Brewing on a Cold Day and Yellow Split Pea Soup

I was brewing beer yesterday, which was nice since I hadn’t brewed in the previous three weeks. We had previously brewed a Belgian Golden Ale using a mix of the Duvel yeast and the La Chouffe yeast. We had mashed it low in hopes of getting a very dry beer and if the samples we had during bottling and kegging yesterday are any indication, we hit the mark pretty close. In the past I hadn’t been too fond of the Duvel yeast because it takes a long time to clear out of the beer, but it does a characteristic fruity citrus note to it that is tough to beat. My half is kegged and carbonating now and should be ready in a day or two, but I think it will take a few more weeks for it to round out. Still it’s very approachable now and quite delicious.

We won Best of Show with one of our Lambics at the Fall Classic a few weeks ago and part of our prize was a 55lb bag of Weyerman pilsner malt, so we decided to repitch the yeast and brew another Belgian Golden style beer but this time with a little more alcohol and slightly spiced. (The last one clocked in around 7% and we were looking for something more around 8-8.5% this time). We used about 23 pounds of pilsner malt and 4.5 pounds of sugar to boost the alcohol and lighten the body. We had some odd lots of American hops sitting around so we decided to actually use them in this batch, so we ended up with Amarillo hops for the bittering and a small amount of Summit hops in the finish for aroma. We also added some bitter orange peel and sliced fresh ginger at the end of the boil to add just a hint of spicing. In keeping with the season, I’m calling it a Tripel de Noel. With any luck it will actually be ready by Christmas. Purists may decry the American hops, but Belgian beer is all about experimentation.

It was cold and overcast yesterday and by the time we were done, I was ready for something warming. We had been eating Thanksgiving food the last few days and needed a break from it. I had cured some pork belly for bacon about a week ago and was smoking it yesterday, so I decided to make a pot of yellow split pea soup. As a kid, I hated any kind of split pea soup, but I’ve since grown to love it (at least yellow split pea), but it’s unthinkable to me to make it without some kind of cured pork for flavor. I’m actually very fond of the smoky undertones that bacon gives it. It was pretty standard stuff: onions, carrots, celery, bacon, chicken stock, a few bay leaves and the yellow split peas, but it was the kind of warming, homey dinner that I love on a cold day. It had only been about 40 degrees, but brewing in the garage left me cold and raw feeling and soup is a natural restorative. We had a loaf of Grand Central Ciabatta with it to help soak it up. After the overindulgence on Thanksgiving, it was exactly what I wanted.

I was looking forward to tasting the new Belgian Golden, but it wasn’t carbonated, so I just had a pint of our dry Irish stout. We sample some of it yesterday while we were brewing and were amazed at it. It’s a simple recipe, British two row malt, flaked barley, and roasted barley, but it’s incredibly good. Most commercial Irish stout, like Guinness and Beamish (my favorite), are actually quite low in alcohol and that increases their drinkability. Most of the stouts we had made in the past were too big and rich, and ultimately, too filling. This one is about 4% alcohol, just roasty and bitter enough, with enough body to match with food, but also light enough to not overwhelm what it’s served with.

While I’m writing this, I’ve been sipping on a Cascade Lakes Monkey Face Porter, which is new to me but very nice. It has nice chocolate and roast notes in the aroma, but a rich bittersweet chocolate flavor and a good long finish. It’s definitely something that I’ll look for again.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving has the reputation of being the “foodie” holiday. But strangely, it’s also a meal that I feel requires sticking pretty closely to tradition. I just feel that it’s not the time to stray too far into new recipes or unusual presentations. I normally stick to a pretty traditional dinner and this year was no exception.

We had gotten a turkey and I put into a brine the night before. I normally stuff the bird because stuffing is so much better cooked inside of the bird than in a separate dish. Stuffing is also a very personal thing. Most people have their own ideas of it and don’t like other stuffings that stray to far from that. Mine is pretty straight forward: bread, sausage (generally an American sage type breakfast sausage), onions, garlic, butter, and enough stock to moisten it all. If you’re worried about cooking the stuffing in the bird there are a couple of things you can do to make sure that the stuffing gets hot enough. If you put a silver spoon into the cavity with the stuffing and keep the end sticking out, it helps to transfer heat into the middle of the stuffing.

I think the single easiest way to ensure you have a good turkey where all of the parts cook evenly is to stick to smaller turkeys. I normally stick to 10-14 pounds and find that they cook quickly and evenly. I’ve seen all kinds of recipes that call for flipping the bird in various ways to ensure even cooking, but fumbling around with a hot 20 pound bird isn’t my idea of fun. I think smaller birds are the easier way to go. If you’re feeding a huge amount of people consider getting two smaller birds instead of one large one.

Our bird this year was just under 12 pounds and cooked at 325 degrees in about 3 hours. On the side we had mashed potatoes, the stuffing, brussel sprouts cooked with pancetta, onions and white wine, cranberries cooked with orange juice, orange zest and fresh grated ginger. I had added onions and carrots to the roasting pan to help make a richer gravy. Later, I deglazed the roasting pan with white wine and turkey stock (from the neck) to make a gravy. Pretty traditional all the way around.

There is a lot of debate about what to drink with Thanksgiving. In the wine world a lot of people call for softer reds. Matching the turkey to a wine isn’t hard. The real difficulty is the side dishes. Most of my sides, except for the cranberries, would have worked well with wine, but I wanted to go with beer this year. I made a run to the local bottle shop and was looking for a good Biere de Garde (and not just because Garret Oliver says so). Biere de Garde is full ad malty with a slight herbal note to some, but it’s essentially a stronger, smooth, full malt flavor style of beer. Unfortunately, finding fresh examples can be hard. I was able to find a La Choulette de Noel, which is their seasonal, slightly stronger version of their Amber Biere de Garde. It also had more hop flavor and aroma than the normal version. The hops weren’t overwhelming, but they lent a slight herbal character to the beer which also worked well with the food. It was an intense full bodied beer and was very satisfying with all of the food (even the cranberries). Plus it also felt like I wasn’t compromising like I would have felt with a softer, lighter red wine.

For dessert, we had pumpkin mousse. It’s from a recipe I developed a few years ago when we needed a dessert and didn’t have the time to make a pie (and the turkey was already I the oven and the pie and the turkey needed different temperatures). It uses canned pumpkin, eggs, cream and sugar and takes about 30 minutes to make plus additional time to cool down and set.

I also discovered several years ago, that pumpkin desserts are also great with barley wines. Some of the really hoppy barley wines can be a bit much, but most work pretty well with pumpkin desserts. I had gotten some Hair of the Dog Doggy Claws and opened one with the mousse. This year’s Doggy Claws is a tremendous beer and is much more approachable than some previous years were (many of them seemed to need a few years of aging to come around). It was rich and hoppy but didn’t overwhelm the delicacy of the mousse. But it did have enough bitterness to cut the richness. Over all it was a fine match and I’m looking forward to opening another bottle with the leftover mousse.

Quick pasta for a weeknight

I had a bad day at work today. Not incredibly bad, but nothing really went right and I ended up going in early and leaving a little late. Still, I wanted a real meal when I got home but I didn’t feel like doing a lot of cooking. Also, I’ve been getting small amounts of grief from one of the maybe six people who read this blog. The complaint was that I don’t write enough entries and there was a mild implication that maybe I skip a lot of nights because I don’t cook something “real” every night, so here’s an example of what I cook when I’m busy but need to eat.

There are a whole variety of pastas that I can make by the time the water boils and the pasta is done. Tonight’s is one of my favorites: pancetta, garlic and a pinch of dried red chile tossed with spaghetti with a sprinkle of parmesan on top. I make my own pancetta, which is actually incredibly easy to do, roughly following Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s recipe form Charcuterie. I don’t bother with the drying. I cure it for about 7-10 days and then cut it into pieces and freeze it. Even with this shortcut method, it’s considerably better than any pancetta you can buy, unless you buy from a real butcher who makes it properly.

So if you have the pancetta, it’s simple. First bring a pot of water to boil for the pasta. Next, cube the pancetta (I use about 2-3 ounces for two servings) and then brown it in a pan over medium heat to cook it and render the fat. I normally pour the pork fat off and replace it with olive oil. But that’s dependant on your cholesterol and how much you want to infuriate your doctor. Throw in 3-5 cloves of minced garlic and brown it. Throw in a little crushed, dried red chile and turn the pan off. Cook the pasta, and save about 3-4 oz of the cooking water when you drain it. Toss the pasta and the pancetta and garlic mixture. Add some pasta water to make it all slick and easy to blend. Season it with salt, if it needs it, and some fresh black pepper. Add some parsley if you have it, but tonight I didn’t bother. Dish it out and sprinkle some freshly grated parmesan. Done. Takes about 15-20 minutes and most of that is waiting for the pasta.

Need a vegetable? Have a salad on the side, or do what we did tonight. Have a good piece of fruit for dessert. We had a tiny amount of the Stilton from last Friday left over so we sliced another two pears and divided the cheese. It’s a great dessert and you can’t beat how easy it is.

What to drink with it? Well frankly, whatever you have that won’t get in the way. Simple is the way to go. Tonight I chose a homebrewed dry Irish stout. Stout is very misunderstood. Most traditional stouts, like Guinness and Beamish, are actually fairly low in alcohol. The roast barley gives it a big flavor but many people confuse that with big alcohol. Dry stout is an incredibly food friendly beer. Stout and pasta may not seem ideal, but it was a hectic day, a quick dinner and frankly, it was a fine match. The dry roast quality of the stout cut through the fattiness of the pancetta and cheese and was malty enough for the garlic and chile. Simple easy and dinner was ready in less than 20 minutes. I even had time to start curing another piece of pork belly for more pancetta while it was cooking. Beat that. Cooking a real meal doesn’t have to be hard and it sure beats using a jar of insipid tomato sauce.

