Guest Author - Beth Schreibman Gehring
First of all, Happy New Year! I hope that yours was a wonderful holiday season filled to the brim with joy!
The Christmas holidays brought me many wonderful gifts , but one of my very favorites, a delightful book called "Artisanal Cocktails" by renowned bartender Scott Beattie was given to me by my nephew Michael and his darling girlfriend Molly, who live in Portland, Oregon. For several years now, Michael has been taunting me with tales of his adventures at Cyrus, a gorgeous and world acclaimed restaurant nestled deep in the heart of the Sonoma wine country. Molly is lucky enough to have a mother who lives in that part of Northern California so she and my nephew get to enjoy the bounty quite frequently!
The bar at Cyrus is at the forefront of a wonderful new trend in cocktails, that of using only the freshest seasonal ingredients in cocktails made totally from scratch. A cocktail made this way is an extraordinary lesson in freshness, more like a delightful dessert or an exquisite amuse bouche than a drink!
I have noticed myself that when I create a cocktail in this fashion I'm inclined to enjoy it more, linger over it than just drink it! Cocktails made from the freshest and finest ingredients, using only the highest grades of alcohol are also easier on the system wreaking less havoc in the wee hours of the morning after!
The sugary additives in the mixers , juices and inexpensive flavorings commonly used to make mass quantities of cocktails are not really very good for us and once you've tasted a cocktail created from fresh fruit, herbs and handcrafted sweeteners you'll not readily accept any substitutes!
"Artisanal Cocktails" is a gorgeous book that holds nothing back! Scott Beattie genuinely cares about his craft and wants everyone to be able to enjoy it! His recipes are nothing short of poetry and his pictures beautiful! But best of all, you can replicate his results at home, he shows you how with the divine detail of an alchemist! His tales of bartering with his neighbors with restaurant credits so that he could use their fresh satsuma mandarins are wonderful. He walks through his woods to find elderberries, blackberries, minors lettuce and other wildcrafted treats to use in his potions and he readily shares his recipes for 5 spice syrup and tamarind syrup as well as the trick to making beautiful fruit foams that he layers with unbelievable delicacy on top of many of his signature cocktails!
If you begin to follow his formulas you will discover yourself thinking about the world in a vastly different way, enjoying certain fruits and vegetables only at the peak of freshness as nature intended, not shipped 3/4s of the way around the world where they lose their specialness. the flavor of fresh grapes in the fall pressed into an exquisite elixir cannot be replicated in anyway in the winter when then they must come from Chile. Spring onions only come once a year along with the fresh parsleys and baby lettuces. Scott Beattie intends for us to refine our palates and have fun doing it!
Run , don't walk to the link I've provided and see for yourself!
