[0:06] Vicious, fish, black girl. Oh, you did. You are listening to cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage

[0:20] Radio Network. Today we're coming to you, not on our usual day. Today we're coming to you on Monday from noon to 1245 instead of our usual Tuesdays. Next week, we'll be back on Tuesday. Today's uh, today's cooking issue is brought to you by Whole Foods Market. You know, you shop there. I shop there. We all know who they are. You know, they do some good work. They try to do local stuff when they can. Whole Foods Market. There's one near you. Okay, so today we're in the studio today with, of course, Nastasia Lopez, cooking

[0:48] issues, Hammer, and live special guest, Dave Wondridge, award-winning author and master of the inebriating beverage. Hi, Dave. for coming in. Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. All right. But cooking issues is the show where we answer your cooking questions. And today, I hope some of you call in with some drink related questions because there's no better person to answer them than Dave Wondridge. author of Imbi, like several versions of the Esquire Cocktail Book, right? What else, what else you got here? Like bazillion magazine articles? Yes, pretty much a metric bazillion at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a cubic bazillion. So, uh, and right now you have a rare opportunity. You can ask any cocktail question you want, and we got you covered, basically. You want a science question. You want a history question, you want a recipe question? 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh, call in will be here for the next 45 minutes. So before we actually hit the drink making. I did get one email question that came in on a regular cooking related issue. Eddie Shepard from the United Kingdom emailed us and he asked, he's a vegetarian chef, and he wanted to know how to do umami without using Dashi or things like this.

[2:00] Well, you're in luck, Eddie, because umami is basically a sensation we get from protein breakdown. It's an actual sensation. actually have taste receptors on your tongue that receive these protein breakdowns, typically, you know, glutamic acids, the most famous one

[2:14] in amino acid, but, you know, other things as well. And they tell your body that awesome broken down protein is coming in. But, and this is a lot of times signaled by meats. Vegetarian, though, there's a lot of vegetarian things that are very high in umami, and they're things that vegetarians often crave, for instance, cooked mushrooms.

[2:32] Parmesan cheese, anything aged with any aged dairy product where it breaks down over time and forms,

[2:39] you know, amino acids, free aminos, has a lot of umami in it. Tomato has a lot of free umami in it and you cook it and you concentrate it and you can get it that way. So there's many vegetarian ways of getting umami. I am not above spiking things actually with monosodium glutamate. It's totally natural. Someone, please call in and say that they're allergic to it, so I can have this discussion with you. Anyway, the other question Eddie has real quickly is, is sous vide useful for someone who doesn't do meat? Absolutely, Eddie. The low temperature isn't as important with vegetables, but the sous vide is great because it allows you to do things like

[3:12] cook a carrot and have no flavor leach out and nothing go into it. So it kind of, you can use it to accentuate the actual vegetables, get the actual vegetable flavor in rather than changing it. So that's our cooking related question. And now we're on to beverages, yes? Beverages? Beverages. Okay. So, uh, we have a question coming in, um, for Dave. Dave's working on a book now called, it's called Punch, the Delights and Dangers of the Flowing Bowl. Ah, right. And so, and so someone, because we mentioned that he was doing this, wrote in and said, I see

[3:46] punch nowadays, more and more, you know, I see it all the time now. Well, what do you think the state, the modern state of punches and where the punches fit in in a modern cocktail menu? It's really cool to see like everywhere you go into, you know, sort of the state of the art modern bars and there are like tables of people sitting around a punch bowl just like they were 200 years ago.

[4:05] It's kind of cool. It's very fun. But I think right now people are sort of at the stage of figuring it out. They've made a couple classic recipes. They've got a very sort of simplified formula that's been passed down where it's

[4:19] like sour, sweet, strong, weak spice, 5 ingredients mixed together. But there's kind of coming at it from a cocktail head. And I taste a lot of these punches and they're, they taste a lot like really big cocktails. They're very, very pungent, and they're great for just a couple glasses. But over the course of an evening, like, uh, back in the day, they would drink punch, just, you know, bowl after bowl until they were all like rolling around on the

[4:45] floor utterly inebriated, which, you know, we can't really get away with as much as we would like. No, exactly. But nonetheless. I think a lot of it is just so pungent. It's like having quail for dinner every day. You get tired of it after a while. So is it, is it that they, is it that they don't follow the original recipe to get an idea for what the original is meant to be like and then build from

[5:06] there or is it just they're coming from a different perspective? Like, I'm going to have one or 2 of these instead of going to be quaffing these all night? I think people haven't really just started working with it, you know, and for me, because of working on this book, I had to make many, many, many old

[5:21] recipes. And it took me a long time to realize that I was kind of doing it wrong from the old point of view. I mean, these modern punches are totally delicious. It's just, they're very spicy and, you know, pungent. They put a lot of bitters and chartreuse and vermouth and herbal elements,

[5:35] et cetera, which work great in cocktails, but, you know, they kind of cloy after about 4 or 5 small cups.