Roast Pork Loin and Pilsner

There’s no denying that the weather has changed and that we’re firmly in autumn now. It had gotten cold early this year but the last few weeks have been dry and sunny which is rare this late in the year. I had salvaged the last of my tomatoes a few weeks ago and let them ripen in the house but now they’re gone and I’m starting to cook differently to reflect the change of seasons.

My homebrew club had our annual competition yesterday and we went to the Green Dragon afterwards (both of which I’ll write about separately) to enjoy some great beers and fabulous food. It was a hectic day and today I’m ready for something a little easier so I planned a simple meal that reflects the seasons pretty well.

My wife had picked up a small pork loin roast and wasn’t sure if I wanted to cut it into chops or roast it whole. (Most loin chops are cut too thin and your best bet is usually buying a good sized loin roast and cutting them yourself. More proof that real butchers are going away and are being replaced by less educated meat cutters. Find a good local butcher and buy from him. They’re a dying breed and nobody can tell you more about how to cook a cut of meat than a real butcher, but I digress.) Because I didn’t want to get too involved, I’ve opted for the easy way out: pork loin roast.

Roasts are easy on the cook, and, when done right, they’re tough to beat. Pork is considerably leaner that it used to be and can dry out easily, so I normally brine my pork roasts for a few hours before cooking them, which helps to keep them moist. The apple crop is abundant now, so cooking a few apples on the side is a natural, especially given the natural affinity of pork and apples. I chose Pink Lady’s which hold up well to cooking and have good acidity. I sautéed them in olive oil and butter with a little cinnamon and finished them with some maples syrup to balance their natural tartness.

For a starch, I opted to use up the loaf of French bread I have sitting around that’s gotten stale by making a panade. A panade is, for lack of a better description, a savory bread pudding, although it lacks the cream and eggs of the dessert type of bread pudding. It’s another one of the incredibly resourceful uses for dried bread that exist in most types of peasant cooking. The panade I’m making is loosely based upon the recipe in Judith Miller’s Zuni Café cookbook. My panade is a combination of dried bread, sautéed onions, wilted Lacinta kale, parmesan cheese, chicken stock, and olive oil. The ingredients are cooked separately and then combined roughly in layers in a casserole. The whole casserole is filled to the brim with chicken stock and then put in a moderate oven to meld in to something that is far more than the sum total of its parts. If you use a hearty enough mix of ingredients, you could easily make a light supper out of it, but it’s also a fantastic side to roasted meats.

I have a fair amount of homebrew kicking about but I also have a plethora of commercial beer right now, so I opted for something commercial. Pork and pilsner is a classic match and I have some Pilsner Urquell, which is the original pilsner style beer. Luckily they now make it in cans which ensure that the beer isn’t light struck the way it often is in green bottles (which means it’s not skunky). Cans still have stigma attached to them, but they’re actually the package of choice for beer since they’re more airtight and don’t let damaging light in. There’s no metallic taste to beers cans anymore so there’s really no downside. I had some Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale in reserve just in case but it doesn’t get any better than pork and pilsner? The hop bitterness and crispness of the pilsner are the perfect foil to the sweet pork and apples and the slow cooked richness of the panade. Does it really get much better than pork and pilsner? Not tonight it doesn’t.

Gumbo and Malty Beers

My brewing partner recently had a milestone birthday and we wanted to have him over to dinner to celebrate. He used to cook for a living and although he likes my food, he always seems to enjoy the simpler things that I do. I asked him what he wanted and he said he had no idea so I gave him some choices and he chose Cajun. I do a pretty good job with gumbo and it’s something that he’s enjoyed in the past so I decided to give that a shot.

Cajun and Creole food was one of the first types of food that I really got into in college and right after. It was during the late 1980’s when Cajun food was getting national attention and Paul Prudhomme became a national celebrity. I’ve never been to Louisiana and my cooking knowledge of Cajun and Creole food is essentially from the cookbooks that Paul Prudhomme did.

My general rule with gumbo is that you can’t have too much variety in the pot. Some purists may prefer a simpler version, but I stick to the “if it can’t run away fast enough, throw it in the gumbo pot” rule. For this batch I used home cured and smoked ham, andouille sausage, chicken thighs, shrimp and a few oysters.

The soupy base of gumbo is the most essential part of the dish. Without a properly made brown roux and good stock, the dish will be a failure. I made stock from the shrimp shells and also had some home made chicken stock from last week’s roast chicken. The roux is made from equal parts of oil and flour. It’s cooked over high heat and it’s essential to stir it almost constantly to ensure that it won’t burn or separate. I try to take it all the way to a rich chocolate brown in color. Once it’s arrived at that color, I throw in a mixture of onions, celery, cayenne peppers, and green bell pepper. This stops the roux from cooking and drops the temperature, but I leave the vegetables in for several minutes over medium high heat to ensure that they essentially get sautéed in the roux.

Once the vegetables have softened, I start adding stock and bring the whole thing to a boil and let it reduce. I’ll add more stock once it reduces and let the whole process go again because I like to concentrate the flavors. Once it’s the right consistency and richness, I turn it down to a slow simmer and season it with salt, pepper, Tabasco, and thyme.

I normally brown the ham, sausage and chicken in a pan before adding them to the gumbo pot itself. I like the extra flavor that browning them gives the dish and I normally deglaze the sauté pan with more stock and then add that to the gumbo. The whole process is essentially an exercise in building and concentrating the various flavors. The chicken, sausage and ham, normally take about 45-60 minutes at a temperature just below boiling. The seafood essentially gets thrown in at the end. Once the seafood is done, serve the gumbo with white rice and plenty of hot sauce at the table.

Beer is the natural choice with such a spicy dish, and past experience has shown me that malty beers work best with hot, spicy foods. Hops don’t cut the heat and just seem to accentuate the burn, but malt sweetness seems to mellow it out. I got a variety of beers to have with the gumbo and we split bottles and tried four different beers with the gumbo. First was Schwemler Bernstein Vienna lager, which is a lighter beer but with good malt notes. It was very refreshing and the malt did make it a nice match, but it was a little light for the complex flavors of the gumbo. Next up was a Monchshof Schwarzbier from Germany, which is a dark lager with good rich, smooth malt, and just a hint of cocoa and roastiness. It too was good and was low enough alcohol that you could drink a few throughout the meal. It was nice but not perfect. Next up was the Doppelbock from Bayern Brewing in Montana, which is their winter seasonal offering. It has an incredible malt intensity and was far sweeter than the previous two beers and really stood up to the complexity of the gumbo while simultaneously mellowing the effects of the chiles. It was a great match and my favorite of the beers we tried. Last on the list was Skullsplitter Scottish ale from the Orkney Islands. It’s an intense sweet, rich, malty strong Scottish ale that has notes of dried fruit from the intense malt character of the beer. It was sweet enough and malty enough to match but somehow the Doppelbock worked a little better and was the universal favorite. Strangely enough when I had another bottle of the Bayern Doppelbock the next day, it wasn’t the show stopper that it had been with the food. It’s tremendous how the food can change the character of the beer so much.

Birthdays normally require cakes but my brewing partner isn’t a cake person, but does have a penchant for good cheese and is particularly fond of stilton. I got a piece of stilton and several Concorde pears for dessert and we decided to try the last bottle of a Russian Imperial stout we had made more 5 years earlier (it was brewed in January 2002). Anyone who knows me knows that this isn’t my favorite style of beer because often they are unbalanced and overly alcoholic and lack the balance that a high alcohol style requires. The beer we had made had been virtually undrinkable in it’s youth and had never been a particular favorite of either of us. It had started out with an original gravity of 1.130 and finished out at about 1.030 which means it clocked in at a heady 13.5% alcohol. It poured very viscous and left a thick glaze on the glass when you swirled it. We decanted the bottled into a pitcher and tasted it. To our surprise, it actually had finally come around and was quite astounding. The abrasive hop character it had when it was young had mellowed, the alcohol seemed more in balance and it was full of coffee, cocoa, chocolate and some dark fruit notes. It was fantastic with the rich creaminess of the cheese and a good counterpoint to the ripe sweetness of the pears. It was a pleasant surprise to all of us and my brewing partner and I admitted that we were secretly dreading that it would still be the undrinkable, unbalanced beer it had been for so many years. Sometimes, those big beers do come around.

Mussels and Carbonade Flamande

We were having a friend over to dinner and I was wondering what to make. I didn’t know how sophisticated a palate he had but it was clear that he liked good beer so I decided to cook something that would be easy to match with beer. I don’t normally require a lot of convincing to drink Belgian beers, so I thought that was Belgian inspired food might be nice.

A lot of people aren’t that familiar with Belgian food, and I must confess that I’m no expert, but it’s fair to say that there is a big French influence in Belgian food, although the food is by no means a knock off of French food. There is a big reliance on butter as a cooking fat, and beer is used extensively in cooking. Belgium is far enough north that grapes don’t really grow there but beer has replaced the central role that wine has in some much traditional French food.

For an appetizer, I decided to go with mussels because of their prominence in Belgian cuisine. Mussels are easy to cook and I decided to stick to a pretty basic preparation. I sautéed some shallots and garlic in butter and then added some Belgian golden ale to the pot and reduced it all. Then the mussels went in and they streamed open in about 3 minutes or so. I served them family style with some parmesan toasts to soak up the juices.

