Cooking Issues

by Dave Arnold.

At this year’s Tales of the Cocktail, Eben Klemm, beverage director for BR Guests restaurants and the author of The Cocktail Primer: All You Need to Know to Make the Perfect Drink; Thomas Waugh, bartender extraordinaire at Death & Co; and I did a seminar called The Science of Stirring –a follow-up to last year’s presentation, The Science of Shaking. Rather than post a summary of the seminar, I’ve taken on the more ambitious task of summarizing everything I’ve learned about cocktail science over the past year.

This year's cocktail crew: Me, Eben Klemm, and Thomas Waugh

I’m breaking this post into segments. The one below is about shaking, stirring, temperature and dilution; the next one addresses how you perceive temperature and dilution, texture, and notes on batching drinks.  Stick with it, and at the end of the second segment you’ll get a bonus:  Thomas Waugh talking about how all this science stuff affects a real live bartender.

For those of you without patience: the Short Story

Cocktail shaking  is a violent activity.  If you shake for around 12-15 seconds (though shaking longer won’t hurt), and if  you aren’t too lethargic, neither the type of ice you use nor your shaking style will appreciably affect the temperature or dilution of your drink. Shaking completely chills, dilutes and aerates a drink in around 15 seconds, after which the drink stops changing radically and reaches relative equilibrium. Shaking is basically insensitive to bartender-induced variables.  See my post on the Science of Shaking.

Stirring is different. Think of stirring as inefficient shaking. It can take over 2 minutes of constant stirring to do what shaking can accomplish in 15 seconds. No one stirs a drink for 2 minutes, so the drink never reaches an equilibrium point. All the bartender-induced variables –  size of ice,  speed of stirring, duration of stirring, etc. — make a difference in stirred cocktails, so bartender skill is very important in a stirred cocktail.

Because stirring doesn’t reach equilibrium, stirred drinks are warmer and less diluted than shaken cocktails. Stirred drinks, unlike shaken ones, are not aerated. Stirring does not alter the texture of a drink –it merely chills and dilutes. A properly diluted cocktail stored at -5 degrees Celsius in a freezer is indistinguishable from a properly stirred one.

Don’t believe me?  The proof’s in the long story.

Long Story

The Equipment I Used for my Experiments.

I took temperature readings with a thermocouple.  I drilled holes into the bottom of metal shakers, pint glasses, and Japanese crystal stirring vessels and inserted thin stainless steel thermocouples with  ½ second response times.  I sealed the bottom of the containers with Mighty Putty, which made them water-tight and  allowed them to sit flat despite the thermocouples.  God bless Mighty Putty, may Billy Mays rest in peace.  I read the thermocouples using a Measurement Computing 8 channel thermocouple input module (Model USB-TC, a pretty good deal at $329). I recorded weights on a digital scale accurate to 0.1 gram.

The mixing vessels.

A Preliminary Rant on the Temperature of Ice:

Fact 1: Ice at 0°C can chill an alcoholic drink well below 0°C. This fact is counter-intuitive to many, but is an irrefutable consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. The universe likes increased entropy. If you want an actual explanation, see my first post on Cocktail Science. For visual proof, I submit the following experiment:

Zero degree ice chills drinks below zero!

I took ice from my freezer, put it in cold water,  and allowed it to sit for 15 minutes. I then took some of the ice and water and put them into a mixing glass with a thermocouple and vigorously stirred for 120 seconds to ensure that everything was at 0°C.  I drained the water from the ice, put the ice into a mixing glass with room-temperature vodka, and started stirring. Less than 30 seconds later my vodka was colder than 0°C.

Fact 2: Bar ice is almost always at 0°C unless it comes straight from the freezer. People have a hard time accepting this fact. As a test, I froze a large ice cube with a super-thin hypodermic thermocouple probe in the center.  I put that ice cube, along with some run-of-the-mill ice cubes for insulation, into a blast freezer for 4 hours until everything was at -20 C.  I then put the entire batch into a plastic container and waited.  In under 20 minutes, the large ice cube was within 0.5 degrees of zero.

Even big ice doesn't stay colder than zero for long.

Why?: 1. The ice warms up so quickly because it is a very good conductor of heat – four times better than stationary water.   Unless water is moving (convecting), it isn’t a good conductor. 2. Ice has a low specific heat — i.e., it doesn’t take a lot of energy to heat it up.  It takes twice the energy to heat a pound of water 1 degree than it does to heat a pound of ice. For more on specific heat, see the Anomalies of Water Page.

