Nuts to You (in the Best Possible Way)

Posted on August 3, 2022 by David Marcus

The more I think about the dishes I like to cook, the more I realize that I most enjoy the low-effort, big-return recipes that make a party a little more special.

This spiced nuts recipe comes from my brother, Ed, who used to make this in commercial quantities for a small supermarket in Washington State. It uses three pounds of nuts, but can easily be scaled down, and the nuts will keep for weeks in a tightly sealed container or in the freezer for several months. And the spice and sweetness levels can be adjusted to your taste, too, of course, but we think this is a reliable starting point.

The recipe calls for walnuts, but I’ve also made it with pecans. Peanuts (skinless only) would probably work, although I haven’t tried them. Next time I make this, I’ll probably try a mix of nuts.

I’ve made this recipe several times, every time a hit. The key is to keep the heat low, stir every 10 or 15 minutes, and give the nuts the time they need to dry out before taking them out of the oven. Do that, and you can create an easy, signature snack for your parties.

Ed’s Spiced Nuts

Ingredients

  • 1 cup dark brown sugar
  • 2 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons kosher salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon smoked paprika (sweet)
  • 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 3 egg whites from large eggs
  • 3 tablespoons water
  • 3 pounds walnut halves or other nuts

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 300F. Prepare two half-sheet pans with parchment, which will make cleanup much easier.
  2. In a large bowl, beat egg whites and water until frothy.
  3. In a smaller bowl, mix dark brown sugar, granulated sugar, smoked paprika and ground cinnamon, making sure there are no lumps.
  4. Add nuts to the egg white mixture and stir until coated well and evenly.
  5. Sprinkle the nuts with the sugar mixture and toss to coat evenly.
  6. Bake at 300F in a single layer for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the nuts are dry. Give yourself some time, as it could take longer.
  7. Remove from oven and separate nuts as they cool.
  8. When completely cool, pour the nuts into a bowl or container(s) for storing or freezing, breaking up any that are stuck together.

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In Which Our Novice Baker Finally Achieves The Bagel Of His Dreams

Posted on June 24, 2020 by David Marcus

For the last three months or so I’ve been trying to make bagels that taste good, replicate the texture and chew of those of my long-lost youth, and look pretty much like a bagel should. Go back a few posts and you’ll see one that looks like it came from the croissant factory. Not good.

But now, I think I’ve got it:

Today’s batch, onion on top, plain on the bottom. I’m happy with them, and I’ll be very satisfied if I can do as well from now on.

These are sourdough bagels, no yeast at all. They have just a little bit of tang that balances the malt in the recipe, and best of all, they are as chewy as the bagels I teethed on as an infant during the first Eisenhower administration. Really chewy.

In fact, it’s said that when teething I gnawed on a single bagel for a month, which would say as much about parenting in the ’50s as it does about the bagels, but my family is known to exaggerate.

These bagels came not from the excellent yeast recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction I used earlier, but from baked-theblog.com, and you can find it here: https://www.baked-theblog.com/new-york-style-sourdough-bagels-with-roasted-garlic-labneh/. If you’re not a sourdough person by all means use Sally’s recipe.

Because I can’t stand not tinkering with stuff, I do have a couple of tweaks to the baked-theblog recipe:

  • The only tricky part with your sourdough starter is making sure it’s quite active when you’re ready to use it. For me, that would be four to six hours after feeding it. But it can work well if you feed it the day before, let it sit out until it perks up, then refrigerate it until the next day. At worst, you’ll have to let the shaped bagels proof for a longer time, up to four hours after shaping them.
  • The recipe also calls for all-purpose flour. I think the bagels are better with bread flour, which is higher in protein but these days may not be so easy to come by. I used Heckers all-purpose flour, which is 11.5 percent protein, and replaced 40 grams of flour with 40 grams of vital wheat gluten, which is available online and in some groceries. This brought the protein content up to nearly 15 percent, and made the bagels teething-worthy.
  • Finally, the recipe equates 750 grams of flour to five cups. A cup of flour weighs 120-125 grams, so if you use cup measure instead of weight, by the spoon-and-sweep method you’ll probably get closer to six cups before you hit 750 grams. I say that when it comes to flour, it’s best to have a kitchen scale and measure by weight.