To go with the mussels, I served Duvel, one of the quintessential Belgian Golden ales. Duvel is light in color but clocks in at about 7.5% alcohol. But it’s very floral and fruity with a distinct citrus note that makes it perfect with seafood. Despite its alcohol content it’s very crisp and very dry. It also has incredible carbonation to help it feel light on the palate. It was a great match to the simply prepared mussels.

For the main course I opted to go with Carbonade Flamande, a traditional Belgian beef stew made with dark beer. If you look at Carbonade recipes there’s very little consensus as to what’s traditional, but everyone seems to agree on beef, onions and dark beer. For mine, I used a homemade Belgian Dubbel which is very fruity and low hopped. I browned the meat first in butter and removed it to a plate. Then I added about 4 large onions (to about 2 pounds of beef). I cooked the onions down some allowing them to caramelize slightly, added some garlic and the deglazed the pan with the beer. I let the beer reduce some, added some beef stock and added the meat back in. I also added a bouquet garni of parsley, bay leaves and thyme sprigs. I like to do braises and stews in the oven and like to cook them long and slow. Generally 200 to 250 degrees max. You don’t want stew to boil at all. It leads to stringy meat. The key is long slow cooking.

I had debated dumplings or spaetzle on the side but went for mashed potatoes instead partly because they’re so easy and everyone likes them. With the carbonade, we had Unibroue Trois Pistole, a Canadian brewed Belgian dark beer. Its fruity notes and rich intensity matched the dish and the underlying flavors of the Dubbel I had used in cooking. Trois Pistole has rich dark and dried fruit flavors similar to a great tawny port, but, unlike port, it’s very dry. For a second glass of beer, we tried the homemade Dubbel and it was also a great match.

For dessert, I broke the Belgian mold and went with a simple apple crostata. Again easy on the cook and something that showcases the great apples we get here in the Northwest. We had a homemade strong ale with the dessert, because it has some nice honeyed notes. It was OK with the crostata but not really the right beer. Not being easily discouraged, we went back to the Dubbel for after dinner conversation.

Chanterelles and 1993 Beaux Freres Pinot Noir

I’m currently teaching my homebrew club’s annual Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) prep classes. The other member who is running the class has a relative who’s a mushroom forager and every fall I try to get some chanterelles from him. I was ale to get about a pound of them from him last week and was looking forward to making a meal that featured them.

Oregon is renowned for wild mushrooms and chanterelles are my favorite of the bunch. I had initially thought about making a steak and mushroom type of thing, but frankly, chanterelles are that good that it seemed wrong not to have them be the centerpiece of the meal. I thought about some kind of mushroom stew, but ended up making a quick sauté of the chanterelles, garlic, shallots, parsley, and amontillado sherry, served over plain polenta.

I will confess that I used to make polenta with lots of butter, cream and mascarpone cheese in it. In fact it was safe to say that the polenta was really just a vehicle for all of the fat, but in the last several years, I’ve found that I actually like polenta that tastes like, well, polenta. So now when I make it all I use is a little salt but otherwise serve it unadorned so that you can actually appreciate its flavor. It’s a good base for richer stews and a natural with a mushroom sauté.

I was also in the mood for good cheese and got a small piece of garrotxa, a goat’s milk cheese from Catalonia, and a piece of an Italian blue cheese with a red wine washed rind, the name of which I didn’t know and was too stupid to write down, alas.

I generally consider beer better with cheese, but really wanted a good red so I pulled my last bottle of 1993 Beaux Freres Pinot Noir. I didn’t buy a lot of 1993 Oregon Pinot because at the time I thought it was a mediocre vintage without the forward fruit of 1992 and 1994. In retrospect I missed the boat. A lot of the local winemakers actually preferred their 1993’s to the overripe 1994 and this wine showed just how right they were. It still had remarkable intensity of fruit but had wonderful acidity that cut through the layers of fruit. If you have any of it, I would likely drink it soon, because it’s on the downward side of its curve. It had a brick red edge, but had amazing cherry fruit as well as some mushroomy, meaty and earthy notes. Several years ago I had a vertical tasting of six vintages of Beaux Freres (1991-1996) and the 1993 was the clear winner. In may have been in decline but it was remarkable with the mushrooms and actually quite good with the cheese (the acidity helped cut through the richness of the cheese).

Now if I can only manage to get more of those chanterelles.

Indonesian Food

Strangely enough, I grew up eating a fair amount of Indonesian food. My parents had lived there before my brother and I were born and my mother has a fairly solid range of dishes that hit a lot of the culinary highpoints. But it’s never been something that I cooked a lot of on my own. James Oseland’s book, Cradle of Flavor, may change all of that. This is a fairly recent book that covers food from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore and is terrific at pointing out the regional differences in all of these cuisines. The recipes are well written and clear, and the whole book is an entertaining read.

I read through various parts of the book the last few weeks and actually got around to cooking some dishes from it last weekend. I opted for three different recipes and actually followed the recipes, well more or less, but certainly more than I usually do, because it’s a cuisine whose subtleties I don’t understand well enough and wanted an “authentic” flavor in order to help get a handle on the flavor combinations. For this meal, I chose the chicken rendang, a Malaysian chicken curry with coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, fresh turmeric, and lime leaves, caramelized tempeh and chiles, and stir fired greens with chili and garlic, all served with rice.

The chicken rendang was a rich dish with deep flavors of coconut with the punchier citrus notes of the lemon grass, and lime leaves. It was a terrific dish but I was happy that I made other dishes as well, because it might have been too rich on it’s own. The tempeh was a complete winner. My wife was a little wary of it because many tempeh recipes from “hippy” type of vegetarian cuisines are, quite frankly, a little scary. They seem to view tempeh as a meat substitute and think you can simply use it in place of meat, but it can be too earthy and funky in many dishes. This recipe calls for frying the tempeh and then creating a sauce of shallots, galangal, chiles, garlic, tamarind and palm sugar. The end result is a sweet sour and slightly hot glaze that works well with the earthier flavor of tempeh, but also doesn’t mask its actual flavor. It was a terrific recipe and changed both of our minds about tempeh. The stir fried greens, I chose baby bok choy, were simple. It’s a quick stir fry of greens in a chili and garlic scented oil. We’re lucky enough to have a great Asian grocery store near us with very good produce. The preparation was simple, and it enhanced the natural sweetness of the bok choy.

All three dishes worked well and all of the recipes were clear and easy to follow. The book is quite good in explaining certain flavor combinations and with more reading I hope that I start to understand the underlying combinations of the food from this area of the world. It’s a terrific book on a region that is under represented in my cookbook collection.

Bistro Seafood

We had a friend over for dinner lat night to celebrate her birthday which was actually a couple of days ago. We asked her what she wanted for dinner and she said she didn’t know. When we said if you could go to dinner anywhere where would you go she said Southpark, which is a Portland restaurant and wine bar that does a lot of Mediterranean seafood. Mediterranean food is probably the most solid cuisine I know so this actually worked out well for me. What I decided to do was a bistro inspired meal, which is something that I love, and something that I do better than haute cuisine. I like the homey honesty of good bistro food and it’s fun food to share with friends.

I thought about different ideas, but finally decided to do an appetizer with clams and a main course of tuna steaks. For the clams, I went with a Basque influenced base. I sautéed some shallots, garlic and tomato in a little olive oil and then added the flesh of two dried New Mexico chiles that I had soaked in hot water for about 30 minutes. I split the chiles open, removed the seeds and veins and then scraped the thin amount of flesh from off the skins. This was minced and added to the pot. I let all of this cook down a little and then deglazed it with white wine. When we were ready to eat, I threw the clams in turned the heat up high and waited for them to open which took about three minutes. I served the clams in individual soup bowls with some parmesan toasts on the side that could be used to soak up the juices. I sprinkled some chopped parsley over the entire thing right before serving.

To keep the whole bistro like effect I was looking for, I served an inexpensive chardonnay in tumblers as opposed to stem ware. This was a meal about the food, and I wanted softer, easy drinking wines to go with it. The sauce had a little bit of chile bite, nothing too extreme, but still enough to kill an expensive bottle of wine. An easy drinking fruity white like this was perfect and it captured the easy going nature of a great bistro meal.

For the main course, I thought about ideas all day long but had a hard time focusing on a single idea. I knew the tuna steaks would be seared quickly on both sides but hadn’t really come up with any thing definitive. I finally decided to make a white bean puree, with just a little olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice and then serve the tuna steaks on top of the puree. I found some beautiful orange, red and yellow peppers and decided to sauté those with garlic and a little tomato to serve on top of the steaks, which is a rough adaptation of traditional Basquaise preparations from traditional French cooking. Instead of deglazing the peppers and tomatoes with white wine, I opted instead to use sherry because I thought the more intense nutty flavor would work well with the tuna.

I debated the wine choice for a long time, because I wanted to serve a red, but this needed a light, fruity red. I had looked for a gamay or Beaujolais, but the place where I was looking had a limited import section. Most of the field blends I found where a little too robust. What I needed was gamay or a soft grenache, and finally settled on a Cotes du Rhone, which although it had some nice spice, also had good fruit and was soft enough to not overpower anything. It worked well and there was a good bistro sensibility to the match.

For dessert we had a spice pound cake and vanilla ice cream. My wife had made the cake and it was moist, intense and very rich, with a deep brown sugar intensity. It was so good, that it was very hard not to eat too much of it, so we did. After all it was a birthday celebration.

