Everyone loves a backyard barbecue, but what if you don’t have a backyard? Not long ago, I ditched my house for a second-floor apartment. While I don’t miss mowing the lawn, the absence of convenient outdoor cooking hurts, as smoking and grilling have been huge fixtures of my year-round lifestyle, especially since beginning three book collaborations with barbecue master Aaron Franklin. Franklin Smoke, our third book, explored the intersection of grilling and smoking—my favorite way to cook. Once I lost my backyard, I had to find a grill that I could store in a closet and easily take outside when needed.

The portable grill market offers a wide range of models, but most of them excel at only one of two things: being easily transportable or grilling food well. The ($695) appears to be an exception, as it combines true portability and high-level grilling performance with versatility as a smoker. I discovered the Nomad last year via a hypnotic and mouth-watering from my friend, the great live-fire chef Adam Perry Lang, who was using it to sear piles of tomahawk ribeyes. The unique design caught my eye, and I spent the summer testing a loaner model of the grill’s latest iteration, which comes with twice as much ventilation as the first-generation model. With minimal setup and easy breakdown, I happily found that I could be up and cooking in minutes whether at my apartment’s green space, a park picnic table, a truck’s tailgate, or a walk-in campsite.

The Nomad Grill and Smoker’s Brilliant Design

The Nomad may be the sleekest-looking piece of barbecue equipment ever created. It looks like something Q Division might have designed for James Bond, but every detail has a function, and no aspect is gratuitous. The more you use it, the deeper your appreciation gets.

The Nomad is shaped like a large briefcase or what used to be called a valise (before humanity woke up and put rollers on luggage). Its oversized plastic handle provides a comfortable and spacious grip. At 28 pounds, the Nomad is not something you’d want to schlep on a long trail, but for a short trip from hatchback to campsite, it’s compact and ideal.

The case’s exterior is made of perforated anodized aluminum, which gives it a polished industrial look but also provides toughness and airflow, as the exterior is really a shell for the grill inside. Two durable plastic briefcase-like clasps (that stay cool during use) unsnap to open the unit. When opened and laid flat, each half of the shell houses a heavy, die-cast aluminum box that will contain the fiery hot charcoal.

Together, the thick aluminum interior and shell allow for enough heat dissipation that the Nomad’s outer surface stays cool during use—enough so that you can set it on surfaces like picnic tables without fear of setting them ablaze.

Classic Charcoal Grilling

It takes two seconds to open the Nomad, and then it’s ready to go. The manufacturer sells proprietary high-quality charcoal made from Thai fruitwood and some fire-starter tumbleweeds, but any type of charcoal works. Whatever charcoal you use, I recommend starting it in a chimney, which is faster and easier than any other method.

The Nomad comes with a grill grate that covers one of the two sides when the box is open. Ordering another separately will let you double the area of grill surface (and add an extra three pounds to the total package). The grate itself is unique and speaks to the quality of the manufacturer’s workmanship and design. Made from rigid, cast stainless steel, its slightly convex shape (for structural integrity and coal clearance) features a honeycomb pattern that successfully prevents almost anything from falling through. For ingredients with a propensity to roll—sausages, asparagus—just turn the grate over and let it be a shallow basket. Cleverly, the grate is also magnetized, snapping satisfyingly into place and remaining there without rattling even when the Nomad is collapsed and on the move.

Once you dump the hot coals and set the grate on top, it takes five to ten minutes for the grill surface to get hot enough to cook on. Manual vents on the ends of each side allow for control over airflow. Open them to whip up the flames, close them partially to dampen heat, and shut them fully to extinguish the coals when the Nomad is folded and locked.

As a grill alone, the Nomad excels. The short distance between coal bed and cooking surface maximizes the heat intensity, making it perfect for searing. Every time, achieving a deep, flavorful crust on steaks was a breeze. For thicker cuts, I constructed a two-zone fire, mounding the coals on one half of the grill while spreading them out loosely on the other for a more mellow roast. Of course, you can also close the Nomad’s top to create an interior cooking chamber, which allows another set of possibilities.

Able and Creative Smoking

The ability to instantly shut the suitcase lid and turn the Nomad into an oven or smoker is one of its best features. When closed, the Nomad’s built-in analog thermometer conveys the internal temperature, and the side vents to control airflow become ever more important. If you plan to close the lid to create oven-like conditions, definitely organize your grill in two zones to make room off the coals for your food to roast. The thermometer told me that after ten minutes I was hitting temperatures over 400 Fahrenheit when using a fair bit of charcoal, though it was easier to maintain temperatures in the 350-degree range.

