Alien Ingredient #2: St. Germain

Elderberries: we're surrounded by them. We even have a guy who supplies local elderberry syrup to the restaurant. So with all that, you'd think I would be up on elderflowers and their potential. Not so.

I've been reading a lot about St. Germain over the last year: I get a lot of trade magazines and many of them have articles on the resurgence of the classic cocktail and the use of all kinds of specialty liquors, liqueurs, and bitters. I keep seeing cocktail after cocktail featuring St. Germain, an elderberry flower liqueur just launched in 2007.

We don't have a big bar program at the restaurant and so I don't get to play with all that many new drink ingredients. And I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a lovely control state where the state has the liquor monopoly. What this means is that we restaurants (Bar? Bar? You can't have no stinkin' bar in the antediluvian Commonwealth!), especially those of us not located in the major metro areas, can have a hell of a time getting specialty beverages such as St. Germain.

In fact, I think I tried about a year ago to acquire some St. Germain, only to be confounded by the Commonwealth. For giggles I tried it again last week and was surprised to find it on the standard price list, not the special order list, and was even more shocked to find that our local ABC store had it on the shelf.

Maybe those of you who frequent the ABC store already knew this, but I did not. It's not like we hang out down there with a restaurant to run and all. Also, we just cannot walk in down there and buy liquor. We have to phone or fax the order in and then go pick it up at least 24 hours later. So, we have no incentive to visit our friends at the local ABC store and thus are the very last to know what is in stock.

Long story short, a bottle arrived at the restaurant and I cracked the top. Wow! Now I knew what the fuss was about. This liqueur has a gorgeous perfume of passion fruit, pears, dried peaches, and dried apricots, but mainly of passion fruit. I could definitely work with this.

I can see lots of dessert and sauce applications for this liqueur. How about a splash of it in a fruit salsa, or crème anglaise, or crème brûlée? But mostly I can see excellent cocktails and I devised one that is still unnamed.

1-1/2 parts vodka
1-1/2 parts St. Germain
1/4 part Campari
2 dashes orange bitters
1/2 part fresh lemon juice
1/2 part simple syrup
Float of prosecco

Rim a chilled martini glass with colored sugar (this cocktail is tart). Shake all ingredients except the prosecco and strain into the glass. Float prosecco on top. Cheers!

Vote: Bartender, hit me one more time! A must-have for our bar and our dessert menu.

Burning Questions: Wine and Beverages

This whole series of "Burning Questions" posts originated as a somewhat amusing troll through the One Block West Restaurant web site server logs, to see what search phrases were bringing people to the web site. As I went through the logs, the search topics seemed to fall into several broad categories, each dealt with in a separate post in this series. This post deals with beverages.

4 Areas Scotch is Made from. See any of the maps on the web. The four basic areas are Highlands (including Speyside), Lowlands, Campbeltown, and Islay. There are also distilleries in the northwestern islands grouped unofficially under the moniker Islands; these include Jura, Mull, Arran, Skye, and Orkney.

Bring Wine/Take Wine to Restaurant in Virginia. I'll let Virginia ABC answer this one:

BYOW (Bring your own wine) is illegal in Virginia. Patrons are not allowed to bring bottles of wine into licensed establishments. (§ 4.1-324, 325 and 225). However, if you are unable to finish a purchased bottle of wine at a restaurant, they may cork the unfinished bottle for you to take home (3 VAC 5 40 30 B).

Which Red Wine Grape is Used to Make Champagne. Two actually: Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier.

Duck in Kriek

I've always claimed that there are very few original inventions in cooking and anyone who claims to have invented a dish is probably fooling himself. I know that the vast majority of times that I have a novel idea, I can go out on the internet and find that someone has already had that same idea. Here's a case in point.

A customer sent me an email recently stating that he had a bunch of kriek in his basement, asking if I had ever cooked with it and what he might do with it. I answered that I had used it various ways over the years, mostly in desserts. Kriek-macerated fresh fruit is wonderful and kriek makes a great sabayon. I also answered that right now, I feel like braising duck in it with dried sour cherries, shallots, and thyme.

Let me digress to say that kriek is a Belgian beer spontaneously fermented with naturally occuring yeasts. After the primary fermentation, sour cherries are added, causing a secondary fermentation. The beer is dry, a touch sour from the wheat added to the barley and from the native yeasts, and it picks up color, flavor, and aroma from the cherries.

The dish I was seeing in my mind was kriek-braised Moulard duck legs with grilled Moulard duck breast, bacon-roasted Brussels sprouts and chestnuts, and a sauce of the reduced braising liquid augmented with demiglace. Unfortunately, our sprouts are about three weeks away from being ready. I did find some celery root in the market, but not a vast quantity, so I thought I would purée it and stretch it with potatoes.

After I had featured the dish on the menu this past weekend, I got curious. I've never braised duck in kriek before nor ever encountered it, but I couldn't imagine that I am the first to have ever done it, so just for giggles I typed "duck kriek" into the Google oracle to see just how often it had been done before.

