You are listening to Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network. Today we're coming to you not on our usual day. Today we're coming to you on Monday from noon to 1245 instead of our usual Tuesdays. Next week we'll be back on Tuesday. Today's uh Today's cooking issues is brought to you by Whole Foods Market.
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Um, so today we're in the uh studio today with, of course, uh Nastasha Lopez, Cooking Issues Hammer, and live special guest, uh Dave Wondrich, award-winning author and uh master of the inebriating beverage. Uh hi, Dave, thanks for coming in. Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. All right, uh, but uh Cooking Issues is the show where we answer your cooking questions, and today I hope some of you call in with some drink-related questions because there's no better person to answer them than Dave Wandrich, uh, author of uh Imbi, uh like several versions of the Esquire cocktail book, right?
What else? What else you got here? Like Bazillion Magazine articles. Uh pretty much a metric bazillion at this point. Yeah, yeah.
It's like a cubic bazillion. Yeah. So uh and right now you have a rare opportunity. You can ask any cocktail question you want, and we got you covered, basically. You get you want a science question, you want a history question, you want a recipe question.
718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh call in, we'll be here for the next 45 minutes. So before we uh actually hit the drink making, I did get one email question that came in on a on a regular cooking related issue. Uh Eddie Shepherd from uh the United Kingdom uh emailed us and he he asked, he's a vegetarian uh chef, and he wanted to know how to do umami without using uh dashi or things like this.
Well you're in luck Eddie because uh umami is basically a sensation we get from uh protein breakdown it's an actual sensation that you have actually have taste receptors on your tongue that receive um these protein breakdowns typically uh you know glutamic acid is the most famous one in amino acid but you know other things as well and uh they they tell your body that awesome break broken down protein is coming in uh but and this is a lot of times signaled by meats uh vegetarian though there's a lot of vegetarian things that are very high in umami and they're things that vegetarians often crave for instance uh cooked mushrooms uh uh parmesan cheese anything aged with pro any aged dairy product where it breaks down over time and forms uh you know amino acids free aminos has a lot of umami in it tomato uh has a lot of free umami in it and you you cook it and you concentrate it and you you can get it that way so there's many vegetarian ways of um of getting umami I am not above spiking things actually with monosodium glutamate it's totally natural someone please call in and say that they're allergic to it so I can have this discussion with you. Um anyway the other question Eddie has uh real quickly is is sous vide useful for someone who doesn't do meat absolutely Eddie uh the low temperature isn't as important with vegetables but the sous vide is great because it allows you to do things like uh cook a carrot and have no flavor leach out and nothing go into it so it kind of you can use it to accentuate the the actual vegetables get the actual vegetable flavor in uh rather than uh changing it. So that's our cooking related question and now we're on to beverages yes beverages beverages. Okay. So uh we have a uh a question coming in uh for Dave.
Dave's working on a a book now called uh it's called uh Punch the Delights and Dangers of the Flowing Bowl. Ah, right. And so and so someone uh because we we mentioned that he was doing this, uh wrote in and said, uh I I see punch uh nowadays more and more uh I you know I see it all the time now. Uh what do you think the the state, the modern state of punches, and where where do punches fit in in a modern cocktail menu? Uh it's really cool to see, like everywhere you go into, you know, sort of the state of the art modern bars, and they're like tables of people sitting around a punch bowl, just like they were two hundred years ago.
It's kind of cool. It's very fun. Uh but uh I I think right now people are sort of at the stage of figuring it out. They've made a couple classic recipes. They've got a very sort of simplified formula that's been passed down where it's like sour, sweet, strong, weak, spice, five ingredients mixed together.
But there's kind of coming at it from a cocktail head, and I taste a lot of these punches and they're they taste a lot like really big cocktails. They're very, very pungent and they're great for just a couple glasses. But over the course of an evening like uh back in the day they would drink punch just you know, bowl after bowl until they were all like rolling around on the floor utterly inebriated, which you know we can't really get away with as much as we would like. No, exactly. But nonetheless, uh I I I think a lot of it is is just so pungent.
It's like having quail for dinner every day. Right. You get tired of it after a while. So is it is it that they is it that they don't follow the original recipe to get an idea for what the original is meant to be like and then build from there? Or is it just a coming from a different perspective, like I'm gonna have one or two of these instead of gonna be quaffing these all night?
I I think people haven't uh have j really just started working with it, you know, and uh for me because of working on this book I had to make many, many, many old recipes. And it took me a long time to realize that I was I was kind of doing it wrong from the old point of view. I mean, these modern punches are totally delicious. It's just they're very spicy and you know pungent. They put a lot of bitters and chartreuse and vermouth and herbal elements, etcetera, which work great in cocktails, but you know they kind of cloy after about uh four or five small cups.