Still, I think that even if you use the recipe exactly as written you’ll come out with very satisfying bagels. Do remember that it’s a two-day process but I found that it works on whatever schedule I have.

This recipe makes the heaviest, stiffest dough I’ve ever seen. Your stand mixer will struggle, and might give up entirely. Kneading by hand will make today’s trip to the gym unnecessary.

In the end, there are a few steps but not all that much effort. And even though one can buy a pretty good bagel where we live, I can now say that mine taste better and look just about as good.

They are, at last, the bagels of my dreams.

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I Don’t Care If My Flour Tortillas Look Like Amoebas. I Am Never Buying Them At The Store Again.

Posted on April 23, 2020 by David Marcus

I like flour tortillas. I’ve been eating them all my life. I’d buy them at the grocery and use them for Latin dishes, rolled sandwiches, whatever.

We’ve even used them cut with cookie cutters as a base for hors d’oeuvres. They can be a little expensive, maybe 30 or 40 cents apiece, but I never considered an alternative.

If I wanted a tortilla, I bought tortillas.

Not anymore, not after last night. Last night I made my own tortillas. The difference astounded me, and they were so easy that I wondered why I’d never made them before.

Last night’s batch, my first, were oblong and misshapen. And they did not fall flat on the pan when I cooked them, so they were wrinkled and lumpy in spots. On the plate they looked like a Mexican grandmother’s nightmare.

But they were so delicious that I didn’t care. They were nicely chewy, soft even after they cooled, and they held together well under last night’s fajitas.

I’m going to keep working at them and I know eventually they’ll look better, but I don’t know how I could ever make them taste better. They taste fantastic, in a completely different world than store-bought.

The recipe is here: https://www.mexicoinmykitchen.com/flour-tortillas-de-harina/ and there’s even a video to go with it. In that video you will see Mely Martinez’s expert hands turn out nearly perfect circles of dough that puff up, blowfish-like, when they hit the hot pan.

Mine did that, too, but they looked more like amoebas with intestinal problems than blowfish. In any event, I’ll bet they tasted just as good as hers, and so there’s no reason for you not to make them.

Her ingredients are flour, shortening, baking powder, water and salt, and she says not to worry if you don’t have the baking powder. You do want to take seriously her admonition to go easy on the hot water. I used about seven-eighths of a cup and I should have used a little less. The extra made the tortillas a bit harder to roll, but didn’t bother me otherwise.

I looked around and found several recipes that used less shortening — one used only an eighth of a cup rather than the one-third in Martinez’s recipe — but I’m going to stick with the larger amount.

And I’m going to stick with homemade flour tortillas. They don’t take long to make and I discovered last night that they are worth every minute, no matter what they look like.

Posted in Baking | Tagged | 4 Comments

Let The Bagel Be Unbroken

Posted on April 18, 2020 by David Marcus

Like everyone else I know I’m sitting at home, except for masked-and-gloved expeditions to the supermarket every couple of weeks. From the looks of things, everyone in the world has decided to take up baking when they are not washing their hands or going to the bathroom. Our markets have vast empty spaces where flour, paper towels and toilet paper used to sit.

I’ve been thinking if a guy wants to see immediate and sincere gratitude, the hot birthday present this spring could be a jumbo pack of toilet paper. But that’s neither here nor there.

I’m a meat guy and baking, like vegetables, has been off my beat. But we wanted bagels a couple of weeks ago, to replicate the deli experience we can’t have right now. I had some flour and yeast so I gave it a try. The bagels were OK, but far from ideal.

I wanted ideal.

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My first attempt. Using the finger-poke method to shape them, the tops turned out OK but the bottoms were wrinkled as a Shar-Pei’s face, and a lot less cute.