Pumpkin Ravioli and Fresh Hop Beers

So I’m been way behind in blogging and in the interim, we’ve gone from summer to fall here almost overnight. Normally we get a gradual change into fall but the change this year was pretty sudden from mild sunny days to cooler, overcast, drizzly ones. So I’ve been thinking more about some seasonal fall foods and vowed to make one of my favorites, pumpkin hazelnut ravioli, this weekend.

The ravioli themselves aren’t that unusual. The stuffing is pumpkin, chopped, toasted hazelnuts, and a little parmesan cheese. But for a sauce I normally do a savory pear and apple sauce, which consists of chunks of sautéed pear and apples in a sage scented apple cider “broth.” I also decided to add some bits of smoked homemade bacon to richen the sauce and add a subtle smoky note. To make the sauce, brown some bacon and then drain it and remove most of the oil from the pan. Then add several chopped, seeded and skinned pears and apples. I normally add the pears in a two to one ration to the apples. When they soften and give up some juice, add some sage and then apple cider, or better yet, apple and pear cider. Let it reduce and add a splash of sherry vinegar to help balance the sweetness. The sauce should be fairly thin but should have noticeable chunks of fruit. The whole dish is filled with flavors that the archetypal flavors of fall.

Fall is also the time for fresh hopped beers here in the Northwest, where almost all domestic hops are grown. Most beers are made with dried hops but fresh hop beers have become a specialty in many breweries in this area because they can get hops that were literally picked a few hours earlier. Because the hops are wet and fresh, this can require a huge amount of hops, generally about 8 to 10 times more by weight, but the results are unlike anything else. Let the French keep their Nouveau Beaujolais as the special libation of autumn. In the NW we’ll stick to our fresh and wet hop beers.

There was a festival in Hood River to celebrate these beers this weekend, and although I didn’t attend, I was able to buy several fresh hop beers. Sierra Nevada makes one and less than 30 cases where shipped to the Portland area, but I managed to grab a few bottles. Deschutes and Bridgeport also make versions. These are not beers for keeping, but for quick consumption to capture the fresh hop quality of the beers. Frankly, most of them are better on draft since that tends to be fresher and hit the market faster. In any event these are beers to enjoy now for their incredibly complex hop character.

None of the beers are incredibly bitter. Instead all of the brewers chose to showcase the complex and intense aromas of the fresh hops. I liked all three but the Deschutes was my favorite with the food. The Sierra Nevada was typical of the brewery’s style: hop intensive and assertive with a good malt backbone to make for an excellently balanced beer. The Bridgeport seemed to be the biggest of the bunch and clocked in at 7% alcohol. Its nose had a little more grapefruit and citrus but also had some wonderful tropical fruit notes than tied in nicely with the fruit notes of the food. I think the Bridgeport was my favorite on its own. But with food the Deschutes somehow nailed it. The spicy hop aroma seemed to be the perfect foil for the sweet intense fruitiness of the sauce and the slightly earthy notes in the ravioli fillings. It also had enough malt and body to stand up to the richness of the dish. It had cutting power from the hop bitterness but also had malt to marry with the fruit sweetness of the sauce. I would have been happy with any of the three beers, but at that time and place, the Deschutes seemed to be the best.

Although I hadn’t thought of fresh hop beer for the ravioli to start, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, because it fed into the seasonality of the entire meal. I had initially thought about a great bottle of wine, but the fresh hopped beers proved better than any wine I had served in the past with this same dish. Further proof that you can’t beat seasonal foods from the same region.

My trip to NY - Part 1

I flew to NY to see family and a few friends a few weeks ago and was able to drink some great wine and beer and had some great food as well. My first full day there, I took the train down to Manhattan to meet my brother, but first stopped at Park Avenue Liquor where I used to work (I left there about 14 years ago, but still recommend it as one of New York City’s best wine and liquor shops). I still have a good friend, Peter, working there and stopped by on the way to my brother’s office to pick up some wine. In NY, liquor stores can sell wine and liquor but not beer. I told Peter I wanted two reds and a white all in the $15 range. He recommended a 2005 Arrocal from Ribero del Duero in Spain (about $20) and a 2005 Delas Cote du Ventoux ($12) for the reds, and a 2006 Saint Bris Sauvignon Blanc from Brocard ($14) for the white. This last one was unusual. Saint Bris is at the northern end of Burgundy near Chablis, but it’s Sauvignon Blanc and not Chardonnay, which is the most widely planted white in that area. I met my brother at his office and we took the bus over to New Jersey where he lives.

We got in about 7:00pm and chilled the white, but spent a fair amount of time with my nephew who I hadn’t met yet (they had been living in London for the last two and a half years). We didn’t start coking anything for dinner until around 8:00 and kept it simple. In this case it was ravioli in red sauce, but I opened the Saint Bris while we got everything ready. The wine was a revelation. My brother doesn’t normally drink whites, but even he was happily impressed. The fruit was very pure but had the steely quality you expect in great Chablis. It had great acidity and finished very crisp and clean with great length to the fruit. We drank part of it as an aperitif, but it would be a standout with food as well. At $14 retail, it’s a complete steal. I don’t know if it’s available in Oregon, but it’s worth seeking out. If you’re in NY, go to Park Ave. and get some of it. It’s that good.

With dinner, we opened the Arrocal which was tremendous but too big for pasta. The wine was deep purple and inky. The nose was filled with tarry, black fruit, and hints of leather and earth. It was well balanced and round, but a massive wine that would have been better with roasted lamb or beef (even though my brother is a vegetarian), but still completely delicious. It overwhelmed the food, and was a real show stopper. It will definitely age well for several years, but unfortunately, I only bought the one bottle. It seemed more muscular than many wines from this region, but had a velvety fruit quality that seems to be a hallmark of the best wines from this region.

The next day, we hit one of the local liquor stores to look for some local beer (because in New jersey, liquor stores can sell wine, liquor and beer). We were lucky to get find a knowledgeable “beer guy” in the store. There’s not nearly the selection of local beers that we have here in Oregon,
But I was able to find some unusual things from the East Coast that I can’t find here.

I found a Farmhouse Ale from Smuttynose in New Hampshire, which is a conditioned Saison style. I also picked up a fourn pack of Imperial Espresso Porter from Flying Fish (Cherry Hill, NJ), a six pack of Stoudt’s Golden Lager (a Helles style from Pennsylvania), and a growler of Climax Brewing’s IPA which was a small brew pub in Roselle Park, NJ (and the most local beer I found). We picked up some food at a local organic supermarket and had triued a few beers with lunch. The Stoudt’s was very impressive and as good as everything I’d read about it. If it was served to me blind I would likely guess that it was a true Munich Helles. The Flying Fish Imperial Porter was also very impressive, which didn’t surprise me as I’ve always been impressed by all of their beers that I’ve tasted. It was certainly “imperial” in alcohol, but was well balanced with great chocolate and mocha notes and without a real dark malt bite to it. It was round and deep and incredibly delicious.

That night I was back in White Plains at my parent’s house and we went to Ernesto’s, an incredible local Italian restaurant, which I opted to write up separately. The next day, I went back to NY to Park Avenue to meet Peter for lunch. We traditionally have gone to lunch around the corner at O’Casey’s which is a great Irish pub and restaurant which has great corned beef and an impressive tap selection. Although Peter had brought a bottle of wine, we actually started with a pint of Leffe, a Belgian Blonde Ale, that I don’t normally find on draft in Portland. It was delicious. We opened the wine with lunch and I’m afraid to say that I don’t recall the grower but it was a Bourgogne Blanc from a grower in Meursault. Peter told me it was essentially declassified Meursault that hadn’t made the final blend. Park Avenue had bought 50 cases of it because it was so good and an amazing value at $25 a bottle. White Burgundy has never been cheap, but this was an incredible value given the quality. After lunch we went back to the store and I bought a few more bottles for the rest of my stay.

That night at my parents we had some beautiful rib eyes and I had more of the Flying Fish Porter, which was even better with substantial food like that. After dinner, I tried the Smuttynose Farmhouse Ale, which was slightly sweeter and less hoppy than Saison Dupont, but which had very authentic flavors and aromas. There was a lovely orange spice note to it and had delicious sweet malt in the finish. I had only bought a single 22 oz bottle of it but would gladly have drunk more of it. I did try the Climax IPA and it was very nice, although like most east coast IPA’s was substantially less hoppy than what we produce on the west coast. It had a good malt backbone and seemed to favor “old school” American hops, like cascade for its hop profile. I fear it was a little past its prime, because it did taste a little tired. I’m not sure how many growlers of this get sold at that liquor store, but I’d like to try it at the brewery to compare. Still it had good flavor and was nicely balanced. I would love to try more of their beers at some point.

Ernesto's: Incredible Old School Italian Food

I’ve been in NY visiting family for a few days and I’m trying to hit some of the highlights of NY food that just aren’t available in NY. One of these things is Italian food. Don’t get me wrong, Portland has good Italian food, but it doesn’t have good Italian American food, particularly of the type served in small neighborhood restaurants that exist throughout the NY metro area. My parents have been customers of Ernesto’s in White Plains for many years. It’s close by, and has great food and service.