Right. But are they overly strong as well or uh they tend to be pretty strong too. But I think you know that's part I'm sure that has to do with consumers too. The consumers also expect something more like a cocktail. They don't expect this this stuff.
I mean punch originally was like artificial wine. That's what people talked about it. So it would be you know right now the artificial wine is more like California Cabernet and less like Burgundy and maybe hopefully over time people will go a little more to the burgundy side. Right and of course our idea of wine nowadays has been somewhat warped. Like we we you know we're ex we expect now like a 14% wine instead of like a you know a 12 or some of them are up to like sixteen which is getting into the cocktail right.
Good look good luck waking up the next morning after a couple bottles of that. Well uh this brings us actually to another uh interesting question we had coming in about uh dilution and they're asking about the proportion of water in a cocktail uh and they want to know you know how how the ice fits in and how the you know the ice breaks down is coming from Chris in Greenpoint. Just wanted to talk about I guess dilution and and and ice uh and so why don't we take your take on it Dave and then you know Yeah I mean I know you've got you've got a lot of stuff about this too. I could talk for a billion years on this but uh I I won't because we're only a forty five minute show. I mean you know the st standard dilution for a cocktail the rule of thumb ever everybody uses is that uh the shaking it or stirring it with ice should add twenty-five percent uh to the volume and thereby diluting it by by that much.
And and that, you know, pretty much when I've measured it out, that is pretty good ballpark uh measure, depending on the kind of ice you're using and so on and so forth. Right. I mean for me the interesting thing about that number is is that it's based on what, based on just the liquor weight? I mean, like you have drinks that have so many things in them. Oh, exactly.
You know, or yeah, because you know, your simple syrup is not a liquor, your your lime's not a liquor, your whatever you're adding in is not a liquor. I think, you know, having done a bunch of tests on on dilution in ice and proportions, I think the the best way to do it to figure out what you like is to uh make a drink, weigh the base, make a drink, and then uh weigh it afterwards and see how much water you added. I mean it's you know that's the only way to figure it out. We did this, we found that we add that in a shaking drink, and this makes a lot of sense if you think about it, you want your shaking drink to be more diluted than you know your Manhattan. Yeah, they're different classes of drinks.
I mean, the shaken drinks are sours already, they're already more dilute. You've already got s as you said, you know, simple syrup and and citrus juice in there. Right. And and and the interesting thing about stirred cocktails, if you look at it, is uh how long would you say the average bartender stirs a a cocktail? Maybe twenty seconds?
Yeah. Something like now uh that's that's uh that's even a lot. I mean it's it's usually even you know like in the fifteen range. Right. And and what's interesting about stirring as opposed to shaking and dilution is that shaking uh does its dilution very fast.
If if a if a bartender shakes their drink for 15 seconds, they've probably they've made it to, you know, a after that point that there's diminishing returns on chilling or shake. Oh yeah, yeah. That's even that's way too long also. Yeah, but in stirring, well, especially if you like a boozy drink, which I know you do. Yeah.
But the but the uh in We all have our weaknesses. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, we turn we have the same one, so it's like but the uh in in a in a stirred drink, it turns out that uh it takes upwards of a minute to get to that same level of dilution as you would shaking for for 15 to 20 seconds. So there's there's a lot uh there's a lot more um room for uh error and room for artistry in stirring. Well well, it also depends on what kind of ice you use for stirring.
I use uh I'll I'll use like finely cracked or or or almost snow ice. Yeah, that's and that the dilution is fast in that, but it doesn't it's not more than twenty-five percent because it it gets so cold instantly. Right. Yeah, well that's that's the you know stirring is all about surface like shaking is so violent that everything happens fairly quickly. Stirring, you can make it actually faster than shaking if you use fine enough fine enough ice.
The d the the dilution in the chilling can be can be almost instant. But like if you notice, like uh bartenders who want to have their stirring be more effective, they'll crack their ice as they're doing it. Yeah, and I thought that was a a bunch of hocum until I realized that ice, you know, has a lot of water sitting on the outside of it, and when you crack ice right before you stir, you're getting more surface area, which makes for faster, uh, you know, uh colder drinks, but you're doing it uh in a way that's not adding extra water because you uh you're making newer dry surfaces as you're doing it. So it's actually good practice to crack the big ice. It makes a huge difference.
Uh I mean you can stir f as you said with cubes, it takes like a minute. I I I find drinks stirred with like the large cold draft cubes that everyone's using nowadays take they they never get as cold as I would like. Right, right. I mean it it's uh you know, people need to think people they they think big ice is the answer, and big ice is big ice. I mean it's it's good at what it's good at and it's bad at what it's bad at.
It doesn't have a lot of surface area, it's not very fast at chilling. It's it's really good at filling up a glass. Yeah, and it's really good at like keeping your your drink cold for a very long time without completely watering it down. But you know the funny thing is studying like the mixology in the in in in the nineteenth century, if I can use that dreaded word mixology, those guys then they got their ice in big blocks, they had to butcher it up as needed. They had different size ice for every kind of drink.