The second hit was from a beer dinner in San Francisco that featured:

Duck Braised in Hansens Kriek
Slowly cooked Duck Legs With Shallots, Thyme, Dried Montmorency Cherries
topped with a Duck Kriek Demi-Glace on a Bed of Celery Root Potato Puree
with Milk Poached White Asparagus

This is identical to what I thought of, less the asparagus.

So to the chef who a few years ago took the trouble to call me to let me know that I had ripped off one of his dishes, I say get over yourself friend. I'm willing to bet that hundreds of people did it before you.

Pearls Before My Swine

Yesterday for lunch, we went to a local Thai restaurant where my daughters enjoyed large quantities of bubble tea. For those of you who don't know bubble tea, it is tea with copious quantities of sugar, cream, often a flavoring, and gelatinous "bubbles," "pearls," or "boba," often wildly colored. It's just the thing that a couple of teenage swine would want to drink!

Of course, the teenage attraction may be that bubble tea is food to be played with. The large centimeter-diameter pearls are to be sucked up a monstrous straw, which leads to numerous games and generally making a mess, something hugely attractive to the teenage psyche!

Forty-something neophyte that she is, my wife had never before encountered bubble tea and was curious what the bubbles were. Before I could reply, daughter number one told her that they were tapioca, though how my daughter came to know so much about it, I haven't a clue. She certainly didn't learn from me: I take my tea straight, unsweetened, unflavored and well, boring. Being lactose intolerant may lead one to boredom in certain areas, I suppose.

My wife gamely tried a glass before deciding that tapioca pearls in tea weren't her thing. I really do think it helps to be a kid to appreciate bubble tea!

You and I, since most of us are way over 40, we have known tapioca all our lives. It was that funny gelatinous stuff made into puddings that we had to eat at all those church potlucks and picnics. You hated it. I tolerated it. Johnny from down the street was the weirdo who couldn't get enough of it. In a word, it's a very familiar product if you're of a certain age.

But what really is tapioca and how does it become pearls? I found these questions running around my mind as the kids were trying to see how many bubbles they could get into a single straw. I've known for years that tapioca comes from the root of the cassava or manioc plant, grown in the tropics. I also know that one form of cassava is a nice source of cyanide and can be harmful to humans unless the cyanide is broken down by soaking it in water. But beyond this, I had no clue how we get from starchy, tuberous root to gelatinous spheres that attract kids everywhere.

The process is really quite simple. The roots are peeled, grated, mixed in several waters, rinsed and centrifuged to yield a wet cake that is then pulverized and screened into a rough flour. This flour is agitated and it starts to clump together and as more damp flour is added the clumps become larger. Do this in a rotating drum and round balls tend to form.

Heat and water make tapioca flour gelatinize, so the round balls are steamed while rotating in a drum, gelatinizing the outer layer. Then they are dried and sorted by size, ready for market. We then boil the dried tapioca pearls until they are gelatinized all the way through and use them to make pudding or entertain our kids.

And now you know.

Crying the Blues

Have you ever noticed that sometimes a problem will arise that forces you to take action and in resolving the problem, you actually come out better ahead? I've learned this over the years and so I've come to look at many problems as opportunities to improve things.

This all sounds rather philosophical for a restaurant blog, so let me bring this back around to the food and beverage world. For years, we've been loyal customers of Tröegs Brewery of Harrisburg, PA and we still are, because the Trogner brothers, Chris and John, make some of the best beer on the East Coast. We're such loyal customers that Tröegs beers have been the only beers in our cooler since day one, much to the chagrin of the Budmiller reps.

Not only are these beers very popular with us at One Block West, but they're generally hugely popular in the mid-Atlantic, so popular that the guys at the brewery cannot keep up with the demand, especially for their HopBack Amber Ale, a superbly well balanced beer and my beer of choice after a hot shift in the kitchen.

Unfortunately, this year we've been shorted on HopBack more times than not. From the brewery's perspective, a great problem to have, but on our part, we don't like to tell customers no, especially ones that have been drinking the beer here for five or six years.

Sadly, I've had to find a replacement for HopBack, one with a less limited production. Just getting to the point of looking for a replacement took some doing on my part; HopBack and I have been close friends for years and I felt like I was cheating on my friend. Plus, we try to keep it local here at the restaurant and any change from HopBack would mean getting less local. While Harrisburg isn't entirely local at 75 minutes away, customers do drive down for dinner and are happy to see their hometown brew in our cooler.

Once I started looking, I kept hearing the name Oskar Blues Brewery from Lyons, CO. And a few days after a friend gave me a taste of Oskar Blues' strong ale called Gordon, I just happened to run across a six-pack of their Dale's Pale Ale at Murphy Beverage. Gordon was really well made, so I took the Dale's Pale Ale away with me to sample at that evening's poker game as a potential HopBack replacement.

Toward the end of dinner service, I got free of the kitchen and spied three friends at a table drinking HopBack, so I poured myself a Dale's and joined them. Before I could say anything, the hop aroma filled the air, so much so that one of my friends asked what I was drinking. I told him and he asked for a taste, which I gave him, and he immediately passed the glass to his wife, who passed it to the third person. By the time I got to taste it, we were all blown away with the flavor, and all three of them asked for a Dale's of their own.