[5:42] Are they overly strong as well? They tend to be pretty strong too. But I think, you know, that's part. sure that has to do with consumers too. The consumers also expect something more like a cocktail. They don't expect this stuff. I mean, punch originally was like artificial wine. That's what people talked about it. So it would be, you know, right now the artificial wine is more like California

[6:02] Cabernet and less like burgundy and maybe hopefully over time people will go a little more to the burgundy side. Right, and of course, our idea of wine nowadays has been somewhat warped. Like we, we, you know, we're we expect now like a 14% wine instead of like a, you know,

[6:16] a 12 or... Yeah, and some of them are up to like 16, which is, yeah, right? They're getting into the cocktail, right? Good luck waking up the next morning after a couple bottles of that. Well, this brings us actually to another interesting question we had coming in about dilution, and they're asking about the proportion of water in a

[6:32] cocktail, and they want to know, you know, how the ice fits in and how the, you know, the ice breaks down. It's coming from Chris and Greenpoint. Just wanted to talk about, I guess, dilution and ice. And so why don't we take your take on it, Dave, and then, you know, Yeah, I mean, I know you've got a lot of stuff about this too. You could talk for a 1000000000 years on this, but I won't because it's only a 45 minute show. I mean, you know, the standard dilution for a cocktail, the rule of thumb, everybody uses is that the shaking it or stirring it with ice should add 25% to the

[7:07] volume and thereby diluting it by that much. And that, you know, pretty much when I've measured it out, that is pretty good ballpark

[7:16] measured, depending on the kind of ice you're using and so on and so forth. I mean, for me, the interesting thing about that number is, is that based on what? based on just the liquor weight. I mean, like you have drinks that have so many things in them. You know, or yeah, because, you know, your simple syrup is not a liquor, your, your lime's not a liquor, your, whatever you're adding in is not a liquor. I think, you know, having done a bunch of tests on dilution and ice and proportions. I think the best way to do it to figure out what you like is to make a drink, weigh the base, make a drink, and then weigh it

[7:50] afterwards, and see how much water you added. I mean, you know, that's the only way to figure it out. We did this. We found that we add that in a shake and drink, and this makes a lot of sense. If you think about it, you want your shake and drink to be more diluted than, you know, your

[8:02] Manhattan. You know, they're different classes of drinks. I mean, the shaking drinks are sours already. They're already more dilute. You've already got, as you said, you know, simple syrup and citrus juice in there. Right. And the interesting thing about stirred cocktails. If you look at it, is how long do you say the average bartender stirs a cocktail, maybe 20 seconds?

[8:19] Something in there. Now, that's even a lot. I mean, it's usually even, you know, like in the 15 range. Right. And what's interesting about stirring as opposed to shaking and dilution is that shaking does

[8:32] a dilution very fast. If a bartender shakes their drink for 15 seconds, they probably, they've made it to, you know, after that

[8:39] point, there's diminishing returns on chilling. But instead... That's way too long, also. Yeah, but in stirring, well, especially if you like a boozy drink, which I know you do. Yeah. But the, but the, uh, we all have our weakness. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, we have the same one. So it's like, but in a stir drink, it turns out that it takes upwards of a minute to get to that same level of

[9:00] dilution, as you would, shaking for 15 to 20 seconds. So there's a lot, there's a lot more room for error and room for artistry in stirring. Well, it also depends on what kind of ice you use for stirring. I use I'll use like finely cracked or almost snow ice, you know? And that the dilution is fast in that, but it doesn't it's not more than 25% because it gets so cold instantly.

[9:25] Right. Yeah, well, that's stirring is all about surface. Like shaking is so violent that everything happens fairly quickly. Stirring, you can make it actually faster than shaking, if you use fine enough, fine enough ice. The dilution in the chilling can be can be almost instant. But, like, if you notice, like, bartenders who want to have their stirring be more effective, they'll crack their ice as they're doing

[9:45] it. And I thought that was a bunch of hookum until I realized that ice, you know, has a lot of water sitting on the outside of it. And when you crack ice right before you stir, you're getting more surface area, which makes for faster, you know, colder drinks, but you're doing it in a way that's not adding extra water because you're making newer, dry

[10:01] surfaces you're doing. So it's actually a good practice to crack the big ice. It makes a huge difference. I mean, you can stir, as you said, with cubes, it takes like a minute. I find drinks stirred with like the large cold draft cubes that everyone's using nowadays. They never get as cold as I would like. Right, right. I mean, it's, you know, people need to think, people, they, they think big ice is the answer and big ice is big ice. I mean, it's good at what it's good at, and it's bad what it's bad at. It doesn't have a lot of surface area. It's not very fast at chilling. It's really good at filling up a glass. Yeah, it's really good at like keeping your drink cold for a very long time without completely watering it down.