They had shavers so they could shave it right off the block and you know expose a new surface that would be dry, shave that and put it in. And so they they had a lot more flexibility than using just cubes out of a machine, which uh so a lot of the the newest places are starting to approach now. Sure, like Richie and you said that. Yeah, the guys uh varnish in in in LA. I mean, those guys are are really serious about using different sized ices for different effects, and that's all it is.
It's a question of effects. There's no no one answer for that. Right. I mean um he the the funny funny thing is is a lot of times you'll hear bartenders talk about uh they'll they'll give some kind of pseudo-scientific reason for Y X, Y, and Z works. And it's like, listen, is your drink good?
Do you yeah, you know, does the presentation good? And you know, that's pretty much it. Because I can get into the the science of it with them, but often I find it doesn't necessarily help them make their drink any better. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, you can have a drink that's scientifically good and still tastes like craft. Yeah, exactly.
That's unfortunately the case. Exactly, exactly. Well, uh that's a good question, Chris. Uh thanks for calling it in. And you brought up uh the word mixology, and I used to uh I used to actually kind of think it was bizarre because I you know it's the same thing with with uh people calling themselves chefs who aren't chefs.
I think there's a lot of honor in being a cook. I don't see anything wrong with the word bartender, but what if you're not a bartender? That's right. I uh that's exactly that's exactly right. And also it is an old word, it's not a new word.
I think people don't necessarily know that. Mixology has a long history of the five. Yeah, it goes back to the eighteen fifties, and the funny thing about it, it was it was coined as a joke. It was in a bit of like patter of you know, a a guy calling him um the bartender a mixologist of typicular fixins, like you know, like tiples. Right.
And it was a joke. And I I I think that's kind of important to keep it that joke aspect in mind. It's is not serious stuff. I mean, you can treat it seriously, but you can't treat it that seriously. You know, you should it still has to have that element of fun and play in it because otherwise it becomes work.
And why would you want to like have your your drinking be work? Exactly. Well, well, I've come around to the word mixology. We could talk about a word when we come back that I've not come around to molecular, because it's always people taking themselves too damn seriously, and it's an awful terrible word, and please erase it from your food and beverage memory. Uh plus a lot of the drinks aren't good.
But uh aside aside from that, we we we'll talk about that when we get back. We're also gonna talk about uh uh what are we gonna talk about? Uh Dutch distilled spirits. We can talk about that and the craft distilling, I think uh is is another uh big buzzword these days that we could uh we could kick around a little bit. Alright, so we're coming right back at you with uh Dave Wonders who says cooking issues.
Oh, how you feel, brother? Feeling good? You feel good? So much bone bella. How you feel, man?
I'm feeling all right. I feel fella getting down. We're gonna have a bump good tech. We're gonna have a bomb good tech. We're gonna have a bomb ticket.
We're gonna have a bomb good. Don't take them up, friend. We gotta take a high! All right, we're gonna do it again. You wanna do it again?
Yeah, that you won't. We gotta take the high. Brother. Yeah. Now I won't have about it.
Let Red blow up my two courses. And then I want to wave you and let's go on to it with dinner. Yeah, alright. Come on, get that bellow with a little horn over there. No, James, hold on, moment.
Red, get it, take us higher. Yeah. Take us higher. Brad! Bam!
You're listening to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold. Uh, we're here to answer all of your cooking and today drink related questions. Please call in your questions to 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128.
Uh today we're here with uh Dave Wondridge, and we are talking about uh booze, right? Uh so in the in the last in the in the last segment, we uh we started in um and I won't spend spend too long on this because anyone that knows me have he has heard me go off on this uh at great length, but uh we were talking about mixology as a term uh and how you know I've kind of come around with it, and Dave was making the excellent point that you kind of have to be lighthearted about it uh in order for it to work. Well, it should be fun in some way, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh and then uh m molecular mixology, though, is a horrible thing, yes?
Well, uh, you know, it's one of those uh if by whiskey questions. It depends on what you mean by molecular mixology. If you're making stuff that's new, different, fun, and not perhaps overly uh pretentious, that's great, you know. You know, i i i if you're treating it like anybody behind the bar has to be in a white lab coat and measuring things by you know joules or something and and and and you're in you're in the presence of technological genius, so shut up and and take your eat your cocktail or you know, drink your appetizer or whatever, then it then it becomes a little a little much. Right.
I mean I think uh the the you know the operative word here is you say you know pretentious. You don't want it to be pretentious. I mean I think that kind of like one of the best applications I've seen of this is uh you know Tony Tony Conyo con Corneliaro. Is that good? My Italian battery?
