Two thousand and nine started oh so sweet, but finished crushingly bitter - the failed relationship, internal strife, and finally being drugged and robbed left me more than a little melancholy. Cliché as it sounds, the internal world does indeed start expressing itself in the things we do, in the product of our hands. So it's pretty unsurprising that one particularly dreary December evening I decided that mixing Cynar and salt would be a great idea.
Some dastardly illness knocked me down last night and hasn't let me get back up...but that doesn't mean abstaining from cocktails. Oh quite the contrary, it's toddy time.
Bitter is beautiful, the Italians know this far better than we sugar-addled Americans, and hence Campari - the deeply bitter/citrusy booze with a long secret history (it's said only one person knows the entire recipe).
Campari's most famous drink is the Negroni - deceptively simple and bitter as hell - it rewards only those that earn it. Like a big hoppy IPA you'll likely hate it at first, but then slowly find yourself craving that sharp citrus bite. I dare say it might be my favorite cocktail (at least this week) but something about it being served 'up' didn't do it for me texturally. Bitter sour drinks really click for me when there's some CO2 involved...so out comes the carbonator...
Just because I wasn't writing on The Goodist these past couple months, doesn't mean I wasn't slaving away at perfecting a few consumable creations. I'll be posting a few of these over the next week or so to get caught up, starting with The Goodist Bloody Mary...
A friend was coming by for drinks the other night and I was getting tired of G&T's, so I asked her what her favorite drink was while I headed to the liquor store: "Bloody Mary". I was terrified, I'd never made a bloody mary in my life and already knew the endless variations would make this a consuming project considering my personality type.
To make a long story short, I got lucky early on, and after a bit of refining I was able to settle on an easy traditional take on the bloody mary:
I was hungry. Hungry in the way that only a belly full of whiskey at 2am can make you. I had been swilling the stuff alone for the last 2 hours to pay homage to the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, since it seems to be the stuff they're always improbably imbibing (searching for food yet they have the grain to make booze?).
Anyway, I'd had a bit too much of the stuff since I was edgy about how they'd wrap up one of the best series ever, and after all was said and done I wanted a snack before bed. I was in no shape to cook, but managed to hunt down a few staples in the kitchen. Ak-mak crackers and New Zealand pretty-darn-sharp cheddar are always on hand (always!), but I was burned out on that combo alone. Luckily, I had a tin of anchovies and my basil plant was coming into it's own.
Two minutes later I had a few crackers layered in cheese, anchovies, and basil straight off the living breathing plant. Perfection - every texture was represented and the strong flavors of each ingredient represented itself yet tempering the tendency of each to be too overpowering on it's own. I started with three, but have no idea how far down the rabbit hole things went. I might have been in there for 15min or 2 hours, it was one of those binges where you find yourself standing in your kitchen pounding your fist on the counter because it's the absolutely perfect thing at that moment.
As promised, here's the riveting conclusion to Making the Perfect Gin and Tonic...
Now that we've made wonderfully bubbly carbonated gin, it's time we make some tonic. Tonic water, originally developed to protect British troops from malaria while conquering strange and foreign lands, tasted awful in it's original formulation. The inclusion of quinine (from the bark of the South American cinchoa tree) made the beverage very bitter, but staved off malaria and allowed for the otherwise impossible colonization of Africa. Quickly the British colonialists realized that a dram full of booze helps the medicine go down and thus the famous G&T was born.
Modern tonic water bears little resemblance to the tonic water of the past, the quinine is still there but much reduced (and therefore less bitter), the sugar content is through the roof (~35g (!) of high fructose - about the same as any other soft drink on the market), and various flavors, preservatives, and citric acid (for a bit of tart). There are a few designer tonics out there now that use real sugar and less of it, but they're expensive, so lets make our own shall we?
With no AC at home and 100+ degree days, it seemed only rational to create a perfect gin and tonic - with cooling doses beginning promptly after breakfast. A well made G&T is excellent refreshment, but there have always been two problems with the modern recipe that have annoyed me. One, I like the ratio of gin to tonic near 1:3, but at this point the beverage looses carbonation, especially as the ice melts. Two, tonic water contains as much high fructose evil as any mainstream soda on the market unless you pay for hard to acquire and very expensive specialty products. Both of these problems can easily be solved with a carbonation machine and a little creativity.
The tomato may just be my favorite single ingredient. It forms the base of some of my favorite dishes, from salsa and indian curries to maybe it's proudest form - Italian red sauces. About a year ago I developed an obsession with creating the perfect red sauce that culminated in creating batches nearly 3 times a week until I finally felt that I couldn't improve upon it any further. Although better sauces are very much possible if you possess an abundance of fresh seasonal ingredients, money to blow, and time to kill, this sauce is tuned to be affordable, quick, and reproducible any time of year. This is an always satisfying go-to sauce.