On my third effort I hit on a really good recipe at Sally’s Baking Addiction, here: https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/homemade-bagels/. I used her instruction for overnight proofing in the refrigerator, and they were delicious.

This is a great recipe and easy. I boiled the bagels for 90 seconds on each side, gave them their egg-white wash before baking and they came out perfectly chewy, with a slightly crisp crust. They taste just a little sweet like a perfect plain bagel should, and I think they taste better than any I can buy.

Shaping them, however, is killing me.

Bagel shapers seem be either pokers or snakers. Pokers make a ball out of each piece of dough then send a floured index finger through the middle and wiggle it until they have what they want. Snakers make a 10-inch-long rope of the dough, then fold it around their open hand and roll to seal.

My tops look fine when I poke the hole, but as I cannot get a perfectly shaped ball in the first place the bottom bakes up looking like a construction zone.

Snaking gives me good-looking circles before I boil them but once in the water they decide to turn into bagel croissants.

A croissant bagel is not what I'm after.

This is not what I want.

On this specimen from a couple of weeks ago, the ends came apart when I boiled it, and once the bagel is in the water there’s no going back. It tasted good, but I needed to do better.

Today I tried the method you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTdbDxfYydo.

The technique in this video has you tie a little knot at the end of your rope, then press to roll everything together. I can see that I didn’t go quite far enough with my knot, and maybe not vigorous enough with my roll to seal, so I had a little unwinding in the water.

Bagel snakes. Looks like the two in the back are attacking each other. Gotta tighten my knot.

Still, I am encouraged and having fun. The bagels taste great and I think I’m closing in on the shaping. I think I’ll have it right next time.

As it is, I’ve learned something fun, useful and delicious.

And that absolute perfection might be overrated.

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In Praise of the Martini and its Essential Ingredient

Posted on June 16, 2019 by David Marcus
Beefeater Gin, Noilly Pratt Dry Vermouth, Fee Brothers Orange Bitters, three crisp queen olives, icy cold: My ideal Martini.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

A man goes into a bar, orders a Beefeater martini up, with olives. The bartender puts a little skewer holding three olives into a cocktail glass, loads the shaker with ice and grabs the gin. He pours the gin into the shaker, stirs it and strains it into the glass. Then he dumps the shaker and presents the drink to the customer.

The customer says, “I didn’t see you put in the vermouth.”

Bartender replies, “Oh, we don’t use vermouth. No one likes it.”

Some bars don’t even keep vermouth anymore, and yet when you order a martini the bartender will serve you a glass of cold, diluted gin and charge you $12 just the same.

I say this is not a martini and this is not right.

The first time this happened I looked around the bar and into the adjoining restaurant. There were a lot of youngish people happily drinking drinks for youngish people, a lot of which had “-tini” at the end of their names. You know them: appletini, chocolatetini, flirtini, peartini, lycheetini. They seem to be named after the glass, which is elegant.

“A martini has vermouth in it,” I said.

“Not here,” the bartender replied.

This was an important moment for me, because I think it was the first time I ever felt like an old coot, one of those guys who will let the train of progress run over him before he will give up his grip on the glorious past.

I don’t care, and I don’t go to that bar anymore.

I think a martini has to have some vermouth in it, and I don’t care if you drink it with gin or its abominable vodka variant. A real martini has vermouth, and orange bitters, because a cocktail has to have three ingredients or else it isn’t a cocktail. It’s just a drink. You’ll hardly ever find a bar that will use the bitters, which add a slight but welcome citrusy sensation.

So, my favorite Martini is about five parts Beefeater Gin, one part Noilly Pratt Dry Vermouth and a dash of Fee Brothers Orange Bitters, stirred in a shaker and strained into a frozen cocktail glass.I find that four ounces, after ice dilution of about 20 percent, is a good amount because I’m likely to finish it while it’s still pretty cold. 

Better to have a second cold one than drink it warm, or drink a big one too fast. Even a short one has the alcohol of about three beers, so it’s well to be careful. If you know you’re going to have a second, dump the other half into a short glass and put it in the freezer until you’re ready.