That's excellent. Yeah. Uh at 69 Colbrook Row uh in uh in London, you know, they use all the newest, all the newest stuff. In fact, stuff that you know almost nobody else has, and yet their bar is completely unpretentious. You know, it's a normal bar.
I mean you can you know just go in, you could have a beer and be very happy there. They wouldn't make you feel weird about it. Right. I mean they have a tranny band playing, you know. It's like it's got hospitality, it's got fun, it's got uh a little bit of uh nightlife going on.
So yeah. It's not Dave Wondrich's ultimate bar for for any listeners out there, Dave Wondrich's uh uh ultimate bar has uh rifle a rifle range in it and you can shoot while you drink. This is like an old That's a nineteenth century standard. I mean I would have to do what they did back then is they had uh cute girls uh as the sort of r who running the rifle range in the bars, and you would shoot uh and try to beat their score, which drove the men nuts because those girls were all crack shots and the guys were all drunk. Right.
And so they kept paying and paying and paying and trying and trying again to uh to to beat the uh sober uh you know dead eyes. That's good. That's good business. That's good business, right? It's the same as the uh mechanical bulls now.
Like you always have the you know, the the one woman tending bar who's extremely good at it. Yeah, you know, it makes all the men look like idiots and then they line up to pay to to get thrown. Yeah, because they don't want to get beaten by that itty bitty girl there. Yeah, right, right. You know, praying on male stupidity is is a growth business always.
Oh yeah, always, yeah, exactly, exactly. That's never gonna go dry. That well is never gonna get tapped. Uh-uh. Uh so um okay.
So uh I don't know how we got into that. But uh so that's our take on molecular mixology. Keep it, keep it fun, don't be pretentious. And also, you know what, make some delicious drinks. Yeah, I mean, one one thing I see a lot with is right now it's sort of at the look at the the the tricks I can do with it.
You know, let me make something that tastes like something else. I'm kind of waiting at I mean a martini only tastes like a martini, right? Right. And a Manhattan only tastes like oh hopefully, right? And a Manhattan only like a Manhattan.
I'm waiting for molecular molecular mixology or whatever we're gonna call it now, a technological uh bartending uh whatever, to to come up with its drinks that are like that, that aren't just tasting like something else. Right, you know, and are aren't playing around with like let me mimic this, let me mimic that. I mean for me, I'm happy because you know this is what I for for those of you out here, uh this is what I kind of do for a living. Uh and uh you know, so I'm not poo-pooing it or make fun of it. I mean, this is how I make a living, is using new techniques and a lot of it in cocktails.
And you know, the goal should be uh to make something that has legs, to make something that people want to have again and again. You know what I mean? It's not like, oh that's cute, I'll have one. You know, so don't say that to a martini. Right.
So you know, Nastasha and I work on a drink that I think has you know legs, but it's no one would think of it as being you know a high tech cocktail. It's uh uh you know uh either nectarine or peach, depending on the quality, uh uh plum juice those juices, plum juice clarified, uh bourbon, little water and and simple. And um, you know, this is a delicious, this is a delicious drink. Yeah, that clarified juice isn't easy though. I mean, that's that's the key.
Right, exactly. But to me, like that's good use of technology right there. That's a drink people have that drink, and they say, hey, you know what? I would like another one of those instead of, hey, that's interesting. Can I have something else?
Yeah. You know what I mean? And that's what you hope for. That's generally when it comes around to is people have like kind of played around and found the the little tricks that get them into it, and then they start taking it seriously. Yeah, and that's when you start getting interesting stuff.
Right. I mean, nothing. As long as it's not too serious, as we said. Right. Well, that's the thing.
I mean, you know, it's yes, it should I like it when people take their craft seriously, but they don't beat you over the head, they don't make you feel good or bad or you know, disguise the effort a little bit. Exactly, exactly. All right. So uh another thing I like to work on, and there's a lot of new both techno and retro going on now is distillation. And I know you're really interested in this, Dave.
Do you want to talk about maybe the new movement for very like micro and craft distillation? Yeah, this is this is something that's uh spawned heated debate lately uh on on the web, in person. We all just got back from uh Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, the annual booze fest for sort of high-end uh bartenders, mixologists, uh, and people who want to sell them things. A lot of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of those. Yeah, how much money do you think Purno Ricard laid out for that? Oh my god, hundreds of thousands of dollars, it seems like Purneau. Yeah, nicely done. Yeah.
Uh but uh and and this is one of the things that's like a perennial source of debate. Uh it's like uh right now we're in the midst of this renaissance and small scale distilling in the U.S. It turns out uh laws have been liberalized. This is one good thing that uh the Republican uh hatred of regulation has brought us uh to balance it against losing the Gulf and all that other stuff. Oh well, at least we got booze.
