Cook For Hire

Since I've had someone else making some of my syrups for me, I've had a lot more free time. So when Erick Castro of Rickhouse texted me asking if I make a cranberry syrup, I answered "No... but I could make some. You want?"

I figured hey, I know fruit and I know sugar. I've made red currant syrup; how different could it be?

Sometimes my arrogance bites me in the ass.

I started the same as with red currants. I washed the cranberries, covered them with water, and simmered them over low heat until they were soft and beginning to fall apart. I strained the mixture through a chinois then dissolved in some sugar. It tasted good, so I threw it in a bottle. Seemed easy enough.
Yet as it cooled, I noticed something funny. The syrup had a strange, clumpy texture, like not-fully-dissolved Jell-O mix. I had fine-strained the whole thing, so there had to be something happening in the making that caused a reaction.

Then I thought about cranberry sauce. You know, the jellied stuff that slides out of a can and is the atrocity of so much Thanksgiving Americana.



Here are the ingredients for Grown Right Organic Jellied Cranberry Sauce:
Organic Cranberries, Organic Sugar, Water and Organic Lemon Juice Concentrate, Organic Aroma Concentrate and Natural Fruit Pectin


And this is what it looks like out of the can.






Despite its appearance, there isn't gelatin in the mixture; it's the pectin in the cranberries (plus extra pectin, for help) that bind with each other and form a big jellied mass.

Most pectin in fruit occurs in the skins, pith and viscera that surrounds the seeds. So I think that pressing the solids through the chinois while the mixture was hot, the pectin, dissolved into the syrup at that point, flowed through the sieve. Then when it cooled, the high amount of pectin bound up again, causing the weird gelatinous globules.

So I ended up doing a crude method of fining on my next batch, sans egg whites or oxblood. After simmering, I let the whole mass cool, undisturbed. The skins, seeds and pulp rose to the top and formed a thick, gloppy mass. It ended up being pretty easy to scoop off, as long as I skimmed off every trace of thick, foamy stuff.

And once I added sugar, the resultant syrup was smooth, flavorful and thick without being gloppy.

Does this mean you can now get a Cosmopolitan at Rickhouse?

Possibilities

I've been spending much of my time lately transitioning two of the syrups I make through my Small Hand Foods label, Gum Syrup and Pineapple Gum Syrup, to larger production. On a good day it takes me ten hours to make eight cases of syrup by hand, and while the notion of someone squeezing pineapples by hand may be grand and romantic, it actually makes me bitter and angry. Juicing pineapples for six hours straight isn't cooking; it's factory work.

However, it's really hard to find companies who can treat ingredients the way cooks do. And regularly available ingredients are concentrated, pasteurized and often not so tasty. So I've started working in a pretty unorthodox manner. Rather than accepting ingredients as they are readily available, I have started working with companies that can treat ingredients as I do when I make the syrups myself.

As an example, I could not find organic, not-from-concentrate pineapple juice. As far as food production is concerned, it practically doesn't exist. But I refused to believe it's impossible. If I can juice organic pineapples myself, there had to be a way to get someone to do it for me.

I found a local juicer, Voila, that has organic certification. They also happen to have a very large version of the same kind of juicer I use, which is very important to maintain the qualities of the syrup I am looking for. Because they do not already juice pineapples, I needed to buy the fruit myself. After a test run, where I could see that the juice was, in fact, identical to what I produced myself, I knew I was on the right track.

(By the way, sourcing enough fruit for such a large quantity was crazy. I had to show up at Earl's Organic with a cashiers check for twice what I make in a month of bartending, as they wouldn't extend me credit or take a card for such a large amount.)

Ultimately, instead of simply handing my recipe over to a co-packer and standing back as they source ingredients and cook them up, I bought the produce, coordinated the delivery, organized and executed labor to chop the pineapple, organized the juicing and delivered it all myself. Before we even started cooking. But we got it done, and I left with 500 cases of syrup.

It's great; I don't mean to complain...

