The past two weeks have been a rollercoaster of management and event planning at the restaurant, mixed with huddling at home in the brunt of winter. Angie ended up with a 5 day weekend due to a combination of MLK day and snow days between snow storms and the polar vortex. Naturally, that means we spent a lot of time with our big beautiful book and tried to decide on our next project.
Angie sent an email with a list of liquors we needed to our local liquor stores to probe about a few cocktail projects we had in mind. To our amazement, out of 18 items between the next few cocktails we were thinking about doing next, they only had 2 items; one we could acquire from one of our wine vendors, and another item which would not arrive until March. Iowa is a difficult beast to acquire liquor in.
With our cabin fever growing under the relentless winter storms, we were itching to make something. That’s when Angie started laughing as we stumbled across a cocktail with the owner of my restaurant’s name on it. Enter — Another Caucasian, Gary.
We have to claim our ignorance here – the title of the drink made us giggle about our Caucasian owner. I did some Google searching to learn that it is a movie quote from the movie The Big Lebowski in which the character, The Dude, asks the bartender, Gary, for a white Russian.
“Another caucasian, Gary.”
“Right, Dude.”
Sadly, neither Angie nor I have seen The Big Lebowski. We’ll probably fix this problem while sipping on some ‘Caucasians.’ On another note, we have an awesome version of the white russian of our very own at our restaurant. Designed by our mentor bar manager from a previous restaurant, the drink is called the Jackie Treehorn. Yes, that is ironically another reference to The Big Lebowski.
The ‘Caucasian’ itself seemed simple enough. The book describes it with the words “coffee, milk, and abiding.” Abiding meaning “lasting a long time; enduring, of a feeling or memory.” I find this description interesting. Some cocktails specifically mention time as an ingredient, and there is a beautiful essay in the book on this topic. Oddly, this recipe specifies abiding, not just time (whereas many other cocktails simply list “time” in their description). I wonder if it has to do with a reminiscing of The Big Lebowski, or the melting of the milk cubes making the drink grow more and more creamy with time, or perhaps both.
We called our local liquor stores again, admittedly feeling less than hopeful, considering our luck thus far. However, much to our absolute amazement they had the liquor that we needed: Appleton Estate Signature Blend Jamaican Rum and Galliano L’autentico Liqueur.
We went off on a shopping journey to explore varieties of ice molds. Angie ordered some 1.25” molds, per the request of the recipe, online. That is… Angie thought she ordered 1.25” molds but she goobered and managed to order 2” molds. Determined to follow the recipe for the first cocktail, we did some searching around and found what we needed at Target, and even more cool molds from our local little kitchen supply store.
We decided to use milk from our local dairy farm, Hansen’s, to make frozen milk cubes, and we were set to begin Another Aviary Cocktail, Blog. Then, we froze “whole milk” in the ice molds. My dearest goober Angie’d again, hence the quotation marks. Her first round was made with heavy cream because she mixed up the ingredients for Another Caucasian, Gary with the Two Turtle Doves, as we were originally working on the Two Turtle Doves first. Double oops. As I wrote this Angie realized the Two Turtle Doves doesn’t use heavy cream either. She’s my goofball. The Two Turtle Doves project was delayed by liquor limitations (spoilers); we intend to visit it next.
The next step was to make the chicory syrup. To make this syrup, we needed “10g chicory.” What the book did not list was what type of chicory we needed, and until this point we had never heard of chicory. After some Google-ing, we learned that chicory is “a blue-flowered Mediterranean plant of the daisy family, cultivated for its edible salad leaves and carrot-shaped root.” The roots are commonly dried and roasted, then used as a caffeine-free substitute and/or addition for coffee. The leaves of the plant are often used in salads or other dishes.
More internet searching lead us to believe that what we are intended to use is roasted chicory root since most of the results that pop up is for this type of product. It also made sense that this would be a natural complement to this coffee based cocktail (Aviary team, if you are reading this, please correct us if we’re wrong). Our main grocery store had a single coffee and chicory blend in stock, but no straight chicory. Instead of battling the frigid hellscape of -45 degree weather, we just ordered some online. Thanks, internet.
This recipe calls for us to toast the chicory at 350°F for 10 minutes or “until fragrant” in the oven. Eight minutes in the oven caused the chicory to come out semi-burnt and smoking. We tried again and put a new batch in the oven for 4-5 minutes, and while it was fragrant, it had started smoking again. Is it normal for roasted chicory to start smoking like this?
We portioned the toasted chicory with the prescribed amount of sugar in mini Ziplock bags to take to the restaurant for the sous vide process. Once we made actual Hansen’s frozen milk cubes, we packed up and headed to the restaurant.
We were getting excited to play with bigger toys for this round, namely a sous vide and chamber vacuum sealer. My experience in the kitchen is pretty basic. I’ve worked fast food lines, buffets, and a small mom and pop’s kitchen, so using the fancy stuff is new to me. Luckily, this first round was as easy as it gets. We had no difficulty setting up the sous vide, but it took an hour to get to temp. The chamber vacuum sealer was fun to use. It caused an interesting reaction with the water, chicory, and sugar. It expanded, did a bubbly fizzy thing, then suddenly suctioned and flattened into a syrupy non-bubbly goop. Excellent science here. I’d like to thank my mom for exquisite vocabulary. For a less sophisticated audience: when the machine first got started, it caused the bag to inflate, and the contents mixed and bubbled intensely, then, as fast as the snap of a finger, the bag flattened into the sealed sauce/syrup.