And speaking of cold, try to keep your vermouth in the refrigerator. It’s wine, and it’ll oxidize if you leave it on the shelf. But it’ll be good to go for a month or two if you keep it cold.

Half an ounce of vermouth to 2 1/2 ounces of gin is a little too much for you? Start with a quarter-ounce; it’ll be extra-extra-dry, but still a martini and you’ll still get a little of the essential taste that made the cocktail the classic it is. You can work your way up, if you like.

Of course, life’s too short to allow someone you don’t know to tell you what or how to drink, so Rule 1 is to do what makes you happy. Not everyone’s standard needs to be the same.

But this is mine, and I’m sticking with it.

Do you like yours with a different gin or vermouth? Let me know in the comments!

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The Final Salute, with a reminder from The Department of It’s Always Something

Posted on June 9, 2019 by David Marcus

Every so often — and not that often, actually — hard work, the generous and unstinting help of one’s friends and plain dumb luck give a guy as close to a perfect day as one can get. That’s what we got yesterday at the 10th and last Salute to Meat.

We had perfect weather for just about 100 people, and when Janet asked some them at the end which of the 10 courses contained their best bite, each course was well represented. This is what you want.

The situation didn’t look so sunny on Thursday night and Friday: Janet had come home from our vacation with a stomach issue that turned out to be diverticulitis. She was admitted to the hospital Thursday after developing a bad reaction to the antibiotic she was prescribed and didn’t get released until late Friday night, just 18 hours before the party.

In the meantime, our friends started calling with offers of help. Phoenix, who drove Janet to the hospital and stayed with her for hours on Thursday, returned Friday to punch out 3-inch rounds from soft tortillas for the pork belly course, and caramelized 10 pounds of onions for the steak.

Other friends Becky and Dan and Madonna and Steve called often to check in and offer help, came to bring coolers and other things you’d only need for the crowd we had expected. Janet’s son, Zach, who is the menschiest guy I know, and his girlfriend, Hannah, came early to help and led all the outdoor setup. And our friend Kathy came early and helped in the kitchen all day and evening.

These are the friends one wants to have, wonderful people pulling us to the finish line.

There were other, less dire challenges. The brisket was done six hours early, actually overdone when I woke up to check it at 3 a.m. Saturday. I foiled it, put it in a cooler wrapped in foil and towels, and put it on warming trays in the afternoon when its temperature started to drop too low. It turned out a little drier than I would have liked, but people came back for seconds!

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Brisket ready to be cut. That’s Janet in the black, with her back to the camera.

I also tried to grill too many 2 1/2-pound steaks at once, going for a reverse sear on two rack levels, and lost one steak in a flareup. There was still plenty that was perfect.

And I thought a few of the ribs were overdone — I like pull-off-the-bone texture — but they went fast and people asked for more.

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12 racks of St. Louis-style ribs, membranes removed, ready for rubbing

Aside from the ribs, the big hits seemed to be the pastrami Reubens and pork belly with gochujang sauce.

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Prepping the pork belly course

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Pastrami Reubens ready to go out. Someone said she didn’t like sauerkraut. We accommodate all tastes!

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Kielbasa picked and ready to go out, lamb just off the grill and ready to cut. The greenery is the mis en place for the deconstructed BLTs, ready for the piece of thick, home-cured and smoked bacon at the end of the toothpick.

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The two picnic shoulders, ready to pull.

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The pulled picnics, ready for sauce.

All in all, we were very pleased with the food, although Janet couldn’t eat a bite — she’s on a bland diet for a while.

But I’ll tell you what: I worked on the food for the best part of a week, thought about this party for the best part of a year. And here’s the image I want to remember:

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A beautiful day in my back yard, our friends having a good time. This is about half the crowd; there is another tent to the left.

Today my almost-67-year-old legs are sore. There is a little cleanup left to do, not much.