In this mode, adding wood chunks or wood chips directly to the coals or on the grate above them will provide smoke. Then you can configure the vents to create draft: open the vent next to the coals while keeping the one above it closed and do the opposite on the other end. This pushes air directly to coals, which smolders the wood, while the open vent next to food pulls the smoke across and out.

Smoking any slow-cooking cut (think brisket, ribs, or pork shoulder) takes hours, and this is not where the Nomad shines. Its heat retention is good, but not in the same league as something like the Big Green Egg, thus you’ll need to replenish its coals fairly regularly, which is a bit of a pain considering you have to open it, set the meat aside, remove the hot grill, and add more hot charcoal that’s been prepped in a chimney.

My best results came from deploying the Nomad as the hybrid it is: smoking for short durations to add a savory-smoky layer of flavor on top of the juicy tang of charcoal grilling. In practice, that meant smoking marinated chicken parts with the Nomad closed for 20 to 30 minutes, then opening it, ditching the wood chunk, and cooking directly over the coals to get that pungent char. It worked just as well in reverse—searing thick-cut pork chops over high-heat coals, then moving them to the unheated end of the grill, adding a wood chunk over the coals, and smoking them for 15 to 20 minutes until done.

The results were spectacular, everything you’d want from a hybrid smoker-grill: professional quality cooking dynamics, achieved with great ease and efficiency, and a level of portability never before seen in a product like this.

When you’re done cooking, simply fold up the Nomad, snap the latches shut, close the vents, and your coals will be extinguished in no time. Cleaning up after any grill is never fun–no other word than filthy to describe ashes, grease, and char. The Nomad acquits itself well here too, though it is a bit unwieldy to turn over and dump. Nomad’s suggestion of using a shop vac to clean out the ashes is a good one. The rest cleans up well with a high-powered spray nozzle and maybe a little scrubbing if you want it to shine.

The only real downside of the Nomad is its price, listed on the website as $695. However, fans of both design and quality gear will recognize quality when they see it. And the Nomad is so brilliantly conceived, simple to use, and well-constructed, that it should not only function well for decades but also never go out of style.

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The brisk bite of autumn air always adds some pep to my step on my morning runs, but it also puts me in the mood for apples, which are just beginning to tumble off their branches. As we sink into fall, freshly-picked Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp and more begin popping up everywhere, from farmers’ markets to bakeries to hot apple cider stands. In that vein, ’tis the season to remember one of the world’s most delightful and overlooked spirits, apple brandy, whose golden glow and heady apple perfume makes it the perfect sip on brisk autumn evenings.

Apple spirits are everywhere from New York state to California to the Carolinas; a welcome, trendy drink that becomes even more profound if you know a little bit about its crucial and complicated heritage on this continent. The bitter history that follows makes today’s rich apple spirits all the more sweet.

The Potentially Dangerous History of Apple Jacking

America’s original “favorite drink” was not bourbon or rye like you’d expect, but apple cider. The apple tree was key for settlers who tamed the rugged North American continent. As most people know, Johnny Appleseed was not out distributing seeds of Granny Smiths or Pink Ladies, but rather tart, indigestible apples. Although they don’t sound particularly appealing, these apples were grown to produce cider, a godsend that was safer to drink than water, and both cheap and easy to make . As delicious as they are, typical “eating” apples that we enjoy as snacks make bland cider. Bitter apples may be inedible, but via fermentation and distillation, effuse aromas and flavors vastly more complex and beguiling than anything you’ll ever get from a piece of raw fruit.Ěý

Apple cider is best turned to hard alcohol using a dedicated pot still. But these weren’t common in the early centuries of this country, hence the funny-sounding technique known as jacking. Alcohol freezes at a lower temperature than water, thus, in winter, when cider is allowed to freeze outdoors, chunks of ice can be periodically removed from the vat. This leaves behind a liquid of even more concentrated alcohol.

Alas, the process of apple jacking lacks precision. While the hard spirit in applejack contains methanol, a dangerous chemical (think blindness, kidney failure), is removed during the responsible, modern distillation of today, that wasn’t always the case with jacking. And at the end of the 19th century, the degradations on the health of American drinkers (and general drunkenness) made applejack the major target of the rising temperance movement, whose ascendance led not only to but also to the destruction of of apple orchards, effectively killing the apple spirits industry.

