In the July issue of Bon Appetit, they featured a portable espresso maker made by Handpresso out of France. The video below shows you how it works, but basically you pump the unit about 40 times, put in hot water, insert one of those little espresso packets, turn over and dispense. It seems pretty nifty, and if you are one of those that needs a shot of espresso in the morning and is also outdoors or on the move a lot, this is probably a great product for you.

With that said, there is  definitely a yuppie feel to this product. Even the name “Handpresso Wild” is a bit silly in that oxymoronic sort of way. And that couple in the video looks rather ridiculous sipping espresso on a rock in the woods. In the end, you might get made fun of more than you get compliments, but then again those same people poking fun at you will probably want you to make them a cup of coffee, so who cares.

There is also a new Handpresso Domepod unit that uses ground espresso instead of the packs, but according to a review at Wired.com, they can be a bit messy. On the Handpresso website you can also see a variety of accessories available such as plastic cups, carrying cases, and other products to make your cup of java even more portable. The price tag is on the high end at $100 for the maker and accessories will cost you too, so this isn’t for everyone, but it would probably make a great gift for the outdoor coffee nut in the family.

You can purchase Handresso products at Importika and at Whole Latte Love.

Via Boing Boing comes this video on how to open a bottle of wine if you don’t have a corkscrew. Granted these French gentlemen clearly don’t need another bottle, but this tactic is useful if you don’t have an opener on hand.

One time while I was living in Kosovo, the owner of a small restaurant opened a bottle of my wine for me this way. Their corkscrew was broken, so the owner just wrapped a towel around the base of the bottle and proceeded to bang it against a brick wall until the cork came out. It worked, but I was a bit concerned as the bottle I brought was a very nice Vino Nobile di Montepulciano. Seeing it for the first time was a bit of a shock, but I have never forgotten this trick. I am sure it isn’t great to agitate the wine so much and I still wouldn’t do this to a fine bottle of wine, but in a pinch it might be the only option.

You can also perform this against a tree trunk if you are out in nature or another hard surface, but wherever you do it, be careful to pad the bottom and strike it flush against the surface.

Gourmet has a very interesting cocktail history called ‘Favorite Cocktails 1941-2009‘. Unfortunately, Gourmet is closing down operations, but their website will remain active for a ‘transitional’ period. What that means, I am not sure, but I will be mining the site in coming months in anticipation of its closure.

Not only is the cocktail summary of each decade informational (and short), but the descriptions of each drink are also worthy of reading as they contain interesting drink history. But what I love most about this web production is threefold: (1) the photography is beautiful (2) the glassware is stunning and (3) it makes browsing cocktails fun. Lists of cocktail recipes in books and magazines are fine but can be rather overwhelming; however, the design of this site alleviates that problem and invites one to enter and explore.

There is one problem though, the last decade (the 2000s) will probably never be finished. It says on the site that it will be up on 13 October and still has not surfaced, but with the closure of the magazine, I somehow doubt it will be completed. Too bad.

Now back to the glassware. The glasses they have on display are amazing. Yes, a lot of what they show is very pricey crystal, but some items are affordable. Just take a look at the Alessi glass above. The ‘Mami’ Martini Glass is simple and elegant. It sells for $126 for a set of six. Not cheap — I know — but not that expensive either. The measured mixing glass is from Mister Mojito and costs $45. You can find dozens of example of great barware and stemware at this site.

I’ve run into enough Italian food resources this last week that I thought I would put them all in one post. I guess October has been Italian month with cooking magazines.

Gourmet in the October 2009 issue recommend in their ‘Obsessions’ section the La Famiglia Delgrosso Pasta sauce. Delgrosso has eight different types of jarred pasta sauce. I know it isn’t fresh, but I think most of us cheat with jarred sauce every now and then. I haven’t tried these sauces, but you can find them at delgrossosauce.com.

Rancho Gordo, the heirloom bean provider out of Napa, says one of their highly sought after Italian beans is back in stock. They have Borlotti back in, which is the preferred bean in northern Italy for pasta e fagioli. According to Rancho Gordo, “They have a thin skin and make a lovely sauce, which is also why you find them so often in minestrone soups.”

In Saveur this month, there were a couple of interesting Italian food/drink resources. The first is Salumeria Biellese, which offers a variety of sausage and cured meats. This establishment in New York City has been preparing meats since 1925, and the shop has established relationships with many top chefs in New York and even makes cured pork jowls for Mario Batali. Salumeria Biellese sells nearly 80 types of sausages and meats and browsing the website will make your mouth water — if you eat meat that is.

Here are some examples:

• Rabbit & Chanterelles Sausage (marinated rabbit and sauteed mushrooms)
• Parsley & Cheese Pork Sausage (fresh parsley, a little red wine, and parmigiano)
• Raisins & Grappa Veal Sausage
• Rosemary, Garlic & Red Wine Lamb Sausage

But the dry-cured meats are the real draw. They are not pasteurized and are dry cured just as they did in the 19th century — very slowly. I counted six different soppressata and the wild boar cacciatorini sounds fabulous. They also have samplers (for a limited time) that you can order for a tasting of several cured meat offerings. You can find their meats at salumeriabiellese.com, and if you want to read the article you can go to saveur.com. The photo above is from the article, and shows a variety of their cured meats.

The last resource also came from the October Saveur, and it goes well with sausage. Italians are known for wine, but the northern area of Italy has a craft beer revolution apparently. You can read the article here. The bottles are big, I mean wine bottle size, but you can check out B. United International Inc. if you want more information and find them locally. The importer has a selection of 50+ Italian beers and ales on offer, but you can only buy direct if you are a wholesaler or retailer. They do, however, have a store locator for consumers that might help you in finding at least some of the brands mentioned in the article.

As far as online stores for Italian specialty food, you can also shop at Di Palo Selects out of New York. This site is well organized and has a good selection of specialty items. Other stores such as as iGourmet also have extensive imported food items to include Italian products. According to Food & Wine, look for the Italian tuna at iGourmet. And for cheese, Formaggio Kitchen has a great selection of Italian cheeses.

If you want to stock your pantry with some good imported Italian staples, Food & Wine had an Italian taste test challenge a couple years back with a variety of ingredients and foods such as polenta, capers, tuna, and honey. In addition to providing some good shopping advice, this article will point you towards several specialty online food stores where you can find a range of imported items. Other than that, there is no shortage of specialty Italian food shops on the web if you just search.

I know absinthe isn’t exactly kitchen related, but after reading an article in the most recent issue of Gourmet, and then watching a video on gourmet.com on how to prepare absinthe, I decided to finally relieve my ignorance in this area of the beverage world.

The video on gourmet.com is basic but informative, and instructs how to make an absinthe drip cocktail. Mixologist, Jim Meehan, shows how this is done, what equipment you need and gives other useful tips. Here are some interesting points from the video:

• Choose absinthe that has a natural green color and not that fake bright green hue, and look for bottles between 60-68 percent alcohol.
• Absinthe glasses are often designed to pour the proper amount of absinthe, so there will possibly be a rim or design difference in the lower portion of the glass to mark the proper level to pour.
• Pour the absinthe, place a lump of sugar on an absinthe spoon, and drip ice-cold water over the sugar. A drip cocktail should take about 3 – 10 minutes depending upon how fast you drip the water.

That video whet my appetite a bit, so I searched for more in-depth information and found a 30+ minute episode on Wine Library TV with a representative from the Wormwood Society and GaryVaynerchuk. They present a lot of information and have a tasting of three domestic brands. Just watching these two videos will get you half way to a functional knowledge on how to make the cocktail and simply know about this drink’s history.

If you are inspired at this point, the next step is buying some absinthe. The Wormwood Society has a pretty good article on buying absinthe, but because of the society’s desire to be neutral, they don’t really recommend any absinthe brands. Too bad. But the article will break down some additional myths and make it seem like you should at least pay attention to which brand you buy.

If you want to buy a bottle, however, a good place to start is on the Wormwood Society Review Directory. Just skip the pre-ban vintage ratings unless you have $2,000-7,000 to spend on a bottle of spirits, and simply sort the reviews for ‘traditional absinthe’ instead. This site is very user friendly. As a back-up resource, you can go to La Fée Verte’s buyers’ guide. This guide is more extensive than the Wormwood Society’s, but it is not as user friendly. The complete list, however, allows you to click on each brand to see reviews and ratings if you have already narrowed down your search.

Ok, so now you can make a drip cocktail, you may know some basic history and what not to do with absinthe, and you just may have bought a bottle. At this point, everyone at your party is going to be asking you about absinthe, and you will either take that final educational step or just start making cocktails until no one cares.

If you are the former, there are two heavy weight sites out there. One I have mentioned already is the Wormwood Society. This site is very well organized and though it has a lot of information, it is not too overwhelming in that you can focus on certain areas of interest. It has 15 pages of FAQs, complete instructions if you want to taste and review absinthe, a list of suppliers, 150+ cocktail recipes, a forum for nerd talk, and a lot more.

The second heavy weight site is Oxygénée. One writer properly said that oxygenee.com probably has the most information about absinthe on the planet. I personally believe that claim, BUT this site is very frustrating. There are numerous sister sites with redundant information, the website design does not flow well for finding what you want, and the layering of information and web structure drags you into anise-scented green vortex of absinthe detail. Go straight for the FAQs or the vintage absenthe section if you have a boat load of money to spend.

If you want the CliffsNote approach, I would recommend the website of Tempus Fugit Spirits, which is a company that imports absinthe from traditional areas of France and Switzerland. The FAQ section on Tempus Fugit is much shorter but has the most crucial information. You will get 80% of the information in a fraction of the time, and the narrative is written better. Here are some interesting facts from the website:

• Absinthe was first a cure-all medicine and that is one reason for its high alcohol content.
• During the French-Algerian War, the French prescribed absinthe as a disease preventative and to cleanse water. The returning soldiers to France helped popularize the drink.
• Absinthe gets it name from the French word for ‘wormwood’ which is ‘grande absinthe’.
• Wormwood grows best in the mountainous area between Switzerland and France, hence those areas were the historical production centers.
• The green color of absinthe comes from chlorophyll, though lower quality absinthe uses green dye. Again, choose a natural green and not a fake green absinthe.
• The bad reputation from absinthe came mainly from poor distillers that sold inferior and sometimes dangerous products and the negative media hype that focused on drug effects and even ‘absinthe murders’.
• The Temperance Movement also played a large part in getting the spirit banned, and the movement teamed up with wine producers to help ban it. Wine makers were suffering after the spread of the phylloxera louse destroyed much of Europe’s vineyards, so wine prices were high. Wine was losing market share, and absinthe was gaining in popularity and cheap.
• By 1912 it was banned in the US and in 1915 it was banned in France. It was never banned in the UK, Spain, and Portugal. Absinthe was only re-legalized in its home of Switzerland in 2005 and in the US in 2007.

The history of absinthe is a case study of misunderstanding at the wrong time in history. Phylloxera, wine politics, the scourge of WWI, and prohibition all created a climate for a popular drink to disappear for decades. And challenges still exits even after legalization. A lot of the distilling knowledge, techniques, and equipment have been lost, and the herbal raw materials are more scarce. Much of today’s absinthe does not resemble the drink of the past, and there is a reason the highest rated absinthe comes from pre-ban bottles.

The irony is that subsequent testing of old bottles of absinthe have proven that these spirits were chemically harmless in terms of secondary drug effects. It turns out, the reason people ‘lost their mind’ was that they drank too much and absinthe was really strong. Makes sense to me.

With that said, there are 50+ legally available brands of absinthe in the US, and the suspect chemical compound from wormwood called thujone has to be under 10 parts per million for it to be legal. And those old bottles tested, well, the level of thujone in them was was around 1 part per million.

