mixer bowl. Increase the speed to medium and beat for 5 minutes. Beat for 5 minutes more at medium-high speed. Beat on the highest speed for I to 2 more minutes, adding the vanilla. The finished marshmallow will be doubled in volume. Quickly scoop about a quarter of the batter into the bowl with the softened butter and whisk to blend. Scrape the buttered batter into the rest of the better and fold to blend well. Pour the marshmallow into the prepared pan. Sift coating evenly over top. Let set for 8 hours in a cool, dry place.

Use a knife to loosen the marshmallow from the edges of the pan. Invert the slab onto a coating-dusted work surface. Cut into pieces, dusting the sticky edges with more coating

Classic Coating

The coating that keeps the confections from sticking to the pan, each other, your fingers, and everything in between is made of 3 parts confectioner's (aka 10-X) sugar to 2 parts cornstarch. The batch below makes more than this recipe uses, but it keeps in an airtight container and is worth making in a bulk if you intend to crank out marshmallows. It can also be flavored with a 1-2 drops of essential oils or colored with food coloring and run through a food processor.

1 ½ cup confectioners’ sugar

1 cup cornstarch or potato starch

Whisk together.

Shauna Sever (2012)
Marshmallow Madness!
96 pages (hardback)
Quirk Books
ISBN: 1594745722
$16.95

Goes well with:

• Sever also has a recipe for margarita marshmallows here.
• Why do I give away the sweet things I make? Because I've no willpower; I'll eat it all otherwise. See I Blew the Ass out of My Jeans This Week for insight into how my tendency to devour anything in sight decimated at least one part of my wardrobe.
• Regarding Wondrich's "pirate juice" — in Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl, Wondrich uses the term to refer to an older style of strong, and strongly flavored, rums characterized by "hogo," a word derived from the French haut goût. He writes in Esquire: 

Derived from the French phrase for the "high taste" game meats develop when they're hung up to mature before cooking — and by "mature," we mean "rot" — hogo used to be a term of art in the rum trade to describe the sulfurous, funky tang that raw-sugarcane spirits throw off. For 300 years, rum distillers have sought ways first to tame and then to eliminate it: high-proof distillation (more alcohol equals less hogo), filtering, tweaking the fermentation, long aging in barrels — all very effective, particularly when used in combination. Perhaps too effective.

Revisiting Real Marshmallow Syrup

[Note: Regular readers will recognize this post as an old one from 2010. Why the repost? Because I'm a jackass. Not ten minutes ago, I accidentally deleted the original post. A hyperextended finger has made me clumsy. Fortunately, in my paranoia of losing data, I keep duplicate backup XML files of the blog in separate locations. Today, those backups paid off. All the great comments and the Facebook 'likes' are gone, but the notes and recipes are restored. With no further ado, here's the original piece.]

Köhler (1887) Marshmallow

I was vaguely aware that common modern marshmallows — the confectionery cushions one finds in S’mores, Rice Krispie treats, hot cocoa, and, regrettably, on cooked sweet potatoes — don’t contain any of the obscure marshmallow plant. “Yeah, yeah,” I thought, “There’s a plant, there’s a candy. Not the same.” But I’ve been increasingly curious about medicinal marshmallow plants and I wanted to learn for myself whether they might have applications for mixed drinks. After all, we use some pretty funky medicinal plants in bitters and syrups. Why not use this one? So I got my hands on actual marshmallow root.

It turns out that marshmallow is…odd. For millennia, the roots of Althaea officinalis — a mallow plant found near salt marshes, hence the name — has been used in medicine and confectionery. Ancient Egyptians are said to have used the roots as both medicine and candy. The reason — and it’s the reason I say that marshmallow is odd — is that the sap in the root is gooey. Until gelatin became a popular stabilizer in the 20th century, confectioners used the plant’s natural gooeyness to stabilize and flavor a soft candy named after the plant: marshmallow. In French, it’s guimauve for both the plant and the candy. As in the US, the connection these days is in name only.