Cider apples never came back. In their place, farmers planted grain—cheaper, quicker to grow, and easier to distill—giving rise to our dominant domestic whiskey industry. The destruction of the American orchard had a cost beyond fruit. Lost too was the cornucopia of genetic material contained in apple trees that had adapted from their European roots to American soils and climates.

The Best Apple Brandy 

The original and, in my opinion, best apple brandy is called Calvados, which comes from Normandy in the northwest corner of France. Here, ancient apple (and pear) orchards thrive, and scores of different varieties are blended to create a complex, vivid spirit. Oak aging is key, as unaged apple spirits can be a bit harsh. Allowing a raw apple spirit to mature for years in a barrel, can make the difference between tart, unripe fruit and apple pie. Look for Calvados producers like Adrien Camus, Lemorton, and Roger Groult for examples of addictively good spirits. They still have a little bite, but also the warm, familiar, comforting flavor of baked apple. Longer-aged spirits are more expensive, but also more rich and complex.

Because of the loss of cider trees, a fair bit of American apple brandy comes from eating apples, which makes for a simpler, less exciting spirit. That said, America’s bourgeoning apple brandies are well worth trying. New Jersey’s , dating from 1698 and the oldest continuously run distillery in the country, is still the largest producer. Out west look for wonderful apple brandies from old-school distillers like Oregon’s Clear Creek and California’s St. George Spirits. But all over the country, newer craft distillers are also getting into the game. Black Dirt Distilling, Copper & Kinds, and Neversink from New York’s Hudson Valley make very flavorful stuff. Outfits like Saint Paul Farms from North Carolina are already producing good spirits, but also growing thousands of new, bitter apple trees whose fruit will be perfect for cider. Follow these spirits over the next few years—they will only get better and better.

So, as the weather turns colder and we all become more contemplative, warm yourself up with a little apple brandy and take in not only the beautiful present autumn moment but also the apple’s deep .

How to Drink Apple Brandy

For good quality, I recommend aged Calvados. I love to drink it neat in a little spirits tasting glass, tumbler, or snifter. If it’s over proof or simply tastes too strong, it’s perfectly acceptable to add a splash of water to tame the alcohol.Ěý

Calvados is also great in cocktails or even just mixed with a little soda water or tonic. For a simple, yet delicious fall Calvados cocktail, I might recommend an apple blossom. This version I adapted from the recipe on Difford’s Guide, which is adapted from the version in Trader Vic’s Bartender’s Guide, 1972 edition.Ěý

Apple Blossom Cocktail

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• 2 oz Calvados or Apple Brandy
• 1.5 oz Red Vermouth (I prefer Dolin) 
• 2 dashes orange bitters 
• 1 dash of saline solution or a tiny pinch of salt 

Directions

1. Stir all the ingredients together in a pitcher filled with ice and strain into a chilled cocktails glass.Ěý

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Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House and .

This preparation of pork combines the dynamics of a slow cook with the fast grill, producing a flavor that hearkens to both. Pork steaks absorb the delicious effect of the grill as their drippings vaporize on the hot coals and subsequently rise up to perfume the meat. Yet they also pick up gentle smoke from the coals and burning wood.

While this pork is cooked like a steak or a chop, it is actually cut from the shoulder, aka the pork butt. As you know, the meat from the shoulder is much tougher than meat from the loin, where the chops are. Consequently, pork shoulder is usually cooked long and slow to break down the collagen and make the meat pull-apart tender. The goal for this approach to shoulder steaks is to cook them over direct heat, like a pork chop, but slowly and deliberately so they soften a bit over time. You’re not looking for exceedingly tender, pulled-pork consistency here. But you’re also going to cook well past medium-rare as you might do for a chop. The length of the cook allows the meat to pick up precious flavor from the fire.

Speaking of pork chops, they would be equally delicious cooked over the firepit and basted with the mop recipe listed here, but they are an entirely different muscle—from the loin, not the shoulder—which cooks quite fast, should be served at a lower internal temperature, and doesn’t need all that time to break down tough muscle fiber. Cook thick-cut pork chops as you would a steak (though not as rare), but feel free to baste them with this mop for added flavor.

THE MEAT

I recommend using rich, well-marbled pork, as the fat content helps the meat hold up over a long cook. Definitely try to avoid modern, conventional pork, which has been purposely bred to be lean. I look for heritage breeds such as Berkshire or Red Wattle. There’s even a ranch raising Ibérico pigs in Texas, the same breed that produces the world’s greatest jamón in Spain.