I would say I would still say deregulation has been a net loss, but at least we got micro boosts. Yeah, yeah. But you know, you know what happens uh it there are a lot of people who uh have started up and they don't really have uh they haven't spent years distilling, they haven't trained to do this, they're entrepreneurs, they buy some grain neutral spirit from Archer Daniels Midland, they put some botanicals in it, uh, you know, sort of what they heard goes into gin, they run it through the still that they've bought, gleaming new, you know, sort of steel still, some maybe some copper plates inside. Right, right. And then they they bottle it and suddenly they're crafts people.
I mean they're they're good business people. It's interesting. Uh uh, but that's I don't think that's craft distilling. I brought an example that uh we here in the studio can taste that you guys will just have to uh either dream about or think of see in your nightmares. Wait a minute.
Let me let me get the sound effect proper. Oh yeah. This is uh from Holland from the Dutch Geneva Museum, Geneva being Dutch Gin, which is sort of a it's actually a cross between gin and whiskey. And this is made from rye malt and barley malt and uh a little bit of juniper berry made in 18th century stills, completely crafted by hand by a guy who's been doing it for 15 years, only available at the museum. And it's utterly unlike anything you'll ever taste.
Let's taste this and then we'll while we're while we're tasting it, we have a question coming in, I think. Okay. Let's taste it. Let's taste it. It is different.
You can smell the what's what's the grain bill on this? It's uh two-thirds rye, one third barley malt. Wow, it's really nice. It's grainy, it's totally smooth and clean. Right.
It's silky, it's a little bit more than a little bit. Botanical's way down. This is craft distilling. And you know, the a lot of this stuff is just not craft. It's delicious, it's interesting, but this is this takes a real commitment.
You know, wow. This isn't done over like coal-fired stills, uh utterly everything is done in the 18th century style. Everything is handmade. This is a handmade by one guy. Let's give the name on this product again.
This is uh old Sheedam, original single malt Geneva. You've got to go to uh Sheedham in Holland to get it, it's worth the trip. Cheers, she dum. Cheers. Uh okay, we have a question.
Who who do we have on the line? Hi, this is Wendy from Brooklyn. Hey, Wendy. Hi. Um, I'm actually new to New York City, and um I was wondering, Dave, if you could uh recommend any mixologists in the city who you really like.
There's so many. I mean you there ten years ago there were about five bars where you could get a great cocktail in New York. Now there are at least fifty. I mean, if you go to uh uh uh Death and Company, uh anybody there will make a great drink. Anybody will make a great drink at Pegu Club or PDT.
I mean, these places all have programs now. It used to be you'd go there and you'd catch the good good guy or the good girl behind the bar and you'd get a good drink, and then you'd go back the next time it'd be somebody else and it wouldn't. But now, like Clover Club in Brooklyn. Uh where do you live? She's somewhere in Brooklyn.
Yeah, somewhere in Brooklyn. She's still there? Do we still have her on the line? Okay. Uh oh well, because uh, you know, now you know you've got options all over Brooklyn, too.
Right. Uh there's there's there's 19th Street in Manhattan has a couple great bars. Uh Rye House is a new one that's fun and and excellent. There they're there i i it it's fantastic. I mean, it's a shame we lost her because the real operative question is what kind of drink do you like, what kind of experience do you like?
Because there's so many you know it's it's gone beyond, you know, you just sit down at a people people have created whole kind of the bar as an as a certain type of experience. You know, if you want you know funtique, we can get you now high quality funki if you want, you know. It was very you can go to painkiller on the lower east side and have like drink out of half pineapples and have you know the drink actually be carefully made by people who uh uh don't just throw throw crap into a blender and dump it out again. That's just not usually my style, but uh you know we were there together and I had a good time there, yeah. Yeah, it was good.
You know, I mean th it it it's it's uh it's a real renaissance. This is uh I mean the golden age. It's certainly not since you know 1920 have we seen uh anything this good, and this is probably better than then too, at least at the high end. Yeah. So it's cool.
All right. So uh uh Wendy, I'm sorry that we lost you. Um so uh let's talk more about this product 'cause I'm still drinking it. So yeah, I mean this is this is what like sort of craft uh entails is it's everything is done by hand, small production, they mash their own grain on the site, they distill it three times in these ancient I think they're r restored stills, but they're built exactly you know to the ancient style. Uh it goes through the still three times and then gets stored in pits in the floor, which was a fire prevention thing.
Is you you you keep your distillant below grade level. Yeah, but the distillation is actually dangerous. It's actually dangerous, yeah. And and this is these are little tiny distilleries. The way the Dutch always did it.
They didn't have big mega distilleries. They had lots of little ones and they all made more or less the same thing. You know, they had traditional ways and uh and you would buy your stuff on the spot market, like, okay, your your gin is good, your gin is maybe less good, we'll get the good one. But you know, they that kept them competing to have the quality up. There weren't these big monopolies.
