You can mix this drink with either Canadian whisky or American straight rye whiskey, and it’ll work. Personally, I think Canadian whisky works better; it gives the Fernet a canvas to spread out on, without fighting it. Or maybe that’s just my patriotism coming through! Also, while some recipes call for a dash of Angostura bitters, I think they’re totally superfluous here.

Recipe for the Toronto Cocktail

2 oz. Canadian whisky (my favourite brands are Forty Creek Barrel Select and Alberta Springs)
1/4 oz. Fernet Branca
1/4 oz. simple syrup
Combine ingredients in an ice-filled mixing glass and stir for a slow count of 20. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with an orange twist.

In the post, he mentions a couple of other non-traditional uses for whipped cream siphons. The first – foams – is probably the most famous, and I’ll talk about those in more detail another time. The second is a technique that I haven’t used for a while, but it’s worth reviewing: carbonated fruit.

A soda siphon works by dissolving carbon dioxide into water under pressure. But carbon dioxide will dissolve in water even when that water is contained in the cells of fruits and vegetables, so by placing those in the canister and charging it with a carbon dioxide, you can make fizzy fruit. Whipped cream siphons have a wider mouth than soda siphons, so they allow you to carbonate larger pieces of fruit. (Of course, whipped cream siphons are not intended for this purpose, and charging them with soda cartridges instead of cream cartridges probably invalidates your warranty. Use at your own risk.)

The basic process is simple. Fill the canister with fruit, charge with a soda cartridge, refrigerate overnight, release the pressure (don’t forget this step!), open the canister and serve. Here are a few additional guidelines:

• Use sweet fruit. When carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it produces a small amount of carbonic acid, which makes the fruit taste slightly sour. I’ve even considered placing the fruit in syrup while it’s carbonating, but haven’t tried it yet.
• Use porous fruit, or cut non-porous fruit to expose an interior surface. The carbon dioxide will have a much easier time dissolving if it doesn’t have to try to pass through a tough skin like on grapes, cherries or tomatoes.
• Similarly, moist fruits work better than relatively dry fruits. Carbonated orange segments? Works great. Carbonated apple wedges? Not so much.
• Chill everything thoroughly. Carbon dioxide dissolves more readily at lower temperatures. Because my Thermo Whip is insulated, this means putting everything in the fridge at least 24 hours before I want to serve it.
• Serve immediately after opening. The fizziness in fruit has a tendency to dissipate faster than in pure water. I assume this has something to do with the plentiful nucleation sites in the fruit.

Now, you may be wondering whether I ever use my whipped cream siphon for whipped cream! In fact, I do; last Thanksgiving, I used it for brandied whipped cream to serve with pumpkin pie at my family’s gathering. But carbonated fruit is a lot more fun!

What kind of fizzy fruit would you most like to try?

Ideas started flying fast and furious: Linda at Playing with Fire and Water, in her inimitable way, started exploring infusions with some of the more uncommonly culinary plants in her garden, including phlox and tomato leaves. Andrew put up a post at Kaiser Penguin describing how to make a quick ’n’ dirty falernum. (No more excuses not to make a Zombie or Royal Bermuda Yacht Club!) And Alex and Aki of Ideas in Food took the technique in a whole new direction, infusing mozzarella with basil aroma.

There are a couple of benefits to this approach to infusion. First, and most obviously, it’s incredibly fast. Second, it can be used with relatively small amounts of alcohol, as low as 4 oz. In my explorations of cocktails, I often come across recipes that sound delicious, but call for you to infuse as much as a litre of spirits for periods of up to several weeks. Now I can quickly mix these sorts of cocktails on the same day I read about them, and in quantities that are more suited to the home than a professional bar. What’s more, because it’s so fast and cheap, it allows you to easily experiment with different flavours at different concentrations until you find one you like.

Where did I go with it? My first impulse was to infuse smoky lapsang souchong tea into rum. I put 6 grams of tea leaves and 120 ml. of Saint-James rhum agricole into my Thermo Whip, charged it, swirled it for 30 seconds and let it stand for 30 more, then opened it and strained. The result was a beautiful, smoky-tea rum with no hint of bitterness.

In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best application of the technique, since tea infusions are relatively quick to begin with, but I was pleased with how well it worked. And new ideas now keep popping into my head: if tea works, what about coffee? How about infusing caraway and other aromatics into vodka to make a version of aquavit? Could you produce a reasonable facsimile of gin, which has met with limited success using traditional infusion? This is a technique that merits lots of exploration.

I used to wonder why risotto cakes don’t fall apart when you fry them. It turns out the answer has to do with the behaviour of starch: gelation, retrogradation and reheating. Any time you cook a starchy food – rice, wheat flour, cornmeal – the starch molecules disperse in the water, forming a gel. Then, when the food is cooled down, the starch retrogrades, with the starch molecules bonding together again into hard clusters. Staleness in bread has long been attributed to this phenomenon; in fact, bread can continue to go stale at temperatures down to -20°C!

Fortunately, when starch is reheated, it re-gels, which is why stale bread gets soft again when you warm it. But some of the clusters that form through retrogradation are firmer than they were before they were cooked in the first place, and harder to break down. This is what gives risotto the structural integrity it needs for the cakes to hold together as they cook.

