I’m probably just late getting to the party, but I have only recently discovered how marvelously Dan Schreiber’s Salted Dark Milk Chocolate pairs with red wine!

Especially the less tannic, more fruit-forward, international style of wine that’s still dominant.  I first tried this “red wine” from Chile when it was on Piccadilly’s tasting last month and was immediately won over by this blend of Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Carignan, and Cabernet Sauvignon.  I am not usually a fan of the soft, easy-pleasy wines made from Merlot, but this but this one is quite a bit more serious while still being easy on the tongue and on the wallet.  It’s a Jorge Ordonez selection, so you’d expect it to be a great value, but unlike some of his Spanish wines, which now taste more like Vanilla Creamsicles from all the toasty American oak they marinate in, this wine spends a few months in French oak barrels.  Just enough to give it some backbone and smooth the edges of this concentrated and seriously ripe blend.  It’s a great value for $10 or so.

And yesterday, I had my first chance to try Dan’s new “Pious” bar, made with one ingredient: cacao beans.

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Back in the spring, when I first encountered the smoky, fiery, spreadable Calabrian salami called nduja at London’s Borough Market and posted on it (on April Fool’s Day, no less), I had no idea that nduja fever would sweep American meatheads and that my posts on trying to recreate this salami would become the most frequently viewed of all I’ve written. Apparently, you don’t have to taste the real thing to catch nduja fever; its regional nickname, as “the Red Nutella,” is enough to enflame the imagination.

The biggest obstacle I faced in reproducing what I had tasted is that I don’t have access to any of the Calabrian peppers that traditionally go into this salami. Seeds from Italy had already sold out of Calabrian peppers for the season, and Scott over at Sausage Debauchery is the only one to have tracked down some concentrato di peperoncini with peppers from Calabria at a reasonable price – almost a kilo for a little more than $10 – but I have yet to see a can of it! (Hint, hint. If he can’t send me a mail order address, maybe we’ll just have to do Christmas early this year, and mail him some goodies from the clubhouse in exchange for some cans of fire concentrate.)

In the meantime, I am working on perfecting a secret weapon of my own to turn up the heat.

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I had a good time with some good friends at Piccadilly’s special tasting yesterday (30+ wines for $3).  Ok, Ok, I should have mentioned this earlier and listed it on the Events page (Sorry, Paul, my bad!), but then I would have had to body surf from table to table.  Besides, it completely slipped my mind until I saw the text from R at 3, reminding me that the tasting started in a couple hours.

Although sipping wine with friends is a simple, civilized pleasure, I really enjoy a tasting like this as a chance to make new discoveries, to get a kind of snapshot of what’s going on in the world of wine.

A good balance of the wines were from the “old” world, but the style of wine-making most in evidence was “new” world, with the emphasis on freshness and fruit.  The big discovery here was Robertson Winery, from South Africa.  While more and more new world wines have tried to make themselves over in the style that Robert Parker likes, with concentrated, jammy fruit and a background of creamy vanilla from toasted American oak, I find such wines cloying.  (Someone else I know has called them “slutty.”)  The wines from Robertson were a refreshing departure from this model: fresh, clean, bright, and light.  Their Shiraz was nothing like the Australian version, almost pale in color, delicately scented, and refreshing to drink, rather than pounding your palate into submission.  All of their wines were a good value, but the lower end ones, at $9 a bottle are a great deal.

But, contrary to the way most tastings go (downhill, that is), the last wine I tasted was the best.  The simple vin de table, Plan Pegau, from vineyards in and around Chateauneuf du Pape, stole the show.  Because it’s a blend that includes grapes from outside the area, they aren’t even allowed to list a vintage, but they manage to get around this restriction by giving it a lot number: lot # 2006.  While all of the wines I had tasted smelled fine, faultless, this is the first one that was perfumed, scented.  Instead of giving it all away, announcing right up front who and what it was, this wine was alluring, beguiling, elegant and elusive, suggesting depths that it was in no hurry to reveal.  Is it just a coincidence that the winemaker is a woman, Laurence Feraud?  Perhaps.  Whatever the reason, at $16 a bottle, this wine was more enticing and ultimately more satisfying than other wines in the tasting costing twice as much.  My neighbor, Mary, gave it 10 out of 10, her only perfect score of the evening.  Enough said.

As long as I’m giving the food-phobes at the Champaign Urbana Public Health District hell, why don’t I keep turning up the temperature and feature another food that gives them the heebee-jeebies: raw milk. [Just in case you think I'm exaggerating here, in my salad days, when I was yet green in judgment, I belonged to a group who sponsored a local tasting of raw milk cheeses. Even though these cheeses are perfectly legal in the US (when the cheese has been aged for 60 days), word got back to me afterwards that some folks at the Health District had got wind of this and had hunkered down in their bunker, brainstorming for ways to stop the tasting.]