It's just that there is simply no infrastructure in place for this kind of food production. Food processors aren't used to clients who want to taste their ingredients, let alone source them themselves. It's not that they mind; they just aren't used to it. I find it extremely disheartening. I'm essentially wedging my way in. I refuse to believe that food can't be made in this way. I really hope demand increases for ingredients treated with care. Not only will available food products increase in quality, but it will make my job a hell of a lot easier.

Process

Since I started Small Hand Foods, I often get people asking me about my syrup-making process, so I thought I'd share some of it here.

When people find out what I do, one of the first things they say to me is, "Wow; you do all of that out of your house?" Um... what? No. You can't legally sell stuff you've made in your home kitchen. Actually, in some states you can certify your home kitchen, but California ain't one of them.

"Don't you need permits for that sort of thing?" Yes. You need a Processed Food Registration, food safety certification, Organic Processed Product Registration (if you use organic ingredients), seller's permit, Fictitious Business Name Statement, and business licenses in both the city you make the product in and the one you live in, assuming you do things like keep records in your house. There may be other permits you need for where you live; state and county offices will be able to tell you what you need.

If you are interested in starting a small food business, one of the big initial hurdles is finding a space to cook out of. Commercial kitchens are available for rental, but they can be expensive. They also may not have all of the equipment you need. Many people get their starts through the generosity of people already in the industry, myself included. I owe so much to the former owners of Fellini in Berkeley, Camino in Oakland, and of course, to Charles Phan and the entire Phan family of Slanted Door and Heaven's Dog. Often deals can be worked out when restaurants are closed; i.e. mornings in a dinner-only establishment, or on a Sunday or Monday when a particular restaurant is closed. I start cooking in the afternoon and usually finish midnight or later, because that is when the space I use is available.

I usually start each cooking session by picking up my produce from Berkeley Bowl. It's just slightly higher in cost than wholesale, they have the quality I need, plus they're really nice. I pack it into my cargo van (size 14). Here are 20 cases of organic pineapples.



I buy my bottles from California Glass. They mostly serve the wine industry, but have a number of other bottles and jars for people like myself. They're wholesale only and have a $500 minimum, which was daunting at first, but I got over that quickly. Now I buy from them about every six weeks or so.

I cook in really big pots. I have to stand on a crate to see inside.


Bottling by hand is really time consuming. Especially when the gum syrup is bubbly, and I have to fill the bottles, wait for it to settle, and top off each one.


I slip on the capsules then use the heat gun I have left over from refinishing furniture to shrink them on.


I used to use stock black capsules, but my bottles have these tiny glass bumps on the necks, and the capsules often broke and shrank away from the bumps.
















I switched to custom capsules from C&E Capsules, and now they not only match my labels, the glass bumps no longer break through!



When I finish a batch, I've usually been working 12 or 14 hours. Plus the bottles are pretty hot, and I'm too tired and cranky at this point to wait for them to cool, so I put them away to label later.

Labeling by hand is also ridiculously time consuming. This is one of several times in this process where the economies of scale turn around and laugh in my face. How I wish I had a machine to do this! I use a ruler for the first bottle, then just visually line up each bottle with the first and apply the labels by hand.



I generally cook a larger quantity than I'll need at any given time, and I'll cook usually one or two products a week. I ask my customers to place their orders by Friday, then I know what I'll be cooking next and what ingredients I'll need to order. I cook on Mondays and Tuesdays, label and deliver on Wednesdays, then finish with my shift at Heaven's Dog Wednesday nights. I invariably get panicked calls on Tuesdays for syrups, and if I have the product in stock, I'm happy to oblige, but sometimes I get cleaned out. I do my best, though.

So that's my process. Like most small businesses, my company lives or dies with me alone. The rhythm of production doesn't afford me the luxury of illness, and I've been dreaming of a vacation for two years. But, like most small business owners, I love it, and I wouldn't have it any other way.


Some resources:
Small Business Administration: Frequent classes, most of them free.
Small Business Development Center: One-on-one counseling sessions: free!

In San Francisco:
La Cocina
Renaissance Center

Grenadine

I make and sell a grenadine through my company Small Hand Foods. It differs vastly from what is currently on the market, and some people have been asking why.