Right. I mean, I wish you guys uh, you know, could smell the nose on this thing because it goes on forever. Yeah. No, I mean it's really it's unique, it doesn't smell like any other spirit. It's not uh, you know, there's nothing else like this.
Uh that's sort of that's sort of what I want what I hope to see from craft distilling is come up with stuff that I've never tasted before. Right. Come up with stuff that just is is so different and so cool. I mean p part of the problem with I think with cra craft distillation and I'm gonna insult people who you know that I actually that I like people that I actually like, I'm about to insult them. Uh but not because I want to, just because it's um i you know uh people want to get into for instance the whiskey business, but they want to have product inside of a year.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, th those two those two are not compatible. You know, it's your business model is good for a business model, it's not good for a craft model. Right.
But you know, but I think that they're they're the desire is good. They just want to have product, but it's you know, the the problem is is that that's why the you know, these are traditions that were built up over a long time, and some of them just take a long time to get it right, you know. And and uh I mean it takes years to age whiskey, at which point your capital is tied up, and it's that's uh admittedly that sucks, but you know that is sort of what it takes to make like really, you know, uh a barrel aged well aged spirits. There's a lot of speed aging going on. They'll put things in little tiny barrels and and kind of speed it up a little.
And that that can work. It's just not, you know, the same as the those seasons in and seasons out of the the the spirits going in and out of the wood as as it can uh expands in the summer and contracts in the winter, etc. etcetera. So I mean the proofs in the palette, but I think that if you go and look, most of the time, you know, trained palates can they will pick out the ones that have been aged for longer. But but this stuff is you know, this is coming.
I mean the the the smart people, and there are many of them uh and the the good good craftsmen at this uh are are are they have stuff that's aging that you know in in two or three years is gonna be out on the market and it's gonna be fabulous. And that's gonna be really exciting. It's just right now it's hard to get utterly excited about it for me because I have to taste a lot of this stuff professionally, like blind tasting, and you know, it's you're competing against a pretty well established uh bar, a pretty high bar. So I mean uh I know that when I you know when I do distillation, I'm not really working on creating new like a new a new spirit or new or or even an old one. I'm I'm more interested more interested in flavor, putting flavors into things.
I mean that's I think a different that's a different process. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not saying there's skill involved, obviously, because sometimes I do a good job and sometimes I do a bad job, and you know, I I learn more every time I do distillation run, and you know, been doing it for you know f uh four years now or so and you learn more all the time, but it's not the same it's not the same thing. I'm trying to do something different. I wouldn't say it's in the same category as basically someone making this geniver.
It's a different it's a different thing altogether. Yeah, it it it but I mean uh I would like to see more of that, you know. I'd like to see people making new spirits from grains that haven't been used before. I'd like to see people uh uh making handcrafted liqueurs from scratch, right? You know, stuff like that.
Uh you know, using distilling their own base spirit, taking wine, making you know, nice uh fresh brandy, and then flavoring that with oranges and making like an old school orange corsao. Right, right. Everybody would use that. It's just uh I just don't see the need to kind of keep making gin and vodka the same way that everybody else's. Yeah.
You know, it's like okay, but that's all right, but you know before we go to break, because we're gonna have to go to break in a second. You mentioned before they buy a lot of their straight liquor from our Arch Archer Daniel uh ADM. Yeah. And so uh it we just recently, you would love this. Next time you're at the French culinary where you know where where we are, uh, we ordered from a chemical lab 200-proof ethanol.
We ordered a crap ton of it at at check this out. We only paid I think like sixteen dollars a liter for it for 200 for 200, straight 200 and hydrous alcohol. This stuff is remote has no. Yeah, nothing, right? It's just alcohol.
Yeah, no, but we diluted it down to 40. We were drinking, god damn, this is sweet. Sweetest vodka you ever had. Oh my god, it's the no, seriously, it's the best ever. And it's so cheap.
Makes Smyrnoff look spendy. It's so cheap. Oh my goodness. Craziness. Yeah, that's really funny.
All right, cooking issues coming back at you in a couple minutes. Bad whisky. I started in the save bed whisky bed whisky bed whisky lose my happy home buddy had a party the cats were on You were listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network I'm the host of Cooking Issues Dave Arnold uh calling with all of your cooking and today drink related questions to 718497-2128 that's 718-497-2128. You still have some time to call in. We have Dave Wondrich in the studio.
Dave Wandrich uh has won a zillion awards, both for his magazine writing and for the uh you know, he's written, of course, the Esquire cocktail books of several of them, how many of those editions I I actually only wrote one of them, but uh that was the last one. So the one I have anyway. You wrote the one I have. Yeah. And uh, you know, wrote Inbibe, which was we actually w before we go into what you're working on in uh a you know, at the moment, why don't you talk a little bit because Inbibe was kind of a landmark cocktail book.
