The Painkiller is one of a handful of cocktails whose name is trademarked by a rum brand. In practice, this means that if you’re making it with a different brand of rum, you can’t call it by that name. The same is true of the Dark ‘n Stormy (must be made with Gosling’s rum) and – somewhat more defensibly – the Bacardi Cocktail (must be made with Bacardi rum, naturally). A Painkiller is a Painkiller only if it’s made with Pusser’s rum. (This fact caused a bit of a headache for a certain bar in Manhattan last year, following an action which the company defended.)

In fact, the drink predates the trademark by more than a decade, having been invented in 1971 at the Soggy Dollar bar in the British Virgin Islands (and according to Beachbum Berry, it wasn’t made with Pusser’s at the time). Of course, you can make the drink with another brand and change the name (I like “Analgesic”), and it may even be as good as, if not better than, the official version. And of course, in the privacy of your own home, you’re unlikely to be pursued by the intellectual property police.

While we’re talking variations, I recently made one with blood orange juice in place of the regular orange juice, which gave the drink a lovely pink hue. What you will need is a can of cream of coconut; in U.S. bar books, the most commonly cited brand is Coco Lopez, but I have never seen it for sale in Canada. It’s the same stuff you’d use in a Piña Colada, and can usually be found in the drinks section of your grocery store, though it seems to be growing more uncommon these days. The brand I used was called “Coco Colada.”

How to make a Painkiller cocktail

2 ounces Pusser’s Navy Rum
1 ounce cream of coconut
2 ounces pineapple juice
1 ounce orange juice
Fresh grated nutmeg (not optional)

Combine all ingredients except nutmeg in a cocktail shaker and shake well. Pour – don’t strain – into a tall glass, and add more ice to fill. Grate some nutmeg on top.

There was only one problem: I couldn’t find veal bones.

This happens every now and then with ingredients, especially ingredients mentioned in American cookbooks. The author will claim that such-and-such ingredient is “widely available” at a given type of store, yet visits to those stores turn up fruitless. It happened when I tried to find mother of vinegar, it happened when I tried to find beer brewing supplies (the stores around here seem to carry only boxed kits, not bulk dry malt extract), and it’s starting to frustrate even my husband in his search for praline paste for chocolates. Is the Canadian market really so different from the U.S. one?

Fortunately, in this case, I found a relatively new butcher in a neighbouring town, the Bauer Butcher, who were more than happy to supply me with the veal bones and veal breast I needed. They’re going to be my new go-to for special meat orders. Sadly, they weren’t able to get me calves’ feet, but I’ll take what I can get for now.

Stock recipes are all relatively interchangeable, but because the end goal here is a dish in the Eleven Madison Park book, I decided to follow their particular recipe as closely as possible, rather than, say, using the pressure-cooker method. (Unfortunately, there’s a typo in the recipe: the ingredient list includes white wine, but the recipe never says where to add it. A quick query to the e-mail address given in the book cleared that up; it goes in with the ice.) The only unusual thing about this recipe, to my mind, is the total exclusion of carrot, and the inclusion of celery root. The celery root is something I’ll probably adopt in future stocks of my own, partly because I love it under any circumstances, and partly because it’s got all the aromatics of celery but in a package that’s sweet rather than bitter. It’s fundamentally just a great idea.

So I loaded my 8 pounds of veal bones and 4 pounds of veal breast into my stockpot – actually, I split it between two pots, because my stockpot wasn’t big enough – covered it with very cold water, and simmered it for 6 hours, skimming as I went. After straining and reducing, I was left with 4.5 litres of gelatinous, lightly golden stock that’s safely stashed in my freezer for the time being, awaiting its destiny in a future recipe.

This isn’t to say I wasn’t curious how they work. Bread is kneaded to develop gluten, the stretchy protein that poses a health risk to a number of unfortunate people (and is vilified by still more) and that gives bread its structure by trapping carbon dioxide bubbles produced by yeast. Several factors go into gluten development: the variety of wheat (“hard” flours have more protein that “soft” ones), mechanical action (kneading), hydration (water) and time.

