Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

6.Transfer the chicken and garlic cloves to a warmed serving dish, and pour the pan juices over all. Garnish the dish with the reserved fried garlic slices.

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

SPOONING WITH CHAMPAGNE

My lady friend was recently visiting me from England. We drank Champagne but didn’t finish the bottle. She suggested that I hang the handle of a silver spoon down into the neck of the bottle before putting it in the fridge. (She saw this on the telly over there.) Believe it or not, the next day the Champagne had not gone flat. How does this work? Would a fork work as well?

Yes, a fork would work just as well. So would a railroad spike. Or a magic wand, for that matter, because the spoon did absolutely nothing. The spoon dodge is pure bunk. Or, if your British friend prefers, humbug and poppycock.

Champagne simply doesn’t go flat as fast as beer and soda do. It would have been just as fizzy the next day without the spoon. All that really mattered is that you refrigerated it. That’s important because carbon dioxide, like all gases, dissolves and stays dissolved to a greater extent in colder liquids.

In order for a dissolved gas to escape from a liquid, the gas molecules must have a microscopic speck of material (a nucleation site ) upon which to congregate until there are enough of them to form a bubble. The main reason that true Champagne stays bubbly longer is that it is extremely clear and speck-free. If it says méthode champenoise on the label, it has been clarified by dégorgement —a process in which all sediment is allowed to settle down into the neck of the inverted bottle, after which the neck is frozen and the ice plug, along with the trapped sediment, is removed. Beers are rarely clarified to that extent and therefore lose their fizz more rapidly.

To save your leftover Champagne overnight, refrigerate the bottle with a tight stopper—not tableware—in its neck. You never know when you’ll have even more to celebrate in the morning.

About that tight stopper: You can spend up to $20 for a fancy “Champagne stopper” in one of those shops that cater to winos—uh, I mean wine enthusiasts. It grips the lip of the bottle around which the wire had been wound, and then you screw its rubber disk down tightly against the bottle’s mouth. It’s just great at holding the pressure if you intend to shake up the bottle. But it’s entirely unnecessary in less dire circumstances. The lip and the original wire cage were intended to hold the high pressure of gas produced during the in-the-bottle fermentation. That’s what makes the bottle pop when you pull the cork. But after the bottle has been opened, there’s no such pressure. Any cork or bottle stopper will preserve the residual gas in your leftover Champagne, provided that it is kept cold and unshaken.

(A footnote: Reportedly, a group of scientists at Stanford University in 1994 found that sparkling wine remained bubbly longer when the bottle was left open than when it was re-corked. But they had to do a lot of test-drinking during this prolonged experiment, and their observations may not have been, shall we say, sharply focused.)

Sidebar Science: Put a cork in it

WHY DOChampagne corks have that weird shape, like a mushroom wearing a dirndl skirt?

When planted in the bottle, they were just as cylindrical as the corks used in still wine bottles, only bigger. A normal-sized wine cork is 24 mm (about 0.94 in.) in diameter; it is compressed and inserted into an 18 mm (0.71 in.) bottle neck by a “corker” machine. (Cork is quite compressible.) Champagne corks, on the other hand, are 31 mm (1.22 in.) in diameter and are squeezed into a 17.5 mm (0.69 in.) neck, with the top third of the cork sticking out as a “head” that can be grasped for opening. As soon as it is liberated from confinement, the bottom portion, which is soft and wet, expands back to its original diameter. (Cork is also quite elastic.)

You can observe cork’s compressibility and elasticity by soaking a used Champagne cork in water for a few days to soften it, whereupon it will expand back to its original cylindrical form along its whole length. It will also revert to its original shape if you soften it by simply microwaving it for a couple of minutes.

(Caution: Don’t operate an empty or nearly empty microwave oven. Radiation that isn’t absorbed by food or water can bounce back into the wave generator—the magnetron —and damage it. Put a cup of water into the oven along with the cork.)

THE WAR BETWEEN THE STATES

I’ve always wondered about Kentucky bourbon and Tennessee sour mash whiskey. No other states seem to have a lock on their types of spirits.

What sets them apart, and why can’t the same products be made in other states?

What sets them apart is largely local pride, but virtually identical whiskey can be made anywhere. They just can’t use those state names if they were made, for example, in North Dakota.

First, what is it that makes bourbon bourbon? Bourbon is officially defined by the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), which was split off from the ridiculously conceived Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. It is defined as a straight (unblended) whiskey produced at a maximum alcoholic strength of 80 percent by volume from a fermented mash containing at least 51 percent corn, and aged at a maximum alcoholic strength of 62.5 percent in charred, new oak containers. In practice, however, most bourbon whiskeys are distilled to around 60 percent alcohol, and bottled at 40 to 50 percent. And they are made from 65 to 75 percent corn, plus smaller amounts of other grains such as barley, rye, or wheat.

According to the TTB, the word bourbon may not be used to describe any distilled spirits produced outside the United States. But no names of states are mentioned in the regulations, except for the perfectly reasonable ruling that a bourbon may not be labeled “Kentucky Bourbon” unless it was made in Kentucky. There are approximately 162 distilleries producing genuine bourbon in the United States. Most of them, but by no means all, are located in Kentucky.

Now what about Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey? Is it a bourbon? Strictly speaking (and I’d better speak strictly here because tempers run high on this topic), no. It fits all the legal definitions of bourbon—made primarily from corn; aged in charred, new oak barrels; and well within the strength specifications—except for one thing: It undergoes an additional step. After distillation and before aging, it is dripped through a ten-foot-thick layer of sugar-maple charcoal, a process billed by Jack Daniel’s as “charcoal mellowing” but known officially as the Lincoln County Process. That’s the only procedural difference between Jack Daniel’s and most of the anointed and consecrated bourbons.

Jack Daniel’s brags about being a sour mash whiskey, meaning that part of the mash used in the fermentation process consists of the exhausted remains of a previous fermentation. But the sour mash process is used in making almost all bourbons and other whiskeys today, so this fact alone has nothing to do with the Zen of being bourbon.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Barley—scarcely

Jack Daniel’s Rib-Ticklin’ Barbecue Sauce

It would be a waste to limit a bottle of Jack’s to simply sipping, when it can add a kick to this sauce. For 2 racks of baby back ribs, you will need about 1 cup of barbecue sauce. Save the other cup to slather over broiled chicken later in the week. You’ll want to add this sauce to your collection of good BBQ recipes.