And uh, you know, and it was it was had kind of a unique premise for cocktail books. Well, it was sort of the right book at the right time. Uh Imbibe is is uh uh purportedly a biography of Jerry Thomas who wrote the first bartender's guide. But since he was a bartender, you know, the materials I had enough materials at the time to maybe write thirty pages of good biography. And then the rest was uh I talked about his drinks and where they came from and all the tools that that he would have used and his fellow bartenders.
And then I had just chapters of recipes uh with I gave the original recipe and then kind of talked about how I would go about recreating them. And that actually before Imbibe there'd been a lot of fabulous cocktail books. But I think Imbibe was one of the first books written acknowledging that fact. You know, it was like, okay, you already have the wonderful basic cocktail books, you already have a couple vintage cocktail books, you've already got Dale de Groff's Craft of the Cocktail, uh, Gary Regan's Joy of Mixology. Both excellent books.
Both excellent books. Ted Hayes uh Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails. You've got those. So this is for those people, you know, so the people who already have an overview and it was kind of let's get back deep into detail into the nineteenth century, find out what is discoverable about how American bartending evolved and became what it is. And uh, you know, I was I was the right guy at the right time for that I guess.
Well I think it really hit a chord because you know there's so many people in the cocktail world who um you know the the mode for a long for a long time for the past eight years, let's say five five to eight years in cocktail world of people who actually knew what the hell was going on was to kind of was a kind of recapturing of lost knowledge and a hunger for history I think and uh but those people didn't have anyone doing any actual modern scholarship on it. You know you had a a couple of older books like uh the the what was that called the Wild West Yeah Wild West Bartender's Bible or something like that. Which is a good book yeah uh a lot of kind of bad histories also but uh I think people were really kind of hungering for this sort of book and so I think it just hit the right chord. Well I I think the the one really good decision I made on that book was to address technique in detail. You know instead of just giving the recipe I broke each one down, talked about the techniques to execute it, the ingredients at some length, you know I just went on and on about this stuff.
But it it walks people through the the recipe rather than just saying go figure it out yourself, we've given you the tools I think that actually was helpful to to to a lot of bartenders because I I go to a lot of bars and I do see it behind the bar which is very flattering and means that I can uh try to twist their arms into getting free drinks. Right well it's ext you know it's extremely well received book at least in you know in the circles I I I run in uh you know I I have it I've read it I like it a lot. But uh so now you're coming off this book. This book maybe was that three years ago three years ago end of two thousand seven. Okay, so you're coming off of this book, and this book is a about a very deeply American subject, and you know, the the history is really, you know, the it it's very it's very American feel book, right?
And then you're you're coming off of that, and now you're working on punch, and punch is a little bit different, right? Yeah, I mean originally I had a a huge chapter on punch bowl drinks in the Jerry Thomas manuscript, and my manuscript is way too long, and my editor said, you know, uh we can't publish this, it's way too long. You gotta cut something. And I looked at it again and I said, you know, none of these punch bowl drinks turn up in like old newspapers uh in about American drinking. And it turns out, you know, they were probably put in there by Jerry's publisher just to to kind of make the length.
And he didn't really engage them in any way. And I realized that's because they were really English drinks. So once I cut that book, it gave that part, it gave the Jerry Thomas book focus, but it also kind of gave me my next book, because I gotta go back and deal with this stuff. And this is a story that kind of that takes me much back into England and British I guess you could call it the British invention of mixology, uh of of mixing strong drinks based on spirits. And it really comes out to have been a British innovation and uh this invention of punch or discovery of it.
Nobody like the martini, nobody will ever know exactly how it came to be. But you can certainly figure out the conditions under which it was created, mostly sailors running out of wine and beer and needing something now. And so what era are we? We're talking about the early sixteen hundreds, maybe the very end of the fifteen hundreds. Right, so you know, back before back before we were us anyway.
It's not like we couldn't have invented it. No, no, we just didn't get the chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They and you know, and it was certainly uh very popular in America before it was popular in Britain. But uh the sailors, it was it was English sailors, as far as I can tell.
Although it could possibly have been Dutch ones too. Right. But we won't talk about that. Right, but like Dutch in the actual Dutch sense, not Dutch meaning bad or fake. Yeah, no, no, yeah.
We're real, real cheese eating Holland Duncan. Uh now the um uh uh about just about punch for a second. Maybe you can talk a little bit, you know, the uh about the the pop kind of fake etymology. You said it was fake, that punch means only that punch comes from five. Yeah, I mean there's uh this idea that uh punch comes from the Indian word for five, uh which you know, punch is like Hindustani, because punch has five ingredients, uh strong, you know, spirits, water, citrus, sugar, and spice.
