GIN AND MOI

I’ve been thinking about gin.  Partly that’s because I’ve been drinking a fair amount if it lately, but not only for that reason.

It started when I was drinking gin in Vienna in the Blue Bar at the Hotel Sacher, which actually looks even more blue than the picture below:

 I had a Gibson martini made with Wien gin, it looked like this:

At the time I didn’t know what Wien gin was, but I think it was probably this:

The Blue Bar made a good martini, even if I could have wished the glass a bit fuller, but those cocktail onions were the real revelation, sweet and mild, a million miles away from the vinegary sourness that goes with so many cocktail onions.

And then there was Das Torberg die Bar – a bar that stocks 200 gins supposedly.  I ordered the Gansloser Black Gin - that's the bottle above - which (call me naïve) I had expected to be black in color but looked just like any other gin.  Tasted very  fine though.

We asked the lady behind the bar about Wien Gin and she served a couple of slugs of this stuff:

Which is certainly Viennese gin, though not the same brew as at the Blue Bar, and again perfectly good, and again I could have used a heavier pour.

And last weekend, in Palm Springs, I had an “Honest Gin Martini” at Mr. Lyons in Palm Springs – (it used to be Lyon’s English Grille, but has evidently gone native).  And yes it lived up to its name.

But here’s the thing I’ve been thinking: gin, as I understand it, is essentially flavored vodka.  At the very least it has to be flavored with, and preferably fermented with, juniper but the basic process and the basic stuff is the same.  Now, if you look at the list of ingredients on any of the fancier gins you’re likely to see they contain licorice, nutmeg, cumin and whatnot: these, along with a dozen or so others go into Citadelle gin, which is French, and which I think is a very good ‘un.

But here’s what I don’t get: licorice, nutmeg, cumin and whatnot are noticeably colored – yet commercial gin continues to be entirely clear.  What’s that about, then?

And I tried a little experiment.  One of my favorite gins at the moment is Death’s Door, made on Washington island in Wisconsin’s and according to the label “it’s crafted with 3 Botanicals” – juniper, coriander and fennel seeds: very simple and all things that can be found in the Psychogourmet test kitchen.

So I got some cheap and cheerful vodka and spruced it up with those three ingredients and put them in my Sempli Incanter – every home should have one if you ask me. 

Of course I don’t know what quantities the Death’s Door folk use (I think I overdid it on the fennel) but after a couple of weeks it tastes pretty decent if not exactly like Death’s Door, then a whole lot better than cheap and cheerful vodka.  It isn't actually as murky as it looks in the picture - there's condensation on the glass

But there’s no way in the world the end result is going to be clear, is there?

So what do the manufacturers do?  Do they re-distill it?  Is it just filtration?  Can you bleach liquids? I have no idea but somebody out there surely knows.

And I thought I should also throw into the mix: Ogden Nash’s well-known and perfect poem, “A Drink With Something In It,”

 See what I’m talking about – the martini celebrated here is yellow, (yellow I tells ya!) – not clear, and that’s surely because of the gin, not the vermouth.  Room for further discussion.  

And OK, here's some of the discussion right here, a Facebook post in response.  

Jonathan Taylor So my friend Darian Af, who makes gins various, says "... true gin isn't an infusion, it's a distillate. That means that whatever botanicals you want in your final product are added to a spirit and then the whole thing is distilled: it is brought to a high enough temperature that it begins to evaporate, then the vapor is collected and condensed back into liquid. So only the compounds that are volatile enough to evaporate (things like essential oils and alcohol) end up in the final product. Those compounds tend to be clear, though there may well be cases where some distillate has a color to it. I can't think of one offhand, though." which seems to be fairly clear/

CRACKLING ON

My previous post about Schweinsstelze, and particularly about crackling, seemed to stir something in the collective bosom.

I was directed to an article in the Guardian by Felicity Cloake, from 2010, in which she cooks pork crackling by seven different methods, most of them \recommendations from “name” chefs.  Some involving doing very little, although one of them, which turns out to be her favorite, involves drying out the skin with a hairdryer before cooking.  I can see the logic of that.

You can find the article here:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/apr/15/how-to-make-perfect-crackling

In the end she makes it sound all too easy: she finds that most of the methods work – the only disaster being Prue Leith’s, which involved rubbing the skin with oil, which I think is an absolute no-no.

On a good day I can generally get my crackling there or there abouts but it’s always a bit hit and miss.  My method remains constant but results, as they say, may vary.  Yes, it’s important to have the skin dry, it’s good to have the oven extra hot at the beginning and at the very end of cooking, it’s important that when you score the meat you don’t cut too deep.  I’m personally against pre-salting but I seem to be a bit of a lone voice in that area.  I do my best, but of course there are still failures, and I sometimes don’t understand why.

With this in mind, at the weekend, back home in Los Angeles, I cooked a small “picnic shoulder” – American butchery and terminology is certainly different from British and I assume wildly different from the way the Austrians do things, but you have to work with what you’ve got.   It had a nice piece of skin on it, it had a biggish bone running through it, and the result was as they say “good in parts,” not so good in others. 

Some of the crackling was good and crisp, some of it was too soft and chewy.  I think it could have used more time in the oven, but the pork itself was already getting overcooked.  Maybe a blow torch to crisp up the skin would have been the answer – a method mentioned not quite seriously in Felicity Cloake’s article.  I’m inclined to think the piece of pork was just too small, and the layer of subcutaneous fat was too thin, but I have no absolute answer.