Fact 3: Even if your ice is below 0°C, it won’t chill a drink that much better than ice at 0°C. Ice’s tremendous chilling power doesn’t come from the energy required to heat it up, but from the energy required to melt it. It takes 0.5 calories to heat a gram of ice from -1°C to 0°C (this value is called the specific heat of ice,) but almost 80 calories to melt that same gram (this value is called the heat of fusion of water). To put it another way, melting 1 gram of ice provides the same chilling power as bringing that same gram of ice from -160°C to 0°C.  If you chill a cocktail with 150 grams of ice at -10°C, the amount of extra chilling power from the super-frozen ice is equivalent to melting only 9.5 grams of ice.

An experiment repeatedly conducted by Eben Klemm and Thomas Waugh indicates that super-frozen ice may actually chill drinks slower than ice at 0°C (even though the drinks reach a slightly lower final temperature).  I repeated the experiment once with them and once by myself, and my results matched theirs (see the chart below).  I am not certain why, but my guess is that melting ice chills three ways: through conduction, convection of the drink, and convection of the melt-water; whereas chilling without melting only uses conduction and convection of the drink.

The ice stored in the freezer gets the drink slightly colder than the ice at zero degrees, but takes longer to chill the drink. Initial drink volumes and temperatures were identical and the weights of ice used were equal within 5 grams.

The Fundamental Law of Cocktails:

Assumption: Bar ice is at 0°C.

Law: There is no chilling without dilution. There is no dilution without chilling. The only way ice can melt is by absorbing energy from its surroundings –by chilling.  Chilling and dilution are two sides of the same coin. This observation seems trivial, but the consequences are deep. For instance, many bartenders like to serve drinks with big rocks of ice because the big ice will dilute the drinks less over time. This is true, but it also will not keep the drinks as cold. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t  keep a drink as cold as possible while also diluting it as little as possible. Personally, if I were served an old fashioned I’d rather have the big rock and let the drink get a little warmer (it can get above 0°C pretty quickly when served with big ice) than let it get too watery.

Later in this post you’ll see some striking proofs of the fundamental law.

As a side note, not all chilling makes your drink colder.  Some chilling power is consumed in chilling your shaking or mixing vessel. This energy isn’t negligible –in stirred drinks especially, the type of container you use makes a difference. Metal shakers heat up and cool down quickly using minimal energy –they don’t affect your drink much.  Pint mixing glasses have more thermal mass than a shaker and absorb some energy from your drink.  Heavy Japanese crystal mixing glasses absorb the most of all.  Pre-chilling those glasses before making your drink mitigates these effects and makes them as good as –or better than, an un-chilled metal shaker. Some chilling power is also consumed overcoming the friction of mixing or shaking your drink, but this energy loss is negligible (for proof see the second experiment in The Science of Shaking II).  Lastly, some energy is lost to the surrounding environment. I ignore this energy loss, because the amount of energy lost during the mixing and shaking process is small. On the other hand, it is this energy loss to the environment that turns a drink to dreck  if it sits around waiting to be drunk.

An Apparent Exception to the Fundamental Law: The Surface Water Problem.

Everyone thinks that small ice cubes and crushed ice will inherently dilute a drink more than big ice cubes will. Here’s what’s really going on: crushed ice has a lot more water trapped on its surface than the big ice does. Big ice cubes have less surface area per gram than small cubes do.  Bar ice at 0°C has water on its surface, so big ice cubes have much less surface water per gram than crushed bar ice does.  This initial excess water dilutes your drink right away. After the initial dilution, the big ice and little ice go back to having the same chilling power. If you shake or spin the extra water off your small ice before you make a drink, it actually won’t dilute your drink any more than big ice will. For proof see my post: Does Crushed Ice Dilute More?

Chilling –Shaking vs. Stirring:

I have shown that ice can chill an alcoholic drink well below freezing.  Just how far below freezing is dependent on a number of variables: the initial temperature of the drink, the initial alcohol content of the drink, and how efficient your chilling is.  The amount of ice you use doesn’t really matter (so long as you use enough –see the Assumptions section of the Science of Shaking II post. Most drinks start at room temperature (unless you are making gin and tonics –shame on you if those ingredients are room temp). The initial alcohol content is determined by the recipe you use.  The only variable you really get to control is the efficiency of your chilling.

