Oh, I think I must have stepped in the proverbial pile.
Inadvertently to be sure. There have been some significant rows over the resurrection of this blend. Do a Google search, though the most inflammatory threads have been removed.
Besides, why try to remake something?
Because that something was really good and there's nothing like it around today. Why not remake it AND come up with new stuff as well. Hell, I like chicken fried steak and I can enjoy having it more than once. I don't need to have chicken fried steak foam because it's new.
I am asking only to ponder how difficult it is to reproduce an old recipe with today's available ingredients with the hope of capturing the essence of the original.
This presumes that a blend is fixed and unmoving, like a marble statue. But blends do shift over time, like Balkan Sobranie Original Smoking Mixture, like the original Warhorse, like a lot of blends which were revised during their runs.
Condorlover1 nailed it. Crops change, ingredients change, weather conditions, water, machinery, supervising blenders, all of this changes. The best one can do is sample the drops from the river and try to match to it and having a superior palate is key. That's what Russ brought to the project. That's what makes WhiteKnight a closer match to Balkan Sobranie Original Smoking mixture than is the Germain's product. A recipe isn't enough, because the components change constantly. A recipe is a starting point. So it's damned difficult.
All that said, I also agree with Cosmic's point that the blend should be evaluated on it's own merits, though given the lengths that SToP went to to analyze the contents of the samples, calling it Taco Bell is, putting it mildly, inaccurate.
Anyone here who can do a better job, put your effort where your opinion is and prove it.
:
