Now that it’s in season, I’ve been mulling over quince quite a bit. The days when we’d just make a syrup and plug it into a drink are over. I don’t know, it seems boring to me but there are days when I’d rather just do this. Ever since we had to raise prices at Rustic I challenged myself to make cocktails with more complexity, whatever that means. I think charging $18 for a drink is outrageous but if there’s some thought behind the drink as well as fresh organic seasonal produce I feel that can be somewhat justified an in line with what’s gong on with the food. I have a hard time with stuff like this because I think about it too personally but the fact is that 100% of everything we serve at the restaurant has gone up in price, some of it exorbitantly. For instance, a product like Rittenhouse Rye was once $16 for a .750 and is now $19 plus change. It didn’t just go up a buck, but almost 20%. This change doesn’t seem like much but it’s an extra $36 a case and this is just a small example of a low cost well item. Every single bottle we buy has increased. In case you didn’t know, drink and wine prices are there to offset the incredible costs of running a restaurant. Believe it or not, a restaurant owner might make 3-8% profit off everything on the menu, and this is only after a certain point. So if there’s a night where there’s $10,000 in sales, if they’re lucky, they might take home $500 in profit. Hey, not too shabby if you can do it seven days a week, but after all the work and stress it’s paltry. It does get better, however. The busier the night the higher the percentage after a certain point, but on those slow nights with everyone standing around there’s a loss.

Not sure how I even got on this bandwagon of thought. This damn post was supposed to be about quince and time and I don’t know.

Quince is a fickle bitch. There’s a reason most restaurants, even good ones, avoid serving it. Maybe because people are unaware of what it is and visiting a website to learn about it is a big waste. I just read something from someone that said to cook it for 45 minutes. What a joke. Quince and others from this time of the year, pears, apples tough from a “thoughtful usage perspective because, well, there are seeds and the core. You can’t use the whole shebang. There will be waste…Something else I’ve been thinking about quite a bit too. I mean, if food waste is biodegradable then why feel guilty throwing it into the compost bin? I get using as much as you can with a fruit from a money perspective but behind the bar there will be some waste, in some cases a lot of waste (limes) and sometimes putting that waste to use will actually cost more than the product itself. I’ve thought about making some sort of citrus vinegar cleaning product with all the lime husks and we’d need vats of white vinegar and several 50 gallon drums to store it all. Yes, I am aware of making lime stock yada yada. That requires a good amount of storage as well as citric and malic acid in large quantities which costs much more than the limes themselves.

At this point, I guess I’m justifying throwing some shit away. Yeah, it’s ok. In the cases where we can utilize “trim,” we do.

And so now, after bloviating for no reason other than the caffeine kicking in, on to quince.

Let’s begin by defining each dimension. The first is one single line, the second is two like a piece of paper with no depth. The third is where we are now, a cube. The fourth…Is what is known as a tesseract, a hypercube with right angles extending from all sides. The cube is six faces whereas a tesseract contains eight cubical cells. Huh? Yeah, it’s a difficult concept to interpret. We’re just monkeys hurtling through infinite space and time on a magnetically pulsing mudball after all. We’re just fortunate to have a nice atmosphere…

Yeah, this hurts my feeble brain so early in the morning. But if we can apply this to fruit, then maybe we can make better cocktails. That’s the idea. but how?

Well, you’ve got very few components at your disposal to make a decent drink but we can apply it all dimensionally. The first would be booze, obviously. This can come in the forms of liquor, liqueur, an infusion, a cordial, amaro, aperitif, etc. The second would be the sweetness. Sugar, syrup, honey, whatever. The third? The sour. Duh. Citrus, sherry, citric acid, verjus…Ok, but what about number four? That, to me, would be mouthfeel, or viscosity which is incredibly difficult to achieve because many times we put the drink over ice and let’s say the person who ordered it went outside to take an important phone call. When they get back in and sit down, the cocktail is diluted and ruined. There’s a five minute window with most drinks and after that they’re shit. Manhattans, martinis, martinezezezezs, are different because you may find new nuances when they get warm but they still taste better cold. Most cocktails don’t have this and not because they’re bad but because it’s difficult to achieve.

Enter: dairy. This is why when you make a milk punch people gush over it. It’s the silkiness of the whey. I talk about dairy being a cocktail superpower a lot because it is, the problem is once you go dairy everything else is a little hairy. It becomes hard not to include it in everything. Big problem.

Hey, so make a quince punch and stop already. Yeah…But I’ve got other ideas. Who knows if they’ll come to fruition or end up being a giant, sloppy, foul tasting turd?