Brooklyn Brainery

Chinatown Roulette: Vinegar drinks

j soma — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:27:30 -0400

When you go to Chinatown, you're morally obligated to buy strange and unfamiliar goods, then decipher (and eat) them back home. It's Chinatown Roulette!

I was on the prowl for Taiwanese sarsaprilla for my root beer class when I was suddenly found myself face-to-face with the drink of my dreams:

Vinegar drinks. Apple vinegar drink. Plum vinegar drink. Beautiful, amazing, vinegary vinegar drinks.

A poorly-kept secret about me is that I love vinegar. I will do shots of black vinegar for little to no reason. I will spend hours googling about drinking vinegar to see if it will kill me, or if other people do it, too (Japan does!).

This was the first time I'd really seen something that was officially drinking vinegar, though. So they got bought, and they were gonna get drunk.

As an added benefit, they'll make me healthy, too. The apple one claims to "help digestion and enhance appetite," while the plum will "moisture my throat and quench my thirst." Not really impressed with the benefits of the latter, but I'll admit my throat does need some moisturing every now and again.

Apple vinegar drink ingredients

First off, can we just for a second highlight that it's made by EXCELLENCE FOOD BIOCHEMICAL CO., LTD? It's memorable because (a) it's definitely who will run the food chain in 2036, (b) I've bought things produced by them before.

A few months ago I came across some fancy mulberry vinegar, not just in a fancy bottle but in a fancy decorative cardboard box, like Scotch. What. Despite its airs, t was not suited for drinking.

But enough of the old! Turn now to bask in the light of the future of drink-tops.

They're both bag-ish, but come with fancy twist-off tops, very much a grown-up Capri Sun.

Plum vinegar drink ingredients

Anyway, looks like drinking vinegar is nothing but water + juice + vinegar + sugar. I like juice and I like vinegar, so let's get to tasting!

The pour

Disappointingly, you can't even tell there's anything in those cups, much less which is which. I'd expect a little bit of color from an EXCELLENT BIOCHEMICAL product!

Apple vinegar drink tasting notes:

It tastes like you are drinking vinegar. The vinegar isn't exceptionally appley or sweet or anything, it's just like... a very plain vinegar. I do not question that it is currently helping my digestion and enhancing my appetite.

"It almost tastes like juice!"

On second tasting, maybe it does taste like watered down apple cider.

Plum vinegar drink tasting notes:

It tastes like green apples. Swear to god, green apples. It's perfectly sweet and only a little sour, it is an amazing perfect drink. How is this the plum one?

It tastes like grapes! x 2

I blind-taste-tested Jen and she picked the plum one as being the apple one. With certainty. Weird.

The same company also sells grape, pineapple and peach flavors; I saw the grape ones at New York Mart but they was only being sold in an eight pack. I got my singles at New Kam Man on Canal.

Turns out that vinegar drinks are absolutely a Thing. Toby Cecchini called them "the first truly nonalcoholic drink [he]'d ever had" in the NYT, and even hits you with a recipe for how to make them. The most important part, though, was was they're called in the US: shrubs.

It is remarkably difficult to find pictures of drinkable shrubs on the Internet. Here is a non-drinkable one from Flickr.

Colonial Americans would preserve fruits in vinegar, and then mix them with water and sugar in the summer for a refreshing drink. And shrubs were born! Switchel, a pitch-perfect summer drink which demands a post all its own, is nothing but water, apple cider vinegar, sugar and a touch of molasses.

Don't worry, though, shrubs can also escape the world of non-alcoholic drinks. For the tipple-friendly readers, your next stop should be Cocktail 101: How to Make Shrub Syrups over at Serious Eats.

A while after I bought these, Jen told me about Bragg's Apple Cider Vinegar Drink. Now to track some of it down and have a good ol' East vs. West showdown.

Some Fun Facts About Sutures

jen — Wed, 16 May 2012 08:46:45 -0400

Monday evening we had a class on suturing, and it was as awesome as it sounds. After learning some history and theory, we dove in and some bananas with some pretty serious wounds. Number #1 fact about suturing? It's hard.

