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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Hello! I am incredibly excited about a project Sarah and I have been working on for a bit under a year now. May I share it with you? Swell!
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
So, around this time last year, she and I had just begun work on The Aviary: Holiday Cocktails. We were excited to make something in this funky "slow-zine" softcover style. As we waded into it, we wondered what other ideas might fit this form factor well.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Something that I was particularly-fascinated by when we were making the Aviary book were the "N/As" – non-alcoholic drinks. These recipes were SO cool to me; they require exponentially more care and thought than actual cocktails, because every bit of them is made from scratch.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
You can buy boozes that have insanely complex flavor profiles, ready to go right out of the bottle. But if you want to take out the booze, you have to start building all that same complexity from nothing.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Also, EACH of the Alinea Group's restaurants develops their own battery of n/a's...not just The Aviary. The collection of recipes from each restaurant differs wildly from that of the others...there's a flabbergasting variety amongst them all.
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Allen Hemberger
Anyway, one day, while talking about these things, Chef Achatz sort of casually made this comment "Yeah, this is what we do all day...we try to combine flavors in interesting ways. These n/a's are the same, just with liquid."
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
This insight blew my mind. These are some of the world's best chefs, choosing to focus part of their energy on spirit-free drinks. These aren't just soda water with lime...they're not "mocktails". They're full-on cookery, just with liquids instead of solids.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Anyway, Sarah and I thought a non-alcoholic booklet could be fun. So we went to work coming up with a pitch to present. We pulled about 20 recipes from our archives here; these recipes are kitchen-scale (so, they're meant to serve like 80 guests. Not super-useful at home).
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
I worked on scaling down all the recipes to be reasonable at home, sourced all ingredients, did all the recipe testing, and make everything entirely at home.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Further, I photographed everything in our apartment as well (on my kid's 1.5-foot-tall coloring table). After about a month of work, Sarah and I had a prototype that we brought in to present to Nick and Chef.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
(I made the cover in Houdini, using a couple fluid emitters pointed at one another with a bit of color diffusion to make a nice, tasty-looking splash).
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Anyway, we showed this thing to Nick, saying "Do you think this would be a good idea for a booklet?" He flipped through our prototype, tossed it on my desk, and said "no." Then he smiled, and said "You guys should make a full-on book about it." So we did.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
We did the entire thing the same way we'd made our prototype; I did all the scaling and testing in our small apartment kitchen. I felt working this way was important: I want these recipes to be easy to make at home, and what better way than to make all of them in a home kitchen?
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
I felt the same about ingredient sourcing; when I could, I would try to use ingredients we could find online or in our local supermarkets, rather than doing special-order stuff through The Aviary itself. Here's what that looked like a few months in.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
(...and here's what it looked like after Sarah gently asked me to please clean my shit up or she was going to send the previous photo to Chef.)
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
The recipes themselves were super-fun to make, and scaling them all down myself forced me to learn how to taste and evaluate them. I brought each version of each drink in to the chefs to let them taste a couple times per week.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
I ended up making most drinks several times before getting them to a point where we all agreed they were delicious.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
In doing this back-and-forth, we ended up expanding the scope of things dramatically; what started as a book with about 30 recipes grew into one with over 120 or so. There's some pretty fun stuff we developed just for the book (things that were never served in the restaurants).
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Anyway, I'm excited today because we've gotten a big box of proofs from our printer and are putting the finishing touches on things before pushing "go" on our big print run. We're debating a few different cloth-cover slipcase options...
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
...and a few interesting cover treatments (we're working on a textured cover that has sort of a glassy "varnish" over the hero drink, so that the whole thing is fun to touch).
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Sarah just finished up the end sheets (the two pages that secure the main book block to the cover itself). I generated the linework in Houdini – a combination of Tessendorf waves and a fluid simulation – and she hand-painted the ice cubes and the water textures)
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Anyway, we aim to have it ready to ship within the next few months, and are very excited to share it.
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Allen Hemberger 24. sij
Odgovor korisniku/ci @dhemberg
Oh, also, we're working on something else that we'll be releasing around the same time. Have a great weekend!
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