Ernesto’s is old school. The room is very nice; the waiters wear suits and bow ties; the bread comes with butter and not olive oil; there’s Dean Martin and Tony Bennett playing quietly in the background; the waiters and Ernesto himself know the patrons. The menu is a little more upscale than most Italian American places, but it’s still an old school menu. They gave us a plate of focaccia with tomato sauce, which I assume is the same dough and tomato sauce they use for their pizzas next door in the pizzeria (there’s a pizzeria and the dinning room). We started with an order of Mussels, which were steamed with tomato sauce and garlic. Nothing fancy, but the mussels were perfect, the sauce was rich with a nice roasted garlic undertone. A single appetizer easily fed three of us. It was simplicity itself, but it was perfectly done. For dinner, two of us had the pollo tasca, which is chicken breast pounded thin and then rolled up with a slice of prosciutto, a layer of mozzarella cheese, and spinach. It’s sautéed and served in a mushroom, stock and (I believe) Marsala reduction and had a side of green beans with olive oil and garlic. It was amazing, and considerably more food than any one person should eat. My father has the sea bass special which came in a light, slightly sweet tomato sauce with mussels and clams on the side. The fish was perfectly cooked and incredibly fresh. The whole dish was light and balanced but also served in an enormous portion. We washed it all down with the house Trebbiano and Montepulciano. Both are work horse wines that went perfectly with the food. The meal was fabulous, and reminded me of other great Italian meals I’ve had in NY, but sadly, never in Portland. In Portland, all of the Italian food is New School, which, although it may be closer to “real” Italian food, can’t compare to the homey goodness of places like Ernesto’s. Plus, there was no snob factor. The service was great. The Maitre d’, Ernesto himself, and the floor manager all came by at different times to say hello and make sure we were happy. I told Ernesto how good the food was and how we couldn’t get food like this in Portland. He bought us a round of wine as well. Food snobs can keep talking about their “authentic” and “real” Italian food serve elsewhere for much more money. I’ll take a meal at Ernesto’s or any of the other great neighborhood Italian American places in NY anytime. And they’ll make me feel like family every time. When was the last time you had a meal like that in Portland?

Keema and Hair of the Dog Adam

My wife still has the sinus infection from hell and it hasn’t completely gone away, so we continue to do the hot and spicy foods. Last night I was supposed to work and she was going to cook, but the plan got changed so she wanted me to cook instead since I would be home. She was planning on doing something with ground beef but had no plans. I suggested keema, and Indian dish made with ground lamb or beef and often potatoes. She agreed so we went that route.

I browned some sweet onions in a little oil until they cooked down and had turned deep brown. Then I added minced ginger, garlic, and chiles and cooked them slightly. Next I added the beef and browned it and added a blend of ground coriander, cumin, fenugreek, a pinch of fennel seeds, and more dried red chiles. I deglazed the pan with water and added a bunch of quartered, peeled red potatoes, lowered the heat, and let it cook. After a few minutes, I realized it would take a while for the potatoes to cook with so little water, but was wary of turning my keema into a liquid stew. I did want to eat at some point that evening, so I did add more water, and ended up with something that was more soup or stew like than most keema. As that cooked, I got some tomatoes out of the garden (because we’re deluged right now), and blanched them in boiling water for a few seconds to remove the skins. I chopped them coarsely and added them to the pot once the potatoes were tender. I also added some garam masala, which is a traditional, aromatic Indian spice blend, and some chopped cilantro. I let the whole sit over low heat for about another three minutes and then served it with rice.

I had thought about what Alan Sprints from Hair of the Dog had said about dark sweeter beers with spicy food and picked up a bottle of Adam when I was at the supermarket. Alan’s web site describes Adam as “top fermented and cold conditioned to give it a rich and mellow smoothness. The unique garnet color is derived from specially roasted barley, and the intense hop profile is provided by the use of only the finest whole hop flowers. It is 8% alcohol by weight (10% by volume).” It uses a small amount of peated malt (I believe) which gives it a subtle smokiness. The smokiness was more apparent with the spiciness of the food. It’s intensely rich (Michael Jackson said it was as rich as any port), and has the body and sweetness to stand up to seriously spicy food. It was a remarkable match with the food and a joy to drink on its own as well. It’s another beer that I have a tendency to overlook because it’s generally available in many supermarkets and in all serious bottle shops. Only in Portland, can you overlook such an incredible, world class beer just because it’s so readily available. It’s always a pleasure to be reminded of how lucky we are to live and drink in Portland.

Henry's Tavern

We went to Henry’s Tavern on Labor Day after a quick trip to Powell’s, where I was able to score a copy of Anya Von Bremzen’s terrific book The New Spanish Table on sale for $10, which gets me pretty much current with all the Spanish cookbooks I’ve been coveting over the last year. Henry’s is a corporate chain restaurant which is owned by the same parent company that owns a few other chains in the Portland area. I had been given a gift card by a very nice client, and was happy to see that it was good at a place that has real beer.

Henry’s has 100 taps, which is impressive, even in Portland, but unfortunately, there aren’t many things on it that you won’t find somewhere else. Still it is an impressive list and two blocks from Powell’s. We had been there once before for afternoon snacks and beer and had a good experience. They have gorgonzola fries which are essentially waffle fries covered with melted gorgonzola. It’s a huge portion that has enough calories to feed a small village but is a perfect snack with a couple of pints (assuming your splitting the order). We’d also had a perfectly acceptable salad. The food was good, the beer was fresh and the service was good.

When we went on Labor Day, we got there around 1:30 at the end of a huge lunch rush. We were able to get a table but the wait staff looked harried and I knew they were trying to get through the end of a large lunch rush (apparently we weren’t the only ones who thought that a trip to Powell’s and Henry’s was a good idea). We got our menus and I chose a pint of Pelican Doryman’s Dark, which I wanted to try last time but which was unavailable. My wife ordered an ice tea. The ice tea came within minutes. The beer didn’t. After five minutes, the waitress came back to say that they were very busy in the bar and it would just be a minute. Ten minutes later (with no other appearances from the waitress), my beer finally arrived. About a minute later, the food showed up. The Doryman’s Dark is a great beer and well deserves the honors it’s gotten. Brown ales are overlooked in this country which is a shame because they’re such good, subtle beers with food. My wife needed another iced tea and again it showed up in minutes.

We started in on the lettuce chicken wraps and fries and my beer was quickly gone. But, alas, where was our waitress. After waiting vainly for more than fifteen minutes, my wife flagged down the hostess and asked if it was possible that we could actually get our waitress. About five minutes later, she showed up, apologetic, and asked what we needed. I ordered an Amnesia IPA and she went to get it, but returned several minutes later to say they had blown the keg, and were too busy to be able to change it, so I ordered a Ninkasi IPA instead, which actually did show up about a minute later. Of course the food was completely cold at this point. Another waitress came by and asked if we needed anything, and I told her, politely, that this was the worst service I had gotten any place in a long time. She explained that our waitress had been pulled down into the bar area because it was so crowded but also said we weren’t the only ones who had complained about the service that day.

At this point we were ready for the check and I was ready to leave absolutely no tip since the service had been deplorable. I don’t do things like this lightly, but I felt it was well deserved. The waitress brought our bill, I put my gift card out, and she went to go ring it through. We had been there well over an hour for two appetizers and two drinks each. The manager did come over and talk to us without being summoned. He did explain again how the bar was crowded and did say that was no excuse. He took the bill and said "let me correct this" and came back a few minutes later. I was expecting him to comp a pint of beer or two, but he actually comped the entire bill. I have to admit that I was very pleasantly surprised and told him as much. He said he didn’t want us to judge them poorly based upon this and said that the service had been unacceptable.

In my mind, it turned a bad experience into a tolerable one. It had been aggravating, but when confronted with it, he was very gracious and more than fair. Because of him, I left the waitress a 20% tip (it wasn’t really her fault that she got pulled into the bar and only had our table left in the main dining room). I will go back again and with an open mind knowing that they tried to take a horrible experience and turn it around.

Merle Gilmore - RIP

The beer world lost Michael Jackson only a few days ago, but today the Portland beer world lost Merle Gilmore, who is far more important to me. Who was Merle? I would have to confess that I didn’t know Merle nearly as well as I should have, so it’s hard for me to try and sum him up.

Merle was a master homebrewer, fabulous mead maker, confectioner extraordinaire, and tireless volunteer in the world of Portland craft brewing. Merle was the kind of guy you would invite for Thanksgiving dinner and would show up with a rib roast, a few pies, and some incredible beers because he didn’t like to show up empty handed. My wife loved the fact that he wouldn’t ignore people in a conversation when it fell into heavy beer nerd mode; he would always do his best to keep everyone in the conversation. Anyone who attended one of Fred Eckhardt’s Chocolate and Beer Tastings knew and had sampled Merle’s fudge (exemplified by his Habanera Fudge that had to be tasted to be believed).

I learned about Merle’s death about an hour after he died. He had fought a two year battle with leukemia and in the end it beat his body but it never conquered his spirit. I had known Merle for some time through our mutual connections in the beer world, but our first real interaction with each other was when I traded him five pounds of homemade sausage for two cases of beer. We both walked away from the deal thinking we had gotten the better end of the bargain but neither of us felt we had “taken” the other. Amongst those two case of beer were two six packs of Saxer’s Jack Frost Dopplebock. When he gave them to me, he pointed that these were from the original Saxer lots, not the ones brewed later at Portland Brewing. At the time I had no idea how valuable these beers were, but I was told before I drank them all and I kept one bottle of it for a special occasion, and what better occasion than this.

Someone on my club’s listserve had suggested that we all toast a pint of great beer to Merle. I did that this afternoon with friends at the Lucky Lab, but it seemed so inadequate a tribute to such an incredible person. What beer can you drink to memorialize and adequately pay a real homage to someone like Merle? Frankly, I don’t have enough great beers to describe or memorialize him, but when I cracked this last bottle of Jack Frost and thought about Merle, I thought about how fitting a beer it was. The beer was incredibly alive, with a deep, rich, complex character. The body was sweet, intense and complex, but incredibly accessible. The finish was long lasting and it beckoned you to go back and experience it again. It was a joy to be around and to experience, kind of like Merle. A beer can never describe a person as incredible as Merle, but, perhaps, it can shine a small light on his goodness and kindness.