Use a bone-in pork butt and ask your butcher to cut it into steaks two to three inches thick. You could also buy a whole shoulder (more affordable but also more work) and then break out the old bone saw, which I sometimes do much to Stacy’s chagrin (not her favorite thing to find lying around the kitchen), and cut through the bone yourself. Most of the steaks from a pork butt will have a sliver of the blade bone in them. This is what you want. Boneless butts have to be butterflied to get the bone out and then are tied up in a round. This is fine for roasting a whole piece, but the steaks need to retain their structural integrity and thus must retain the bone.

THE MOP

A mop is necessary here to add pork-friendly flavors and to keep the meat moistened so it doesn’t burn while it cooks for a good long while over the coals. The mop also provides additional fat that your pork might not have (even a well marbled heritage breed), augmenting the supply of vaporized juices as it drips onto the coals.

You can prepare the mop on the stovetop in advance and then warm it over the fire when it’s time to use. Doing this advance prep makes it easy to cook these steaks at home or at a campsite.

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When strolling down the street during winter in a Japanese town, you’ll  notice green, fuzzy globes suspended outside doors.Ěý Made of cedar branch tips, these beachball-sized decorations are  called sugidama.  are presented to  convey a joyous message: Come inside for  freshly brewed sake.Ěý Traditionally hung by sake breweries during brewing season, sugidama announce to customers the arrival of the year’s new sake.

Sake is the national beverage of Japan, an alcoholic liquid made from fermented rice and thus sometimes referred to as “rice wine.” It’s usually colorless (although some styles are unfiltered and thus cloudy), between 15 to 17 percent percent alcohol, and has a mild, subtly sweet flavor suggestive of various fruits (apple, banana, and pear are common notes). Most styles are served chilled, though there is a tradition of warmed sake. It’s very difficult not to like.

Why Is Sake a Winter Drink?

Historically, sake was only brewed during the cold months because  the rice, which was  harvested in autumn, required  rest before being polished down. Winter’s cold temperatures also contributed to the brewing process. The open fermentation of rice generates a lot of heat, and a cold environment helps keep temperatures under control,  which is important for the preservation of certain flavors and aromas. Frigid air is also cleaner air, helping to prevent airborne yeast and bacteria from compromising the hygiene of the fermentation. And, finally, some brewers prefer the purity and cleanliness of winter water and even utilized ice caves to safely age the just-brewed sake.

Today, the advent of brewing technology—temperature control, air and water purification, microbiology labs—has made seasonality less important than it once was, but Japanese sake brewers remain steadfastly attuned to history and tradition. Indeed, some brewers still revel in the connection between winter and sake by celebrating it in the brewing process.

Snow Sake

For instance, the Hakkaisan brewery—located in the mountains of Niigata prefecture on the west coast of the main island of Honshu and Japan’s second snowiest region (yes, there is skiing)—produces a famous sake called “Yukimuro” (“snow room”). This snow-aged sake matures for three years in an insulated cellar cooled by massive mounds of collected mountain snow. The bottle’s barren, white color reflects this unique method and the sake itself, a junmai daiginjo, is impossibly creamy and rich with flavor.Ěý

Not very far away, the Tsunan brewery announced this year the creation of new limited edition sake “Yukikamoshi”  (“snow brewing”), which is actually brewed with melted Niigata snow. When the snow eventually melts in spring and summer, its water becomes the growing environment for the local rice, which is used in the sake. So, essentially, from seed to sake, “Yukikamoshi” is a celebration of the resource of the local snow, which measures up to 13 feet in a typical winter here (some areas of Niigata get twice this). “Yukikamoshi” has yet to be released, but will be well worth tasting when it arrives.Ěý

One quality of snow is its fleeting existence, a fact emphasized to me when I learned while writing this that the most famous winter sake—and one of my favorites—“Divine Droplets,” is no longer being made in its original fashion. The special sake used to be brewed through viaa drip filtration in an igloo on the far northern island of Hokkaido. An  ice chamber was painstakingly rebuilt every year for  sake to drip  slowly from burlap bags. Evidently, climate change has made the necessary conditions too inconsistent to continue making the sake this way. Divine Droplets still exist  and is still wonderfully silky textured and richbut it is no longer made in Hokkaido nor in an igloo. The original brewers passed the brand to the Ginga Shizuku brewery, a specialist in drip fermentation.

