A carnival of technology

Tomorrow is Kat’s birthday, and since she already knows about the cake I might as well post about it now.

Kat doesn’t eat anything that comes out of an animal, and this diet makes certain items, like birthday cakes, a little bit difficult. I figure that I have a cake pan shaped like a dinosaur and a little patience, so I thought I’d give it a shot. So, what ingredients can I not use?

Non-vegan sugar. This one doesn’t take any work to replace; it’s just kind of an oddball surprise. If you took cane syrup and just let it set out to dry, you’d end up with a funky mess, so it takes a bit of processing to make sugar. Some sugar refiners will filter cane sugar through a charcoal made from cattle bones because it turns out that it works really well. Not all cane sugar refiners do this, and beet sugar isn’t filtered in this way at all, but trying to figure out what brand of sugar comes from where takes a bit of research. Both Dixie Crystals and Domino, the brands most prevalent around here, use bone char, so I settled on the Whole Foods brand because it was labeled as “vegan” and I didn’t have to look things up or write any letters.

Milk. This one’s pretty easy. Milk doesn’t do anything special to the cake, just adds a little bit of flavor and some more liquid, so soy milk will work fine as a substitute. All of the sugar will cover up the funky taste.

Butter. This one’s a little harder, but still not a huge deal. There are plenty of non-dairy margarine’s out there. The only trouble is making sure to use one that doesn’t have too much water in it. Vegetable shortenings are another substitute, but this runs into a dietary idiosyncrasy I have: I think that hydrogenated oils like Crisco (“It’s digestible!”) are kind of gross. I settled on Earth Balance shortening, a blend of palm, soy, canola and olive oils that somehow comes in solid sticks without being hydrogenated. I guess I have all the saturated fat in the palm oil to thank.

Eggs. This is where things get difficult. Eggs do a lot of things for a cake: at their most basic they add some liquid and fat to the batter, but they’re also an emulsifier and a leavener. I found several ways that people get around the leavening aspect, but very little about emulsification. A lot of vegan recipes will use a little more baking powder or soda and add in some vinegar to get the cake to rise, but I found that this made the cake rise too quickly and give up, creating cakes that came out more or less the right height but were too dense. There are also some egg substitutes available, usually blends of gluten and vegetable gelatin, but according to Internet these still work better as leaveners than emulsifiers, producing fragile, crumbly cakes. I decided to go with the egg substitute, a bag of Uncle Bob’s Weird Yellow Powder or something like that from Whole Foods. It’s a mixture of soy flour, wheat gluten, corn syrup solids and algin, and it has a bit of an…odor to it. It smells like tree bark and protein from the sea. I hope sugar can cover this up, too. To make up for the weakness of the fake eggs, I decided to toss in some gum arabic as well.

I was a bit nervous about meddling with cake recipes trying to find the right one. Common wisdom seems to state that while savory dishes are a fast and loose art, something well suited to people like that cajun guy on PBS who just make things up as they go and only use measurements as a starting point, pastry is exact, a careful chemistry that demands patience and perfect ratios. I don’t guess things like eggs are very exact, so hopefully it won’t hurt too much if I screw around trying to figure out how to avoid them. Here goes.

Before settling on the recipe I’d eventually use, I solicited some aid from a hippie friend and got some recipes for cakes and frosting from a vegan cookbook. Both the cookbook cake I tried and another cake recipe from the Internet used the vinegar method. The cookbook came out very dense. I think that with some nuts or some other texture it could have made a very nice coffee cake or something similar, but it was no birthday cake. The Internet cake had a lot of trouble cooking through. I’m not sure exactly why, but it formed a crust well before the center of the cake cooked, and by the time it was done it was too crumbly to even make it out of the pan. The cookbook frosting was another disaster, some kind of weird combination of non-frosting things that turned into an unappetizing gray sludge, and it was at this point that I had an epiphany. I made another batch of frosting using a normal buttercream recipe, replacing the butter and milk as appropriate, and it came out great. It was white, fluffy, and it tasted good. For the cake I ended up doing the same thing: take a normal recipe and just replace all the things you can’t use.