Merle, you will be missed. I only hope the angels appreciate your company and fudge as much as we did.

Vindaloo and Doppelbock

My wife has been sick for several weeks. She had a cold that turned into a bad sinus infection and has been suffering from it for a couple of weeks. Antibiotics didn’t help and although she’s getting better, I’ve been trying to make a lot more spicy food of late in the hopes that the heat will help to temporarily unclear her sinuses. We had done some hot and sour soups and various Thai dishes and decided today to do Indian food. I love Indian food and actually cook a fair amount of it at home, but not always in the summer since a lot of the Indian dishes I like require long simmers.

Since it’s not too hot here I decided to make a truly spicy dish that I love: Pork Vindaloo. Vindaloo, to many people, is synonymous with anything Indian that’s insanely hot, but it is a specific dish with an interesting history. The dish was developed in Goa, which was a Portuguese colony for several hundred years. Vindaloo is traditionally made with pork, which is unusual in Indian cooking and uses vinegar which is another non-traditional ingredient. It is a spicy dish, even by Indian standards, but some of the heat comes from mustard oil and the vinegar helps to accentuate the spice of the chiles. Vindaloo also uses some sweeter spices like cinnamon and cardamom, which is reminiscent of the Moorish influence in Iberian cooking.

The basic recipe calls for creating a spice blend of cumin, cinnamon, chiles, mustard seeds, fenugreek (in many versions), and black pepper. This is mixed with vinegar and the meat is marinated in the resulting paste. Later it is cooked with onions, more chiles, garlic, cardamom and occasionally ginger. The resulting dish is spicy but slightly tart form the vinegar bit also sweet from the spices. It’s a definite head clearer and I thought it would be good for my wife’s sinuses.

On the side I planned to have basmati rice, pepper rassam, a fresh mango chutney and tomato chat masala. Pepper rassam is like a thin soup made with toor dal, onions, and tomato and is spiced with chiles, cumin and mustard seeds and is soured with tamarind. It’s delicious on its won or over rice. The mango chutney would be fresh mangoes, with shallots, lime juice, chile and mint. The tomato chat masala is fresh cherry tomatoes tossed with a spice blend that consists of cumin, chiles, black salt (which has a distinct sulfur taste but is still salt, mango powder (which is actually tart), and black pepper. This would spice the tomatoes but not overwhelm them.

There’s a lot of debate about what beers or wines go with very hot and spicy food. I used to try a lot of things, like pilsners, weiss beers, Belgian goldnes and saisons, but to truly beat the spice and heat nothing beats sweeter darker beers like bocks, Oktoberfests, and Baltic porters. Sugar cuts chile heat like nothing else. The one who enlightened me to this fact was Alan Sprints from Hair of the Dog Brewing. Several years ago on our list serve, someone asked what to serve with a traditional Mexican meal. Opinions varied, but Alan insisted on dark sweeter beers. I tried it and he is in fact correct. Hoppy beers (without the sweetness) don’t cut it. Dry beers like Saison Dupont or Duvel don’t cut it. Malt sugar counteracts chiles like nothing else.

Not having any of these beers on hand, I went to look for some German Doppelbocks, as well as some Baltic porter. Both are well suited to hot food. Unfortunately, it can be hard to find fresh examples of both. I was able to find an Aktienbrauerei Doppelbock and am Obolon Porter from Lithuania. Both were good with the food. I’ll be honest the subtleties of the beer were overwhelmed by the spice, but the body and sweetness made both quite nice with the food. The Doppelbock was all about deep rich maltiness. The porter had good dark fruit flavors, as well as an intense molasses and dark sugar flavor. Both were over 7% alcohol and had enough to stand up to the spiciness of the food.

Don’t believe it? Next time you have spicy food, dump the lighter hoppy beers in favor of a good sweet dark beer. You’ll likely be surprised by how well the beer and food come together.

Michael Jackson

I was at my friend Max’s place to meet a friend and discuss our club’s prep class for the BJCP exam. They were swamped and between all of his running around I had the unenviable task of telling Max that Michael Jackson had died. Michael Jackson, for those who don’t know, was, perhaps, the most influential beer writer of our times. He began writing about beer in the 1970’s and was a tireless advocate of real beer, and was an inspiration to a new generation of beer writers. He writings began at a time when beer was given no respect and at a time when many traditional beer styles were dying out. His writing certainly helped to preserve and save these styles and also helped to lead to the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) in England and the craft brewing revolution in America. He will be sorely missed. I’m sure many a pint of many excellent beers were raised in his honor on Thursday night.

My clubs list serve was filled with Michael Jackson stories, anecdotes, and quotes, but Max isn’t an online kind of guy and had been so busy all day that he didn’t know until I told him. Max had given me a sample of his Gluteus Maximus barley wine and it seemed an excellent choice to use in a toast to Michael Jackson. Max told us the story of having lunch with Jackson in 1995. I had never met him personally and didn’t attend a tasting he held at Rogue’s brewpub here in Portland a few years ago. I was tight on cash and figured I would have another opportunity to meet him, because I didn’t expect him that he would die at such an early age (he had Parkinson’s and other health issues).

I drank through the sample of barley wine and had a pint of Farmer’s Daughter, which is Max’s Belgian Golden Ale, which falls somewhere between a Saison and Golden Ale. Frankly, I don’t care what style people want to place it in. It’s a fantastic beer that’s filled with exotic spice and fruit notes and finishes very dry (far drier than most American made Belgians). It’s become his flagship beer and I’d happily drink a pint of it any time. I also did have his excellent Belgian IPA, which uses the same yeast as the Farmer’s Daughter, but the same grain bill and hopping schedule as his traditional NW beer. It was another good choice for toasting Michael Jackson, who loved the hoppy beers that the NW is famous for and was also an authority on Belgian beers (he literally wrote the book on it).




John Foyston, the beer writer for the Oregonian has a wonderful tribute of Michael Jackson stories on his blog, The Beer Here. It’s a far better tribute than I could write, so I’d encourage you to read it. In any event, the beer world will never be the same with his passing.

A Sausage Making Primer

Making sausage at home isn’t hard. The basic thing to remember is that sausage is essentially just ground meat mixed with salt and seasonings of some kind. It doesn’t have to be stuffed into casing and it doesn’t even have to be formed into patties. The basic idea is to take tough cuts of meat and grind them in order to make them easier to cook and eat. You can make perfectly serviceable sausage by buying ground pork, beef, lamb or poultry and then spicing it yourself.

But of course, the more of the process you get involved in, the better the end result and the more control you’ll have over the whole process. You don’t need a huge amount of equipment but a meat grinder is helpful as is some kind of stuffing attachment if you want to make links. I have a Kitchen Aid mixer and use their grinder and sausage stuffing attachment which is fine. The grinder isn’t ideal in that the knife blades are difficult to sharpen and sometimes the results seem less like ground than slightly torn or pulverized, but it’s OK for most applications. If you really get serious, get a good grinder and take good care of the grinding knife.

If there is one primary rule in making sausages, it’s to keep everything very cold (bordering on or slightly freezing). This includes the grinder and stuffer, as well as the meat. In fact, the meat should be slightly frozen to cut a good grind and to keep from getting “smear.” Smear is the sausage maker’s nightmare and it’s to be avoided at all costs. Most sausage is about 25-30% fat. Smear occurs when the fat gets broken down and is smeared into the meat. The fat separates and when the sausage cooks, the fat and meat separate resulting in stringy, pasty meat and pools of fat (plus they make the sausage shrink and you can see big pools of fat in the casings, yuck). If you keep everything during grinding, mixing and stuffing you’ll be fine, but that’s why sausage making is best done in a few steps: grind the meat and then re-chill it in the freezer; mix the meat and the spices and then re-chill it; and then stuff them.

Most home grinders come with two different size plates: 3/8 and 1/4 inch. 3/8 is the better grind for coarser styles like Italian sausage, chorizo, etc, but I generally prefer the 1/4 plate for brats. If you can only choose one size, though, go with the 3/8 grind which is like a chili grind from the supermarket. If you want really coarse, rustic sausages, hand cut a portion of the meat into tiny cubes. I normally will hand cut about 1/3 of the meat for a coarser more rustic look.




Salt is essential for any sausage and quantities vary but a good rule of thumb is one teaspoon of salt per pound of meat, but some varieties will be considerably higher. There’s a big debate about “pink salt” because it contains nitrites. If you’re going to cold smoke your sausages for any length of time, use nitrates, because botulism is a real threat and scary reality. Cold smoking normally means smoking food between 80and 100 degrees. Botulism requires moisture and an absence of oxygen to grow, and a cold smoker is a perfect environment for it. If you wouldn’t leave thawed meat out on the kitchen counter on a hot summer day for 8-12 hours, then you probably should add pink salt to your sausage. Pink salt is premeasured and generally contains 94% salt and 6% nitrite. One level teaspoon per five pounds of meat is plenty to keep botulism and other nasties at bay. If you’re going to make sausage that’s going right onto the grill or that will be hot smoked at higher temperatures don’t bother.