So, it was a wonderful time, a fantastic 10 years of feeding our friends, learning how to smoke, cure and cook my favorite meats. From time to time I would sing a song or two with the trio of our friends who’d play guitar and violin to entertain; I’d never done that before and I’m not likely to again.

I’ll remember the night in 2014 when the police came because we had been noisy outside after midnight. And the monsoon in 2015 when I pulled steaks off the Egg while wearing a slicker with someone holding an umbrella over me so the meat wouldn’t get wet.

There was last year, when the freezer died a month before the party and we didn’t know about it until 10 days later because we had been on vacation. Then lightning struck a tree on our front lawn the night before the party. It was great, anyway.

We thought last year’s drama had been had been pretty much the limit, until yesterday.

The thing is, there is no limit to what can happen, but neither is there a limit to what you can do if you have friends to help you.

On the day after a party like this it’s easy to wax nostalgic and imagine just one more party, one more perfect day watching Janet create a miracle in the kitchen — 10 courses in three hours — and seeing all our friends in our back yard in the sun, eating and enjoying themselves.

I might imagine it, but I’m never doing this again. Maybe we’ll find something else, a different menu, fewer people, a more relaxed day for us. It may be a different kind of perfect, but perfect nonetheless.

And for all I’ve learned about food and cooking in these 10 years, I’ve learned that the perfect party isn’t entirely about the menu. The food may have created the occasion, but our friends’ gift of their days with us has given us a collage of memories that will warm us forever.

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So Far, A Salute to Pork

Posted on June 7, 2019 by David Marcus

2019-06-07 09.50.59

The two picnic shoulders after 17 1/2 hours on the smoker. They’ll rest for a while before I pull and sauce them.

The last two pork shoulders — these guys are picnics — just came off the Big Green Egg. They’re about 9 pounds each, with the bone, and I put them on at 4:30 yesterday afternoon. They went about 17 1/2 hours later with the pit temp raised to 250 after being at 225 until 5 a.m. I took them off when one was 195 and the other 198 internal.

I’ve also put away the last five pounds of pork belly, which I roasted this morning in the oven. I did 10 pounds last night. This morning’s will joined last night’s in foil with some of the liquid from the bottom of the pan, and will be heated and crisped tomorrow afternoon.

This roasted pork belly recipe is so good that the first time I made it for Janet she took one bite and then looked at me kind of angry, as if to say, “How do I know you for 13 years and this is the first time you’ve made this?”

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Last night’s roasted pork belly. It started out as 10 pounds, roasted another five this morning, just to be sure. Each of these pieces should make about 20 servings in little tortillas with gochujang sauce.

It’s really good and as easy as it gets and the recipe is entertaining, if pretty foul-mouthed, so be warned. It’s here: https://deadspin.com/how-to-cook-pork-belly-which-thoroughly-kicks-bacons-a-1619788169.

The briskets will go on next, and I’m worried about them, as I always do, because somehow I always find a way not to play it safe. A few years ago I tried to cook two behemoths without trimming especially well and I got about 30 pounds of burnt offerings when the drippings caught fire. I’m more careful about trimming now, even liberating that pocket of fat between the flat and the point, but I’m worried that the two chests, which weigh 40 pounds between them untrimmed, will be too big for the two racks on the Egg.

The worst case will be that I take the points off and trim up the ends to fit, because it would be better to have not quite enough than to serve bad brisket. I could also smoke it on the Pit Barrel Cooker — I’ve seen videos that show a 16-pounder being done in six hours, but I have to say that the finished product didn’t look that good to me.

Anyway, enough of the Hamlet moment. I’m going to trim my briskets and see what I’m getting myself into.

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Cooking for 104

Posted on June 6, 2019 by David Marcus

2019-06-06 06.30.53

There are 104 people who say they are coming to my house Saturday for the 10th and final Salute To Meat, and these two pork butts will not satisfy them.

