The Edible Martini Is Here

Lille Allen/Eater

After a resurgence behind the bar, martini ingredients are starting to show up in recipes for salad, babka, and more

As a growing number of restaurants and diners lean into nostalgic, luxurious experiences, martinis — which the Guardian once called “retro hedonism in a glass” — have also found themselves at the center of a hot cultural moment. Now, it seems our recent martini madness is moving out of the glass and onto the dinner plate.

The first martini-inspired food recipe that caught my attention was Emily Ziemski’s dirty martini salad dressing, published on Food52 in March. It made perfect sense: I like my (gin) martinis crisp, salty, and olivey, which is also how I like my salads. A few weeks later, via a paywalled Substack post, came a martini babka from recipe developer Kate Ray involving twists of orange marmalade and green olive tapenade. More recently, a dirty martini pasta has been popping on my TikTok feed thanks to Emily Eggers, the recipe developer also known as Legally Healthy Blonde.

These martini-inspired recipes aren’t just olive-flavored: Eggers’s pasta involves making a sauce of crushed olives, gin, olive brine, and butter, then topping it all with blue cheese. It looks delicious. Naturally, Eggers’s videos of the pasta have gone viral, and the recipe has gotten traction on food sites.

To me, these martini-inspired foods are certainly preferable to the reverse: Social media has brought us TikTok engagement bait in the form of chicken soup martinis, tzatziki martinis, burrata martinis, and other weirdly dinner-esque drinks. While those ideas stretch the boundaries of “dirty” to questionable degrees, martini as a flavor profile in the opposite direction makes complete — and kind of obvious — sense. It’s just salt, olive, and (if you’re using gin) a hint of botanicals, and that works with lots of dishes.

A recent recipe from Amy Thielen’s forthcoming Company offers more inspiration to cook with gin. Thielen uses the spirit as part of a sage-infused pan sauce for crispy smashed chicken breasts, to seemingly great effect. “This is perfection. Do not change a single thing,” one New York Times Cooking reader commented. Other cooks offer recipes for gin-cured salmon and gin-spiked mussels; add some olives and there’s another martini-inspired dish.

There is so much potential in thinking of the martini as a flavor profile that’s ready to be brought to new formats, but maybe even also in the martini as an ingredient. Recently, I tried the martini from the restaurant Via Carota’s bottled cocktail line. Lazy and with no bar equipment, I was excited to drink it, until I realized it was vodka-based. But with the martini dressing on my mind, I figured out a way to use it: That bottled martini became vodka sauce. It didn’t taste like a martini, but then again, maybe not everything has to.



from Eater - All https://ift.tt/enUj3NW
via IFTTT

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

You Can Eat Martha Stewart's Baked Goods (Without Baking a Thing)

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for a new project for Martha Stewart, who I can only assume never, ever sleeps (meanwhile I, a 26-year-old, get fussy after anything less than a rock solid eight and a half hours ). This time, it’s not a partnership with Snoop Dogg or a craft store or a CBD-company . Martha Stewart has teamed up with Goldbelly to bring her lifelong favorite baked recipes—everything from flaky, buttery French croissants to luxurious kouign amann to sticky-sweet apricot danishes to her Extraordinary Chocolate Chip Cookies —straight to your home. “I’m thrilled to partner with Goldbelly to bring my favorite baked cookies and pastries to their loyal customers," said Martha Stewart in a statement. "Thoughtfully packaged in my signature Martha blue, these cookies are baked using some of my life-long favorite recipes and they make the perfect gifts for your loved ones or for yourself.” Read More >> from Food52 https://ift.tt/9c4W8MLeB via IFTTT
Read more

29 Great American Diners

Image
Lille Allen/Eater America’s diners account for some of the oldest restaurants in the nation. Here are some of the most iconic. A diner is a mood. It’s the slosh of sharp, black coffee poured from a steel tank behind the counter into a heavy white mug. It’s the miniature packets of butter and strawberry jelly waiting for their foil to be peeled back. It’s the waitstaff who’ve been scribbling orders on blue-striped checks for 40 years and know how to balance eight plates of pancakes on one arm. It’s the assurance that your eggs will always come out just the way you like them — not too runny in the whites, with a soft orange yolk built to drag slices of crisp, buttery, industrial-grade toast through. The promise of feeling like a regular no matter how many times you’ve actually visited. America’s diners account for some of the oldest and most iconic restaurants in the nation. A dying breed by some accounts and a resurgent one by others, they’re shorthand for a vision of the Unite...
Read more

Beyond Impossible: The Sanitarium and World War II Past of Meat Substitutes

Image
Photo by Tom Kelley/Getty Images We’ve come a long way from John Harvey Kellogg’s “protose cutlets” It’s no stretch to say that fake meat is having a moment . With the popularity of brands such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat joining fast-food menus and grocery store aisles alike, plant-based meats are no longer seen as a sad option for vegetarians long denied flavor with meat substitutes (though, as we know, plenty of vegetarian food is packed with flavor), but for anyone who enjoys a good burger, fried chicken, or nuggets. But are meat substitutes really the future of eating? Maybe by necessity as food resources run out, but not likely by choice. In fact, despite the big money raked in by Impossible and Beyond over the past few years, industrial meat consumption in America is actually on the rise. This week on Gastropod , Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley see how the not-sausage gets made, with visits to the Impossible Meat lab and Meati , a Colorado-based start-up that’...
Read more