When you get started it pays to use some recipes at first until you’ve done a few batches, at which point I would encourage you to go hog wild and add whatever sounds good. There are several great resources to check out. For supplies, The Sausage Maker and Butcher and Packer are both reputable and reliable sources. For books, check out Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie which is a masterpiece for both beginners and advanced sausage makers. A great book for beginners is Bruce Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book, which will teach you to make sausages and will also give you recipes to use them in. The old school bible for sausage makers (which is geared more to professionals, but is well worth tracking down) is Rytek Kutas’s Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing. The recipes are generally for 10, 25 and 100 pound batches, but they scale down nicely. There’s a great web site by a gentleman named Len Poli which is a terrific resource as well.




A few more tips if you haven’t tried this yet. Start with a basic fresh sausage, whether it’s a breakfast variety, sweet Italians, Brats, etc. Dried cured sausages like salami are very difficult and require temperature and humidity control and can require bacterial cultures as well. Emulsified sausages like weisswurst and frankfurters are do-able but have their own special challenges and aren’t the best type to try for your first batch. I normally make pork sausage, and I generally some cut from the shoulder (shoulder roasts or Boston butts are great). If you want beef, go with chuck. These cuts will give you enough fat without having to find fat back, which is a special order unless you have a really good butcher. If you use chicken, use thighs and tried to use some skin as well or they may be a bit dry.

So give it a try and you’ll likely be well rewarded by your efforts.

Cameron Clos Electrique With Pork Loin Chops and Potato Corn Cakes

We’re in full tomato season, which means that if even a day goes by when we don’t eat tomatoes, we risk being overrun by them. In some ways, this makes planning meals easy, because when you think what vegetables you want to use, you automatically know that tomatoes will be one of them, but it also means that you need to think of new things to do with tomatoes, or face culinary boredom. Even though we planted zucchini as well, we’re not as overwhelmed with those, but we do have a few.

We’ve been getting remarkable poblano peppers and sweet corn of late, and I had been thinking about making some kind of corn, potato, and poblano pancakes and wanted to use them as a base for some kind of grilled meat. I needed to work the tomatoes in, so I opted to make a cherry tomato, Walla Walla sweet onion, and zucchini compote to go around the whole dish.

I still had some pork loin chops from a whole loin that I had bought so I decided to brine a few of those and grill them over charcoal and hickory. There would be enough flavors going on in the compote and corn and potato cakes and I didn’t want to add anything else to the pork because I was afraid everything would be too busy. Besides, a grilled, brined loin chop should have plenty of flavor on it’s own. I felt like drinking wine instead of beer, even though I was cooking with some chilies. Because all the ingredients were all local, I decide to keep to an Oregon wine. I love Oregon Pinot Noir, but don’t drink as much of it as I used to. This is partly because of price, and partly because my tastes have really been geared towards Southern French and Spanish wines of late. But good pinot is a remarkably food friendly wine.

I pulled my last bottle of 1996 Cameron Clos Electrique. Clos Electrique is Cameron’s top bottling of Pinot Noir. A “clos” is a walled vineyard and in this case, the wall is an electric fence, hence the name Clos Electrique. The 1996 is still drinking beautifully. It’s a deep garnet red with just the slightest hint of brick at the edge. The nose is a big, intense blend of red berry and bing cherry, smoke and vanilla. There’s an almost “chocolate covered cherry” note to it. On the palate, the wine is rich with deep layers of fruit, good acidity, and a long finish that mixes the fruit and smoke. It’s aged beautifully. Considering how approachable it was in its youth, it’s remarkable how intense and lively it is at 11 years old. It was one of the best Oregon pinots I had drunk in quite some time and made me realize why I love these wines so much.




The meal was very good, but the corn and potato cakes need to be reworked a little bit. I started with three russet potatoes and three ears of corn, a poblano chili, an egg, and a little flour to help bind it all. Unfortunately, there should be a little less corn and a little more potato. I didn’t want a batter based corn cake. I wanted the potato starch to hold it all together and figured the egg and flour would help, but I found that I could have used more potato because you need to completely get the corn kernels enmeshed in the cake or they end up in the bottom of the pan. The mix I had worked, but they were difficult to flip and to plate. Once they were on the plate, I didn’t really care, but it did require two spatulas and a quick transfer.

The Walla Walla onions in the compote had been caramelized to a sweet, rich mass and I added the quickly sautéed zucchini and briefly cooked tomatoes to it. It had a rich sweet note that worked well with the corn and the natural sweetness of the pork. The chili heat was balanced by the sweetness of the compote as well. The Clos Electrique had beautiful sweet fruit flavors but also had a fair amount of acidity which helped to cut through all of the rich flavors. If the pork had been sautéed, I likely would have added a tiny amount of sherry vinegar when I deglazed the pan and the spooned that over the pork, because another touch of acidity like that would have been nice, but it was still a great meal.

A trip to Belmont Station

We met some friends over at Belmont Station last night. None of us had been there since they moved from their location next door to the Horse Brass Pub, which is a Portland beer landmark and one of the best beer bars in the country. Belmont Station used to be a bottle shop that only did beer-to-go. At their new location, they have a café one on side and the bottle shop on the other. You can freely wonder between the sides, and any of the beers available on the bottle shop side can be brought over to the café side and drunk there (for a very slight surcharge), which is a very nice feature.

Our friends had recently returned from a trip to Belgium and had been on a Lambic kick since then. Being a big Lambic fan myself, we were able to sit and taste several beers side by side. We chose Cantillon Grand Cru, Girardin 1882 Gueuze, Drie Fonteinen Gueuze, and Oud Beersel Gueuze. The Cantillon was in a 750ml, but the rest were in 375ml bottles. We opened all of them at once so we could compare and contrast them.

The Cantillon was freshly bottled in January 2007 and hadn’t built up much carbonation because it was a relative youngster in the bottle. It still had the distinctive house style and tartness, but wasn’t as tart as older more mature bottles of it I’ve had. The Girardin is a perennial favorite and didn’t disappoint. It was nicely carbonated and poured with a thick billowy head. It had more barnyard than Cantillon and a slight amount of smokiness as well and was my second favorite (after the Cantillon of course).

The Drie Fonteinen was a close third (I really could have gone either way on this one and the Girardin). It was a little funkier and even barnyardier and lacked a little bit of the elegance of the Girardin. The Oud Beersel finished last, but was still a nice beer. It was distinctly sweeter than the others but did have a nice honeyed note to the nose. I would still be happy to drink it, but it was a little outshone by the other three.

After the Lambics, we opted to go with a non-sour beer. They had several French Biere de Gardes but only one, La Bavaisienne, which was an amber. Biere de Garde is a traditional farmhouse style from France and the really traditional style of it is an amber beer. But it’s now available in blonde, amber, and darker varieties. To me the ambers are still the only true Bier de Gardes.

Biere de Garde is a fairly controversial style of beer probably because it’s hard to come up with a consensus of what it really is. Essentially it is a very malt forward style of beer. The aroma should have an intense maltiness, similar to a Scottish ale, but with more earthiness and often some herbalness as well. The hops are essentially there to balance the malt. Some people look for a damp basement or cellar odor (like the BJCP guidelines) which is actually a sign of a bad cork. This is likely because of the poor condition of the beer by the time it was tasted in the US. It’s unfortunate that a beer judging organization, like the BJCP, would help to push this notion.

Despite the heavy malt aroma and malt flavors of the beer, it actually finished quite dry and is an excellent choice with food. Garret Oliver, the talented brewer and beer critic, loves Biere de Garde with Thanksgiving and it is a great choice.

The La Bavaisienne was a delightful beer and a nice change from the intensity of the Lambics. It was in good condition and actually tasted fairly fresh. The aroma was a mix of malt with a slight herbal note. The taste was very full but finished dry with a lingering malt flavor.

At this point we were winding up, but opted to get one more bottle and opted for something bigger and sweeter. I’m a big fan of Green Flash’s IPA’s but had never tried their Barleywine, so we opted for a bottle of that. It had a rich hop aroma. In fact it was a bigger hop nose than most, but not as hoppy as Sierra Nevada’s Bigfoot. The palate was full and rich with a slight brandy-type of flavor underlying the malt. It was a little drier than I expected, but still a very nice beer and a good way to end an evening.

Sausages, Elysian Avatar IPA and Full Sail Amber

I got stuck working late and had already gotten a call from my wife saying that she was going to go out and meet some friends and wouldn’t be home when I got home for dinner. There are a lot of things my wife won’t eat, like lamb, which I love so I don’t get a chance to eat them that often. This seemed like a great opportunity for that, but I got stuck working until a little after 8:00pm and didn’t feel like getting too involved in a cooking project. Sausages had snuck into my brain and I was hoping to find some lamb sausage that would hit a bunch of my cravings. I hit the local New Seasons market n the way home, because they have a great butcher department and generally very good sausage.

I was looking for lamb sausage and found some lamb, spinach and feta sausage, but also noticed that the pork, Marsala, and fig sausages were on sale, so I got one of those as well. Both sausages had the advantage of containing fruits or vegetables so I was able to convince myself that it would be a balanced meal. I did a quick cruise through the beer aisle and was thinking about trying to score one of those beers that I almost always overlook. Of course I instead got caught up in new things and things I hadn’t tried in quite some time and opted for a bottle of Elysian’s Avatar IPA, which is an IPA brewed with dried jasmine flowers. I had tried it once, years before at an Oregon Brewer’s Fest and decided to try the bottled version.

I got home, threw the sausages in the cast iron skillet and cracked the Elysian. I like Elysian a lot. They’ve won Large Brewpub of the Year award at the Great American Beer Fest, and the honor is well deserved. Their beers are generally very good across the board. I also have a weak spot for them because the head brewer was very fond of my Collaborator Saison which was served at OBF a few years ago and told me it was his favorite beer at the festival.