When chilling, stirring is just inefficient shaking.

Shaking is so violent that it accomplishes everything it needs to in about 15 seconds. After 15 seconds, the drink won’t chill much more, and the drink won’t dilute much more.  It’s reached relative equilibrium. The type of ice you use, how hard you shake (within reason –lazy shaking is no bueno), the style of shake, and how long you shake after 15 seconds doesn’t really matter. The long-winded proof of is in Science of Shaking II, but here is a chart from that post showing chilling curves for different bartenders and different types of ice:

This chart comes from last year's Tales of the Cocktail seminar. The top graph is Alex Day, the noted bartender. The second graph is Eben Klemm. Crazy Monkey is me, so named because I shook as hard as I could. I shook so hard that by the end of the shaking I couldn’t move my arms and had to jump up and down to keep going. Notice that even going crazy monkey, all of our final temperatures are about the same, regardless of shaking style and regardless of ice type.

Stirring is much more mellow than shaking.  To stir a drink to the same temperature plateau that a shaken drink reaches in 15 seconds, you might need to stir 1-2 minutes.  No one stirs this long, which means stirred drinks never reach equilibrium, which means stirring is complicated.  Here, a comparison of stirring versus shaking:

Shaken drink is in blue, quickly stirred drink is in red, and slowly stirred drink is in green. All drinks started with the same volume of liquor at the same temperature. Equal weights of un-cracked Kold-Draft cubes were used for each. Time is in seconds and T=0 represents beginning of shaking/stirring.

You can see large temperature drops in the stirred drinks when the ice is dropped (denoted by “ice” in the chart).  This is because the ice is actually hitting the thermocouple.  The temperature rises sharply when the drink is actually stirred (denoted by “st” in the chart).  The beginning of shaking is denoted by “sh.” The temperature swings are large in the shaken drink because the drink and ice are sloshed on and off the thermocouple.  Equal weights of uncracked Kold Draft ice cubes at 0°C  were used for all three drinks.  The initial volume and temperature of the drinks was identical. Notice how fast the shaking chills. The drink hits 0°C in under 10 seconds and has plateaued at -7°C in less than 17 seconds. Fast stirring gets the drink below 0°C in about 45 seconds and hits -3°C in about 1 minute 45 seconds.  The slow stirring takes almost a minute and 15 seconds to get to 0°C. How you stir makes a difference.

Here is a comparison of stirring using three different sizes of ice all at 0°C:

Stirring with different sizes of ice.

For scale, the “medium” sized cubes are the standard cubes produce by my home fridge’s ice cube maker.  All of the pictures are to scale. The big ice is really bad at chilling quickly. The small ice gets the drink below 0°C in a snappy 20 seconds –the big ice takes well over a minute. Notice that the medium ice is only about 20 seconds behind the small ice in getting to 0°C, but 2 minutes behind the small ice in reaching a -5°C plateau. It is more difficult for larger ice to chill those last couple of degrees. The big ice plateaus in a whopping 220 seconds at about -4°C.  Presumably, the length of time I had to stir and the extra energy from stirring so long is what prevented me from reaching -5°C like the other two drinks. To demonstrate that small ice chills more effectively, Ryan Fitzgerald, from Beretta in San Francisco, volunteered to stir a drink with very finely crushed ice during our seminar at Tales of the Cocktail. We spun the ice in a salad spinner to make sure it was “dry.” The tiny ice was so efficient that it chilled as fast as shaking.  His drink made it to -5°C in under 10 seconds and went all the way to -7°C in under 15.  Unfortunately, we all decided that his drink was too diluted.  All that extra chilling came at the expense of too much dilution. It would have been fine for a shaken drink, but not for a stirred one.

In light of the above chart, the common bar practice of cracking large ice cubes with the back of a spoon for stirred cocktails makes a lot of sense.  Un-cracked big ice is too inefficient at chilling; but smaller, more efficient ice might be carrying a lot of water on its surface. Cracking a big cube increases your surface area without increasing the amount of surface water.

The upshot? In stirring, the type of ice you use makes a big difference.

Two Visual Proofs of the Fundamental Law:

Proof 1: If you stir two drinks with different size ice cubes, but pour them out when they reach the same temperature, they will have the same dilution even though they were stirred for very different lengths of time.  The drinks will be identical!

If the temperature is the same the dilution is the same too!