The cut root I purchased was perfectly dry and felt like any other root or shredded bark. But wait. In water it became mucilaginous; a thick, colloid, almost ropy syrup formed as the infusion sat overnight. Dry, it had just the faintest musty smell. Once it got wet, the smell was, well, rooty. Seriously. Smelled like someone had been digging up the garden. Before I added any sugar to the infusion, it had already formed a mildly sweet syrup.

That mucilaginous thickness has long been regarded as excellent for helping to soothe sore throats. I’m less interested in marshmallow’s purported medicinal properties, though, than I am its culinary applications.

Taking a cue from French cooking manuals, I decided to make a batch of Sirop de Guimauve with actual guimauve. The syrup is sweet, of course, but it also provides a supple mouthfeel not unlike gum Arabic, adding body as well as flavor. The taste is woodsy, bosky. There’s a fleeting impression of violets, but that passes and is replaced by a general sense of something vaguely old-fashioned. I mentioned to friends that it was like something once tasted, but long forgotten. My first taste reminded me of the paradoxical feeling I had at my first taste of black truffle; I’ve had this before.

I’ve tried the syrup successfully in a few drinks such a simple daiquiri and in a Tom Collins. Pairings with gin seem especially promising — whiskey less so. My emerging rule of thumb is to use about 75% marshmallow syrup as I would sugar syrup in a drink. It is a notably thick syrup. The first time I poured it from a bottle, I used a knife to cut the end of the pour. That turned out to be overkill; just stop pouring before reaching your desired quantity and the amount in the jigger may well pull out the rest of the volume you need from the bottle.

The first recipe came from Phaidon’s reprint of Ginette Mathiot’s massive cookery tome, I Know How to Cook. A standard in France since the 1930’s, Mathiot’s book covers over 1,400 recipes, including drinks. Her recipe is from this first American edition.

Sirop de Guimauve (Ginette Mathiot)

2.25 oz marshmallow root
2.25 pounds sugar

Wash, peel and slice the marshmallow roots. Bring generous 2 cups water to a boil in a pan and add the marshmallow roots. Let infuse for 24 hours. Strain and add the sugar. Bring to a boil again, skim and immediately remove from the heat. Strain and let cool. Pour into sterilized bottles and seal. To serve, dilute with water to taste.

In Élixirs & boissons retrouvés, Gilbert Fabiani offers a similar recipe. My translation is below. The original French follows because my French is entirely self-taught and is, admittedly, a mess. Feel free to correct it.

Marshmallow Syrup (Rowley’s translation of Fabiani)

With 75 grams of the root, ½ liter of water and 1 kg of sugar. Wash the root well and cut it into little pieces. Cover with boiling water and let it infuse for 24 hours. Strain, add sugar and cook over low heat for 10 minutes to ¼ hour. Check the consistency of the syrup, which will adhere to the edge of the pot as it cools. Put in bottles and refrigerate or sterilize them for ½ hour for a long shelf life.

Sirop de Guimauve (Fabiani’s original)

Avec 75 grammes de la racine, ½ litre d’eau et 1 kg de sucre. Bien laver et tronçonner la racine en petis morceaux. Recouvrir avec l’eau bouillante et laisser infuser pendant 24 heures. Filtrer, ajouter le sucre et faire cuire à petit feu pendant 10 minutes à ¼ heure. Vérifier la consistence du sirop qui doit attacher sur la bord du récipient en se refroidissant. Mettre en bouteilles et conserver au frais ou stériliser pendant ½ heure pour une longue conservation.

Cooking the syrup

My final version is essentially a 2:1 rich syrup flavored with, and thickened by, Althaea officinalis.

