EMBURY COCKTAILS

One Bag To Rule Them All

The current VMan features a piece I wrote a piece about the this supremely useful and narcotically good looking bartender bag that Jim Meehan of PDT designed in collaboration with luxury leather goods outfit Moore & Giles. The above image is a pre-publication version of the page that featured my beloved Beefeater 24, some toasty Krug champagne and a French 75 adapted from the version found in Judge Jnr.'s 1927 cocktail book "Here’s How", updated and tailored to 24's subtle flavor profile by Meehan himself. Embury's homeboy Mark Buettler styled the drink for the shoot but, sadly, the drink and Buettler's first 'Cocktail Stylist' credit didn't make it into the final version of the page. This is a common scenario with the arc of magazine story production: copy and images mutate and evolve past the writer's original intent. Here's the original version of the page with the cocktail and the credit intact. Thanks, fellas. J.R.

FRENCH 75

1 oz. Beefeater 24 Gin

.5 oz. Lemon Juice

.5 oz. Simple Syrup

Krug Champagne 

Shake first 3 ingredients with ice and strain into a

chilled coupe

Top with Champagne

Garnish with a lemon twist

Krimko On Wine: Thanksgiving Edition; Lioco, Scalloped Potatoes, George Strait & Taylor Swift.

Can someone explain to me why I've been listening to nothing but George Strait lately?  And it's not only the King of Country himself; I've even been listening to other people sing songs George Strait has sung.  Does Embury count among its readers anyone else who has watched Taylor Swift sing 'Run' a dozen times on Youtube? [See here, well worth the 3 minutes. J.R.]

Perhaps someone can also help explain why I've been favoring big white wines lately.  This week it was Lioco, a Sonoma County Chardonnay (I've really been keeping my promise to myself to drink a lot of wine from California).  Lioco got some good press from Eric Asimov in The New York Times, but he drank Indica, their red Rhonish blend.

The Chardonnay is made in about as Burgundian a style as you can make in the Russian River Valley.  No oak.  Perhaps not as zingy as I might like, but there is a kelly green, minerally thing going on in the midpalate that I cannot remember tasting before.  Almost synthetic.  Probably would go pretty good with those scalloped potatoes on your Thanksgiving table.  $19.75, tax included, at Silverlake Wine; $17.99 at Astor Wines & Spirits. S.K.

Wednesday Cocktail: Perfect G & T

The casually louche West Village lounge Highlands' Perfect Gin & Tonic puts the gin-to-tonic ratio in the hands of the guest,  allowing them to mix their own G & Ts to taste. 2 oz of Hendrick's in a rocks glass is garnished-and chilled-with two cucumber ice cubes. An individual serving bottle of Q Tonic comes with the drink, leaving the balance of gin to tonic in ones' own hands. As the cucumber ice slowly melts it adds progressively more freshness and a frisson of green vegetable goodness.

Cucumber Ice:

Peel 1  whole cucumber

add a liter of cold chilled water and put in a blender - put in a ice tray and out in the freezer until frozen.

Fantasy Fest Toolshed 09: Hemoglobin (a.k.a. Bandera)

Key West's Fantasy Fest is the town's annual week-long costume party and balls-out bacchanal. I had some business there that put me right in the middle of the madness, and when I registered the hard partying significance of the timing I started to keep my eyes open for something special to whip up in my dad's tool shed. Requisitioning the shed for drinks production for holidays and parties when I'm town has become quite standard, and at this point the pressure's on to do something interesting and subtly-but indisputably-intoxicating. An entire cavalcade of friends and family had been collaborating on a fairly high concept group costume for the Masquerade March, a daytime foot parade that happens on the Friday before the big parade and is much more local, funky and cool. A couple cases of Dengue Fever had recently been diagnosed in Key West, and somehow this led the crew to the idea of doing a Dengue Night Fever themed ensemble-disco mosquitoes and a helicopter that would dispense bug spray.  In admirably bad taste, all around. Weeks of proboscis crafting and helicopter building was their job--mine was to come up with something appropriate to drink. At a Tres Generaciones dinner at higher end Mexican restaurant Toloache I encountered the Bandera, and I knew I had a strong candidate at first sight. The collaboration between TG Brand Ambassador Jaime Salas and Toloache's Julian Medina and Miguel Montes is a magical two-toned margarita topped with beet reduction, garnished with mint. The colors made me think of red & white (or somewhat green) blood cells--which made me think of Dengue Fever.  I re-dubbed it for the occasion:

HEMOGLOBIN A.K.A. BANDERA

2 ounces Tres Generacions Reposado
8 Mint leaves
1 ounce Lime
¾ ounces Simple Syrup
¾ ounces Beet puree
Crushed Ice

1.  Combine mint, lime and simple syrup in the bottom of the glass.  Muddle ingredients well.  Pour the crushed ice on top.  Add the Tequila, then top drink with the beet puree.  Garnish with mint leaf.

