What’s shakin, cocktail fans?
Welcome to Episode 148 of The Modern Bar Cart Podcast!
Thanks for joining us for this third installment of our “Art of the Recipe” series, where we’ve been digging deep to learn about the history, craft, and artistry behind the recipes we follow to sustain our bodies and enjoy life.
This time around, we’ve got an interview episode for ya with Los-Angeles-based artist Ben Turner (@b3njaminlturn3r on Instagram), who is the creator of Earth No Patio – a podcast centered around the art of the recipe.
Compared to a lot of podcasts out there, Earth No Patio is WEIRD. In fact, the first time I tuned in, I almost deleted it immediately – you’ll hear the full story about why I didn’t in just a few minutes. But if I had to summarize Earth No Patio, I’d call it an eclectic mashup of technical food and drink recipes, world music, and soundscapes that has more to do with building a feeling in the listener than it does with telling a linear story or advancing an explicit idea.
In the words of our talented audio engineer Samantha Reed:
Ben’s show is […] meditative, […] inspirational, poetic, weird, experimental, mesmerizing. I feel […] simultaneously that I don’t understand anything, but also like he’s explaining something in a way that I’ve intrinsically known my whole life but never put into words before.
Some of the topics we cover with Ben Turner, creator of Earth No Patio include:
How Ben’s experiences in the art and culinary world led him to this structured, yet highly associative experiment of pairing recipes with soundscapes.
Why some of the best (or most efficient) recipes can seem almost boring or banal, but tend to be extremely thoughtful in their structure and sequence.
The intuitive process by which Ben selects the recipes he features on Earth No Patio – from bland, unassuming Italian eggplant recipes, to Ayurvedic dishes that comment on bile color and bodily excrement.
Why Ben views cocktail recipes as punctuation in his podcast, as well as a few thoughts on the wild and funky barscapes he’s been playing with in recent episodes.
What to drink while chatting with Avante Garde composer and artist John Cage, and much, much more.
We’ve got clips from Earth No Patio scattered throughout this episode so you can get a little sample of Ben’s work, and we’ve also got a fun little announcement about halfway through that you should keep your ears peeled for.
This episode’s featured cocktail is the Tallulah, a cocktail recently featured on Earth No Patio. It’s a modern cocktail – certainly not a classic – but it’s basically a mashup of Jack & Coke and a Corn n’ Oil or an Old Fashioned. Inspired by the southern tradition of adding salted peanuts to Coca Cola, the Tallulah cocktail (like sweet tea and shoofly pie) somehow gets away with having way more sugar than most drinks with similar profiles, which is certainly part of its charm. To make it, you’ll need:
2 oz Bourbon or Tennessee Whiskey
1 oz Peanut Orgeat (which we’ll cover in a moment)
2 oz chilled Coca Cola
In a rocks glass filled with ice, add your Whiskey and orgeat, then stir for about 20 seconds until the outside of the glass fogs with cold. Then you can add your 2 oz of Coke, give it a final gentle stir for good measure, and garnish with crushed salted peanuts.
To make that peanut orgeat, you’re going to want to make a simple syrup on the stovetop, add 1-2 cups of roasted, unsalted peanuts and one teaspoon of orange blossom water, bring it up to just below a boil, and then let it sit for several hours before straining and refrigerating it. It’ll last about as long as any simple syrup in the fridge, and it definitely adds a lot of body and sophistication to the Tallulah cocktail – which otherwise is just a whiskey and coke.
In keeping with the on-linear and associative style of Earth No Patio, here are some links to some of the subjects Eric and Ben discuss in this episode. The order is not particular.
My stand-out cocktail is a smoky Boulevardier. It was the first drink I had at the “Red Bar” in Germany.
I would be a solid ice cube. I think that’s my favorite ingredient because it’s like a mixer or a blender. It helps the drink coalesce. It’s also an ingredient you can’t live without – there’s no real replacement.
I’d love to have a drink with the older John Cage in a small apartment in the Bay Area. I’d have a Gin Tonic, but I don’t know what he would be drinking.
Natto – fermented soy beans that are really sticky and stringy.
I’m not as big of a fan of the celebrity chef trend. We often tend to fetishize one restaurant or one type of flavor, and that irks me a little bit.
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