The most classic winter style you can get at any good sake store is called shiboritate, which means “freshly squeezed” and refers to the first pressing of the newly brewed sake. In addition, most of the shiboritate is released without pasteurization, meaning you get a complete and unadulterated taste of the new sake. (Pasteurization is necessary for the stability and durability of sake during shipping and storage, but does indeed suppress some of the native flavors and aromas.)

Japanese culture is ever attuned to nature and the endless passing of seasons, and sake is a piece of that. Today, whether the sake is made in or with snow is less important as recognizing in it the spirit of winter and relishing it as such. Its chill and purity  mirrors the crystalline cleanliness of a snowy day. The quiet delicacy of flavors resonate with the way winter throws details into relief:  ice crystals on frozen leaves, the crunch of frost under our heels, the muted colors of a winter landscape. So after your next wintry hike or ski or snowboard run, consider unwinding with a glass of winter. And when in Japan, keep your eyes out for those hanging green spheres.

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No matter how dry you like your martini, the original definition of the word cocktail—still considered canon by purists—calls for sugar.Ěý

A piece by Mallory Arnold called “A Sticky Day in the Life of a Vermont Sugar Maker” reminded me that, now that it’s sugar-shack season, one of my favorite uses for maple syrup is not on pancakes, but in drinks.Ěý

Centuries ago, a little sugar was necessary to offset the harshness that would have characterized most spirits, which didn’t have the benefit of modern distillation and aging to round out their flavors and textures. We Americans may have a sugar problem—our foods and bodies are drowning in it— but it wasn’t until the 18thth century that sweetness was anything but the greatest luxury. Maple syrup has never been easy to make, but almost certainly would have been used in cocktails throughout the northeast until cane sugar became affordable and accessible toward the middle of that century.Ěý

Unlike flavor-neutral simple syrup, maple syrup’s contribution to cocktails isn’t just sweetness, but also buttery, nutty, and vanilla flavors. Its flavor prevents maple syrup from being the Swiss Army knife of sweeteners that simple syrup is, restricting its use to certain spirits. But that list is longer than you’d think. Maple blends well with pretty much all brown spirits—rum, brandy, whiskey—as the wood components in both cask and maple tree have an undeniable affinity. But maple can also work well with the potent flavors of gin and even mezcal. And while I wouldn’t call maple syrup healthy in and of itself, it has a lower glycemic index than sugar, not to mention a host of minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants.Ěý

Surprisingly, there’s not a lot in cocktail historiography about maple syrup, probably because by the time the first major cocktail book came out in 1862—The Bar-Tender’s Guide—white sugar was commonplace. But there are a couple of classic cocktails with maple syrup and a couple of obvious places where it fills in for ordinary sugar syrup beautifully.Ěý

One note on using maple syrup: It used to come in grades—Grade A, B, etc.—but that system has now changed. Most of what you find in stores today will be what used to be Grade A, light amber in color and more delicate in flavor, as to not to overwhelm with maple flavor. What used to be Grade B is syrup from later in the season, and it’s darker, thicker, denser with minerals and possesses a more intense maple flavor. Today, this is known as something along the lines of “Grade A Very Dark (strong taste)” and is what I prefer in cocktails.Ěý

We have three maple cocktail ideas to help you remember that, whether it’s tapping season or not, that sticky bottle of maple syrup can have a life far beyond the breakfast table.Ěý

Click for the recipes:

The Applejack Rabbit

Japanese Maple

Maple Old Fashioned

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I discovered this cocktail in the voluminous online recipe database of the Difford’s Guide, which attributes the Japanese Maple cocktail  to a 2009 recipe from bartender Damian Windsor, then at Los Angeles’ The Roger Room. It’s sort of a riff on the Maple Leaf, which is just a bourbon sour with maple syrup. But here the dryness of a Japanese blended whiskey (think Toki) is embraced by the warmth of the maple syrup, while lemon juice adds perkiness and the egg white brings a creamy suaveness.

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This is an obvious one, but worth mentioning.Ěý The Maple Old Fashioned perfectly embodies the original definition of a  cocktail by incorporating a  spirit, sugar, bitters, and water. This recipe calls for rye, but feel free to substitute bourbon on an aged rum.

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I first encountered the Applejack Rabbit at , when famous bartender and drinks writer Jim Meehan was the bar consultant. It makes terrific use of a classic American spirit, Applejack—aka apple brandy—which pairs perfectly with another signature vestige of New England, maple syrup. Though the drink first appeared in print in 1927 in the now rare book Here’s How by Judge Jr., Meehan re-proportioned it a bit to give it a modern day zing, while keeping up its original flavors.

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