So here’s what I did. For the cake:

• 2C flour
• 2t baking powder
• ½t salt
• ½c shortening
• 1c sugar
• 3T egg replacer + 9T (½c+1T) water
• 2t vanilla extract
• ¾c soy milk
• 2T gum arabic dissolved in 2T water and left to sit overnight (probably
  optional)

Mix all that stuff. Bake at 350° for 20-25 minutes. One thing I noticed about the vegetable shortening is that takes a lot to soften it. It’ll melt if you heat it, but for some reason it wouldn’t become soft and pliable like butter does if left at room temperature, making it difficult to cream with the sugar. Adding some liquid (like the milk) makes it mix, though. Also, adding the egg replacer really brought out that nasty smell. It doesn’t show up in the final cake that I could notice, though, so just hold your nose and keep going.

For the frosting:

• ¼c vegetable shortening
• 2¼c powdered sugar
• 2T vanilla rice milk
• 1t vanilla extract

Blend all that stuff. I used rice milk here instead of soy milk because the fake milk isn’t going to bake away into the æther in the frosting: you’re pretty much going to eat it straight. Whatever they do to soy milk to make it look and taste sort of like milk makes it incredibly gross on its own: it has an almost orange tint to it, like it’s visually trying to be soy buttermilk instead, and it tastes so bad, like wheat germ and plaster. Rice milk, on the other hand, though its pale gray pallor is disturbing, doesn’t look too much different from skim cow milk, and it doesn’t taste like much of anything. The vanilla variety gives a little more flavor to the frosting, and, as noted above, the vegetable shortening is going to need a little bit of some sort of liquid in order to do anything.

And that’s it. Use some eggs next time.

What visions dance
In the eyes of a cat
What wonders it must see
Not awake by day
Or deepest night
Crepuscularity

I started thinking that something might be wrong with me on Wednesday when at some point during the day I started coughing for no good reason. Did all of the city’s diesel exhaust and coal fumes finally destroy my lungs? Have I finally developed an allergy to something and I’m going to die at the hands of those stupid Bradford pears? This too shall pass, I told myself, and I went on with day, washing my hands frequently and coughing into my sleeve like that CDC video taught me. Maybe it’s just another cold.

I was pretty sure something might be wrong with me on Wednesday night when, just before going to bed, I began shivering uncontrollably and, once wrapped up in blankets in my seventy degree apartment, I started to have visions of floating in a tower cocoon in Mexico City. Or something like that, I can’t remember the details very well. I would have written it down, but I was convinced that if I left the safety of my tightly wrapped sheets, even just to thrust out an arm for the notepad on my nightstand, that I would freeze to death and die. I made it through the night and started taking aspirin and cough syrup the next day, and it looked like I was probably going to survive. Sometime during the night I awoke with a pain in my lower back around where I think my kidneys are, and since I watch too much of that House TV show my fever-addled mind entertained the thought that this meant my body was shutting down, but no, it was just my back. My self-made swaddling clothes kept me from moving around very much. My solution was to move to the couch.

On Thursday night I awoke about once an hour and attempted to cough my stomach inside out. I felt like I really wanted to hurl, though what would have been hurled I know not, and again my overheated head fought itself to a standstill with crazy ideas, wanting both to run to Kroger to get some syrup of ipecac to purge whatever evil lay restless within me and also wanting not to move ever again forever. I never did puke, which made it hard for me to believe that this was something serious like the flu, but I didn’t really want to spend another night on intermittent bucket vigil, productive or not. I guess it’s time to figure out how to go to a doctor.

