Pickle & Fink. Sam Bygrave
Sydney bartender, buyer, enthusiast. Other interests include frying cheese curds, reproducing the alphabet in tiny little pastas, and writing.
Search
Find me on...
Posts I like
-
“I can’t get down with the muddled fruit salad style though.”
(thanks to dessertsthatlooklikepacman for...
-
A cognac of the people: Jean Grosperrin 1991 Bois Ordinaires Cognac
For an egalitarian-minded people like the French, they certainly embrace the aristocratic when it comes to wine and spirits. For proof one need only look at the almost-immutable nature of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux Premiers Crus (or 1st Growths) - the only change took place in 1973 when a certain Baron de Rothschild lobbied for the inclusion of Mouton-Rothschild, according to The Oxford Companion to Wine. And this isn’t confined to the rarefied world of French wine.
In many books you will find the regions (or crus) of Cognac listed in order of reputation: Grande Champagne, Petite Champagne, Borderies, Fins Bois, Bons Bois, and Bois Ordinaires bringing up the rear.
These reputations are built on centuries of grape-growing and trial-and-error learning about terroir. Grande Champagne wins it’s distinction as the finest cru of Cognac because of the quality of its chalky soils, essential to producing the best wine for distillation. And this is the aristocratic point. Much like the landed aristocratic classes of a bygone era, Cognacs from Grande Champagne have a better reputation because they have a better start.
Poor Bois Ordinaires. Even its name suggests one should not expect anything great or grand from this region.
Read more
Visit www.shakeandstrainblog.com
SPELLBINDER: This aromatic summer spin on the traditional gin martini takes its vivid hue from Strega, an Italian liqueur infused with saffron. For an added aesthetic boost, try garnishing with a long curl of cucumber cut with a vegetable peeler.
Ingredients
2 ounces gin
1/2 ounce dry vermouth
1/4 ounce Strega
1 lemon peel strip, for garnish
1 cucumber strip (a long ribbon made with a vegetable peeler), for garnish.
Photo and credit: NY Times 23rd June 2011
Textured drinking: a re-post
This was originally published on the old GourmetRabbit.com site, and parts of this were included in their second issue
You learn a lot about taste when you learn to make drinks. Cocktail bartenders learn to balance the sweet, sour and bitter components of a drink; some study aroma wheels, and search high and low for new flavour combinations. You learn to love the minutiae involved in wringing essential oils from a twist of citrus that’s had its bitter pith carefully carved away. The world is a cornucopia of tastes! Yet texture – a drink’s body, its physicality – isn’t as prominent.
It’s not that we don’t think of it, it’s just the nature of drink. Whereas chefs can toy with different textures in the one dish – crunchy, creamy, tender or firm – the range of textures afforded to the bartender is much narrower. Flavoured edible sands, for instance, might suit the dining room, but unless you’re at the beach (and even then!), a sandy cocktail is an awful cocktail. Drinks need to be drinkable.
Read more
Understanding eggs in drinks, pt. 1
Understanding eggs in drinks pt. 1
Booze nerd alert: part one of a look at eggs. The dry-shake, and egg yolks, coming next week.
“Do you know how to make a Red Eye?” Bryan Brown’s character Doug Coglin cracks an egg and drops it whole into the mix of vodka, beer and tomato juice in the movie Cocktail (that’s right, a Cocktail reference!). Disgusting, right? Maybe.
The idea of eating and drinking raw eggs can turn a lot people off. Yet drinks with egg - yolks and whites - have long been used in cocktails for taste and texture rather than as hair-of-the-dog hangover “cures”. Fizzes, flips, eggnogs and sours all make use of eggs and egg whites. Egg whites are even used for fining red wines. They help to gently remove harsh tannins and other colloids, which are responsible for the wine’s viscosity, or body.
Read more
Tom Estes & Tequila Ocho
“I started in bars in 1976!” Tom Estes says, uncharacteristically holding a glass of rye whiskey. Tom Estes is the Saint Paul of tequila, and has been proselytising to Europeans about tequila’s virtues since opening his first bar in Amsterdam in 1976.
The wiry, grey-haired and bespectacled Californian is described by Phil Bayly – Sydney’s very own tequila apostle – as “the guy who single-handedly convinced Mexicans” of the quality of tequila.
Sydney is the last stop for Tom and Phil as they toured around the country showcasing Tom’s tequila brand, Ocho. Ocho tequila is an agave-forward, fruity tequila from the higher-altitude Los Altos region Jalisco, and focuses on vintaged, single-estate expressions of tequila.