Real Marshmallow Syrup (Rowley)

80g/2.8 oz (about 2/3 cup) dry cut marshmallow root
500ml/2 cups filtered water
900g/4 cups sugar

Place the cut marshmallow root in a large jar or heatproof container. Bring the water to a boil and pour it over the marshmallow. Cover and let this infuse for 24 hours. Strain, pressing on the solids to extract as much liquid as possible, into a clean pot. Over medium-high heat, add the sugar to the marshmallow infusion and stir until it dissolves completely. Pour into sterilized bottles and refrigerate.

If you make a batch for yourself — or already use marshmallow syrup in mixed drinks or cooking — let me know, eh? I find this stuff is promising, but would love other ideas about how to use it.

Recap:

• Thickens, flavors mixed drinks
• Use about 75% of the volume you might use of a 2:1 syrup
• Promising with gin, some rums, not so much whiskey
• Make a batch, play with it, and let us know what you've done
• UPDATE 1/30/11: our recipe for Marshmallow Collins is here. 

Ginette Mathiot (1st US edition, 2009)
I Know How to Cook
Phaidon Press
976 pages, hardback
ISBN: 071485736X
$49.95

Gilbert Fabiani (2000)
Élixirs & boissons retrouvés
Éditions Équinoxe
424 pages, trade paperback
ISBN: 2841351262
€26.65 (on Amazon.fr)

Goes well with:

• I picked up the marshmallow root at The Herb Store in Albuquerque. It’s not obvious from their website, but they will ship. Tenzing Momo in Seattle also sells marshmallow.

Mexican Chocolate Pudding with Dark Rum

This summer, noted one of my young friends, has been so hot that you've got to take your shirt off just to think. Certainly, it's been so hot that we keep the stove off as much as possible, lighting it maybe once a day to bang out a few things at once, things  that will keep; iced tea, for instance, or a quick vinegar dressing for cole slaw.

And pudding.

I've never enjoyed particularly intricate desserts. As  demanding as I can get in my cocktails and liquor, my tastes for dessert are decidedly straightforward — pies, cakes, ice cream, brownies, cookies. That sort of thing. Wholesome, uncomplicated, good ol' 'Murcan food.

Except, of course, if you've visited here before, you know that I don't live far from downtown Tijuana and my tastes reach far beyond our American shores. Yes, I like simple desserts, but they may be flavored with vanilla, pandan, cardamom, kafir lime, lemongrass, a range of flavors from homey to exotic. Mexican chocolate is one of those tastes I like and I deployed it this weekend in a simple pudding. This type of chocolate comes in dense discs laced with sugar and canela. Canela is the soft, fragile, true cinnamon (Cinnamomum zelanicum) from Sri Lanka that is ubiquitous in Mexico. What Americans know as cinnamon is actually the dried bark of the more strongly flavored and sturdy cassia (Cinnamomum cassia), a species of laurel tree whose dried, clove-like buds are called for in a number of old bitters recipes.

Right. Enough of botany. Ibarra and Abuela are two readily available brands of Mexican chocolate sold in American grocery stores. If you can't find them, you can follow the directions below using bitter or semi-sweet chocolate and a bit of ground cassia (or, better, if you've got it, canela). It's not necessary to pulverize the chocolate completely, but do break it into small pieces so it melts more readily. Use a box grater, a serrated kitchen knife to shave off pieces, or — as I do — show it who's boss with hefty butcher's cleaver.

An 8.5" cleaver makes short work of Ibarra chocolate discs.

Mexican Chocolate Pudding with Dark Rum

½ cup sugar
¼ cup cornstarch
Pinch of salt
2 cups whole milk
1 cup cream
3 tablets (6 oz total) Mexican chocolate, chopped
¼ cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels
1 Tbl dark rum
1 tsp pure Mexican vanilla extract

In a medium metal mixing bowl, whisk together the sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Add the milk and cream (or use all milk) and whisk briefly until thoroughly combined. Make a double boiler by placing the bowl over a pot of simmering water, making sure the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water.