I pulled the drinks when they reached -0.6°C.  Notice this temperature is a far cry from the -5°C plateau temperature I could have achieved by stirring for a long, long time, but stirred drinks are never stirred long enough to reach the plateau.   –0.6°C is much more realistic in the real world.

Proof 2: Whether you start stirring right away, or dump ice into a drink and let it sit for a minute before stirring,  the drinks will end up about the same. Just throwing ice into a drink doesn’t chill it very much.  Because it doesn’t chill very much, it doesn’t dilute very much.

Letting ice sit in a drink: We added Kold-Draft ice to a a room temperature drink and let it sit for one minute. That is the blue curve. At the end of one minute we added Kold-Draft ice to the drink represented in red (same volume of liquor and ice as in the blue curve) and began stirring both simultaneously. The large instantaneous drop in temperature of the blue curve prior to stirring is ice actually touching the thermocouple. As stirring commences, the temperature rapidly rises to show the true temperature of the drink.

This fact really surprised me. I had assumed that allowing ice to sit in a drink for a minute without stirring would over-dilute the drinks, but both drinks had nearly identical weights when they were finished.  You can’t get around physics.

Part 2 coming soon.

by Nastassia Lopez

Dave holding up traffic on Grand Street, as he pushes our new vacuum machine home.

A quick update on what’s happening around the lab (and apologies for the dearth of posts) –

Dave is currently putting the finishing touches on his Cocktail Stirring piece.

Interns have been crisping up beaver tails, playing with minerals, and working on new infusion techniques.

The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman talked to Dave last week about the recent egg recalls and salmonella outbreak (read the article here).

And our friend Mark Ladner, chef at Del Posto, graciously donated his enormous Ultravac 500 vacuum machine to the Cooking Issues team. Dave pushed it 2 miles along city streets from the restaurant to the lab today. Thanks Mark!

Many more posts to come. As always, thanks for reading.

-The Cooking Issues Team

Cooking Issues will be broadcasting live on the Heritage Radio Network tomorrow (Tuesday) from noon to 12:45 EST.  No special guests; just Dave answering all of your cooking issues via phone and/or email.

Give him a call at the Heritage studio at 718-497-2128 or email Nastassia at lopez.nastassia@gmail.com and we’ll answer as many questions as we can.

Thanks for listening!

The Cooking Issues Team

by Nastassia Lopez

Jeffrey Steingarten.

Cooking Issues will be live on the Heritage Radio Network tomorrow (Tuesday) from 12pm-12:45pm EST with special guest, and good friend, Jeffrey Steingarten. Steingarten has been the food critic for Vogue Magazine since 1989, is the author of several must-read books on food and eating, and sits at the judges table on the Food Network’s Iron Chef.

Dave and Jeffrey will be taking callers and answering all of your cooking issues at: 718-497-2128.  How often are you going to get to ask Jeffrey a question? As usual, if you’re not able to call in, email Nastassia your questions at lopez.nastassia@gmail.com (but we love live callers more than anything!).

If  you miss the show, be sure to download it on iTunes.

Thanks for listening,

The Cooking Issues Team

by Dave Arnold

Czimer’s Meats, outside of Chicago, specializes in hard to find meats.  We ordered up some beaver,  yak, a whole raccoon, some bear, and a lion steak. Lion?

Strange meat: 1) Yak meat was dark and fairly well marbled but felt tough. 2) Lion meat looked like pork and was very soft when raw. 3) Bear meat was extremely dark and very soft. 4) Beaver tail, bony and fatty. 5) Beaver flapper --looks like reptile skin and feels like a floppy canoe paddle. Not pictured: whole racoon.

It is illegal in the US to sell wild hunted game, so how does Czimer’s get these meats? Some of Czimer’s meats, like Yak, are farmed.  In other cases the meat is a by-product that would be thrown away if not eaten. Czimer’s raccoons and beavers are wild animals that are trapped for fur.  Perversely, although commercial hunting is illegal, selling meat from trapped animals is not –provided they are slaughtered in a USDA approved facility. Bears and lions are raised by big game dealers for circuses, exotic pet enthusiasts and zoos.  When those animals get too old to breed or their owners discard them they are slaughtered for their fur and the meat goes to Czimer’s.  Sad but true. If the animals are being slaughtered, it is a sin not to eat them.

Why cook these animals?