In general, the more water added to a dough, the more easily it will form gluten from the precursor proteins, glutenin and gliadin. The hydration trade-off, though, is that as you increase the water content, the dough becomes more difficult to work with and shape. A no-knead dough takes this to the extreme, increasing the water content so far that you don’t even need to work the dough: given enough time, the gluten will essentially produce itself.

As I was flipping through Ideas in Food for the chocolate pudding I knew I wanted to make, I spotted the no-knead brioche recipe. I’m planning to make a dish soon that requires some brioche bread crumbs, so it seemed like a good excuse to give the recipe a try.

Sticky bun topping

The technique was as easy as advertised: mix dry ingredients, mix wet ingredients, combine, let rest for several hours. Fold the edges of the dough into the centre (no, this doesn’t count as kneading!) and let rest overnight, then bake. I was surprised to see that the dough didn’t need to be shaped at all before baking. It just went into the loaf pan as a lump, but produced a pretty nice oven spring.

With 8 eggs and a pound of butter, it’s an expensive recipe, but the payoff is in the flavour. This is a rich brioche that speaks of luxury. Unfortunately, I overbaked it a little, slightly burning the bottom of the loaf, but that’s easy to fix next time, both by baking on a higher rack and reducing the cooking time. (My only beef with the recipe is that it uses the old “tap and listen for a hollow sound” test for doneness, rather than specifying an internal temperature.) I used the other half of the dough to make the “brioche sticky buns,” which were delicious the first day, but staled quickly. I’d happily make them again, but only if I had several guests to share them with!

One of the benefits of a blender like the Vitamix is the size of the container: no more “transfer to a blender in batches” for me! And a good thing, too, because the first preparation I used it for, the chipotle ketchup from Michael Ruhlman’s Twenty, wouldn’t have fit in the 5-cup container of my old blender. One of the ingredients it calls for is a 28-ounce can of tomatoes, which would nearly have filled my old blender on its own.

With this much speed and power, purées form a lovely vortex, perfect for dispersing hydocolloids.

It also calls for seeded chipotles, but I was curious to see how the new blender would handle the seeds, so I added the chipotles whole. When I strained the resulting puree, there were only a couple of fragments left, and even they would probably have been broken down completely if I’d let it run a bit longer. Of course, in keeping the seeds, I also kept the membranes they’re attached to, which is where most of the capsaicin resides, so the ketchup turned out a little hotter than I might have expected. Fine for me, but potentially challenging for more timid palates!

There’s a flip side to the high speed the Vitamix is capable of producing: its low speed is quite low, almost “stir” rather than “blend.” So the next thing I made in it was the chocolate pudding from Ideas in Food. You start by mixing egg yolks and tapioca starch in a blender “on low speed until they form a light colored paste,” then add a boiling hot milk/cream/sugar mixture and increase the speed to medium, before adding the chocolate and emulsifying it all together. Incidentally, this is why I wanted a Vitamix rather than a Blendtec: I liked the idea of a speed dial better than individual push buttons. The pudding, of course, was delicious. (I assume it’s the same as the one I had at the Ideas in Food dinner at Atelier last March.)

This piece of equipment is definitely threatening to move into “How did I live without it?” territory.

What’s your favourite thing to blend?

Whether your cooking is devoutly traditional or boldly avant-garde, a blender is a vital piece of kitchen equipment. (Unless, that is, your cooking is so traditional that you use a food mill for everything.) Obviously, its main use is to puree soft foods and soups, but it can also be used to grind brittle foods, disperse hydrocolloids, and emulsify sauces, such as hollandaise.

