Fat Lips Spill Sips

Hey, bartender! You spilled something...

I don't drink coffee, so I use my Bodum French coffee press for tea. The press is elegant, it’s a perfect size, and it can withstand the shock of boiling water I pour over loose leaves. It also usually stays in the cabinet because when I pour from it, it spills. Every time.

When we spill liquids, we do so for very specific reasons. We are drunk, for instance, or clumsy. I myself am stranger to neither state. But even the most steady and sober imbiber can end up with a spreading wetness when pouring from a vessel that has the wrong kind of lip. As much as I like the Bodum press, its lip — thick, rounded — is the wrong kind.

I’ve been reading up on the physics of pouring lately to learn how best to avoid dribbling hot tea on my hands and the counter. The search led me to India, physics journals, and that bar-raising Canadian, Jamie Boudreau.

Any number of videos online may be found showing Indian chai wallahs “pulling” or “throwing” tea for their customers (see, for instance, this one). Bartenders may recognize the move as first cousin to the back-and-forth tossing of high-proof whiskey needed to create a Blue Blazer. Well, minus the flaming whiskey. Some think that thick mugs able to withstand high temperatures are de rigeur for bartenders and home enthusiasts wanting to recreate the 19th century Blue Blazer. But it turns out that they may be handicapping themselves by using clunky old pewter mugs.

In their book Mangoes & Curry Leaves, Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid describe the long arcs of hot liquid Indian tea sellers pour to froth their tea:

“Throwing tea” is a subcontinental tradition. A person making tea will often pour the milk and tea mixture from one container to another and then back again, over and over, in order to blend and froth the tea. You’ll see people do this all over the Subcontinent, but nowhere as dramatically as in South India where a tea maker will have an arc of tea that is three to four feet long flying through the air. An expert thrower never spills and can work with the smallest of containers, even while gazing in a completely different direction…

They go on to say, almost in passing, that one of the tricks to learning the move is to use containers with thin lips. This is an important note. It turns out that fat-lipped containers are particularly prone to dribbles and spills. In fact, there’s a name for the phenomenon: the teapot effect.

The teapot effect is as old as creation, but it wasn’t explained until 1957, when Joseph B. Keller of New York University tackled the problem of why tea dribbles from the spout of teapots rather than pouring without incident into cups. In his later essay, Spilling, Keller explains why liquids tend to dribble at the point of the pour:

It is simply that at the pouring lip the pressure in the liquid is lower than the pressure in the surrounding air, so that the air pushes the liquid against the lip and against the outside of the pouring container.

In a pouring container with a thick, fat, or rounded lip, this actually can cause the liquid to flow backwards along the rim of the pouring container and along its outer surface. That’s where the dribble comes from and why I end up with tea on the counter. There’s more — much more — to be said about the teapot effect; streamlines, flow rates, atmospheric pressure, velocity vectors, etc. Jearl Walker offers a more detailed examination of the forces at work here.

The take-home points for bartenders, drinks enthusiasts, and those who would practice throwing tea with minimal spillage, though, are:

• Use containers with thin lips. Most two-part Boston shakers, for instance, are perfect. But pouring from the metal canister rather than the glass is less likely to cause spills.
• Pour from containers that are only partly full. Once it hits the lip, the liquid from a partially full glass is moving at a greater velocity and is less likely to spill along the outer container. Also, in order to spill, the liquid would have to turn a large angle — which is unlikely.
• Increase the angle of the pour as much as possible. Poured at a right angle (90°), a liquid has far more opportunity to travel back along the outer surface of the pouring vessel. Increase that angle, and you’ll end up with a cleaner pour. 
• Pour quickly. Liquids traveling at greater speed is more apt to go where you want it. 

Jamie Boudreau demonstrates a Hot Toddy done Blue Blazer-style below. Notice that the lips on his metal mugs (1) are relatively thin and (2) actually angle away from the mugs’ apertures, thereby increasing the angle the burning liquid would have to overcome in order to spill along the outer surface. Seems especially important when dealing with flaming overproof rum, no?



I still use the Bodum press — after all: perfect size, can withstand boiling water, and all that. But after reading Keller, I now know why it's better not to fill it quite so much and to pour quickly. There's nothing I can do about that lip, though.

Goes well with:

• Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid (2005) Mangoes & Curry Leaves: Culinary Travels Through the Great Subcontinent. Artisan Books, New York.
• Joseph B. Keller (1957) Teapot Effect. Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 28, No. 8, pages 859-864.
• -- (1988) Spilling. In Kurti, Nicholas and Giana (ed) But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Adam Hilger, Philadelphia. I mentioned this book a few weeks ago in a confession for my love of port wine.

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.

An Excess of Port

I am inordinately fond of port wine. Tawny, ruby, vintage, late bottled vintage, Portuguese, Australian, even those of my own state, California. Whatever is at hand, I’m game. I was, nevertheless, taken aback that this weekend’s inventory revealed that fully 27% of our home wine stock is port. The numbers skew high because we’ve been drinking the other wines and not replenishing the supply. Plus, frankly, I’d lost track of how much port I’d laid down in the first place. But still. Damn.

I’m acquisitive, sure, but no hoarder. It’s time to reduce the stock. The inventory made me think, naturally, of grabbing a wedge of Stilton cheese, port’s classic postpriandal sidekick.

It also got me thinking of a fantastic little tome in the back library called But the Crackling Is Superb. The book is a collection of essays by members of The Royal Society (Britain’s long-standing academy of sciences) dealing broadly with the intersection of food, drinks, and science. If you read Harold McGee with pleasure, you’ll like this volume. In the collection, we see one of the earlier public displays of what’s now called molecular gastronomy and mixology. I’ve had it nearly twenty years and still find surprises in its pages.

Contributor John Postgate was Professor of Microbiology at the University of Sussex. His essay "Two Aperitifs" deals with concocting compounded drinks on a base of cheap British port. That’s the essay that popped into my mind as I mulled our port situation. Fresh out of cheap British port, I’m considering using his recipe for Corsican Aperitif, but deploying some of our stash of proper port — which he warns works less well. Hmm. We’ll see if Professor Postgate and I have similar tastes.

The recipe was developed with his father as the two of them sought to create something akin to French aperitifs such as Dubonnet, Byrrh, and Cap Corse. Postgate’s notes are included in brackets.

Corsican Aperitif
(John Postgate)

Take 1 bottle of British Ruby or Tawny Port wine, sometimes marketed ‘of Port character’ [1]. Add 2 to 4 drops of quinine bitters [2]. Insert a vanilla pod [3] and leave to steep in the bottle at room temperature for at least 3 weeks [4]. Decant from the pod (which can be re-used) and serve with ice, with a slice of lemon, or straight.

Notes

[1] Gratifyingly, the cheaper the British wine, the better. Real port and Cyprus port-type work less well.

[2] A thimble of Campari, not available at the time of our researches, is ideal.

[3] Nonsense, Use 2-3 drops of vanilla essence and skip the decanting. My parent was rather against essences.

[4] Chemists will find this difficult to believe, but 3 weeks at domestic room temperature transformed it from vanilla-flavoured port into a drink with its own character. I’ve kept it for six months longer without further improvement.

Postgate goes on to offer Solace, “a good cheap aperitif” that “goes down well for elevenses with cake.” It is nothing more than a bottle of (again, cheap British) white port flavored with a swath of orange peel (sans pith) and decanted after two days. Postgate warns not to use orange essence which would make the aperitif “surprisingly nasty.”

Well worth tracking down:

• Kurti, Nicholas and Giana (ed) (1988) But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society. Adam Hilger, Philadelphia.