America used to be the place to eat strange animals.  We were world renowned for the quantity, quality, and variety of our game.  We ate wild animals, farmed animals, young animals, old animals. For an eye-opening reference, see Thomas DeVoe’s 1867 book The Market Assistant(free on Google books), which describes all the foods available in 19^th century American markets.  Now we eat a fairly small number of animals, almost all of them young.  Hunters are the only people here who eat a wider variety of meat from animals of different ages.  Because older animals are tougher, and wild game often lacks extensive marbling, hunters often have problems making meat as delicious as it could be.  They frequently relegate game meat to highly sauced preparations or stews, or serve tiny chunks of meat fried in a heavy batter.  I have had alligator seven times and I still don’t know what it tastes like; it’s always served as generic fried stuff with a gloppy sauce. Every hunter should adopt low temperature cooking to get the most out of their meat, which is what we did with our Czimer’s shipment – you get delicious and tender meat without overcooking and without masking natural flavor. 

The meat we got from Czimer’s came frozen. We thawed it, then seared, then bagged with salt and butter, cooked low temperature, and finished in a raging deep fryer.

Our answer to cooking problems: fry everything.

Most of the meat we ordered was in steak form.  Unfortunately, these steaks were cut very thin.  Czimer’s  explained that most cooks grill these meats, and if they were cut thick they would be preposterously tough.  They agreed to cut thicker for me next time.  Here’s a rundown of the meats:

Yak:

Yak

Yak is delicious. Our piece arrived hard and tough, so I knew we’d have to cook it a while.  I wanted it fairly rare, so I cooked it at 56 degrees C for 24 hours.  It was great –tender and juicy.  Strangely, it tasted a bit like duck breast — it had a bit of a livery taste that certain cuts of meat  take on when you cook them a long time –duck, eye of round, etc.  Usually, this liver flavor is a negative attribute.  On yak it worked nicely.  A definite do-again.

African Lion:

Lion --tastes like pork.

Lion tastes like pork with a special savory twang. The guy at Czimer’s told me lion tastes different because lions eat meat exclusively.  The meat itself was very pale and soft when raw, so I figured I wouldn’t have to cook it a long time.  It had very little intramuscular fat, so I thought the greatest challenge would be not drying the meat out.  We cooked it at 60 C for 2 hours; it was good but still tough. Next time I would cook a little lower - maybe 58 C, and for a lot longer time –like 24 hours.  It turns out that older meat can be tough even if it feels soft raw.  Czimer’s explained that lion meat is always soft, and you can’t use the way it feels raw to judge how tender it will be after cooking.  I liked lion, but don’t know that I would cook it all the time –I’ll stick with pork.  It probably isn’t healthy to eat a lot of carnivore meat anyway (concentration of toxins, prion nonsense, etc).

Black Bear:

Old black bear.

The bear meat was dark –almost black.  Like the lion, it felt soft.  Bear meat has to be cooked thoroughly to kill possible trichinosis parasites; I cooked it at 57 degrees C for 2 hours, which is sufficient for safety.  Like the lion, it was still a bit tough.  The bear meat started out slightly sweet, but I found it had an off-putting  metallic, bloody aftertaste. Nils didn’t mind it.  I wouldn’t cook an old black bear again.

Racoon:

Crisping up the racoon with ladles of hot fat.

Cooked racoon. Looks bad, tastes worse.

Racoon was a big disappointment.  The one we had was whole.  We cooked it at 60 for 5 hours. The meat was tough, and there wasn’t much of it.  The fat wasn’t great either.  If I were to cook raccoon again, I’d cook it a lot, lot longer –like 48 hours, shred the meat, and serve it pulled like pork.

Beaver:

When I called Czimer’s and asked for beaver tail, the guy asked whether I wanted the tail or the flapper.  The tail, he explained, is a nice fatty chunk of meat from the posterior of the animal.  The flapper is the tennis-racket looking appendage that, along with buck teeth, are the signature characteristics of the beaver.  He said that a lot of people call and ask for the flapper, but they are always disappointed, because there isn’t any meat on it.  “It’s pretty useless,” he said.  I took that as a challenge. “I’ll take two flappers and a tail,” I replied.

In medieval times, good Christians were forbidden from eating meat on many days of the year.  Fridays, Wednesdays, Lent, and other Saint’s days were fast days.  Meat, dairy and eggs were not allowed, but fish was.  The human mind being strange, and the scientific classifications of Linnaeus being far in the future, the medieval cook got around these rules by classifying  mammals like whales as ”fish.”  Even stranger, while the body of the beaver was considered an animal (verboten on fast days), the tail was considered fish and could be consumed whenever.  God knows what they would have done with the platypus.  I suspect that it is the medieval food recreactionists who have been calling Czimer’s looking for the beaver tail, only to be disappointed by the paucity of culinary possibilities for the flapper.