How can milk be “raw”? Or rather, when do we ever buy cooked milk? The fact is that all pasteurized milk, which means all milk sold in supermarkets in Illinois and approximately 99.5% of all milk consumed in the US is “cooked” or heated to a minimum temperature of 161º F for 15-20 seconds. Ultra-pasteurized milk is heated to 280º F for a fraction of a second or really cooked. Pasteurization was mandated in 1924 by the United States Department of Public Health, which set the standard for state regulation of milk production. In Illinois today, raw milk can only be sold directly on the farm where it is produced and only as long as the farmer does not advertise the raw milk in any way and the customers supply their own containers. (If the producer used his own bottles, he would be operating a “bottling plant.” I don’t understand the restriction on advertising–you can sell it, but nobody can know that you have it?) Only whole milk can be sold, and not cream or butter from raw milk.

23 states do not allow the sale of raw milk under any conditions. Why all the restrictions? Why is raw milk about as hard to come by as a Schedule I Controlled Substance? What is the danger? Are there groupies or raw milkheads out there who pose a serious threat to public health?

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OK, if you’re such a loser that you have nothing better to do on a Sunday than cruise the internet and read people’s blogs (particularly the blogs of ultralosers, who have nothing better to do on a Sunday than post on their blogs), here is your reward, your sweet vindication:

Find the retailer nearest to you who is selling Giovanni Puiatti’s “Le Zuccole” cabernet franc from Friuli, and, as soon as their doors open, buy all that you can. In Urbana, the older, 2003 vintage is available at The Corkscrew for $10 a bottle, which is a steal of a deal. If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know that I don’t recommend much wine. There is an ocean of mediocre wine out there, as well as a lot of very decent wine, selling for very decent prices. Only once or twice a year do I find an elegant, beautifully-crafted bottle of wine, low in alcohol but high enough in acidity to partner perfectly with food, going for $10 or less, and only then do I have something to write about.

Of course, if you like big, alcoholic, over-oaked, smack-you-upside-the-head-with-fruit wines that slip their tongue in your ear with the first sip, then this ain’t for you. Although cabernet franc can have fresh raspberry fruit flavors and even rich chocolate and pepper aromas in really ripe years, I most appreciate its dark side or down-to-earth side: the funky, meaty, vegetal, and herbaceous flavors that develop with a few years of bottle age. The summer of 2003 was a scorcher in Europe (remember people dropping like flies in France?), and so, as you would expect, the wine shows great concentration and ripe fruit for the price (although what I taste is less raspberry than that sour Morello cherry that makes Valpolicella so beguiling, as well as a hint of blackcurrant). The amazing things is that, under these conditions, he still managed to produce a red wine with only 12% alcohol and enough acidity to allow it to age beautifully for the past 5 years. Maybe part of the secret is the “metodo Puitatti,” developed by his father, which ferments and ages the wine entirely in stainless steel, without any exposure to air. The result is a very pure and clean varietal wine, well-balanced and smooth, that’s perfect with grilled meats, sausages, funky aged cheeses, and rich charcuterie.

Why a photo of a six-pack of beer? Because it’s Bell’s beer. And it’s my very last six-pack.

Bell’s has been a scarce commodity in Illinois for the last two years, ever since the distribution rights were sold to a new company that didn’t care much about craft beers. When Larry Bell talked to them about his concerns that they wouldn’t carry or promote the whole line of Bell’s beers, just the few that they thought would be big sellers, he was pretty much told to siddown and shaddup. Under Illinois law, they owned the exclusive right to distribute his beer, and they owned him; if Larry Bell wanted to sell his beer in Illinois, he would take whatever the distributor was willing to give him. Larry decided he didn’t want to sell his beer that much and pulled out of Illinois.

Since then, a taste of Bell’s has only been available to those of us travelling to Michigan. When I drove the van up to Detroit last year to pick up a commercial freezer for TLP, I started taking orders for Bell’s beer over the phone by text message. Driving home, I was amused to find that the beer I was bringing back had cost more than the freezer. Now, six months later, I’m down to my last six-pack of Two-Hearted Ale, one of the greatest American beers ever brewed.

So I’m delighted to find out that Bell’s is back in Illinois, thanks to a new distribution agreement! The first shipments (truckments?) arrived in Chicago last week, and local stores expect to see their first deliveries within the week. It will probably take a little longer for their smaller-production beers, like the Two-Hearted, to trickle down from the great, guzzling beer belly that is Chicago, so I’m not ready to pop all mine open in celebration just yet. But I’ll open at least one today, just to say “Welcome back! God, how we missed ya!”

Now we’re talking! Finally, someone has come through and provided the perfect drink to have with TLP’s pulled pork. Not surprisingly, it’s Cuban-inspired and features rum, a fair amount of lime juice, and a good amount of ginger beer, which stand up to all the smoke & spice in the barbecue and slice right through the fat of the pork shoulder.

This cocktail was created by Dale DeGroff, a master mixologist and author of a number of fine cocktail books. Here’s the recipe.