First and foremost is the issue of taste. There are generally two kinds of grenadine on the market: ones that contain juice, like Stirrings and Sonoma Syrup Company, and ones that don't, like Rose's and Monin. Unfortunately, although the ones with juice in them are far tastier than their artificial addititive counterparts, when mixing them into cocktail, they simply don't taste like pomegranate. There is the sweetness, of course, and the citric acid tartness, but none of the tannic juiciness I associate with ripe pomegranate.

I had always understood that grenadine was a syrup made from pomegranate and sugar, grenade meaning pomegranate in French, and granada in Spanish. But unlike other cocktail ingredients I can find almost no recipes for it in my collection of old cookbooks. In fact, the only recipe I found is in Home Made Beverages: The Manufacture of Non-Alcoholic and Alcoholic Drinks in the Household by Albert A. Hopkins, first published in 1900. And it is a rather unfortunate one:

Grenadine:
Extract grenadine, 2 oz.; liquid foam, 1 oz.; red fruit coloring, 1 dr.; syrup, 1 gal. Mix then add fruit acid, 2 oz.

(Syrup here would refer to simple syrup, made in this book by adding 2 pounds of sugar to each pint of water and heated until dissolved.)

So I guess we shouldn't fault the modern artificial versions too much; they obviously are following a long heritage as well. But for me, I want a simpler product that tastes like its ingredients. I like to drink the way that I like to eat, close to the earth with minimal processing. I want to know my ingredients, how they were grown and produced, and if possible, the people that grew and produced them. So I knew that my grenadine was going to taste like pomegranate, and hopefully, make cocktails that tasted like there was pomegranate in them.

In a lot of classic cocktails, grenadine is called for in dashes, leading me to believe that it was used often for color. And if you look at a modern version of a common grenadine cocktail like a tequila sunrise, you will see that yes, indeed, there is a very noticeable color addition.My problem is that if grenadine is made with just pomegranate and sugar, it wouldn't be a bright red, it would be a darker, more wine-like color.

Perhaps we have gotten so used to artificial colors that something natural looks too muddy. When we serve a Shirley Temple at Heaven's Dog we use Fever Tree Ginger Ale (as the Shirley Temple was originally made with ginger ale, not 7up or Sprite) and sink some Small Hand Foods Grenadine into the glass. Kids, and the occasional adult who order them, often look askance at the beverage until they take a sip. It's really good, and tastes like ginger and pomegranate, like the actual ingredients. Unusual, yes, but only compared to the high-fructose corn syrup and FD&C Red #40 concoction we've become accustomed to.

There is a great discussion in the Spirits & Cocktails forum on eGullet about making your own grenadine. There are many, many recipes that contributors have posted, and every one of them is vastly superior to anything you can find on your typical liquor store shelf. However, one of the most interesting parts of the discussion is that some people add additional flavors to their grenadine, from vanilla to orange flower water to star anise. One post compared grenadine to pomegranate syrup like orgeat to almond syrup, as in, one is a pure flavor syrup and the other is a flavored syrup with pomegranate or almond as the base. Etymologically this is erroneous, of course, as grenade means pomegranate, and orge actually means barley, the culinary root of this syrup, which has evolved into its current form.

I tried adding flavors to mine. I love orange flower water, and thought vanilla, since it is often used in artificial grenadines, would make the syrup taste a bit more familiar. I even tried adding hibiscus, thinking it would donate a brighter red color and a bit of that lovely sorrel-like zing. But they all tasted weird to me. The vanilla made the syrup taste more like artificial grenadine, which was really unfortunate. The orange flower water tasted out of place and lended a body-product floral unpleasantness, the way too much lavender or violet can. And the hibiscus just muddied the bright acidity of the natural pomegranate.

So I came back to a pure pomegranate syrup. It's dark and murky, like a reduced red wine sauce, and adds a lot of color to a cocktail. But it tastes juicy and rich, less sweet than commercial products, and still has a tannic bite that reminds you it comes from real fruit. And yes, it will add more flavor to your cocktail than the other stuff. But I think that's the way it should be.

Sherry Wine Punch

I have a predilection for sherry-based cocktails for drinking on hot Sundays while relaxing with friends.