Here is what I did:

The Tail:

Beaver tail. Muy bueno.

Beaver tail is straight up fantastic.  It has a woody-musky aroma and flavor that is unique among all meats I have tried.  Nils went bonkers for it as well.  Every recipe for beaver I could find advised soaking the meat in vinegar, so I brined the tail in a mild salt and vinegar solution before searing it and bagging it with butter.  I cooked it at 60 degrees C for 48 hours.  Man, was it good.

The Flapper:

Beaver flapper is basically skin, fat and cartilage with a bone running up the middle.  We figured if it was going to be good at all we’d have to treat it like a pigs ear -cook it at high temperature to gelatinize the connective tissue, then crisp it up in the fryer.  Since we had two, I cooked one whole and the other we blanched and skinned.

Skinning the flapper. 1) The flapper. 2) Blanching. 3) Skinning. 4) The skinless flapper.

The blanched and skinned one was a gloppy fatty mess.  Maybe it would have been good for something, but we were tasting it after we had tasted all the other meats and we weren’t in the mood.  The whole flapper puffed up nicely in the fryer but we deemed it too fatty and weird for general enjoyment.

Both beaver flappers cooked.

Watching it puff up gave me an idea –beaver flapper chicharron.  I took the skin from the second flapper, cooked it in boiling salted water, then cooled it, scrapped off the excess fat, and dehydrated till it felt plastic-y (see our post on puffed snacks).  When I fried the pieces, they puffed up beautifully and still had that woodsy beaver flavor that we all loved.  I fed it to an amphitheater full of students at a demo Nils and I did a few weeks back; they seemed to like it too. Call up Czimer’s and get your flapper while they last.

Beaver-flapper chicharron. Hell yes.

By Dave Arnold
You can infuse flavors into liquor (and water based things, too) almost instantly with nothing more than an iSi Cream Whipper . You can use seeds, herbs, spiced, fruits, cocoa nibs, etc. Here’s how:

Put room-temperature booze into the cream whipper. Add herbs, seeds, whatever. Close the whipper and charge it with nitrous oxide (N2O –the regular whipped cream chargers). Swirl gently 30 seconds and let stand 30 seconds more. Quickly vent the N2O out of the whipper, open it, and strain out the infusion. Done.

Left: Mis en place --booze, parsley, whipper, N2O cartridge. Middle: pour in booze. Right: stuff in parsley.

Left: charge with N2O. Middle: swirl for 30 seconds then let sit for another 30. Right: vent the gas back to the atmosphere.

Done

I did a 5-minute knee-slapping song-singing jig around the school when I figured out this technique.  It’s really good. I like it better than vacuum infusion for some products. Plus, a vacuum machine will set you back 2 grand.

I got the idea from a technique emailed to me by Mister Fizz. Mister Fizz does rapid marination using pressurized CO2.   He gets chicken strips to soak up a heap of marinade real quick.  Pretty nifty.  Here is a YouTube video.  I figured if you could force liquid into foods using pressure, maybe you could also force flavor out.

Here is what I think is happening:

When you charge your whipper with nitrous oxide, high pressure forces liquid and nitrous oxide into the pores of your flavorful food (your seeds or herbs or what-have-you.)  When you suddenly release the pressure inside the whipper, the nitrous forms bubbles and escapes from the food quickly, bringing flavor and liquid out with it.

Some pointers:

Use room temperature food and liquid.  In our tests, cold liquid made for weaker infusions. The cold infusions were slightly clearer than warm ones, but I think that’s because they were weaker.  I suspect the bubbling of the N2O is less violent in colder products;  the violent bubbling is what brings out the flavor.

The room temperature rum labeled "H" made a much stronger infusion than the cold rum labeled "C"

Use N2O, not CO2. CO2 can leave some residual carbonation and flavor in your liquor, N2O won’t (there might be a slight sweetness from the N2O, but it will flash off pretty quick in room temperature liquid).

In our tests it didn’t seem to matter whether we vented the whipper quickly or slowly, although I persist in believing that quicker venting is better because of the violent bubbling effect.