[10:38] But, you know, the funny thing is studying like mixology in the 19th century. if I can use that dreaded word mixology. Those guys then, they got their ice in big blocks, they had to butcher it up as needed. They had different size ice for every kind of drink. They had shavers, so they can shave it right off the block and, you know, expose a new surface that would be dry, shave that, and put it in.

[10:58] And so they had a lot more flexibility than using just cubes out of a machine,

[11:03] which a lot of the newest places are starting to approach now. Sure, like Richie. Yeah, and the guys varnish in LA. I mean, those guys are really serious about using different sized ices for different effects. And that's all it is. It's a question of effects. There's no one answer for that. Right. I mean, the funny thing is, is a lot of times you'll hear bartenders talk about, they'll give some kind of

[11:26] pseudoscientific reason for why X, Y, and Z works. It's like, listen, is your drink good? you know, does the presentation good? and, you know, that's pretty much it. Because I can get into the science of it with them, but often I find it doesn't necessarily help them make their drink any better. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, you can have a drink that's scientifically good and still taste like crap. Yeah, exactly. It's unfortunately the case. Exactly, exactly. Well, that's a good question, Chris. Thanks for calling it in. And you brought up the word mixology. And I used to, I used to actually kind of think it was bizarre because, you know, it's the same thing with people calling themselves chefs who aren't chefs. I think there's a lot of honor in being a cook. I don't see anything wrong with the word bartender, but what if you're not a bartender? That's right. That's exactly, that's exactly right. And also, it is an old word. It's not a new word. I think people don't necessarily know that. anxology has a long history. It goes back to the 1850s. And the funny thing about it, it was coined as a joke. It was in a bit of like patter of, you know, a guy calling

[12:22] the bartender, a mixologist of typicular fixings, like, you know, like tipples. And it was a joke. And I think that's kind of important to keep it that joke aspect in mind. This is not serious stuff. I mean, you can treat it seriously, but you can't treat it that seriously. You know, it still has to have that element of fun and play in it because otherwise it becomes

[12:43] work. And why would you want to like have your your drinking be work? Yeah, exactly. Well, I've come around to the word mixology. We could talk about a word when we come back that I have not come around to molecular because it's always people taking themselves too damn

[12:55] seriously, and it's an awful, terrible word, and please erase it from your food, beverage memory. Plus a lot of the drinks aren't good. But aside aside from that, we'll talk about that when we get back. We're also going to talk about what are we going to talk about Dutch distilled spirits. We can talk about that and the craft distilling, I think, is another big buzzword these days that we could we could kick around a little bit. All right, so we're coming right back at you with Dave Wonders. This is cooking issues. How you feeling, brother? You're feeling good. Be so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feeling, Bella? Hey, Jeff. You're getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home. Yeah. All right.

[14:09] I want to do it again. You wanna do it again? Yeah, let's go on that. Gotta take you home.

[14:19] Brother? Now I won't have everybody. Let bread flow in my two courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go and do that with it now, all right? I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Now, James, horn, moment. Fred, can you take us higher? Yeah. Take us higher. Fred! Fred!

[14:45] You're listening to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold. We're here to answer all of your cooking, and today, drink related questions. Please call in your questions too. 718-497-2128-718-497-2128.

[15:04] Today we're here with Dave Wundridge, and we are talking about booze, right? So in the last segment, we started in, and I won't spend too long on this because anyone that knows me has heard me go off on this at great length, but we were talking about mixology as a term, and how, you know, I've kind of come around with

[15:24] it, and Dave was making the excellent point that you kind of have to be lighthearted about it in order for it to work.

[15:28] Well, it should be fun in some way, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then molecular mixology, though, is a horrible thing, yes? Well, you know, it's one of those if by whiskey questions. It depends on what you mean by molecular mixology. If you're making stuff that's new, different, fun, and not perhaps overly pretentious. That's great, you know, if you're treating it like anybody behind the bar has to be in a white lab coat and measuring things by, you know, Jules or something. And,

[16:02] and, and, and you're in the presence of technological genius, so shut up and and take

[16:08] your eat, eat your cocktail or, you know, drink your appetizer or

[16:12] whatever. Then it becomes a little a little much. Right. you know, the operative word here is you say, you know, pretentious. You don't want it to be pretentious. I mean, I think that kind of like one of the best applications I've seen of this is, uh, you know, Tony, Tony Con, Connill

[16:25] Yarro. Is that good? My Italian batter? excellent. Yeah. At 69 Colebrook Row, in London, you know, they use all the

