If you're a Jets fan, like me, there's nothing super about the upcoming Super Bowl: the hated Giants playing the despised Patriots? It's like a recurring nightmare—we had to suffer through the same game just four years ago! Back then, I survived by focusing on the food and drink. Well, mostly the drink, and this year the survival plan is the same. On hand will be chavelas, beer-based cocktails that hail from Mexico (they're part of the country's great tradition of cervezas preparadas — prepared beers). Keep reading »
It had been years since I'd given much thought to grenadine, that bright red fruity syrup made famous by the Shirley Temple, a childhood favorite. But then I recently had a Ward 8 — a classic whiskey cocktail whose original recipe calls for orange juice, lemon juice, and grenadine — and that splash of sweet grenadine had me intrigued. Keep Reading »
Photo: MacKenzie Smith
Hands-down the best part of being an editor at SAVEUR is working in alluringly close proximity to the test kitchen. All day there are tantalizing smells wafting out into the office, and we get to nibble on recipes being tried and tweaked to run in the magazine — but often the call goes 'round when someone working in the kitchen has made up something on the fly, done something creative with leftovers, or just whipped up a batch of their favorite this or that. Keep reading »
Photo: MacKenzie Smith
From SAVEUR Issue #144
During the 100-odd years between the War of 1812 and World War I, when American bartenders perfected the fine art of mixing drinks, American drinkers liked their cocktails, punches, fizzes, sours, and even mint juleps made out of good French brandy, preferably cognac brandy—the smoothest of grape-based spirits. Cognac and the cocktail had long since parted ways, though, by the waning years of the 20th century, when most drinks were designed more to disguise the taste of the liquor that went into them than to highlight it. Even in the past decade, with the recuperation of the bartender's craft, I have rarely come across cognac drinks. Keep reading »
In the pantheon of cocktails, sours get a particularly bad rap. Thanks to generations of drink-happy college students sloshing together cheap booze with syrupy store-bought sour mix, it's rare that you'll find a sophisticated drinker who asks the bartender for a whiskey or amaretto sour with a straight face. So it was surprising for to find the Ada Clare on the menu at The Vault at Pfaff's, a speakeasy-style bar in New York City that caters to a clientele of decidedly sophisticated drinkers. The drink, a staple of the menu since the bar's opening in 2011, combines sour mix with both whiskey and amaretto, resulting in a cocktail that gives new meaning to the idea of a whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Keep reading »
It was love at first sip for me and Becherovka, a spirit I first met during a college semester abroad in Prague. Ringing with notes of sweet spices, pungent herbs, and stomach-soothing bitters, it's like a little dose of Christmas. And just like my favorite holiday, it makes everything better, no matter the season. Produced since 1807 in the Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Becherovka is made from a secret mixture of herbs and spices, and my grandmotherly Czech host-mother believed in its curative powers just as much as she believed that the government could tap her phone line and that all savory sandwiches should be made with a base of thickly buttered bread. Keep reading »
A whole lot of bottles of wine pass through the SAVEUR offices every year, and we swirl and spit our way through a great range of flavors, regions, and prices. We love different wines for different reasons, but when it comes to entertaining, we want wines that pair easily with a variety of foods and don't cost too much per bottle so we can buy enough to generously serve a crowd. Out of all the wines we tried in 2011, these are the bottles that stood out for this purpose. (We certainly put them to work as we entertained over the holidays!) See the wines »
While most alcoholic beverages have robust cocktail lives, mixing merrily with bitters, juices, sugars, and other boozes in an infinity of concatenations, beer has managed to stay pretty much above the fray — with the exception of the occasional michelada. But at the New York City restaurant JoeDoe, cocktail whiz Jill Schuster runs a bar menu where beer factors into more than half of the drinks on offer. Often they share space in the glass with stronger spirits like tequila, vodka, or gin, but in the Mr. Adams — a drink Schulster developed for brewery Sam Adams — the beer stands alone. Keep reading »
From SAVEUR Issue #144
Since 1891, the Giulio Cocchi estate, a wine producer in Asti, Italy, has been making Cocchi Americano, an aperitivo of fortified Moscato d'Asti wine steeped with bitter, quinine-rich cinchona bark, citrus peel, and other botanicals. Keep reading »
From SAVEUR Issue #144
The dry, earthy, effervescent wines we adore from the five lambrusco appellations in Italy's Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy regions are nothing like the sweet pink stuff that flooded the American market in the 1970s and '80s. Keep reading »
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