You may recognize the setting for this photo as the same as the one for my Italian Lemonade post. Last year I made a sherry and milk lemonade for exactly the same purpose: kickin' it on the river the Sunday after a big party at my friend Jen's farm in the Capay Valley. I figured, why break with tradition?

This time it was our friend Beth's birthday. We ate under the stars and played in the river. I napped and read about pickles. We took eggs warm from the hens. Jen made pita from scratch. There was a pinata for the kids, and another one that was supposed to be for adults, but I never saw it get cracked. (What is in a pinata for adults? Weed and porn?) We slept under the stars. These parties are always fabulous.

So I needed a low-alcohol drink for the day after such revelry. Sherry-based drinks are ideal, and a brief search turned up a Sherry Wine Punch listed in Harry Johnson's "New & Improved Illustrated Bartender's Manual" published in 1888. It includes Orchard Syrup, an ingredient I have been working on for a while. This time I made it with extra lemon juice and more warm spices like cloves and allspice. It came out a bit too apple-pie-like, but the cocktail was still tasty. Next time I think I'm going to try Chinese 5-spice powder.

I made it all in a large jug for sharing, but here it is scaled down for one:

Sherry Wine Punch

3 oz amontillado sherry
1 oz orchard syrup
1/4 oz lemon juice
3/4 oz red wine

Stir sherry, orchard syrup and lemon juice together in a frappe glass, then pack crushed ice in to fill and stir briefly. Float red wine on top.

Enjoy!

Sirop-de-Groseille

As a pretty geeky bartender, I like to scan old bar books looking for drink recipes that call for obscure ingredients (see Capillaire and Orchard Syrup).

I first came across Sirop-de-Groseille in the Savoy Cocktail Book, although it's also listed in Harry McElhone's "Barflies and Cocktails." It's a red currant syrup, sometimes used as a substitute for grenadine or raspberry syrup. It's often described as having a similar flavor to those, although I find it quite different, tannic and with an odd seedlike flavor, like biting into an apple seed. I think it is this quality that makes it a good match with kirsch, as kirsch is made by fermenting whole sour cherries including their pits.

Stone fruit seeds and apple seeds contain benzaldehyde, a poison related to cyanide (see The Trouble With Cyanide). The flavor is barely noticeable in fresh red currants, but when I cooked it into a syrup, the seedlike pungency is much more pronounced.

The first recipe I saw with this syrup was the Artist's Special from the Savoy. I always like drinks that combine sherry with another liquor, and the nutty oxidation of the sherry tones down the tannins and seedy flavor of the groseille. Erik Ellestad of Underhill-Lounge describes his experience with this cocktail here.

Artist's Special Cocktail

1 oz whisky
1 oz sherry
1/2 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz groseille syrup

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

CocktailDB lists the Nineteen-Twenty, a cocktail with both groseille and kirsch. I love this combination, and I love this drink, although I prefer a variation made with genever instead of gin. My co-worker Jon suggested this as I was working out the drink, and I think it is just fabulous.

Dutch 20

1 1/2 oz dry vermouth
3/4 oz genever
1/4 oz kirsch
1/4 oz sirop-de-groseille

Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

There is a French cocktail called The Rose, published in "Petits et Grands Verres" from 1927 that is essentially this drink without the gin. The name refers to the color the syrup lends the drink.

CocktailDB also lists a recipe for making the syrup:

Express the juice of small red currants, reds. Per quart of juice obtained, add 2 quarts of water and 3-1/2 lbs. of sugar. Dissolve sugar in water before adding the juice. Leave standing for several days. Filter or clarify and bottle.

I suppose you could put the currants through a juicer, but I find it easier to simmer them in water for about 10 minutes until the water is bright pink and the fruit looks anemic and sad. Press the whole mass through a chinois. You don't need to de-stem the currants, either, just throw everything into the pot. And I don't know why you would let it stand for several days, except to eliminate solids. I am far too impatient, so I let the whole mass drip slowly through a jelly bag. It still had a tiny amount of sediment, but not enough to be noticeable in a drink.

In any case, red currants are only available fresh for a short period of time every year. But the syrup will last for a while, so give it a try! Or come into Heaven's Dog, for as long as my bottle lasts, of course.