The last time I visited a doctor for non-emergency services was at Georgia Tech when I took advantage of the health center for the occasional case of the sniffles of that one time that I had so much ear was that I couldn’t hear out of my left ear man that was gross. I don’t have a primary care provider, and I don’t really know how to find one. I guess times like these are what those walk-in clinics are for? I never know what to make of them. Who uses them? Do they cost more than a regular doctor visit? Am I going to get worse care? Will they laugh at me for not having a regular doctor? I suppose it’s either that or the emergency room again, so Internet found me a clinic on Roswell Road, and away I went, probably unfit to drive but not in much of a state to care about it.

I don’t know about quality of care, since there wasn’t much care to provide. When I walked in there was only one other person there, some middle school aged looking kid with his mom who, based on his red nose and severe bed head, probably had about the same symptoms as me. I filled out a form, watched Fox News talk for a few minutes about shooting down that spy satellite, and then walked back into the second room to wait. The nurse took my blood pressure and my temperature (102.some, alternate between 4 ibuprofen and 2 acetaminophen every three hours) and then jammed a q-tip up my nose and left. Hurray, it’s the flu. But I guess there are pills for that now? I’m taking Tamiflu, but I don’t know how to tell whether or not it’s actually working. It’s supposed to knock a day or two off the flu, but how long would have taken to run its course on its own? Those pills sure were expensive for something that doesn’t seem to do much. What is doing something is that cough syrup I got. It’s a terrible quaff, something that looks like egg drop soup suspended in corn syrup, but wow, that stuff has a kick. Where would we be today without the opium poppy? Coughing a lot more, probably.

February 1st was the feast day of St. Brigid, the first day of spring in Ireland. While here in America we mark the first day of the season by the solar event that defines it, in Ireland they more sensibly put their solstices and equinoxes in the middle of a season. The winter solstice marked the hump of winter, the moment when the days start to become longer and we make our slow way out of the frozen, barren miasma, and it’s now time to mark our ascent into new plantings and the first hints of new life. The passage of seasons is easy to mark with beer, whose production is controlled by the availability of the ingredients, but what of spirits? Springtime means a time for a more seasonally appropriate cocktail, perhaps something with a taste of the tropics and a reminder of hot, lazy days to come.

Rum has come a long way over the years. Its precursor of sugar wine was probably invented through that alcoholic ingenuity that infects so many of the cultures of the world.

WORKER: Hey boss, what are we going to do with all this extra sugar?
BOSS: Make some booze, you big dummy!

Old world settlers brought the magic of distillation to the new world, and eventually the Caribbean, those fertile tropical islands planted with sugar cane from across the sea, started to make rum. At first it kind of sucked. One traveler to Barbados in the 17th century described the island’s drink as “a hot hellish and terrible liquor.” From these humble beginnings as a cheap staple for islanders and seafaring vessels the hellish sugarcane spirit cleaned itself up to become the base of the finest Cuban, and later Polynesian, cocktails. Today rum can basically be divided into three categories by their colors: white rum, filtered and briefly aged; gold rum, aged in charred oak barrels much like bourbon (often using discarded bourbon barrels), and dark rum, aged in more heavily charred barrels to create a deep, strongly flavored, opaque libation. White rum, first made by Bacardi, is the one most often used in cocktails as it has little flavor. It’s basically a sweet vodka, adding alcohol to drinks without any heavy flavors to complement or disguise, but at the same time not quite as bland as a flavorless grain spirit.

The daiquiri is one of those rum cocktails. I’m not going to try to research an accurate history since cocktail drinkers aren’t known for taking good notes. It’s a Cuban cocktail, and in the interest of starting at least closer to the beginning, here’s the recipe as transcribed in The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book in the “Cuban Concoctions” section, contributed by Will P. Taylor of the Hotel National in Havana:

One part Bacardi
Juice of half a Lime
One barspoon powdered sugar

Note: The order of adding ingredients is important. Personal preference
dictates serving the cocktail with finely shaved iced in the glass.