Incidentally, this is a technique that can be applied to a wide range of starchy foods, not just risotto. It’s frequently seen with polenta, which can be cooked and chilled, then cut into shapes and either grilled or fried. Properly done, the outside should be crisp and the interior meltingly smooth. But there are more esoteric possibilities as well: I once made a dessert based around “fried oatmeal,” using the same technique: I cooked the spiced, sweetened oatmeal, then chilled it in a square pan. To serve, I cut it into pieces, fried them in butter, and plated them with a variety of other elements, including strawberry puree, rhubarb fruit leather, and honey frozen yogurt. It was a hit!

Recipe for risotto cakes

Leftover risotto, preferably without large, chunky garnishes
Eggs, as necessary
Flour for dredging
Panko or breadcrumbs for breading

After chilling the leftover risotto overnight, unmold it and cut it into suitable pieces. Dip each piece in beaten egg, then flour, then egg again, then panko or breadcrumbs. Shallow-fry until the breadcrumbs are golden-brown and the interior is warmed through. Serve immediately.

English muffins are one member of a family of enriched, yeasted, griddle-baked breads popular in the United Kingdom; other members include crumpets and pikelets. Where crumpets are griddled on only one side, muffins are cooked on both, creating two browned surfaces and, ideally, a honeycombed interior. According to the Oxford Companion to Food, they peaked in popularity during the 19th century, when muffin men would sell them on the street for teatime. (It also calls English muffins “a physical base and a pretext for eating melted butter”!)

The recipe I used comes from Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day, and is a process that, although it takes two days, is remarkably straightforward. It involves making a wet, batter-like dough, then resting it in the fridge overnight. The next day, a little baking soda is mixed in, and the dough is cooked on a griddle (or, in my case, a skillet) in cornmeal-dusted stainless steel rings to give the muffins their shape.

As is often the case, the trick is to cook them so they brown nicely on the outside but cook through completely. This involves filling the rings with the right amount of dough, and keeping the temperature low enough that the outside doesn’t burn. On my first attempt, I overfilled several of the rings, and the interiors were still slightly doughy.

Still, split – with a fork! – then toasted and dressed with butter and strawberry jam, these were delicious.

What’s your favourite way to eat English muffins?

My local butcher had a special on veal shank slices the other day, so I picked some up to make osso buco, even though I don’t usually associate braising with the dog days of summer. I made it a two-day process, searing, braising and chilling the meat on the first day, then de-fatting and reheating it on the second, and making a Milanese risotto and gremolata to accompany. It was a great reminder of why the classics are classic. The richness of the veal found its counterpoint in the zingy brightness of the gremolata, and the whole dish was underpinned by the floral saffron risotto. This is the sort of dish that I love: comforting and familiar, and the perfect lesson about how careful technique can elevate a dish from humdrum to inspiring. If only we could have served a nice bottle of Barolo alongside!

What classic dishes do you turn to for inspiration?

But if you don’t get to it in time and it does break, you’re going to have to fix it. Just follow these simple steps:

How to fix a broken hollandaise

At this point, the sauce is well and truly broken. Transfer the broken sauce to another container, such as a measuring cup, and wash out the bowl or pot you’re making the sauce in.

Next, for every cup of butter in your sauce, add about a tablespoon of water to the bowl you’re using, and then add an equal amount of the broken sauce.

Whisk the two parts together until they’re well combined. As you can see in this photo, the sauce no longer looks “broken,” it just looks like a very thin hollandaise. Which is exactly what it is! From here, keep adding the broken sauce spoonful by spoonful, whisking to incorporate each addition. As you do, the sauce will start to thicken. If it thickens too much and looks like it’s going to break again, add a splash of water to smooth things out. (I had to do so with the sauce for this demo.)

Eventually, once all the broken sauce has been incorporated, you’ll be left with a hollandaise sauce that’s as good as new!

One of the great things about this technique is that it allows you to reheat leftover hollandaise sauce. If you find yourself with too much sauce, refrigerate it promptly. Then, when you want to reheat it, put it in a double boiler, and gently warm it. If there was enough water in it in the first place, it may not break, but if it does, you now know how to fix it.

Has a broken hollandaise sauce ever caused you to despair?

For me the key to a good amatriciana sauce is the relatively long cooking over high heat; the sugar in the tomatoes should caramelize thoroughly. To incorporate the tomato leaves, I added them pretty early in the process, along with the tomatoes themselves, with the intention of removing them before serving. It turns out this may have been a mistake: afterward, I referred back to Heston Blumenthal’s recipe for pizza sauce in In Search of Perfection, and he calls for a tomato vine to be added to the cooled sauce, observing that heat may destroy the aromatic qualities of the vine.

So did the tomato leaves punch up the tomato flavour in the dish? It’s hard to say. It certainly tasted very tomato-y. But clearly more experimentation is in order.

Recipe for bucatini all’amatriciana

Olive oil
Half a small onion, diced
125 g. unsmoked bacon or pancetta, diced
28 oz. tin of whole tomatoes, drained and chopped
Salt, pepper and pecorino cheese to taste

Heat a good pour of olive oil in a large skillet. Add the diced onion and bacon, and sauté until the bacon starts to crisp. Add the tomatoes and a pinch of salt, and cook over medium-high to high heat, stirring frequently to prevent burning, until they take on a tomato paste-like appearance, about 15 minutes. In the meantime, cook a pound of bucatini. When the pasta and sauce are done, add the bucatini to the skillet and toss to combine. (The noodles will be only lightly dressed.) Grind some black pepper and grate some pecorino cheese over top. Serves 3-4.