Stir occasionally with a spatula, scraping the sides, for 15 to 20 minutes, When the pale mix is thick enough to coat the back of the spatula, add the Mexican and semi-sweet chocolates. Stir only enough to assure the chocolates are melted and thoroughly combined.

Remove from the heat and stir in the rum and vanilla. Pour immediately into serving cups or a single one-quart/liter dish. Cover the surface of the pudding with plastic wrap (unless you prefer a skin over the top, in which case, don’t let the plastic touch the surface), let it cool a bit, and then refrigerate an hour or two to chill.

Serve plain, with whipped cream, or a few fresh gratings of canela (the softer, more fragile, "true" cinnamon sold in Mexican markets). Or all three.

Goes well with:

• The San Diego Tribune ran a piece on modern desserts this Spring. Asked my opinion on who makes the best local examples, I went on a bit of a rant. "Few things depress me more," I wrote, "than the freakish curiosities of pastry chefs who’ve abandoned familiar forms in a misguided rush for the sublime." More here.
• The chocolate/canela combination plays out often in Mexican cookery. Champurrado, a hot drink made with the same Mexican chocolate and thickened with corn, is common around here, but better suited for cooler weather.
• Straight-up chocolate pie is a great thing to have around. Here's a version I made with dark chocolate, Nabisco's nearly black Famous Chocolate Wafers, and a healthy dose of Dos Maderas PX rum.

Moonshine Monday: Uncork that Pig's Ass and Have a Go at It

One look at their upended pig-shaped bottle with a cork jammed in its ass and you realize that Mick and Michael Heston have a sense of humor. What is not as readily apparent is that the West Virginians are paying homage to an old American tradition.

Many of toady's more fanciful bottles hold tequila — calaveras (skulls), the Republic of Texas, machine guns, and the like, dripping with testosterone and machismo — but in the late 19th century, some American distillers offered their whiskey in bottles shaped like fat, jolly swine. Usually, these were glass, but pottery examples do sometimes surface. Randy Ludacer shares photos of a variety over at the packaging blog Box Vox.

Why swine? Well, pigs — especially white ones — have long been associated with wealth and luck. Fat, happy pigs have been deployed as mascots in European and American advertising almost since the field's advent, selling everything from candy to, sadistically, sausage, hams, and bacon. Pigs also have an historic association with distilleries; for centuries, savvy distillers raised pigs in lots next to their stillhouses and fed them on spent grains. Selling off the litters added a welcome line to the account books at the end of the year.

Like fez monkeys, pigs also stand in as humans, filthy examples what what we're supposed not to be. Pouring from the rear end rather than the mouth just encourages more coarse joking. Men, after all, are such pigs.

The Hestons' Buckwheat Moon is made of 51% buckwheat with the balance of the grain bill corn and barley. Hats off to them for some fun whiskey* packaging. As it is for most craft distilleries, distribution is limited, but check out the website below to see if they can hook you up with a source in your area.

Goes well with:

• That Whiskey You Like May Cause Hog Farms to Explode, a bit on the mysterious modern case of exploding hog farms with historical notes on the distilling/hog-raising connection.
• Dan Aykroyd (yeah, that Dan Aykroyd) once held my skull in his hands. Read on and you'll understand the connection.
• Check out Pinchgut Hollow Distillery's website and see what else the crew is putting in pigs.
• *Buckwheat Moon isn't a true whiskey. As we've mentioned before, buckwheat is not really a grain, but it can be treated as one when brewing and distilling. Of course, this isn't true moonshine, either, but heel-over-heads pigs make me smile enough to not go on my usual rant about that.

Watermelon and Sea Salt

Salted watermelon? Bollocks. Why ruin a perfectly good, sweet melon with gobs of salt? Salt is a savory mineral and has no place in sweet things. Or so I thought.