Nowadays, absinthe is making a comeback as classic cocktails are back in style and it is again legal. The licorice scented aperitif spirit will be surprising to many. For years the drink was taboo, subject to misinformation, and illegal but when you first smell licorice you think of candy and your childhood and not images of psychedelic drugs or an illegal substance. But if you don’t like licorice, you won’t like absinthe. Find something else.

If you want to purchase absinthe domestically, DrinkUpNY has an excellent selection and they ship all over, and you can also find a few other brands if you have it shipped from the UK at absintheonline.com.You can buy absinthe barware at Amazon.

More and more classic paper cups are coming back in all sorts of designs and materials. A while back I purchased a to-go cup (to the right) made of porcelain that is fashioned to look like a regular paper coffee cup. The name is appropriately ‘I Am Not a Paper Cup’ and it is sold at the MoMa Store. The cup is designed by James Burgess and made out of hefty double-walled porcelain with a silicon rubber cover.

Admittedly, it is a great design, but if you are wanting to keep things hot for a long time and hold a lot of coffee, it would be better to find another product. It is functional, but it is more design than function. The coffee will stay hotter longer than a non-capped cup, but not that much longer. The cup volume is also pretty minimal and really only holds about a regular cup’s amount of coffee.  Also, the silicon caps will get coffee stained around the mouth, so if you think you will use it a lot and won’t want a brownish-white cap, then I would suggest getting the extra black cover to use instead.

But I must admit that I like to use my cup, and the fact coffee actually cools in it and doesn’t stay undrinkably hot for 30+ minutes is fine with me. Also, it is much better than using paper cups and throwing them away after each use, so it’s better for the environment.

Sagaform out of Sweden has an almost identical item but with a black top and a bit more design to it. It just came out in their Christmas catalog, so it might not be available in online stores yet. Amazon usually carries a lot of Sagaform items so you can probably check back in a month or so and find it there.

But the cups keep coming. At MoMa and the ConranShop you can also can get porcelain crumpled versions of the water cooler cup. Again, they look interesting and will no doubt get some comments at a party. The site suggests using them for coffee, condiments, and desserts. They are dishwasher safe, so hopefully the crumpled surface won’t be too hard to clean.

Then there is a stemware option for cups too. The Conran Shop has two Seletti glass beaker glasses. One is on a stem and the other is without. So there is a water cooler wine glass now too if you want to use it for that. Part of me thinks this just looks a bit weird though, and I wouldn’t be using it for a wine tasting.

I recently purchased the Hinckley Cellars wine label remover (’The Note’) and overall I am pretty satisfied. There is a YouTube video that shows you how it works on their website if you are interested in buying one, but essentially it uses a process of soaking the label along with a sharp-edged scrapper to take the label off.

Before buying this product, however, I researched other methods for removing labels such as the adhesive removers, but I didn’t want to be bound to using tape and having to replenish adhesive strips. In the end I chose ‘The Note’ instead.

Regardless, here are my initial impressions of the product.

• It does a good job taking off labels, but you need to practice a little bit.
• Even though the blade comes with a leather protector, the edge is not that sharp and in fact it seemed to be too dull to effectively scrape off the label. My solution was to use a knife honer to improve the edge and it was then easier to get the scraping started evenly.
• The longer you soak the label under the faucet the more delicate the label becomes and it is more likely that you will end up ripping the label. What I found was that by filling the bottle up with really hot water and letting it sit for 15 minutes, I was able to get the adhesive to loosen without over soaking the label. Sometimes I wouldn’t even need to run the label under water at all, but usually a short soaking helped.
• After taking about ten labels off, I was pretty good at it. But with that said, some labels are just plain tough and will be challenging regardless. Not every label will make it, but practice first on labels you care less about.

All in all I would recommend this product, but I would try sharpening the edge to make the scrapping more effective and you may also want to try the hot-water technique too. Also, when I bought mine, they had a restaurant edition for $39 and a scratched/discontinued product for $29, so I would consider buying those if it is not a gift. Otherwise it will cost you $49 with the gift box.