Now, often it had four ingredients, often it had six ingredients. So that's put that beside the thing. Uh put that put that to the side. There's also it only com this comes back to one guy's theory, who was a classical scholar who visited India in the 1680s, you know, almost like 60, 80 years after punch was invented. And he says this because he seemed uh learned, it gets picked up and becomes orthodoxy, and nobody ever really questioned it until uh a guy in like around 1900 working for the Oxford English Dictionary put out an article saying, you know, this is maybe a little bit fishy.
Uh and I I only found that article after I'd been sort of come to the same conclusion. So I was very pleased to find it. But well, uh it must really be fishy because the OED, as great as they are, has always sucked with food etymology anyway. Yeah, exactly. And this guy's our this guy put out this article because they wouldn't use his theory in the in the dictionary.
Oh, yeah. You know, and he he questions it pretty pretty strongly. As as you know, it's like why the English didn't mangle suddenly some somehow didn't mangle this one word out of all the words that they've mangled. You know, it's like, okay. There's that.
There's the fact that punch was uh an English word for kind of round things in general and bowls, etc. There's there's all kinds of stuff. Uh so one really does uh ha has grounds to to to question that etymology. Uh it it certainly shouldn't be printed as like gospel truth and moved on from as it is. Uh so it's it's a tangled tale, the history of punch.
It's it's it gets very complicated. There are lots of byways and and uh interesting factors that have barely ri been researched. So I'm sure somebody will write a book that will uh prove that everything I say in mine is wrong. Before we go, I realize that we've been talking about punch, but we haven't really told people who don't know what the hell punch is, who think it's Hawaiian punch maybe, what what punch is, and kind of like, you know, it's give a quick 'cause I because they're gonna make us leave soon. Let's give them a quick hit of what it is, and then let's talk about a couple of recipes maybe to give people an idea.
Oh, easy. Now uh originally punch, you know, we think of it as like frat house punch where you dump a bunch of stuff into a garbage can. Or then there's like the the food magazine punches with lots of sparkling wine and sliced fruits and they're very pretty and nice and and delightful. But punch was originally as serious as a martini. I mean, it was uh liquor and very strong flavorful liquor at that, uh water, sugar, citrus juice, nutmeg, uh tea, various spices, all put up in a bowl, ice came later.
Uh a very easy way to make punch, uh well, actually my favorite way, is you peel uh three lemons with a swivel bladed peeler, right? And put the peels to try to get as little of the white pith as possible. Put them in a bowl, put in six ounces, uh, you know, three quarters of a cup of super fine sugar, muddle them up together and let it sit for an hour, and you'll find that the lemon peel uh pulls out uh uh the the sugar pulls out all the oil from the lemon peel over that time, and you get this thick lemony paste that's delightful. Then add six ounces of lemon juice, stir it up, uh pour in a bottle of cognac or uh you can put in uh dark rum, navy rum, all kinds of good stuff like that. Uh ice and about a quart of water, great nutmeg on the top, and you're done.
And it's and really it's all about the fellowship. Yeah, it's all about sitting around with your friends, everybody drinking the same thing, sharing it, talking about it, uh talking about whatever, uh, and making sure you don't leave anything left in the bottom of the bowl. All right, well, you know, you can pre-batch certain aspects of your of your punch and make, for instance, you can make a batch with the with the citrus called. Yeah, you can leave the liquor out and and the water. Leave the liquor and and most of the water out, and you can bottle it and it will keep for a long time.
Right. And well, but it has a different flavor from fresh. It's an aged flavor, it's a different flavor in the shrub. Yeah, it's not quite as sharp and and bright, but it it if you let the solids settle out uh and and strain it, you'll get something that's pretty mellow and tasty. And by the way, not worse, just different.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh and a you know, but for all of those recipes, you um I apologize, you will have to purchase his book, which is coming out It's coming out November 2nd from uh Perigee Books. Uh you could probably pre order sooner than that on Amazon, and uh I encourage you to do that. Uh we have one more question that we're gonna leave with, but uh before we we're gonna actually leave on the question, so uh because it's a good one, it's always a a good one to answer, and I want to hear Dave's answer as well.
Uh, but you have been listening to cooking Issues today, brought to you by the Whole Foods uh Whole Foods uh Market. But here's the question we're gonna leave the show on. Uh it comes from Phil and uh Dave. If you go to a crap I'm gonna read this verbatim, okay. If you go to a crappy dive bar and your date wants a cocktail, what are the safe cocktails to order?
Well, I'll I'll get I'll I'll say what my uh wife Karen always ordered, which works incredibly well. Uh Myers on the Rocks with a splash of pineapple juice. There you go. Done. Done.
Finished. Contains its own instructions. Alrighty. Well, thanks. Thanks for coming in here.
Well, thank you so much. And this is fun. Thank well come again, please. You've been listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Oh, you dare got me on this corner.
And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. You got my head all twisted. And I just can't get it straight.
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