Until recently, I had two different blenders to work with: a Braun immersion blender and an old Osterizer upright blender. These were fine for most applications, but in some cases they just weren’t up to the task. One day in particular, I remember swearing that I would never make an artichoke puree again; although it was delicious, the work involved in blending and straining the artichokes just wasn’t worth it. Similarly, I’ve made a few things from the Alinea cookbook that challenged – or downright exceeded – the capacity of my previous blenders. This is notably true of agar-based fluid gels, but also of the roux-thickened dill sauce in the dish “Smoked salmon, salsify, dill, caper.” (When the motor in your blender starts smelling like burning oil, it’s time to stop. I ended up omitting that sauce from the final dish.)

Fortunately, all that changed in December, when my husband gave me a brand-new Vitamix blender. This high-speed blender, much like its competitor, Blendtec, is more powerful, better designed, and faster than most home blenders. The model I got is intended for home use; Vitamix also makes commercial-grade blenders, but that’s probably more power than I need. Of course, this much power comes at a cost, but if you have the money, it’s almost certainly worth investing in one.

Although they have a special name, there is no specific recipe for toshikoshi soba; you can make them the same way you make soba noodles the rest of the year. What counts is the long noodles, which represent long life. It’s important not to bite them off in the middle when you eat them!

This year, I decided to observe the Japanese tradition (as well as the mincemeat tradition, for good measure). I even made a special trip into Toronto for kamaboko and mitsuba. Unfortunately, I promptly forgot both of them in the fridge at a friend’s house. I went ahead with the noodles anyway, though not until New Year’s Day, which is technically one day late. I cooked the noodles then chilled them in ice water to firm them up, mixed up a simple broth of dashi, soy sauce, salt and sugar, and garnished the whole thing with some green onion curls, red pickled ginger, a 13-minute onsen egg, some simmered king oyster mushrooms, and a small sprig of cilantro in place of the forgotten mitsuba.

What food do you eat at New Year’s to ensure a year of happiness?

If you find yourself with some extra bubbly (or some leftover that’s still got some fizz), or you just feel like a change of pace, why not mix up a sparkling wine cocktail, like the classic French 75?

How to make a French 75

1 oz. London dry gin
0.75 oz. simple syrup
0.5 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
Champagne or other sparkling wine, preferably traditional method (I used Henry of Pelham “Cuvée Catharine” rosé brut)
Long, thin lemon peel cut with a channel knife (for garnish)

Combine the gin, syrup and lemon juice in a mixing glass with ice, shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a champagne flute. Top with sparkling wine and garnish with the lemon peel.

Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas!

I’ve always loved mincemeat. When I was growing up, my mother always made mincemeat tarts at Christmas. She used store-bought mincemeat, but made her own pastry: the only time I can recall her doing so. She formed them in muffin tins, and I remember asking her one year whether they were hard to unmold. Naturally, that was the first year she ever had trouble with it!

But mincemeat – like fruitcake – is a divider, not a uniter. My husband’s family tradition of mincemeat comes in the form of mincemeat squares. Every year, we include them on the trays of Christmas cookies at our gatherings; every year, we get queried as to whether they are date squares; and every year, we find pieces of half-eaten mincemeat squares wrapped in paper napkins and tucked discreetly into corners. Conversely, the mincemeat fans will happily help themselves to several of them.

It would seem that mincemeat has had a bit of a hard reputation for a long time, even when it was enormously popular. Of course, back then it was still actually made with meat, an ingredient reflected only in the vestigial suet in modern recipes. (Some “mincemeat” blends omit even the suet!)

When I came across a recipe for mincemeat in Fergus Henderson’s Beyond Nose to Tail, I decided this would be the year I finally made it myself, not least because it included quinces, one of my favourite Christmastime fruits! The quinces first have to be poached, then the other ingredients mixed in and the whole allowed to rest for two days, before being slowly baked for 4-5 hours, so it’s not a quick proposition. (At least it doesn’t have to be closely monitored.) But if you have the time to do it, you will be rewarded with a wonderful, rich aroma that will take you straight back to Christmastimes of old.

When it comes to mincemeat, are you pro or anti?