We tested infusing a mixture of orange peel, Thai basil and cilantro into rum for 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes and three minutes.  We swirled the containers every 30 seconds during the tests. The one-minute batch tasted best, 30 seconds was weak, two minutes was a little bitter, and three minutes was bitter and grassy. I suppose the optimum infusion time is different from product to product, but we know for sure that infusion time matters.

Different infusion times: 30 seconds, one minute, two minutes, three minutes. In this test, one minute tasted best.

The amount of liquid in the whipper and the number of N2O chargers you use also makes a difference. Our standard batch was 120 mls of liquor in a one-liter whipper using one N2O cartridge.  Tripling the amount of liquor to 360 mls resulted in better balanced, but weaker, infusion. We boosted flavor in the 360 ml batch with a second N20 charger.  Using 2 chargers in the standard 120 ml batch made a harsh infusion.

Cream whippers are better for this technique than soda bottles, even if you have a large N20 tank like we do.  The large mouth of the whippers is extremely useful.

If you crush green herbs before they are infused, the infusion might turn brown over time.  Ascorbic acid might help but will also alter flavor.

An infusion of crushed Thai basil, on left, turned brown. Undamaged leaves, on right, didn't.

The standard recipe:

120 mls white rum
3 grams cilantro leaves
8 grams Thai basil leaves
8.5 grams orange peel

Charge with N20, swirl for 30 seconds.  Allow to infuse for 1 minute total, then vent and strain.

Other flavors we tried, using a 1 minute infusion into vodka:

Star anise made a strong infusion with a smoky note and lots of color.

Sliced jalapenos made a very spicy infusion that also captured the green notes of the jalapeno.  It had much more actual jalapeno character than traditional infusions we have tried.

Sliced ginger produced an infusion that was light in flavor but clean, similar to ginger ale.  Our slices were somewhat thick; thin slices might produce a stronger infusion.

Left to right: star anise; jalapeno; ginger.

Fresh bay leaves didn’t taste great, but might be good with something else.  Bay leaves didn’t infuse well till they were crushed.

Sliced carrot infusion picked up a lot of color but not a lot of flavor. The flavor the infusion did pick up wasn’t great.

Carrot. Color: great. Taste: meh.

The best we saved for last.  This little gem was Nils’ idea:

Cocoa nibs made a cloudy but very flavorful infusion. If you let it settle for a half hour, it clears up substantially. A miraculous thing about the nibs infusion — it’s not bitter, just chocolate-y.  Apparently, it takes longer to extract the bitter flavors than the chocolate ones.

Cocoa nibs infusion. Chocolate flavor, no sugar, no bitterness. This will clear a bit if left to settle.

Cooking Issues Radio will be live on the Heritage Radio Network this Tuesday from 12pm-12:45pm EST, so please call in with questions (and win some bacon while you’re at it!): 718-496-2128.

If you can’t call in, email Nastassia at lopez.nastassia@gmail.com and we’ll try to answer as many as we can.

Thanks for listening and please be sure to download all Cooking Issues Radio podcasts here.

-Cooking Issues Team

by Nastassia Lopez

Dave Wondrich --scribe of the drink-- racing to an 18th century London pub for a pint.

This week’s Cooking Issues radio show will broadcast live tomorrow, Monday, from noon-12:45pm EST instead of our usual Tuesday (Itunes link here). We’ll be welcoming special guest Dave Wondrich – spirits and cocktail editor for Esquire magazine, author of many books including Imbibe, and undisputed authority on booze. Maybe we’ll hear a bit about his upcoming book, Punch. Please call in to 718-497-2128 with any historical, shaking, stirring, batching, alcohol-related questions. For those who can’t call in, email questions to Nastassia at lopez.nastassia@gmail.com.

Cheers,

Cooking Issues

by Dave Arnold and Nils Noren

Michael listening to one of Dave's rants.

From Dave:

Michael Batterberry was a giant in the food world for over forty years. Long before we Americans were interested in what chefs were up to, Michael dedicated himself to improving the stature of that profession here.  Along with his wife Ariane, he founded Food and Wine Magazine, Food Arts Magazine, and wrote the definitive history of dining in New York. You can read about his life and  accomplishments here, and here. He went to great lengths to introduce people  he thought should meet, and he made forceful recommendations for people he believed in. He decided I was right for the FCI’s  Director of Culinary Technology position and cajoled the school into hiring me. I would not be who I am without him, and countless other people in this business can say the same thing. Michael was always searching for what was new –what was next. His eye was on the future but he had a deep appreciation for the past. His breadth of knowledge was staggering.