They are only the start of the last push. Two more will go on when they come off late Thursday morning, because my Large Big Green Egg will not accommodate all of the 35 pounds of pork shoulder that I will pull and my wife, Janet, will serve on King’s Hawaiian Rolls with a little coleslaw. Those rolls are smaller than slider-sized, perfect for two bites.

I’m saucing the pulled pork with a traditional North Carolina vinegar sauce, for which the very easy recipe is here: http://www.nakedwhiz.com/elder.htm#rubs. If you follow the link you’ll also be treated to an exhaustive and very entertaining treatise on the smoking of the divine butt.

Anyway, the next two shoulders will come off Friday morning and then the two Prime briskets, which will weigh in at about 35 pounds after trimming, have to go on the Egg, and I hope they will be done by 7 or 8 a.m. on Saturday. If they are not, I have a couple of Plan Bs.

Also on the menu:

  • 12 racks of St. Louis style ribs, a little over 35 pounds;
  • 10 pounds of home-cured bacon, to be served as deconstructed BLTs;
  • 15 pounds of pork belly to be cooked in the oven then cut bite-sized and put in little tortillas with gochujang sauce;
  • 15 pounds of beef rib-eye and dry-aged sirloin strip, which Janet will serve with caramelized onions and blue cheese, on crostini;
  • 10 pounds of lamb leg, which I’ll grill Saturday after marinating in lemon, olive oil and rosemary. Janet makes a great spicy mango sauce for it;
  • Open-faced Reuben sandwiches with the 20 pounds of pastrami that I cured and smoked;
  • And my friend, Mike Schroeder, is bringing kielbasa from Bristol, Conn., which I have to dole out after grilling it at the beginning of the party, because it is so good that people will eat so much of it that they’ll ruin their appetite for the rest. I always swear that I will not give them more than 5 pounds of it;

So with the pork butt and brisket, call it 180 pounds of meat, give or take. Of course, there is a lot of bone in the ribs, but I think we’ll have enough.

I have a Pit Barrel Cooker, and plan to smoke eight racks of ribs on it Saturday, the other four on the Egg if the briskets are done early enough to give me a six-hour window before the lamb and steaks have to go on. If they aren’t, I’ll go two rounds on the PBC, pulling the first set off a little early to hold, then finishing them on the grill when I’m ready to serve.

Today I’m making the gochujang sauce for the pork belly, which I’ll cook tomorrow and Janet will crisp and serve on little tortillas cut from Mission Soft Flour Tortillas. The sauce recipe, which was intended for Korean fried chicken but is fabulous with pork, is here: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/10/sweet-and-spicy-chili-sauce-korean-fried-chicken-recipe.html.

I’m also picking up the beer, wine and soda and the perishables for the sides. There will inevitably be some stuff I forget, and that I’ll grab Saturday morning when I pick up the baguettes for the crostini and the ice for the coolers.

So far we seem to have avoided last year’s excitement, when our freezer failed while we were on vacation and all the meat for the party rotted inside it, and a tree on our front lawn got hit by lightning the night before the event and nearly took out my car parked on the street.

But it’s a good reminder that anything can happen, especially when you’re smoking brisket and cooking for more people than attended your wedding, and so it is well to keep one’s knees loose.

 

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Planning The Last Waltz

Posted on February 24, 2019 by David Marcus
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The steaks from 2016. The two in front were about to go back onto the grill for their final sear.

It’s only late February but it’s time to get serious about planning our 10th and last Salute to Meat, our annual summer party, which this year we’ll hold in early June. By the time we’re done we will have served considerably more than a half-ton of beef, lamb and especially pork at these parties, to an increasing number of guests each year.

Last year we had 84 RSVPs and 71 people showed. This year my wife, Janet, and I expect more, since we’re combining it with the retirement party for my colleague, Sally Hale.

The save-the-date email is going out tonight, and I’m going to start dry-aging a Prime sirloin strip roast. It’s going to go 45 days or so, then I’ll trim it and cut it into steaks about 2 1/2 pounds each and freeze them. It’s about 14 pounds now; after aging and trimming I expect to get about 10 usable pounds.