It’s a straightforward drink and was a favorite of Hemingway, though I think every drink was a favorite of Hemingway. Daiquiris have gotten an unfortunate reputation in more recent years as girly drinks, and the original form is rarely seen; fruity slushies are more often seen bearing the daiquiri name, and the original form of sweetened citrus and rum is all but forgotten. That’s really unfortunate, because it’s not a bad drink, and no man should feel his masculinity challenged by drinking one. Traveling back into modern times, here’s the International Bartenders Association recipe for a daiquiri:

4.5 cl White Rum
2.0 cl Fresh lemon or lime juice
0.5 cl Gomme syrup
Pour all ingredients into shaker with ice cubes. Shake well. Strain in chilled
cocktail glass

Translated to American, that’s a shot of rum, about half a lime’s worth of juice and a dash of gomme syrup. Gomme syrup? Also known as gum syrup or sirop de gomme for those who don’t like franglais, this is what this post is really all about.

The most basic and best remembered cocktail syrup is simple syrup, a mixture of sugar and water, and gomme syrup is a variation of this using sugar, water and gum arabic. Gum arabic is produced from the sap of the acacia tree found mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. It acts as an edible adhesive and emulsifier and is found in a wide range of products, things as diverse as Coca-Cola and ink and postage stamps. I finally got around to getting some. I bought it from some herb-selling hippies in Oregon at $16 for a pound, a much better deal than other sites selling an ounce or two for about $8. It’s certified organic, which I found funny. I don’t doubt that the average acacia tree farm has no need for pesticides or artificial fertilizers, but it’s amusing that someone had to visit Sudan for a week or so to confirm that. I hope I didn’t inadvertently fund a genocide.

I found a couple of gomme syrup recipes, and the basic method was to dissolve some powdered gum in water, let it maintain for a while to soak up the water and form a paste, and then dump that into some simple syrup. I ran into a snag with these in that the all of the ratios were expressed in weights, a simple thing to calculate for people that bought the eight dollar ounce, and I had no way to figure out weights from my pound of syrup. Time for some creative guessing.

The paste steps in both of the recipes involved boiling two ounces of water: one mixed it with an ounce of gum arabic, one with two ounces. How do you boil two ounces of water? There’s no way I could stir that. The answer is to use a double boiler, which I don’t have, and I didn’t realize this until about halfway through. I decided instead to try boiling some water in a kettle, something I conveniently do every morning already for my coffee, and dump that into a jar with some powdered gum. Not knowing the weight of the gum, I tried starting with a 1:2 ratio by volume: I filled a small jar with a tablespoon of gum and added an ounce of boiling water. That seemed to dissolve pretty well, so I added another tablespoon of gum. That didn’t dissolve so well. I ended up with a sticky white blob sitting in the hot water that refused any attempt to stir it or break it up. I tried just letting it sit in the water in the hopes that it would eventually dissolve, but it didn’t. Maybe the second tablespoon was a bit much.

One other thing I noticed at this step was that the hot gum, flavorless as a powder, had started to smell a little bit woodsy, kind of like pine or tea tree oil. I wonder if that little bit of taste will make it into the drink or even be strong enough to be noticed over the alcohol.

After the big white blob of gum made it clear that it wasn’t going anywhere, I decided to reheat the solution by dropping the jar into a pot of boiling water. That actually worked pretty well. The extra heat and stirring dissolved the gum good enough; I let that sit for a while and then started boiling a simple syrup. I usually make simple syrup at a 2:1 sugar to water ratio, and since the gum acts as an emulsifier I thought I’d make this syrup 3:1. I boiled half a cup of water with a cup and a half sugar, dumped in the gum paste, skimmed the foamy scum off the top and let it all cool. After filtering the syrup through some cheese cloth to get rid of whatever scummy bits I missed the first time, I was ready for a daiquiri.

A daiquiri made with simple syrup comes out kind of like a limeade with a kick, and I was expecting much the same here but with a silkier texture. I took a sip and…it wasn’t sweet at all. The syrup was too thick and didn’t dissolve, instead forming a gooey layer on the bottom of the shaker.. Maybe I shouldn’t have used so much sugar, and maybe I should have stopped at one tablespoon of gum. Oh well; maybe I’ll take another shot later.