Another Sazerac, Please

This past Saturday evening we found ourselves in the Village for a play, A Very Common Procedure at the MCC Theatre. We came quite close to not making the curtain, due to my insistence on cooking mackerel for dinner rather than quickly reheating leftovers and running out the door. And of course I probably would have reheated the leftovers from dinner the previous night at Mandoo Bar had I actually thought to do that. It was the most reasonable thing to do considering the time constraints we running up against. But no, I just had to have the mackerel, didn't I? Yes, it turned out quite well and yes, it was very quick and easy to cook (especially with the Professor helping with the prep) just like Mark Bittman said it would be. But was it worth it? Was having the mackerel worth the incredible stress we experienced while waiting for the downtown 1 train? Was it worth the agony of waiting for an express train at 96th street, the whole time thinking that it very well might have been a huge mistake to try and catch the express train rather than just take the local downtown? Was it worth running along Christopher Street dodging slow poke pedestrians and vehicular traffic while crossing Bleeker against the light?

Yes, because we made it to the theatre on time despite our giving in to our mackerel cravings.

The highlight of the evening though, even after a not half bad dinner and an pretty good play, was the bar we went to afterwards, Little Branch. I've been wanting to check out this joint for quite sometime but never remembered to stop by whenever I was in the neighborhood. The Professor and I were both very impressed by the level of craftmanship employed at this particular bar. Very high quality ingredients, freshly squeezed juices, freshly peeled garnishes and a whole host of other items on display left no doubt that I was going to enjoy whatever it was the bartender concocted. And I did, VERY much.

For our first round I ordered a Sazerac and Hye-Kyung the Presbyterian (rye, ginger, sugar and soda). I had heard of the sazerac somewhere before but wasn't quite sure what it was. A few days earlier I had overheard someone say they ordered one at Little Branch and was impressed. As it turns out, the Sazerac is THE classic cocktail, being one of the first (some say the first) cocktails ever mixed. Chuck Taggart over at Gumbo Pages describes it thusly:

This is an absolutely exquisite cocktail. As you sip it, you come across layer after layer of flavor -- the warmth and glowing burn of the rye, effused with the flavors of spice and honey, the bite of the bitters balanced with the sweetness of the sugar, with the subtle yet complex flavor of the anise underneath and the perfume of the lemon oil from the twist feel like a symphony inside your mouth. This is also a drink that warms up well, revealing even more flavors. Sip it very slowly. Savor it. Take your time with it.

I think this might very well be my new favorite cocktail.

Please Bring Some White Slaves, or, The Joys of T9

For various reasons, tomorrow seems to be the perfect day for cooking a meal for the Professor; a nice meal, one that not only tastes, but also looks, wonderful. That is the goal at least. To aid in that goal I'm enlisting the help of a set of white plates. Aesthetically, nothing presents food as well as a big white plate. It's an empty canvass upon which to place your masterpiece.

The only problem is that I left all my white plates at the Professor's place the last time we threw a dinner party. So I sent her a text message asking her to please bring some white plates when she comes up tomorrow. I should have checked the message before sending it, however, as it came out as "please bring some white slaves."

Ginger Calamari

Just about all of the books I've read recently have been about food; where it comes from, the craft of preparing it, the joys of eating it; the social, political, economic, environmental and health ramifications of our eating habits; as well as the interesting personalities that inhabit the culinary world. My recent reads have included Heat, The Omnivore's Dilema, Kitchen Confidential and, most recently, The Soul of A chef: The Journey Toward Perfection by Michael Ruhlman.

One aspect of these books that I've really enjoyed is cooking from them. No, these are not cookbooks, and they don't contain recipes per se (Ok, The Soul of a Chef does indeed contain recipes, but I didn't know that until after I finished the book, since they are all the way in the back. More on that in a bit), but they do contain entire paragraphs of prose on how to prepare certain dishes, from braised short ribs in Heat to perfectly roasted whole fish in Kitchen Confidential. I've attempted both dishes and they both turned out quite well.

It's fun to sometimes read a very basic description of a dish with perhaps a few sentences on how to prepare it and see how well it turns out in my kitchen. So when I read the following in Soul of a Chef, in the part of the book focused on Michael Symon, I knew I had to try it:

And he did do good food, fun food, worth noting. His fried calamari were the best I'd tasted anywhere. He wanted to get the flavor of ginger into his calamari somehow. He tried grating ginger into the flour coating, but that didn't produce the right effect. He tried putting ginger powder in the flour, but it resulted in a fake ginger taste. He began to think about batter, how some batters use carbonation as a leavener, such as beer batters. He didn't like heavy batters, but this idea led him to the idea of soaking the calamari in ginger-ale and fresh grated ginger. The ginger-marinated squid would then be coated in a peppery flour and fried. "It came out really nice," he told me. He served it with a smooth green onion sauce.

All I had to go on was this brief description, but I figured that was enough. Some squid, some ginger, some ginger-ale, flour and pepper. Surely this couldn't be difficult.

I started with a half pound of clean squid that I picked up at one of the areas best fish markets. The squid smelled of the ocean; it was extremely fresh! This gave me the confidence I needed to prepare another squid dish after getting sick the last time I did so. I sliced the squid into little rings about a half-inch wide and put the rings into a bowl, into which I then poured some ginger-ale, making sure the all the squid was covered by the ale. I then peeled and, using a microplane, finely grated an inch long piece of fresh ginger directly into the bowl. I covered the bowl in placed it into the fridge. I didn't have any guidance into how long the calamari should be marinated for, but I figured an hour should be long enough. Surely it didn't need more than that, did it? It was only after I finished reading Soul of a Chef that I learned that the calamari should in fact be marinated overnight, after first grating the fresh ginger directly onto the calamari and marinating in the fridge for 1 to 4 hours.

Even though I didn't get the recipe quite right the end result was still pretty good. After marinating I dipped the calamari into flour into which I had put a good deal of freshly ground black pepper and cooked them quickly in a pan with canola oil heated to 375 (more or less). Cooking the calamari in two batches turned out to be a very good thing, as I left the first batch in the pan for way too long. Although they were in the pan for no more than 2 and half minutes they were very, very overcooked. That batch was almost too rubbery to eat. About a minute of cooking time yielded much better results, rendering a very well textured, lightly brown, crisp exterior and a nice soft calamari interior. The second batch was VERY tasty. I can only imagine how much more intense the dish would have been had I marinated correctly. Next time that will happen.