Tales!

Like many bartenders, enthusiasts and all around bar geeks, I spent last week in New Orleans at the annual Tales of the Cocktail event. It's more interesting than a lot of cocktail events in that there are seminars and workshops, not just brand shills. (Unfortunately, some of the seminars are given by brand shills, so you have to read the descriptions carefully.)

But for most of us working bartenders, it's really an excuse to rub elbows with those industry folk we admire, and hang out with bartenders we like but rarely have the opportunity to spend time with outside of their bars (and ours). And drink, of course.

The workshops themselves were a mixed bag. I've learned to go by the people giving them, as they tend to be pretty informative. One I went to, Asian-Influenced Cocktails, was essentially a brand promotional event given by two soju and sake producers trying to convince everyone that these liquors were the Next Big Thing. (Example: Soju cocktails are low-calorie! Which everyone appreciates! Um, aren't they lower in calories because they're lower in alcohol? And why is the drink you're serving me blue?) I wish I had spent the same money on the ice-carving demonstration given by an actual bartender. The best one I went to was Sugar: The Science of Sweet given by Darcy O'Neil of The Art of Drink. He discussed various sugars (sucrose, glucose, fructose, etc.) and how they act in the mouth and in the presence of other ingredients like acid and alcohol, all important considerations when composing cocktails. I've been a fan of Darcy for years, and will happily sit in any seminar he gives.

One of the most fun nights was a party and barbecue held by a handful of San Francisco bartenders who had rented a house right near Frenchman Street, home of some of best bars to see live jazz (more on that later). It was close to our rented apartment, which, seeing as I did not have a prize-winning cocktail that garnered me a spot in the Hotel Monteleone like last year, was a far more practical option.

Me and Miss Jackie Patterson, the two lady bartenders of Heaven's Dog

The Pisco Duggan was drinking was delicious. I would totally buy it if I knew what it was.

One of the absolute best things about San Francisco bartenders is our support of each other and willingness to share tips, techniques, recipes and anything else involved in making our drinks. It's a dynamic I haven't seen, at this level, in any other city. When we're off work, we sit at each other's bars and ask questions, and drink, and talk shop. No one is cagey, and no one is rude, or even rarely very arrogant. People who act that way don't fit in very well, and it's pretty obvious. We all work so much that we rarely get to hang out without being at a bar, in which case, one of us is working. So when a San Francisco bartender party gets going, it's pretty much love all over the place. Smack-talking, of course, but mostly drunken, drunken love. Ronnie from Magnolia worked the grill, there was swag and product promotion (i.e. free booze) all over the place, and it was overheard that "if this house burned down you wouldn't be able to get a decent drink in San Francisco for ten years." Great fun.

This year I brought my boyfriend, a member of the Oakland-based Dixieland style brass band Blue Bone Express. Although I had been to New Orleans before, I got to see a whole new side of it (arguably the better known side) as he took me to club after club, introducing me to his industry giants. The New Orleans Jazz Vipers at d.b.a.

Kermit Ruffins at the Blue Nile

We also saw Treme Brass Band, but the venue was little more than a smoky basement, and none of my photos turned out. It was pretty amazing; I've lived in California my whole life, and was never exposed to this kind of music before. But in New Orleans, live brass is played nightly, and often for free. It was a welcome respite from the 10:00am drinking workshops, too.

Our last day we rented bikes and had a picnic in Audubon Park. Anyone who knows me well knows I love picnics!

New Orleans in July is the low season because of the ridiculous heat, so hotels and apartments are dead cheap. The struggle with the conference on the whole is how to negotiate brand sponsorships while trying to provide informative discussions on aspects of drink-making. I don't consider a sales pitch something I'd like to spend money on, and yet I did, unwittingly until I was there. I left early from such events, and felt taken advantage of. I know the event itself is expensive, and sponsorships help offset that cost. But if the seminars continue to consist of brand shills and company bartenders, I'm pretty sure home enthusiasts and professional bartenders will stop attending. So I'd recommend the event for next year, but with the advice to only take classes taught by folk you have heard of, on subjects you are interested in. Taste the brand products in the tasting rooms. They're free.