Beet Purée

Serves 25 drinks

 5 Beets

1. Set oven for 450°F.

2. Place beets in a roasting pot and cook in the oven for 2 hours, or until tender.  After removing from the  oven, place the beets in cold water to cool and carefully remove the skins.

3.  Once the skins are removed and beets are cooled, place beets in blender.  Pulse until the beets are fully puréed and the liquid’s texture is smooth.

 

So that's it: TG Reposado, lime juice combined with the simple syrup for expediency's sake, beet reduction, chiffonaded mint and ice from the corner market. The recipe calls for crushed ice and it's certainly preferable as the ingredients remain suspended and separated longer, extending the drama of the red on green contrast.  But for the tool shed's purposes corner store ice cubes worked. (if anyone has advice on how to crush several bags worth of ice easily I'd love to hear it in the comments). I don't regret not crushing the ice for 25 drinks, but I wish I'd splurged on another overpriced bag of mint so there could be a garnish in each one, it's a nice touch that caresses the nose.

I lined them up and knocked out ten at a time. Surprisingly simple in the end for something that makes such an impact. Something to stir the cocktail with is a good idea as its mature iteration occurs when the beet, the tequila and the lime start co-mingling. For this crowd and on this day fingers would do.

 

Disco mosquitos gearing up.

By happy coincidence Elena matched the drink. More photos of the parade after the jump.

Wednesday's Cocktail: Ginger & Raspberry Sour

 
This cocktail comes from Highlands, the sexy new lounge in the West Village that manages to be both chic and cozy.  Scotch is the featured player in a lovely and often surprising array of cocktails. On the night I stopped in with some friends small servings of the forthcoming menu were passed around and the term"contemporary Scottish cuisine" makes great sense after tasting some samples--fantastic stuff.  The only problem here is that it's bound to be hard to get a table in the very near future, so go now before New York Magazine writes it up and it gets discovered by simply everyone. J.R.

GINGER & RASPBERRY SOUR

Ginger and Raspberry Syrup  2 oz

Egg White 1 oz

Freshly Lemon Juice  3/4 oz

Glenrothes Special Reserve  2oz

Dry shake all of the ingredients ( to make nice and frothy) and then shake with ice to chill. Strain over ice and add a raspberry has garnish.

GINGER & RASPBERRY SYRUP

1 packet of rapsberries

1 lb ginger

1  cup of sugar

2 cup of water

Peel the ginger and add all the other ingredients and bring to the boil. Let cool and then strain to get a nice spicy red syrup.

Dinner With Krimko: "Killing"; Cheap Terroir; And Octopus & Bratwurst Stew

(Embury Wine & Food Editor Stuart Krimko will be taking us through his rock & roll dinners periodically.) People in Los Angeles are always killing things.  There are gang members, for instance, who kill other gang members––sometimes from the same gang!  Angelenos have gotten used to the Lakers killing the majority of their opponents.  (I'm a baseball fan, and the Dodgers got killed by the Phillies in the NLCS, but that's another story.)  And then there are all the comedians, actors, and musicians who are looking to kill their next performance:  'Dude, The Pixies killed last night at The Palladium.' Recently Silverlake Wine has been killing its selection of cheap wine with a bit bottle age.  Last week I bought a 2004 Mercurey 1er cru for $10.  It wasn't the most amazing bottle of Burgundy I ever had, but it was damned good and it had that thing that named growths have––I guess I should just own up to wine terminology and call it terroir.  Usually you have to pay for esteemed terroir, but sometimes you don't.  Esteemed terroir does not always mean good wine, and it rarely means good value, but once in a while worlds collide, cases fall off a truck, and a buyer for a particular store kills and makes a great purchase.  When this kind of killing is going on I like to stock up. A case in point: this 2001 Saint-Chinian 'Les Sigillaires' from G. Moulinier in the Languedoc.  Apparently 'sigillaires' are plant fossils, and there are a lot of them in Mr. Molinier's vineyard.  The wine probably has a higher percentage of Syrah than is typical for Saint-Chinian, and it is drinking very well; it's spicy, fresh, and deep.  And it only costs $11 at Silverlake, where it was described to me as 'textbook Saint-Chinian.' I must say that I killed the dish that I served with this wine last Friday night: octopus and bratwurst stew.

First you submerge a small octopus in water that's just below a simmer for about half an hour.  Do not boil the octopus, lest it toughen.  While the octopus is not boiling, slowly sauté a sliced bratwurst, onions, carrots, a mildly hot pepper or two and a bay leaf in a medium Dutch oven.  Once these start to caramelize, add a good dose of red wine (I used a cheap tempranillo) and scrape the bottom of the pan.  Now add more wine, and some tomatoes from a can.  Let them reduce, then add some more.  Then add some diced potatoes, a few more sliced bratwursts, some chili sauce, some soy sauce, etc.  Slice the octopus into 1- to 2-inch pieces, head and all, and throw them in the Dutch oven.  You should have poured about 2/3 of the bottle of wine in there by this point.  Keep it at a low simmer for about two hours, until the potatoes are soft and the octopus is no longer tough.  Serve the stew over slices of baguette toasted in olive oil, salt and pepper.  Garnish with a tiny dollop of chili sauce and toasted pepitas. If I'd stuck to the Saint-Chinian and the octopus it would have been a healthy and satisfying night of culinary murder.  But then someone put on Albert Ayler and I filled my wine glass with Jim Beam and things took a turn for the ruthless.