Read more
Disaronno, almond, benzaldehyde!
Legend. History. Myth. They’re all a big part of marketing booze. See Chartreuse, for example: Carthusian monks have been making it for hundreds of years, based upon a recipe given to the Order in 1605. Only two monks know the recipe, and each of them knows just half of it. It’s a story steeped in history and legend.
A recipe dating to 1605? That’s nothing, according to Disaronno. The recipe for their amaretto “hasn’t changed since 1525”. Never mind that commercial production (rather than home-made stuff from Nonna) didn’t start until the 1900’s, we’re told that 
the recipe was passed down unchanged through the years by the Reini family, one of whom eventually set up shop selling booze in the town of Saronno, Italy. It might be true. But it doesn’t seem like human nature not to tinker with things over the years.
The story of Disaronno goes something like this: a student of Leonardo da Vinci painted a fresco depicting the Madonna for a church in Saronno. His muse for the depiction of the Madonna was a local lady innkeeper, and to express her gratitude and love for him she prepared a drink that would come to be known as amaretto by flavouring alcohol with crushed apricot kernels and herbs.
Thankfully, authentic or not, those apricot kernels and herbs make Disaronno a wonderful, distinctive drink that is useful in cocktails. The characteristic notes of almond and marzipan wafting from the bottle are one of the more recognisable aromas in food and drink, and the amaretto sour is enjoying popularity as an off-the-menu drink in many bars.
Read more
Akvavit, skål, & gløgg.
This is an extended version of an article written for the current issue of Gourmet Rabbit.
Akvavit is a drink that’s eluded me for some time. It’s not a bottle you see in most liquor shops in Australia unless you really go looking for it. Luckily, during a recent night of drinking in Wisconsin, my Danish mates Mathias and Martin began pouring snaps – ice cold glasses of akvavit. The bottles were sent as care packages from home to prepare for Christmas. I was excited as only a booze geek can be. Here, in Wisconsin, I was embarking on a little trip to Denmark courtesy of a little snaps. That’s globalisation for you.
Akvavit is distilled spirit flavoured with caraway, coriander, dill and others. Although the way it’s made varies, akvavit is a drink common to Scandinavia. Its name stems from the Latin aqua vitae, meaning “the water of life” an etymological root it shares with whisky and eau-de-vie. There are different types of akvavit – some are clear and some take on the colour of the wood barrels they age in. Its flavour profile makes akvavit a ready match with Scandinavian foods like herrings, mackerel, rye bread and cabbage.
Read more
Where to drink, Madison?
Where to drink in Madison
Most cities have a guide to their best watering holes. Madison didn’t. So, after much research, I’ve listed a few places that might get you started.
One thing to bear in mind though: first and foremost, Madison is a college town. It was voted the number one party town, or something to that effect. Expect lots of inane yelling late at night if you live within a mile of a bar. Particularly at 2 in the morning, otherwise known as “bar time”, when the bars shut. It doesn’t matter what night of the week it is, there will be someone drunk in the middle of your street.
The most common bar in Madison is the college-type bar: pitchers, sometimes fishbowls full of cocktails concocted with haste (and, sadly, little taste), and cheap dollar beers. Don’t expect a lot.
Nonetheless, there are places in Madison where you can go to avoid the dudes in the baseball caps high-fiving and pouring cheap nasty beer down their gullets. Here’s my list:
Nostrano
It’s a restaurant that has recently opened up but with space for ten people at the bar, and by far offers the most current, considered drink list in Madison. The guy who runs the drink program, Chad, has spent a lot of time in kitchens previously and skilled up behind the stick in Chicago. They’ve got a short cocktail list, but the house creations are premised on classic cocktail formulas, and use all the craft ingredients seen in the cocktail bars of the bigger cities: house-made bitters and syrups sit amid bottles of amari, rye and gins. You won’t go wrong, either, in throwing open your choice of drink to the bartender. The food is great too.
Maduro
If you don’t like cigar smoke, you won’t like this place. It is a cigar bar in the proper sense of the term – you can’t smoke cigarettes inside, but you can drink one of many whiskies and bourbons all the while puffing on a stogie from their humidor. The place doesn’t kick off til 10pm most nights, but if you like a quiet drink it’s best to go early because it can get loud. You’ll also see a few of the city’s bartenders there after their shifts. That’s a good sign.