A few things the obituaries don’t mention: Michael was a sartorial wizard –the most dapper man I ever met. Despite always being the best dressed man in the room he was never, ever snobbish or stuffy. He could show up to a pig-pickin in a three piece suit and look perfectly at home. He had an amazing voice that easily held a room. His wit was sharp and dry but never biting. He was a great raconteur, but was also eager to listen.
Michael was gracious and generous and I am proud to be one of his protégés. I am sad I won’t see him again, but sadder for those who never got to meet him.

From Nils:
Michael was truly a great man in so many ways, and meant so much more to our industry the most people can comprehend. I personally have Michael to thank for many things. He gave me the chance to write, together with Dave, for Food Arts magazine, something I never thought I could really do. Michael was such a great visionary and when he spoke, you listened. His wealth of knowledge was so incredible. I never met anyone who knew more about the history of dining in this country and around the world, and who could also tell what the next big thing was going to be. Michael was opened minded and always curious about new things. He never dismissed new techniques or equipment. On the contrary, he  embraced them and he embraced progress, something I admired much.
I don’t know how many people in the food industry have Michael to thank for their success, but I know that there are a lot of us. There will be a huge void without Michael here, and we will miss him tremendously. But we will do everything we can to honor his memory. Skål Michael!

by Dave Arnold

You need to grind a small amount of spices and your mortar and pestle isn’t handy. You don’t want to clean out your pepper-mill. What are you going to do?  Those damn coffee/spice grinders do a crappy job on small quantities.  The spices just sit there under the blades.  You have to shake and shake –and still your spices don’t get ground. Potheads to the rescue.

Tech-savvy stoners use a device euphemistically called an “herb grinder” to crush marijuana into small pieces for use in devices like the volcano vaporizer.  Herb grinders are just two discs with meshing teeth.  Put something between the two discs, twist them in your hand, and viola –your product is ground. These grinders are small, simple, fast, and easy to clean –perfect to throw into your knife-bag.  We bought a plastic one and a metal one called the “chromium crusher” and put them through their paces with a variety of spices.

Two "herb grinders:" no-name plastic on the left; Chromium Crusher on the right.

1. Load the plastic grinder; 2. Twist away. 3. The Chromium Crusher at work.

I had high hopes for the chromium crusher.  I loved the look of the heavy metal monster. But the plastic device was the clear winner.  I think the geometry of the teeth is better in the plastic grinder; or perhaps the metal grinder’s teeth are just too far apart.

The Grinding Tests:

There are spices that grind well with an herb grinder, and spices that don’t.  I’ve divided them into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

The Good:

In the photos below we have dried rosemary, lavender, and pepper. Both grinders, as you might expect, quickly pulverized the dried herbs. With the pepper you start to see the divergence between the plastic and metal grinders –the plastic grinds finer, as it did for all of the spices in our test.

Top to bottom: whole spice, plastic grinder, Chromium Crusher. Right to left, rosemary, lavender, and black pepper. All of these were easy to grind.

Both grinders also made short work of larger, harder spices, like cloves, allspice and star anise:

Top to bottom: whole spice, plastic grinder, Chromium Crusher. Left to right: cloves, allspice, star anise. These large, hard spices were also easy to grind.

The Bad:

Long thin seeds, like caraway and fennel seed, fared poorly.  I think they slipped between the teeth of the grinders.  Green cardamom seeds were just too small and hard to grind well.  The metal grinder did a slightly better job on the cardamom.

Top to bottom: whole spice, plastic grinder, Chromium Crusher. Left to right: caraway, fennel seed, green cardamom. Long, thin seeds just seemed to move around between grinder teeth without getting crushed. Super-hard cardamom seeds were just too-hard to grind.

The Ugly:

The plastic grinder ground soft round seeds, like mustard and coriander, marginally well; but left behind large pieces of skin that refused to grind any further.  The mustard seeds were a little too small for the metal grinder –it couldn’t crush them (coriander was okay).  Juniper was too wet and mucked up both grinders.  Everything but the juniper was easy to clean; the juniper was a royal pain.

Top to bottom: whole spice, plastic grinder, Chromium Crusher. Left to right: mustard seeds, coriander, and juniper. These soft round seeds worked, but not great. Juniper was just too wet and mucked up both grinders.