All things Krimko here.

Necessity, And Thirst, Are The Mothers Of Invention Part 2: Chaussuer Edition

In August we wrote about a workaround for opening a wine bottle without an opener in the woods in Oregon, using only a screw and some elbow grease. In this clip some ingenious and sauced up Frenchies get all MacGyver on a bottle of wine with a shoe, a wall and force borne of serious thirst. Respect.

Wednesday Wine: Candidus

(Ed. Note: Wine and Food Editor recently moved to Los Angeles, taking a brief hiatus from Embury. We are delighted to have him back in the mix.) The Santa Anas are blowing here in Los Angeles, where the wine landscape looks a bit different than it did in New York.  I feel somewhat obliged, not to mention aesthetically curious, to drink what is now the 'local' wine.  But proportionally speaking, I meet fewer New World wines that I like.  On the whole they just don't seem to be as dirty as the bottles from the Old World.  Candidus, a North Coast white from Malm Cellars in Healdsburg, is one of the exceptions that proves the rule.  Apparently Mr. Malm distributes the wine himself, selling the wine out of his truck to stores. 

This unknown blend of white grapes is big and burly and dirty, and it's sealed with red wax.  The wax crumbles and gets all over the place, but maybe it adds to the dirtiness I like so much.  At just shy of 15% alcohol, Candidus is a bruiser; the people at Colorado Wine Company, where I first bought it, described it as 'off-dry.'  I don't know that I'd go that far, but it's certainly not your crisp, zingy sipper.  That said, I've found that Candidus goes quite well with a wide range of food.  Plus, it gets you drunk about 25% percent faster than your average nimble muscadet.  Its slightly sweet front allows it to accommodate spicy food––there's a lot of that in Los Angeles.  But it's the intriguingly dirty, almost muddy, character beneath the sweetness that makes this stuff compelling.  $15 at Colorado Wine Company and Silverlake Wine. Stuart Krimko.

Persephone's Dram And Farewell Yoko Devereaux

It was a bittersweet party last week as Embury friend Andy Salzer hosted a wake for his menswear line's fictional muse, Yoko Devereaux. Jim Ryan of Hendrick's made drinks for the event at the burlesque club The Box, Ana Matronic of Scissor Sisters read the wickedly funny eulogy in a character that felt like the love child of Rosalind Russell and Bette Davis as penned by Fran Lebowitz, and Alan Cumming, Parker Posey and a slew of Yoko's friends turned up in full  "Funeral Realness." As Ana was quoted in the New York Times "The Moment", “With the smoking, everyone in black, vogueing and lip-synch performances, it feels like old New York.' Full article here. Recipe for Jim's punch below. As usual he employed his secret weapon for punches: a giant ice cube made using a take-out container, this time customized with dried crabnberries and slices of cucumber.

PERSEPHONE'S DRAM

Juice from 12 lemons
1 1/2 handfuls of dried cranberries
7 tbsp honey
1 oz Fee's Old Fashioned Bitters
4 cups strong Chamomile tea*
1 quart Pomegranate soda (Whole Foods makes a good one)
1 liter Hendrick's Gin
1 Quart sized ice block
Garnish:  Cucumber wheels, clove spiked orange wheels. Pomegranate segments if in season.

Empty the quart sized ice block in a punch bowl. Add cranberries and honey. Muddle to incorporate the honey in the cranberries. Stir in the lemon juice to break the mixture up. Pour the mixture into the punch bowl and add Hendrick's Gin and tea. Add pomegranate soda and bitters. Give a goodly stir. Adjust taste with more bitters or more Hendrick's Gin. Garnish and serve to the thirsty, grieving guests.

 

Above: Ana and Jason Schell. On the right: Jim Ryan preps punch.

 

Friday Night Cocktail: Vampire Bill (Season One)

Mark Buettler is running this homage to "True Blood"'s Vampire Bill at Dressler for Halloween-and very specifically for he character as he was drawn in the show's first season, when he wielded some potent menace ,before he got a bit de-balled, and de-fanged, in Season Two.

VAMPIRE BILL (Season One)

3/4 oz. Angostura bitters
3/4 oz. Stirring's Blood Orange Bitters
3/4 oz. lime juice
3/4 oz. simple syrup
1 oz. egg white

Dry shake the egg with the lime juice to emulsify; add rest of ingredients, shake with ice, strain into a double rocks glass.