[16:33] newest, all the newest stuff. In fact, stuff that, you know, almost nobody else has, and yet their bars completely unpretentious. Yeah, it's a normal bar. I mean you can, you know, just go in. You could have a beer and be very happy there. wouldn't make you feel weird about it. Right. I mean, they have a tranny band playing, you know, it's got it's got hospitality. It's got fun. It's got a little bit of nightlife going on. Right, it's not Dave Wondersch's ultimate bar for any listeners out there. Dave Wondridge's ultimate bar has a rifle range in it, and you can shoot while you drink. This is like an old... That's a 19th century standard. I mean, I would have to do what they did back then is they had cute girls as the sort of running the rifle range in the

[17:15] bars and you would shoot and try to beat their score, which drove the men nuts because those girls were all crack shots and the guys were all

[17:22] drunk. And so they kept paying and paying and paying and trying and trying again to

[17:26] beat the sober, you know, dead eyes. That's good business. good business, right? It's the same as the mechanical bulls now. Like, you always have the, you know, the one woman tending bar who's extremely good at it. You know, it makes all the men look like idiots, and then they line up to pay to get thrown. Yeah, because they don't want to get beaten by that itty bitty girl there. Yeah, right, right. But, you know. Preying on male stupidity is a growth business always. Oh, yeah, always. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's never gonna go dry. God, no. That will is never going to get tapped. So, um, okay. So I don't know how we got into that. But so that's our take on molecular mixology. Keep it, keep it fun. dont be pretentious. And also, you know what? Make some delicious drinks. Yeah, I mean, one thing I see a lot with is right now it's sort of at the look at the the tricks I can do with it. You know, let me make something that tastes like something else. I'm kind of waiting it. I mean, a martini only tastes like a martini, right? And a Manhattan only tastes like, hopefully, right? And a Manhattan, only like a Manhattan. I am waiting for molecular molecular mixology or whatever we're going to call it now, a

[18:26] technological bartending, whatever, to come up with its drinks that are like that that aren't just tasting like something else, you know, and aren't playing around with like, let me mimic this, let me

[18:38] mimic that. I mean, for me, I'm happy because, you know, this is what I, for those of you out here, this is what I kind of do for a living. Uh, and, uh, you know, so I'm not poo-pooing or make fun of it. I mean, this is how I make a living, is using new techniques and a lot of it in cocktails. And, you know, the goal should be uh, to make something that has legs, to make something that people want to have again and again. You know what I mean? It's not like, oh, that's cute. I'll have one, you know? You don't say that to a martini. Right. So, you know, Nastasia and I work on a drink that I think has, you know, legs, but it's no one would think of it as being, you know, a high-tech cocktail. It's, uh, you know, uh, either nectarine or peach, depending on the

[19:13] quality, uh, plum juice, those juices, plum juice, clarified, uh, bourbon, little

[19:19] water, and simple. And um, you know, this is a delicious, this is a delicious drink. Yeah, that clarified juice isn't easy though. That's the key. Right. Exactly. But to me, like, that's good use of technology right there. Yeah, I agree. That's a drink people have that drink and they say, hey, you know what? I would like another one of those instead of, hey, that's interesting. Can I have something else? You know what I mean? And that's what you hope for. central maturity without everything, you know, that's generally what it comes around to is. People have like kind of played around and found the little tricks that get them into it, and then they start taking it seriously, you know, and that's when you start getting interesting stuff. As long as it's not too serious. Right, we said. Right, right. Well that's the thing. I mean, you know, it's, yes, it should, I like it when people take their craft seriously, but they don't beat you over the

[20:02] head. They don't make you feel good or bad or, you know. Disguise the effort a little bit. Exactly, exactly. All right, so another thing I like to work on, and there's a lot of new, both techno and retro going on now is distillation. And I know you're really interested in this, Dave, you don't want to talk about maybe the new movement for

[20:18] very, like, micro and craft distillation. Yeah, this is this is something that's spawned heated debate lately. on the web, in person. We all just got back from Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, the annual booze fest for sort of

[20:34] high-end bartenders, mixologists, and people who want to sell them things. A lot of those. A lot of those. How much money do you think Perno Ricard laid out for that year? Oh my God, 100s of 1000s of dollars, it seems like. But anyway, yeah, nicely done. But, uh, and this is one of the things that's like a perennial source of debate, uh, it's right now we're in the midst of this Renaissance and small scale distilling in the US. It turns out laws have been liberalized. This is one good thing that the Republican hatred of regulation has brought us to balance it against losing the

[21:11] golf and all that other stuff. Oh, well, at least we got Buddhists. I would say deregulation has been a net loss, but yeah, but at least we got microbooze. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, you know, what happens, there are a lot of people who have started up and they don't really have, they haven't spent years distilling. They haven't trained to do this. They're entrepreneurs. They buy some grain neutral spirit from Archer Daniels Midland. They put some botanicals in it. you know, sort of what they heard goes into gin. They run it through the still that they've bought gleaming new, you know, sort of steel still, some maybe some copper plates inside. And then they bottle it and suddenly they're craftspeople. I mean, they're good business people. It's interesting. But that's, I don't think that's craft distilling. I brought an example that we here in the studio can taste that you guys will just have to either dream about or