1 ½ oz Añejo rum
½ oz orange curaçao
½ oz lime juice
2 dashes Angostura bitters
2 oz ginger beer
lime wheel for garnish
orange slice for garnish

Añejo means “aged,” and the rum for this drink is specially aged for years in charred oak barrels, which gives it a smokiness that makes it pair wonderfully with barbecue. The lime juice, of course, must be fresh squeezed. I like my ginger beer strong, but then it tends to drown out the other flavors. If you go with a strong ginger beer, bump up the other ingredients (except for the lime) by 50%.

1 Piggy Point to Matt for supplying this recipe! It looks like we now have the official cocktail for this year’s Lar-b-que!

Ah, the sweet taste of vindication! Just a few months ago, Carlos was razzing me about the bacon-infused vodka I made, joking that if he got mixed up with this stuff he probably would not be let back into his favorite bar in Chicago. Then–lo and behold!–the latest issue of a cocktail magazine he gets shows up on his doorstep, with a feature article about drinks from bacon-infused bourbon!

A quick internet search turned up these other bacon-flavored drinks out there.

PDT in NYC has a has an Old Fashioned on their menu with bacon-infused bourbon.

Jimmy’s Cocktail Hour website has a similar Old Fashioned he calls “pig in a bucket.”

Meanwhile, the future of bacon-infused cocktails is being written by Canadian-born Jamie Boudreau, who has been hailed as a “molecular mixologist,” but who call himself instead the “cocktail whisperer.” On his website, spiritsandcocktails.com, he serves up a Bohemian Cocktail that pairs cherry cordial and cherry bitters with bourbon infused with bacon that was smoked over cherry wood (pictured). According to the the Seattle Times, the new three-page drink menu at the bar Tini Bigs, where he currently mixes it up, “features bacon-infused bourbon with chocolate finished off with an orange twist that was lit under a lighter to bring out a ’smokey orange’ flavor.”

Yes, next on my agenda is making some of my own bacon-infused bourbon! Can you imagine? The bacon is used to make the bourbon that’s then used to make the bacon that’s used to make the bourbon . . . in a continuous cycle. If I keep this up, both bourbon and bacon will be able to trace their ancestry to this first batch in January 2009. In reference to recent events that may come close to this in their ability to contribute to the happiness and wellbeing of humanity, maybe I’ll christen this my 2009 Inaugural Bacon and 2009 Inaugural Bourbon. Sounds a little classier than Obama Bacon or Obama Bourbon.

Update 1/28/09: A little more searching around the internet on the subject of “fat washing” (no, this is not something you do at a spa or in a washing machine) turned up other infused liquors: Don Lee at PDT also makes a rum infused with hot buttered popcorn. I say lay that on for the next Ebertfest!

A great time was had by all last night, and I was truly impressed by the variety and the creativity of the drinks that people came up with to feature the bacon-infused vodka (BIV) I had concocted.

Peter came up with an inspired combination of unfiltered sake and BIV, with just a dusting of freshly ground black pepper. The floral, ever so slightly sweet taste of the sake combined seamlessly with the BIV. Although several thought they recognized the smell, no one could name Peter’s secret ingredient until he revealed it.

Suzanne was game and made a dirty martini with BIV and vermouth, served with a blue-cheese-stuffed green olive. We decided this is the drink for those who really want their BIV to come through nice and clear.

It turned out no one had made a Bloody Mary mix for the BIV because it just seemed too obvious. But it was so obvious that we all thought we should try it. (And of course by then we had already had a couple cocktails under our belts.) So we got ahold of some mix, which Matt doctored up, and sure enough, the BIV made a nice, fatty-tasting Bloody Mary. Just the thing to roll out for your next Sunday brunch!

Finally, Matt came up with the most outrageous and surprisingly successful combination: BIV and Baileys, served warmed. Just what you need to light up your winter evenings. Many, many thanks to Kim for the one she took for the team, sucking up all the sample versions Matt mixed up at home, perfecting this recipe. Now we know what to expect at this year’s winter beach party.

So despite the many reservations that people harbored about bacon-infused vodka, we put away more than half the bottle and enjoyed many good laughs at the expense of our hapless governor, who has done just an outstanding job at making the rest of us look so normal and sane!  Don’t you think, for my contributions to baconology, I deserve to be appointed to that vacant Senate seat?

When our good friends Kathy and Patrick lived here in Urbana, they hosted a series of fabulous cocktail parties. For some reason my memory is a little hazy on this point, but I seem to remember that they got up to #8, so I’m naming this gathering Cocktail 9 in their honor. Patrick, I’m even going to wear the black dinner jacket that I somehow picked up at one of your parties.

Sometime in the late afternoon, we’ll start trying out all the cocktail recipes members have submitted for bacon-infused vodka. Our new member Carlos will be in town that day, and he has generously offered to bring his portable bar and mix up a different selection of cocktails that might prove more potable. After the cocktail hour (or two), we’ll plan on sitting down to a potluck dinner. So bring yourself, bring what you need to mix up your cocktail contest recipe, and bring some food to share. I’m sure there will also be a selection of This Little Piggy offerings to sample.

around 5pm ’til whenever, 405 North Garfield Avenue, Champaign