Watermelon: Take it a grain (or twelve) of salt

For more than half my life, I regarded the salting of watermelon as some inexplicable aberration, like plunging peanuts in Pepsi or deep-frying peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But then...but then, one salts margaritas. And what is olive juice in a martini but salty brine? Some even cast a bit of salt in their beers with a squeeze of lime.

Counterintuitive as it may seem, salt can bring out flavors that are already present in foods. In small doses, anyway. Put enough of it in and you'll get nothing but salt.

What finally got to me to try a dash of the stuff on melon was the way I make whipped cream. Years and years ago, I picked up an Austrian trick of adding a tiny amount — a knifepoint — of fine salt to heavy cream when whipping. It enhances the sweetness of the sugar in the whipped cream and somehow makes the whole thing more creamy. If you taste the salt, though, it's too much. It's there as a foil.

And so, thinking something similar may work on melons after all, I one day strew a bit of rough French sea salt over a slice I'd just cut. Ah, what a fool I'd been. Watermelon alone — a good one, anyway — hardly seems to need any adornment. Gilding the lily and all that. But needing and wanting are different beasts and there's hardly a slice of juicy, sweet watermelon that doesn't want a bit of salt.

You'll want to use more than the knifepoint I put in whipped cream. Give it a good scattering. Don't bother with the ionized iodized granulated salt that comes in squat blue tubes. A bit too close to licking batteries. Flaky kosher or Maldon salts are better. They lend a bit of crunch to each bite and set up a great contrast between the enhanced sweetness of the melon and pinpoints of brine as they melt. The salt I use is Fleur de Sel de Guérande, a hand-harvested sea salt gathered along the coast of Brittany. Any decent sea salt will do, so use one you know and like, but I enjoy the Guérande salt because its rough, chunky texture is a counterpoint to the juicy, giving melon in each bite.

Goes well with:

• Mark Bitterman's 2010 book Salted. I have several books on salt — historical overviews, scholarly stuff, quite dry. Salted, though, is more of a field guide to salts of the world and if I could have only one tome of the stuff, this would be it. I give it a review here.
• Plugged For Your Pleasure: The Melon-Aged Cocktail — It's hot this summer. Before chilling it, why not spike your watermelon with something a little classier than grain alcohol, something like arrack punch?
• When you're done with the melon itself, be sure to save the rind for making pickled watermelon rind with ginger and try the recipe for the watermelon agua fresca on the same page (oh, hey, is that salt I see in the recipe?).

Rowley Named Distiller's New Contributing Editor

We cover a lot of things here at the Whiskey Forge that aren't whiskey. From rum to raccoons, if you can eat it or drink it, it's fair game. But spirits and those who make them are the bedrock of my...I won't say passion; that threadbare word has lost any real meaning through overuse and conflation with mere enthusiasm. Let's instead agree that spirits and those who make them are an obsession. And, yes, I fully embrace the negative connotations as well as the positive.

Just bring your apples to the distillery

Meeting with distillers is one of the main reasons I travel. When I'm on the road, I delve into archives and historical collections about liquor. I visit bars and track down particular bartenders to keep on top of the never-ending cycle of old becoming new and new becoming old. Used bookstores, flea markets, estate sales, and antique malls are my hunting grounds for tracking down the material culture of the distilling arts.

So when Distiller magazine invited me to become contributing editor, what could I do but say yes? Distiller is the print magazine of the American Distilling Institute. Its focus is the business and industry side of beverage alcohol distilling (i.e., booze). I'll be doing book reviews and feature pieces primarily on the American distilling scene with diversions into Caribbean, South American, European, and Asian distilling when they fit the conversation.

The first feature piece I've written is on American apple spirits. Lord knows we like Laird's 100-proof bonded apple brandy around here — having killed two bottles in the last two weeks — but it's no longer the only respectable option. The piece takes a look at the history of American apple distilling  from colonial times to just about three weeks ago.

When it drops, I'll give the details.

For now, I'm working on book reviews and a longer feature on...well...you'll just have to wait.