Those folks at Marks and Spencer have found a partial solution.  When I was in England I made a staggering discovery of their “Snacking Crackling” – that's it above - crunchy skin with no meat whatsoever, sold as an eat-anywhere-any-time snack. There is something wonderful but maybe slightly sinister about that.  How do they get them to stay so crisp? My crackling, even the best of it, is soggy the day after it’s cooked.  Ah the wonder of M and S.

And again, back in the southern California saddle, I just bought myself a bag of Baken-ets Chicharrones – that’s the Mexican term for fried pork skins: Chicharrones, not Baken-ets, obviously.  These were “hot n spicy” (which I don’t absolutely need in a pork skin) and it said on the front of the pack in very small letters “colored with paprika.”  Also, according to the list of ingredients on the back, colored with “Artificial Color (Red 40 Lake, Yellow 6 Lake, Blue 1 Lake” – I guess that’s all right, but I really don’t know.  Also containing monosodium glutamate (which I personally find unobjectionable), and Torula Yeast, which I’d never heard of, but having looked it up online I suspect it’s worth a blog in itself – “a type of yeast that is grown for the food industry by feeding on wood alcohols. It is also a byproduct of the paper industry. The end result after drying is a fine tan powder with a meaty flavor” – that’s according to fooducate.com.  
With a beer – actually an Australian Fosters, the hot n spicy chicharrones tasted just fine; without one they’d have been very hard work.  Hands across the sea, right?

 

EATING VIENNA

“Oh where have you been my blue-eyed son?  Oh where have you been my darling young one?”

Vienna actually.

“And what did you eat my blue-eyed son?  Oh what did you eat my darling young one?”

Well, quite a lot of sausage, of course.  Blood sausage, for instance, one at a gorgeous, gothicky restaurant called Brezl Gwolb (that name looks like an anagram of something indecent) in the form of Blunzngröstl, i.e. a fry up in a pan with potatoes:

And blood sausage again from the buffet at Mayer am Pfarrplatz, a restaurant attached to a winery on the outskirts of the city:

The latter turned out to be pretty startling, an amazingly familiar taste.  It had all the lardy richness of the black puddings of my youth in Yorkshire, a really similar flavor profile, as we say.  Was it the breed of pig?  The amount of fat?  The seasonings?  Possibly all the above.  And for contrast, some white sausage:

There was some Landjager (the “walking sausage” of legend) bought at a supermarket and eaten in my hotel room:

There was some debreziner, eaten with breakfast at the Café Hummel, a spicy sausage with all the heat right at the very end as you swallow:

There were also a few frankfurters, and a Bosna from a Wurstelstand in the city center.  Everyone says that these sausage stands are manifestations of democracy and equality, frequented by all kinds of people, rich and poor, plebs and Bourgeoisie, and even a few posh folk.  No doubt some are more democratic than others, and some are certainly more architecturally interesting than others, but on a brief acquaintance the legend appeared to be essentially true.

On the non-sausage front, there were, of course, cakes – Vienna being famous for it’s cakes Sacha Torte and Apfelstrudel and whatnot.  There were these - punsch krapfen, fruit cake inside, and that icing on the outside is so sweet it starts attacking your teeth before it even gets to your mouth.

There was also some of this – Preiseelbeer tartlet - Preiseelbeer is cranberry, though not exactly the kind of cranberry I was used to; but they were sour enough to satisfy my lack of sweet tooth:

         But I the best single thing I ate in Vienna, and I’m tempted to say one of the best things anybody’s ever eaten in Vienna, or possibly anywhere else, was this “Hintere Schweinsstelze Frisch vom Grill” with all the trimmings, potatoes, horse raddish, sauerkraut (really not all that sour), and mustards:

This was eaten at the Schweizerhaus, in the Prater, the big permanent fairground, just downwind from Harry Lime’s Ferris wheel – (where as a matter of fact you can eat dinner in one of the revolving cabins).

The Schweinsstelze was absolutely great, but I was initially unclear about what I was eating.  The word is variously translated as pork knuckle, pork shank, and pork hock.  I would not have thought these terms were synonymous, but it seems they are.  The body part in question is marked on the diagram below.  Since this was “hintere” I suppose we’re only talking about the back.

As for how the thing is cooked, some online recipes seem to involve braising and then delvering a blast of heat at the end to crisp up the skin, but as far as I can tell ours were roasted, possibly spit roasted: you don’t get pork crackling like that any other way, surely.  And in fact I’m not sure how you get crackling like that full stop. I imagine something like this but on an industrial scale:

The flesh was tender and delicious and very good, but really it was the crackling that made it.  Lord knows I love crackling, and lord knows my attempts to cook good crackling are a hit and miss affair, but these guys at the Schweizerhaus have got it down so perfectly it almost makes me want to stop trying.  Almost.

Once home I dug around in the Psychogourmet Memorial Food Library and found my copy of Time Life’s, The Cookery of Vienna’s Empire – no recipe for Schweinsstelze there (nor in the German volume either), but I did find this remarkable picture.  The things on sale are sweets, made of marzipan, made to resemble sausages.  Austria – my kind of country.

And many, many thanks to the blessed Del Barrett for organizing the Vienna trip, and being a guide through the city’s food labyrinth.