Using the chamber vacuum sealer as opposed to a standard vacuum sealer that most people are familiar with (such as a FoodSaver) was interesting. Chamber vacuum sealers use a powerful motor to create a vacuum inside the entire chamber (where you set the bag that you are vacuum sealing). This allows you to vacuum seal liquids without issue, where as standard vacuum sealers would end up sucking out liquids during the process. We are really fortunate to have access to a restaurant full of specialty equipment for this project.
Once the chicory syrup was ready, we prepped the cocktail batch at the bar. Angie went next door to buy us some lunch while I got to work on our coffee.
The coffee that the recipe calls for is double-brewed. The process for it was very simple — brew the coffee, then brew new ground beans in the already brewed coffee. However, I decided to explore more coffee methods to experiment with the flavor and final product.
After doing some math and research, very generally speaking, double-brewed coffee has about twice the coffee per volume to normal drip coffee. Espresso has about four times the coffee per volume to normal drip coffee. So, in theory, equal parts water and espresso would create a similar effect to double brewed coffee. After following the double brewed coffee recipe, I brewed some espresso with our espresso machine. Then, once I brewed the espresso, I diluted it with equal parts water to make it similar in strength to the double-brewed coffee. After sampling, we found this to be fairly true with one major caveat — double-brewed coffee has no crema, however watered down espresso still has crema.
My last experiment (which we sampled with the final product) was to filter out the crema from some espresso to make it nearly equivalent to double-brewed coffee, and leaving some espresso with crema.
I cooled all of the coffee via ice baths, meaning we had three varieties to compare: 1) Double-brewed coffee (per the recipe), 2) diluted espresso without crema (filtered), and 3) diluted espresso with crema (unfiltered). Looking back, I want to sample this with the extreme coffee lover’s palette in mind using undiluted, unfiltered espresso.
At this point, we invited some of our fellow management staff from the restaurant. Knowing that there were several cocktails to be made in a set for this picture, we needed help drinking all of it. Professional development, anyone?
Finally, we were ready for the moment of truth, and we had a fun comparison ahead of ourselves as we drank our cocktails. The first batch we made was true to the recipe with double brewed coffee and the cocktail batch over the frozen milk cubes. It was balanced and simple, with a nice blend of coffee and chicory flavor. The coffee flavor wasn’t strong, and the texture was nice and smooth. The second batch was made with filtered espresso. It had a slightly more waxy, rich flavor from the fine-ground espresso beans. Lastly, the third batch was made with unfiltered espresso with crema. This round tasted the most rich and flavorful. Everyone agreed that we liked it the most. We may have been biased, as this was not a blind tasting. I am curious how these three would compare under a blind tasting, but it was a fun experiment nevertheless.
The final product was finished, and Angie and I celebrated the completion of our seventh cocktail from the Aviary book. However, we decided the job wasn’t done. Angie and I just were not in love with the pictures we had from this round.
Once we had seen the scene from The Big Lebowski that inspired this drink, we wanted a cool photo to capture the spirit of the scene better than our first attempt. Angie had the genius idea to use some miniature wine carafes to emulate bowling pins, and mini milk balls to represent bowling balls. We weren’t sure if it would pan out like we intended, but we definitely couldn’t stop until we got the picture we imagined.
Angie prepared our small wine carafes with some red nail polish tape to create bowling pin themed glasses. Alas, we were running out of time to finish that Sunday, so we had to spill into the next day or two to finish the job.
The next day, I made more chicory syrup and began all of the preparations for another round of cocktails. This time around, Angie achieved a much more fragrant toasted chicory at 325°F degrees for 7 minutes. I re-batched everything which proved particularly challenging because I worked on this round while juggling office work at the restaurant.
Then, I made more diluted espresso with crema, and made small milk balls with a spherical ice mold from home, creating a resemblance to mini-bowling balls. Once the balls were ready, we were worried they wouldn’t fit through the neck of these tiny carafes. Crossing our fingers, we attempted to push one of the milk balls through the shallow neck of the wine carafe, and to our surprise and excitement, it was an exact fit. It barely fell into the base of the carafe with a gentle nudge.
Brimming with delight, Angie and I started to shake up and make up Another Seven Caucasians, Readers. She set up for photos on our dance floor and this second photo-op was a strike!
With a beautiful photo and a horrible pun, it was time to knock these pins back instead of down. After making so many bowling puns (ha) this round, I look forward to getting my mind out of the gutters. Word for the wise, drinking out of wine carafes is like begging to accidentally wear your drink. Don’t do it. Angie’s sweater is still hanging to dry in the bathroom as I type this post. That was several days ago…
Seriously, we are so lucky to be running a fine dining restaurant to do these projects in. Special thank you to my owner, Gary Kroeger. I’ve had incredible opportunities thanks to him, so this Caucasian is to him. The picture below is Gary in his youth. It made for a funny touch. Thanks, “Dude”!