[22:01] think see in your nightmares. Wait a minute. Let me let me get the sound effect proper. Oh yeah. This is from Holland, from the Dutch Geneva Museum, Geneva

[22:12] being Dutch gin, which is sort of a, it's actually a cross between gin and whiskey. And this is made from rimealt and barley

[22:20] malt, and a little bit of juniper berry made in 18th century stills, completely crafted by hand, by a guy who's been doing it for 15 years, only available at the

[22:31] museum. And it's utterly unlike anything you'll ever taste. Let's taste this. And then while we're tasting it, we have a question coming in, I think. Okay. Let's taste it. taste this. That is different. You can smell the, what's the grain bill on this? It's two-thirds rye, 13rd barley malt. Wow, it's really nice. It's grainy, it's totally smooth and clean. It's silky. It aged a little bit. Botanical's way down. This is craft distilling. And, you know, a lot of this stuff is just not craft. It's delicious. It's interesting, but this takes a real commitment, you know? This has done over like coal-fired stills, uh, utterly everything is done in the 18th century style. Everything is handmade, and this is handmade by one guy. Let's give the name on this product again. This is old Sheidam, original single malt Geneva. You've got to go to Sheidam and Holland to get it. It's worth the trip. Cheers, Sheidon. Cheers. Okay, we have a question. Who do we have on the line? Hi, this is Wendy from Brooklyn. Hey, Wendy. Hi. Um, I'm actually new to New York City and um, I was wondering, Dave, if you could uh, recommend any mixologists in the city who you really like. There's so many. I mean, 10 years ago, there were about 5 bars where you could get a great cocktail in New York. Now they're at least 50. I mean, if you go to uh, Death and Company, uh, anybody there will make a great drink. Anybody will make a great drink at Pegu Club or PDT. I mean, these places all have programs now. It used to be, you'd go there and you'd catch the good, good guy or the good girl behind the

[24:11] bar, and you'd get a good drink, and then you'd go back the next time it'd be somebody else, and it wouldn't. But now like Clover Club in Brooklyn. Where do you live? She's somewhere in Brooklyn Yeah, somewhere in Brooklyn. She still there? Do we still have her on the line? No, okay. Oh, well, because, you know, now you've got options all over Brooklyn, too. There's there's 19th Street in Manhattan has a couple great bars. Rye House is a new one that's fun and excellent. It's fantastic. I mean, it's a shame we lost her because the real operative question is, what kind of drink do you like? experience do you like? Because there's so many, you know, it's gone beyond, you know, you just sit down

[24:50] at people, people have created whole kind of the bar as

[24:54] an, as a certain type of experience. You know, if you want, you know, fun tiki, we can get you

[24:59] now high quality fun tiki, if you want, you know, it would. You can go to Painkiller on the lower east side and have like a drink out of half pineapples and have, you know, the drink actually be carefully made by people

[25:10] who don't just throw throw crap into a blender and dump it out again. That's just not usually my stomach, but, you know, we were there together and I had a good time when I was there. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. You know? I mean, it's a real Renaissance. This is, I mean, the golden age, certainly not since, you know, 1920 have we seen anything this

[25:29] good, and this is probably better than then too, at least at the high end. Yeah, so it's cool. All right, so Wendy, I'm sorry that we lost you. So let's talk more about this product because I'm still drinking it. So, yeah, I mean, this is, this is what, like, sort of craft entails is, everything is done by hand, small

[25:52] production. They mash their own grain on the site. They distill it 3 times in these ancient. I think they're restored stills, but they're built exactly, you know, to the ancient style. It goes through the still 3 times and then gets stored in pits in the floor, which was a fire prevention thing, is you

[26:12] keep your distilled below grade level. is actually dangerous. It's actually dangerous. Yeah. And these are little tiny distilleries. The way the Dutch always did it. They didn't have big mega distilleries. They had lots of little ones and they all made more or less the same thing. You know, they had traditional ways and, uh, and you would buy your stuff on the spot market. Okay, your gin is good. Your gin is maybe less good. We'll get the good one, but, you know, that kept them competing to have the quality up. There weren't these big monopolies. Right, I mean, I wish you guys, you know, could smell the nose on this thing because it goes on forever. Yeah. No, I mean, it's really... It's unique. It doesn't smell like any other spirit. It's not, you know, there's nothing else like this. Uh, that's, that's sort of what I want, what I hope to see from craft distilling is come up with stuff that I've never tasted

[26:59] before. Come up with stuff that just is so different and so cool. I mean, part of the problem with, I think, with craft desolation. And I'm going to insult people, you know, that I actually that I like, people that I actually like, I'm about to insult them. But not because I want to, just because it's, you know, people want to get into, for instance, the whiskey business, but they want to have product inside of a year.