We are big fans of the reverse-sear method of cooking large steaks and roasts, and we’ll do that with the steaks and lamb. Reverse sear is when you cook the meat in a low oven, smoker or closed grill at a low temperature and then sear it when it’s almost done.

This makes a more tender steak, I believe, and it also eliminates almost all of that nasty grey band that you get at the margins when you sear first.

So I like to cook the steaks at about 225 degrees until they get close to the internal temperature you want — I usually look for 128 or so, aiming for medium-rare. Then you take them out to rest while you run the grill to about 450 degrees, or heat the broiler. Then the steaks go back for just a couple of minutes to get the char you want, then you pull them off and let them rest again, maybe for 15 minutes or so, depending on how long they were off the heat the first time.

You can also use a butane torch to crust them inside, handy in bad weather.

Janet, who actually does more for this party than I do, will cook a pile of onions very slowly and when they’re very brown and almost a single mass she’ll hit it with some Bourbon to deglaze the pan and run up the heat to burn off most of the alcohol. Then she’ll add blue cheese to the mix and we’ll put slices of the steak on crostini made from baguettes and the blue cheese-onion jam on that, and out they’ll go.

It’s always the last course, but the one I can start first, now.

I’m getting excited.

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Syrup, The Cowboy Way

Posted on August 4, 2018 by David Marcus

There is the right way, the wrong way, and sometimes the cowboy way — a shortcut that one uses for expedience or necessity.

I like to have simple syrup in the refrigerator for cold drinks, and especially for Old Fashioneds and mint juleps. But making it the right way tries my patience.

I know that to make either drink properly you’re supposed to muddle the sugar with the flavoring — bitters for the Old Fashioned, mint for the julep — but the sugar never dissolves completely. Or maybe I just don’t have the patience to do it right, it could be that, too.

Either way, I use syrup. A teaspoon of syrup into the Bourbon and bitters and your Old Fashioned just needs ice and garnish.

And I even make the syrup wrong, probably, but it works perfectly, I like it and it’s easy and so I’m going to tell you how to make it in case you don’t already know.

The way you’re supposed to make simple syrup is to heat the sugar in the water until it dissolves. Then you have to wait for it to cool and then you can put it in your container and into the fridge.

I don’t have the patience for this.

I just throw two parts sugar — I like raw, but you can use white — and one part water into the blender and let ‘er rip at the highest speed. Let it go for a good minute and then check to make sure everything’s dissolved. If it needs another 30 seconds in the blender, go ahead.

Then you pour it into a squeeze bottle or whatever you’re going to use, and you’re done.  I always use two parts sugar to one of water, because I like the viscosity that even a little of it gives to a drink. But one-to-one is fine, too, if that’s how you like it.

And if you don’t have a blender, you can even make syrup by putting your sugar and water into a covered container and shaking it really hard for two minutes, letting it sit for a minute, and then shaking it again for 30 seconds. This is too much trouble for me, but I’ve done it.

The blender trick also works for mint syrup, but here especially any purists who might come across this post will scoff, and I will scoff with them — it’s not the Right Way.

Still, it works and it tastes really good.

You just take a fistful of mint leaves, throw them in the blender with your two parts sugar and one part water and let it rip for a minute or two, maybe less in a Vitamix, until it looks like you couldn’t strain anything out of it in even the finest cheesecloth. Put it in your squeeze bottle or whatever and you have mint syrup.

It looks like cloudy green sludge, I warn you. But it tastes great — fresh mint and sugar. It keeps for a long time in the refrigerator and it’s good in tea, too.

I realize that aside from the proportions of  two parts sugar to one part water, which makes a product that’s twice as concentrated as true simple syrup, I haven’t told you how much mint to use. The answer is that I haven’t found that it matters too much. I’ve used maybe a cup of leaves to two cups of sugar, and twice that much, and they were both sweet and minty.

So try it, and even if you live in Bucharest or New York City, you’ll still be making something very useful and tasty the cowboy way.

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