During the class, I was particularly excited to learn that the oldest known suture dates to a mummy from 1100 BC, even though historians believe the practice goes back much further, to at least 3000 BC, and perhaps all the way back to 30,000 BC.

So yeah, people have been sewing up their cuts forever. Nowadays, sutures are likely to be made of nylon, but in ye olden days, they could be made of a whole lot of other, more interesting things. Things like hair, flax, hemp, nerves or even arteries.

Nylon doesn't dissolve, which is good for sutures on your face but less awesome for sutures deep inside your body. Good thing we've got absorbable sutures for that.

Today, absorbable sutures are often synthetic (what isn't?), but long ago, they were made of a fun thing known as catgut. It's not the gut of a cat, but it is the gut of another animal - generally a sheep or goat, but if you have a horse or donkey kicking about the house, you can use them too. Wikipedia has a pretty thorough paragraph on catgut production, if you're interested.

One last, random tip. Next time you're sewing up a buddy, make sure the edges of the skin pucker slightly up, like this: /\ and not like this \/.

If the edges are forced together and turn downward, the skin's waterproof nature will interfere with healing, and that's the whole reason you put stitches in in the first place.

And, in conclustion, here's my banana with a running stitch:

This is a quick and dirty stitch, but you wouldn't really want to use it on a wound, because if it breaks in one place, your whole suturing job is ruined. That's why, generally, each stitch is individually tied off. If one breaks, you've still got 6 other ones to hold the cut together so it can keep healing.

Organize your desk: Always Be Knolling

j soma — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:40:20 -0400

I have a rule about how to not get mugged: it's called ABR, and it stands for Always Be Running. If you are running, it is my belief that muggers will say "oh, that dude is running" and will decline to mug you.

Being at your desk is different. You probably won't be mugged, but you might be disorganized instead. In this case, the best advice one can give is ABK, Always Be Knolling.

Knolling is the process of arranging like objects in parallel or at 90-degree angles. You have seen this and been impressed by it, but maybe you didn't know it had a name.

I will strongly assert that it is a highlight of Wes Anderson movies until I am proven otherwise.

from Willow & Bloom

from Tobias Bergdahl

Maybe you want a whole tumblr on knolling

The term "knolling" was coined by Frank Gehry's janitor, Andrew Kromelow, because he saw the everyhing-at-right-angles arrangement as similar to Knoll furniture. The sculptor Tom Sachs took this to the Next Level and coined ABK as one of 10 rules of his shop.

If you promise to knoll your desk when you're done, you can watch the video below.

You can see all of Tom Sachs' 10 Bullets here.

Let's Make: Homemade Fruit Wine

j soma — Sun, 13 May 2012 09:12:48 -0400

Okay, let's be honest with each other: I'm not giving you any recipes (yet). I put together a batch of blueberry wine a month ago, and I need to make sure my house doesn't catch on fire before I really report back to you.

Blueberry wine? You cry incredulously. Blueberry wine? What happened to good ol' grapes?

I bought blueberries instead, is what happened.

Fact: You can make wine out of pretty much anything. From Wikipedia:

Although most wine is made from grapes, it may also be made from other fruit or non-toxic plant material

See? Blueberries are non-toxic, so sounds good to me. Beer, if you are curious, is made from grains. Grains are indeed from plants and aren't generally toxic, but for some reason they don't fall under the same umbrella.

The short story on fruit wines is as such: mix the fruit with some water. Mix that mixture with some yeast. Wait a while. Rebottle. Wait a while. Rebottle. Wait a while. Drink until pleasant.

Easy enough in theory, but we'll see if practice bears this out. The waiting period spans a few months to a year, so you'll need some patience on you for this one.

If you're interested in making your own fruit wine, you should check out Jack Keller's Winemaking Home Page, which deserves a post all its own. Blueberry recipes abound!