Yes, you can do these ribs in your oven or on a gas grill, but I love the aroma of the smoke that comes off a pellet or charcoal grill. Be a pal and supply plenty of paper napkins, a finger bowl, a bone bowl and toothpicks for after dinner!
Nowadays various recipes for coffee barbecue sauces are floating around. But when I first came up with mine, it was an original and inspired distillation of my life at the time. I was working at Little City coffee shop, starting to get geeky about coffee and even geekier about barbecue.
An all-nighter on a brisket cook was inevitably accompanied by strong coffee, and
it didn’t take a genius to notice the affinity that starlight, the sweet roasted aromas of good espresso, and the homey aromas of wood and smoke have for one another. If these smells go so well together in the middle of the night, I thought to myself, their flavors should just as easily merge into a sauce. And the sauce was a way to capture that experience of being awake in the depths of the night watching a fire.
It didn’t turn out to be that easy to bring the flavors together. The first time I made the sauce, I used a little Krups espresso machine that a guy I worked with at Little City had given me. And the sauce seemed great to me. Then I tried to refine it, but when I forced a taste of the “improved” version on Stacy, she told me it was nasty and that I needed to hang it up. Then I went back to my original recipe with a few, small tweaks, and it was a go.
It’s important to note that there is no substitute for the espresso in this recipe. If you don’t have access to an espresso machine, I would take some of the warm sauce to a reputable coffee shop, get them to pull a shot for you, and mix them together there. I know it sounds weird and may even be slightly embarrassing, but the results are worth it. A freshly pulled shot with a good crema brings much more to this recipe than a stale or cold one. I prefer a medium-roast, Central American bean (Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica). The brisket drippings are a matter of taste, but I believe this sauce needs the beefiness to make it taste right.
The holidays just wouldn’t be the same without these delicate filled pastries on the table. They are made on special occasions like Eid Al-Fitr and Easter. It is one dough filled with three different fillings. It takes a little time to prepare these pastries but is well worth it. I usually bake a big batch, and freeze some in an airtight container. They keep well in the freezer. I have given instructions to decorate the pastries using decorative pinchers. After a couple of attempts you’ll get the hang of it. Alternatively, you can use special molds.
We didn’t know it when Phil added this drink to Death & Co’s first menu in 2007, but the Oaxaca Old-Fashioned would go on to symbolize our approach to cocktails: a simple recipe grounded in the classics, but with a level of innovation that comes from a deep understanding of the ingredients at play. The drink also represents an important breakthrough for us. Phil had started with a tequila-based old-fashioned he’d previously created and added an aggressively flavored spirit—mezcal—as a modifier. At the time, bartenders were struggling to make mezcal—a relatively recent addition to the craft cocktail scene—work in mixed drinks. Nobody had thought to cast it in a supporting role until Phil—and this opened the gates to countless exciting, more evenly balanced mezcal recipes. Today the Oaxaca Old-Fashioned is the most-requested drink we’ve ever produced, and the most replicated. We’ve found it on cocktail menus all over the world.
By and large, the cocktails in this chapter are characterized by a core flavor of spirit and vermouth or another aromatized wine, and generally speaking, they fail when those components aren’t in balance. However, there is an exception to this rule (as there always is): the Negroni, a deeply bitter cocktail made with a full ounce of Campari. Because Campari brings a lot of proof to the drink, the Negroni has less gin, and it finds its balance in the typical core of gin and vermouth, but in an equal-parts combination in which the amaro is a unified part of the core, with the gin providing a clean structure upon which the bitterness of Campari is balanced by the richness of the sweet vermouth.
Have you ever drizzled a really good grapefruit with honey? It’s one of those perfect combinations, so it’s not shocking that the pairing works in a glass, too, as Milwaukee’s Adam James Sarkis demonstrates with this recipe. It couldn’t be simpler to combine honey, grapefruit, lemon, and seltzer, but the mixture is surprisingly complex in flavor, both tangy and rich. Make sure you have nine or ten grapefruits; yields will depend on whether you’re using an electric juicer or squeezing them by hand. Prep the honey syrup at least an hour—and up to a week—in advance, so it’s properly cooled when you start the batch.
Juicy red bell peppers are just as refreshing as any other fruit, and this drink from Atlanta bartender Emily Earp Mitchell shows the intriguing flavor they can add to cocktails too. Slicing the peppers thin and letting them macerate with sugar draws out the juices, which are paired with tart hibiscus tea and lime. Tequila adds its desert sage note, and Pinot Noir backs up the band with its own earthy qualities. Think of this as sangria gone savory and all the way fresh.
I wrote about the spritz on my blog several years before le Spritz took over the tables of seemingly every café in France, but I still can’t say that I saw it coming. I had taken a trip to Trieste, Italy, near Venice, to learn how to make espresso. In the evening, while doing my best to unwind after a day of drinking a few dozen shots of very strong coffee, I noticed that everyone was sipping from large goblets filled with orange liquid. In my mixed Italian, I asked for “one of those orange drinks, per favore,” and after my first taste, I was immediately taken with the spritz, too.
I still drink them, although now I reach for a red French bitter, such as Dolin, to provide the bitterness. Dolin is less aggressive than some of the Italian red bitter apéritifs, whose intensity can mask any subtle botanical flavors. I’ve also become smitten with Bruto Americano, made by St. George Spirits in California, which is naturally colored and keeps the flavors of the roots and spices in the forefront.