You should have seen their faces when I brought out the remaining five Dale's. They were thinking what I thought when I first encountered Gordon. My head just about popped off my shoulders when one of my beer connoisseur friends pulled out the can of Gordon and poured tastes for us one evening. Good beer in a can?!?!?

It's saying a lot that the six-pack of Dale's disappeared within about ten minutes. So much for the beer for the poker game! But this experience proved to me that there is life beyond HopBack and that life is going to be exceptional.

Now about this can thing. It's now a quasi-trademark of Oskar Blues, the Canned Beer Apocalypse, that is. Watch their video to learn more about why canned beer is great beer. And, come experience the Apocalypse yourself. Dale's is amazing beer.

My beer problem has left me crying the blues, the Oskar Blues.

P.S. Chris and John, we still love you. Just get some more brew kettles if you have room for them!

A Good Cup of Coffee

Do you love coffee? I do. I really love the flavor of coffee and so it matters to me what kind of coffee I am drinking. I'd rather have no coffee than Maxwell House or Folgers. Am I a snob?

Maybe. However, I am convinced you can tell a whole lot about a restaurant by the bread it puts on the table and the cofee it serves. These are two areas that many restaurants ignore, buying on price or convenience, which is a shame. When I go out to eat and finish my meal with a cup of coffee, I want to say, "Wow! Somebody here cares about coffee!"

I am reminded of this because I just rolled in at this miserable hour and first thing, I brewed a pot of our house coffee. It's part ritual and part need. The ritual thing is easy: I'm on autopilot this early in the morning and I do things by rote; a pot of coffee (or increasingly more frequently, tea) just happens.

The need part is more difficult. I don't need the coffee per se, but running on fumes as I am now, that cup of coffee sure helps me get through the previous night's sales numbers more easily. Or so I imagine.

And the term "cup" is disingenuous. I drink my coffee black and straight out of a pint glass from the bar. I'm not too keen on 6 ounce cups of coffee!

By and large, customers love our coffee here at the restaurant. But there are some dedicated Maxwell House lovers who hate our coffee. And that's exactly what I was looking for when I chose the coffee for the restaurant: a coffee that would be memorable, a coffee that would force you to choose sides, not some middle-of-the-road-pleases-nobody coffee.

Years ago, I tasted hundreds of coffee samples over a few weeks in choosing our two coffees. And I bet you thought it was simple matter to pick coffee for a restaurant. Well, it is, unless you want to serve your guests memorable coffee.

For our standard coffee, I went with a blend heavy on Indonesian beans with a very full roast. Our decaf is a high quality, mainly Brazilian light roast that has really good flavor; you'll never know that it is decaf.

I also have two other tricks to ensure good coffee. First, I asked the coffee roaster to give me 2.75-ounce packages of coffee. The industry standard measure for a liter of coffee is 2.5 ounces and a lot of places cheat by using only 2.25 ounces. Also, I tweaked our machine to brew 28 ounces instead of the standard liter (about 34 ounces) about a full cup of coffee short. This ensures that we have a really rich and robust cup of coffee. Sure, it costs me more, but some things are just worth it.

And of the comments I get about the coffee in the dining room, the vast majority are glowing. And the other customers, well they hate it. And that's OK by me: there's no sense in trying to please everyone. My mission is accomplished—nobody is ambivalent about One Block West coffee.

My 14-year old daughter just arrived—her summer job is helping here in the restaurant, one day in the kitchen, one day in the office, one day in the dining room—and asked, "Did you make a pot of coffee yet?" She's always drunk coffee: she started drinking espresso drinks as a toddler. I've created yet another coffee monster.

A Mojito Spring

“Mojito: the Official Drink of One Block West Staff. Hey, you ought to put this on the blog.”—Anonymous One Block West Server

I was outside last night trying to knock some of the aphids off the roses when it struck me how gigantic and lush our spearmint is. But then, it should be. We've had a wet (16 to 20 inches of rain since April 1 according to NWS) and cool spring, ideal growing conditions for mint. Seattle, take that!

Just for grins, here's a shot of the top of a typical plant, showing the size in relation to my hand. Huge!

Besides using this bounty as garnish for desserts, we've used it in Mint Pesto for the lamb and Mojito Crème Brûlée, apparently named after our drink of choice and flavored with rum, mint, lime zest, and brown sugar. But to be fair, most of the mint has gone into Mojitos after hours. [Am I alone in thinking that those Kentuckians are wasting both good Bourbon and good mint in their juleps?]

One Block West Mojito

The following recipe is for one drink. Are you serious? Who makes one Mojito?

8-10 mint leaves
1/4 lime, sliced lengthwise and crosswise
juice of 1/2 lime
1/2 teaspoon white sugar
1/2 ounce simple syrup
2 ounces Bacardi light rum
club soda
1 sprig of mint
slice of lime

Put the mint leaves and lime pieces into a tall glass, squeeze the 1/2 lime over that, and sprinkle in the sugar. Muddle well. Add the simple syrup and Bacardi. Stir well. Taste and adjust by adding more simple syrup or lime juice as necessary.

Fill with crushed ice and top with club soda. Garnish with a mint sprig and a lime wedge. Enjoy!