[27:23] You know what I mean? Yeah, those 2 are not compatible. You know, it's your business model is good for a business model. It's not good for a craft model. Right. But, you know, but I think that the desire is good. They just want to have product, but it's, you know, the problem is, is that that's why, you know, these are traditions that were built up over a long time. If someone just take a long time to get it right, you know? And I mean, it takes years to age whiskey, at which point your capital is tied up, and

[27:48] that's, admittedly, that sucks, but, you know, that is sort of what it takes to

[27:55] make, like, really, you know, barrel aged, well-aged spirits. There's a lot of speed aging going on. They put things in little tiny barrels and kind of speed it up a

[28:06] little. And that can work. It's just not, you know, the same as the, those seasons in and seasons out of the, the, the spirits going in and out of the wood

[28:15] as, as, as it can uh, expands in the summer and contracts in the winter, et cetera, et cetera. Right. I mean, the proofs and the palate, but I think that if you go and look, most of the time, you know,

[28:27] train palettes can they will pick out the ones that have been aged for longer. But this stuff is, you know, this is coming. I mean, the smart people and there are many of them. and the good craftsmen at this are they have stuff that's aging that, you know, in

[28:41] 2 or 3 years is going to be out on the market. It's going to be fabulous. And that's going to be really exciting. It's just right now it's hard to get utterly excited about it for me because I have to taste a lot of this stuff

[28:52] professionally like blind tasting. And, you know, it's you're competing against a pretty well established bar, pretty high bar. Right. I mean, I know that when I, you know, when I do distillation, I'm not really working on creating new, like a new, a new spirit or

[29:09] new, or even an old one. I'm more interested in flavor, putting flavors into things. I mean, that's, I think, a different, that's a different thing. It's a different process. I mean, I'm not saying, I'm not saying there's skill involved, obviously, because sometimes I do a good job and sometimes I do a bad job and, you know, I learn more every time I do a distillation run and, you know, been doing it for, you know,

[29:29] uh, 4 years now or so and you learn more all the time, but it's not the same. It's not the same thing. I'm trying to do something different. I wouldn't say it's in the same category as basically someone making this. Right. It's a different, a different thing altogether. Yeah, but I mean, I would like to see more of that, you know? I'd like to see people making new spirits from grains that haven't been used before. I'd like to see people making handcrafted liqueurs from scratch. You know, stuff like that. you know, using distilling their own base spirit, taking wine, making, you know,

[30:06] nice fresh brandy and then flavoring that with oranges and making like an old school orange Corusau. Everybody would use that. It's just, I just don't see the need to kind of keep making gin and vodka the same way that everybody

[30:21] else is. You know? It's like, okay, that's all right, but you know, before we go to break, we're going to have to go to break in a second. You mentioned before, they buy a lot of their straight liquor from Archer, Daniel, ADM. And so, we just recently, you would love this. Next time you're at the French culinary where, you know, where we are. We ordered from a chemical lab, 200 proof ethanol. we ordered a crap ton of it at check this out. We only paid, I think, like $16 a liter for it for

[30:49] 200, straight 200 and hydrous alcohol. This stuff is Remo has no... Yeah, nothing, right? just alcohol. Yeah, no, and we diluted it down to 40 and we were drinking, god damn, this is sweet. We're like, this vodka you ever had? Oh my god, no, seriously, it's the best ever. And it's so cheap. Makes Smirnoff look spendy. So cheap. Oh my goodness. craziness. Anyway, really funny. All right, cooking issues coming back at you in a couple minutes.

[31:27] Bad, bad whiskey. Bad,

[31:38] bad whiskey. Bad, bad whiskey. Made me lose my happy home. When I live homeless morning. I promise I would think. To stay real straight and sober. I swore I wouldn't drink. Bad, bad whiskey. Bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey made me arose my happy home. I passed up all the pool hearts. Gave the boss and slip. Before the night was over. I started in to say Bad, bad biscuit. Bad, bad this kid. Bad, bad, bad whiskey. Baby, you lose my happy home. My buddy had a party. The cats were on... You were listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm the host of cooking issues, Dave Arnold, calling with all of your cooking and today drink related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. You still have some time to call in. We have Dave Wondridge in the studio. Dave Wondridge has won a zillion awards both for his magazine writing and for the, you know, he's written, of course, the

[33:28] Esquire cocktail books, so several of them. How many of those editions? I actually only wrote one of them, but that was the last one. Okay, all right. The one I have anyway. You wrote the one I have. And, you know, wrote imbibe, which was, well, actually, before we go into what you're working on in, you know, at the moment, why don't you talk a little bit because

[33:46] imbibe was kind of a landmark cocktail book. And, you know, and it was it was had kind of a unique premise for cocktail books. Well, it was sort of the right book at the right time. Imbibe is, is, uh, purportedly a biography of Jerry Thomas, who wrote the 1st bartender's guide, but since he was a bartender, you know, the materials, I had enough materials at the time to maybe write 30 pages of good biography.

[34:11] And then the rest was, I talked about his drinks and where they came from and all the tools that he would have used and his fellow bartenders.

[34:19] And then I had just chapters of recipes with, I gave the original recipe and then kind of talked about how I would go about recreating them.

[34:27] And that actually, before imbibed,

[34:32] there'd been a lot of fabulous cocktail books, but I think Imbibe was one of the 1st books written acknowledging that fact.

[34:38] You know, it was like, okay, you already have the wonderful basic cocktail books. You already have a couple vintage cocktail books. You've already got Dale DeGroff's craft of the cocktail, Gary Regan's joy of mixology. Both excellent books. Both excellent books, Ted Hayes, vintage spirits and forgotten cocktails. You've got those. So this is for those people, you know, so the people who already have an

[35:00] overview and it was kind of, let's get back deep into detail into the 19th century. Find out what is discoverable about how American bartending evolved and became what it is. And, you know, I was the right guy at the right time for that, I guess. Well, I think it really hit a chord because, you know, there's so many people in the cocktail world who, um, you know, the mode for a long, for a long

[35:24] time, for the past 8 years, let's say, five, 5 to 8 years in cocktail world of people who actually knew what the hell is going on was to kind of was a kind of recapturing of lost knowledge and

[35:33] hunger for history, I think. But those people didn't have anyone doing any actual modern scholarship on it.

[35:39] You know, you had a couple of older books, like what was that called? Wild West. Yeah, Wild West Bartenders, Bible or something. Which is a good book. The book, yeah. A lot of kind of bad histories also, but I think people were really kind of hungering for this sort of book. And so I think it just hit the right chord. Well, I think the one really good decision I made on that book was to address technique in

[36:00] detail. You know, instead of just giving the recipe, I broke each one down, talked about the techniques to execute it, the ingredients at some

[36:10] length. You know, I just went on and on about this stuff, but it walks people through the

[36:14] recipe rather than just saying, go figure it out yourself. We've given you the tools. I think that actually was helpful to a lot of bartenders because I go to a lot of bars and I do see it behind the bar, which is very flattering and means that I can try to twist their arms into getting free drinks. Right. Well, it's extremely well-received book, at least in, you know, in the circles I run in. Uh, you know, I have it. I read it. I like it a lot. But, uh, so now you're coming off this book, this book, maybe what was that, 3 years ago, 3 years

[36:44] ago, yeah, 2007, end of 2007. Okay, so you're coming off of this book, and this book is about a very deeply American subject, and, you know, the history is really, you know, it's very, it's very American field book, right? And then you're coming off of that and now you're working on punch and punch is a little bit different, right? Yeah, I mean, originally I had a huge chapter on punch bowl drinks in the Jerry Thomas

[37:07] manuscript, and my manuscript is way too long, and my editor said, you know, we can't publish this. It's way too long. You got to cut something. And I looked at it again. I said, you know, none of these punch bowl drinks, turn up in like old

[37:19] newspapers, uh, about American drinking. And it turns out, you know, they were probably put in there by Jerry's

[37:25] publisher just to kind of make the length. And he didn't really engage them in any way. And I realized that's because they were really English drinks. So once I cut that book, it gave that part, it gave the Jerry Thomas book focus, but it also kind of gave me my next

[37:39] book because I got to go back and deal with this stuff. And this is a story that kind of that takes me much back into England and British, I guess you could call it the British invention of

[37:51] mixology, of mixing strong drinks based on spirits. And it really comes out to have been a British innovation and this invention of punch or discovery of it. Nobody, like the martini, nobody will ever know exactly how it came to be, but you can certainly figure out the conditions under which it was created, mostly sailors running out of wine and

[38:14] beer and needing something now. So what era are we doing? We're talking the early 1600s, maybe the very end of the 1500s. Right, so, you know, back before we were us anyways. Yeah, it's not old. It's not like we couldn't have invented it. No, no, we just didn't get the chance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and it was certainly very popular in America before it was popular in Britain, but the sailors. It was English sailors as far as I can tell, although it could possibly have been Dutch

[38:39] once too. We won't talk about that. Right, but like Dutch in the actual Dutch sense, not Dutch, meaning bad or fake. Yeah, no, no. Yeah. Real, real, real, real. She's eating Holland. Now, the, just about punch for a second, maybe you can talk a little bit, you know, the, about the pop kind of fake etymology, you said it was fake that punch means only that punch comes from fun. Yeah, I mean, there's this idea that punch comes from the Indian word for five,

[39:07] which is, you know, punch is like Hindistani because punch has 5 ingredients, strong, you know, spirits, water, citrus,

[39:15] sugar, and spice. Now, often it had 4 ingredients, often it had 6 ingredients. So that's put that beside the thing. Put that to the side. There's also, it only, this comes back to one guy's theory, who was a classical scholar who visited India in the 1680s, you know, almost like 60, 80 years after

[39:33] punch was invented. And he says this, because he seemed learned, it gets picked up and becomes

[39:40] orthodoxy and nobody ever really questioned it till a guy in like around 1900 working for the Oxford English dictionary put out an article saying, you know, this is maybe a little bit fishy.

[39:51] And I only found that article after I'd been sort of come to the same conclusion. So I was very pleased to find it. Well, it must really be fishy because the OED, as great as they are, has always sucked with food

[40:02] etymology anyway. Yeah, exactly. And this guy's art, this guy put out this article because they wouldn't use his theory in the dictionary. Oh, yeah. And he questions it pretty strongly. As, you know, it's like, why the English didn't mangle suddenly, somehow didn't mangle this one word out of all the words that they mangled, you know? It's like, okay. There's that. There's the fact that punch was an English word for kind of round things in general and bowls, et cetera. There's all kinds of stuff. So one really does has grounds to question that etymology. It certainly shouldn't be printed as like gospel truth and moved on from as it is. So it's a tangled tale, the history of punch. It gets very complicated. There are lots of byways and interesting factors that have barely been researched. So I'm sure somebody will write a book that will prove that everything I say in mine is wrong. Before we look forward to it. Before we go, I realize that we've been talking about punch, but we haven't really told people who don't know what the hell punch is, who think it's Hawaiian

[41:06] punch, maybe. What punch is, and kind of like, you know, just give a quick, because like, because they can make us leave soon, let's give them a quick hit of what it is, and then let's talk about a couple

[41:14] recipes maybe to give people an idea. Oh, easy. Now, originally, punch, you know, we think of it as like frat house

[41:20] punch where you dump a bunch of stuff into a garbage can or then there's like the food magazine punches with lots of sparkling wine and sliced

[41:28] fruits and they're very pretty and nice and delightful, but punch was originally as serious as a martini.

[41:33] I mean, it was liquor and very strong flavorful liquor at that. water, sugar, citrus juice, nutmeg, tea, various spices, all put up in a bowl. ice came later. A very easy way to make punch. Well, actually, my favorite way is you peel 3 lemons with a swivel bladed peeler, right? and put the peels to try to get as little of the white pith as possible, put them in a bowl, put in 6 ounces, you know, 3 quarters of a cup of super fine sugar, muddle them up

[42:07] together, and let it sit for an hour, and you'll find that the lemon peel pulls

[42:11] out the sugar pulls out all the oil from the lemon peel over that time, and you get this thick lemony paste that's

[42:17] delightful. Then add 6 ounces of lemon juice. Stir it up. pour in a bottle of cognac, or you can put in dark rum, navy rum, all kinds of good stuff like that. ice and about a quart of water, gray nutmeg on the top and you're done. And it's in really, it's all about the fellowship. It's all about sitting around with your friends, everybody drinking the same thing, sharing it, talking about it,

[42:49] talking about whatever, and making sure you don't leave anything left in the bottom of the

[42:54] bowl. Well, you know, you can pre-batch certain aspects of your of your punch and make, for instance, you can make a batch with

[43:00] it with the citrus called shrub. Yeah, you can leave the liquor out and the water. Leave the liquor and most of the water out and you can bottle it and it'll keep for a long time. Right, and well, it has a different flavor from fresh. It's an aged flavor. It's a different flavor. Yeah, it's not quite as sharp and bright, but if you let the solids settle out. and strain it. You'll get something that's pretty mellow and tasty. And by the way, not worse, just different. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, but for all of those recipes, I apologize, you will have to purchase his book, which is coming out. coming out November 2nd from Parag books. You could probably pre-order sooner than that on Amazon, and I encourage you to do that. We have one more question that we're going to leave with, but before we're going to actually leave on the question. So, uh, because it's a good one. It's always a good one to answer and I want to hear Dave's answer as well. But you have been listening to cooking issues today brought to you by the Whole Foods Whole Foods market. But here's the question we're going to leave the show on. It comes from Phil and Dave, if you go to I'm going to read this verbatim. If you go to a crappy dive bar and your date wants a cocktail, what are the safe cocktails to order? Well, I'll get, I'll say what my wife Karen always ordered, which works incredibly well. Myers on the rocks with a splash of pineapple juice. There you go. Done. Done. Finished. Contains its own instructions. Alrighty. Well, thanks, thanks for coming in. Well thank you so much. Come again, please. You've been listening to cooking issues on the Heritage radio network. Fishes, fish, and vodka. Oh,

[44:29] you did. Got me on this corner. I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby I'm 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.