The Avatar IPA pours with a slightly hazy light copper/orange color with an off-white head. There’s a good floral hop aroma, with a hint of jasmine flower sweetness. There’s an underlying sweet malt and honey aroma and a slight candy note. On the palate the beer is round and medium bodied. There’s a sweet floral taste and a good malt backbone. The hops frame the malt sweetness very well but don’t come on too strong, but there’s a lingering hop bitterness in the finish. Overall, it’s an exceptional beer. The jasmine gives it a floral sweetness that fits very well, but doesn’t overwhelm the beer. It’s a dynamic and interesting beer, but not so much so that it overpowers food. It was good with both of the sausages.

As part of my attempt to retry a lot of beers that I normally overlook (because of the abundance of great beer available everywhere in Portland), I also opened a bottle of Full Sail Amber. Full Sail Amber is one of the old school Oregon craft beers. It was one of the first beers I had when I moved here in 1993. I had always regarded it as a reliable standby that could be found even in places that had a limited supply of craft beer. But like many of the old school beers, it’s widely dismissed or overlooked by my fellow beer snobs, which is a shame. It’s not a flashy beer, but it’s well made and very flavorful. It has a beautiful deep copper color, an appealing nose of caramel malt, toffee, and a piney American hop aroma. It’s medium bodied with a good malt and hop balance and it finishes crisp and dry. It’s an understated, somewhat unassuming beer (at least by modern craft beer standards where brewers seem to push the envelope constantly) which in many ways makes it ideal with food. This is a beer that works with food because it doesn’t demand top billing. It’s full of flavor but has a subtlety that many beers lack. In matching beer and food (or wine and food for that matter), subtlety and restraint often makes for a better match than flamboyance.

Of the sausages, my vote was for the pork, Marsala and fig. I love lamb and would have expected a lamb, spinach and feta sausage to be a little highly seasoned (because feta is so salty), but strangely it seemed a little bland. Perhaps they cut back a little too much on the salt to compensate for the feta. I admit that I use a fair amount of salt in cooking and sausage making and perhaps this sausage was geared towards “modern, healthy palates” that use less salt. It was very good, but I would have preferred a little more pizzazz. The pork, fig and Marsala was quite good. The sweetness of the figs and marsala married well with the inherent sweetness of the pork. It’s a recipe I may well adapt (ie, steal) at some point.

Scallop Pasta and La Fin du Monde

I had initially planned to cook some kind of pasta with tomatoes, because my tomato plants are finally starting to come on strong (particularly the cherry tomatoes), but I had to stop by the store on the way home and found some attractively priced scallops, so the menu changed. The scallops were frozen, but unless you meet the boat at the dock (and it’s only been out for one day), chances are that most of the seafood you buy has been frozen at some point, so I generally don’t have a problem with frozen seafood. These were large New England scallops at a good price, so I decided I needed to do something with them. I picked up some mushrooms as well, headed home, and tried to figure out exactly what I was going to cook. Scallops and mushrooms are a good combo and don’t really need much else. I was still thinking about using some of the tomatoes, but I was worried it would make for a dish that was too busy. I settled on sautéing the mushrooms in olive oil with garlic, then searing the scallops in a hot pan and serving it all with pasta.

I put the scallops in cold water to thaw, started to prep the mushrooms, and put water on for the pasta. Mushrooms give off a lot of liquid when they cook, and I generally try to cook them in batches to help reduce the amount of liquid in the pan (which can otherwise turn sautéing into stewing). You don’t necessarily need to remove each batch, but if you only throw in a handful at a time and then brown them before throwing in more, it keeps the liquid from building up too much. I cooked the mushrooms until they were firm and browned, then added the garlic. As the pan got dry, I deglazed it all with amontillado. I love sherry and generally keep fino and amontillado on hand. Amontillado is the more full bodied and flavored of the two and is a great match with mushrooms. Fino would do fine in a pinch, but the amontillado is nuttier and works better.

I pulled the mushrooms out of the pan, added a little more olive oil, and put the scallops in to sear (making sure that I patted then dry first). Scallops cook very quickly and get tough if overcooked, so I let them sit for about a minute and a half, and then flipped them. I gave them about another minute on the second side and pulled them out to rest. I added the mushrooms back to the pan, added the drained pasta (which was penne), some parsley and tossed it all together. The mix was a little dry so I added some of the pasta cooking water in order to add some silkiness to the dish. I put the scallops back, turned the heat off and let it sit for about 30 seconds before plating it. In Italy you don’t add cheese to pasta with fish in it, but I was in the US, so I felt no compunction to skip the cheese, although I’m sure there was a loud groan somewhere from the pasta police.

A few days before, I had picked up a Unibroue La Fin de Monde, which is Belgian style Golden Ale, because it was on sale. Unibroue is a Canadian brewery that brews some of the best Belgian-style beers outside of Belgium. I think it’s fair to say that many of their beers are as good as or better than some authentic Belgian beers. According to their website, this is their beast selling beer and it’s no wonder. It clocks in at 9% alcohol, but is wonderfully balanced. The aroma is full of orange, lemon, spice and malt undertones. On the palate it’s full bodied but finishes fairly dry. There’s a wonderful combination of fruit, malt and spice to the flavor. Because it’s so highly carbonated, it’s very lively on the palate which helps to mask its high alcohol content.

Scallops are fairly rich and with the added mushrooms, you need something that has a fair amount of body and flavor to stand up to it. La Fin du Monde was an excellent choice. It was big enough and complex enough to stand up but because of its carbonation and dryness, it also helped to cut through the rich flavors of the dish. The scallops had a buttery quality to them and the citrus notes of the beer contrasted beautifully with that. I have a tendency to overlook a lot of beers at the supermarket because they’re part of the regular inventory and I’m normally looking for something new that I haven’t tried. A lot of these beers are great beers, but being in Portland, I’m spoiled by the selection. So I tend to overlook some classics, like La Fin du Monde, Trois Pistole (which is my favorite of Unibroue’s beers), and the various beers from Chimay, because they’re so readily available and I’m searching for something new and different. Luckily, I was smart enough to give this beer a second look this time and it reminds me of how many “standards” I overlook on a regular basis. Maybe it’s time to go get one of those bottles of Chimay…

Garbage Plates (and David Rosengarten)

I did finally get around to making my garbage plates, which is a specialty of Rochester, NY. A friend of mine had brought me a package of Zweigle’s White Hots, which is an emulsified brat-like sausage from Rochester, NY. A garbage plate has two side dishes, a couple of white hots (you can get other things like red hots, or hot dogs instead), white bread and a chili-like sauce. For the sides you can choose two of the following: French fries, home fries, macaroni salad, or baked beans.

I conferred with my friend because I was unclear if everything was kind of piled on together, or if things were separate. He grew up a few blocks from the original Nick Tahou’s, which invented the garbage plate, but warned me that his recollections of them would be filtered by the fact that he rarely ate them when he was stone cold sober. This fact is, to my mind, part of the appeal. A garbage plate is something you eat late at night after you’ve been out drinking with friends. In many respects, this would make it similar to White Castle Hamburgers, which were a favorite of many friends I had growing up in NY after they had been out drinking. In any event, my friend’s advice was sound. The sides are sort of separate, and the white hots and chili sauce go over the top. You can get to the individual sides, but part of them is also covered with the white hots and sauce.

We had made some barbecue over the weekend and had some leftover baked beans, so that was an obvious choice for one side. I opted to do some oven fries as the other. The white hots are traditionally butterflied and grilled. I had been given the popover type of white hots, so I didn’t butterfly them assuming instead that the heat of cooking would pop them open (a bad assumption on my part actually, since they never popped). The chili-like sauces was out of David Rosengarten’s excellent, It’s All American Food, which is one of the best ethnic and regional American cookbooks I’ve seen. I did a variation of the traditional plating. I put the beans and potatoes on the plate, but put some white bread down as well. The white hots went over the bread (primarily, although they did flop onto other things), and then poured the sauce on.

One other difference was that I was eating my garbage plate as dinner, and not at 2am in the morning. Unlike most garbage plate diners, I would have my beer with it and not before. In many ways this is a dish like barbecue, which requires a lighter bodied, versatile beer. I opted to go with my Belgian Summer Ale (which is about 20% wheat and about 5% alcohol), because it’s easy drinking and light and wouldn’t interfere with the delicious, gooey mess that is a garbage plate. Another good choice would have been one of the leftover bottles of Session lager form last weekend’s barbecue. It fits the bill in a similar way.

The meal was delicious and satisfying and made me think and some of the things that David Rosengarten talks about in his book. David Rosengarten is a food critic, TV cook, and cookbook author. He knows high brow food and knows how to cook. He was a high profile critic in NY and reviewed an astounding number of restaurants in the early days of the culinary revolution in the US. What’s refreshing about his book on American food, is that he realizes that great food doesn’t necessarily mean high brow food. For instance, he prefers a hamburger with Heinz ketchup instead of fancy house-made ketchups that a lot of restaurants were doing in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. He understands the importance of Hellmans (or Best Foods) bottle mayonnaise vs. homemade. Each has their place, and neither is necessarily a replacement for the other. In a word, he knows how to “slum it” in the culinary world and he’s big enough to not care what others think.

He’s not alone in this either. Many well known cooks and critics like some foods that most foodies (including me at one point) would consider “low brow” and beneath them. Julia Child was fond of Goldfish crackers (which are still one of my weaknesses), and James Beard had a penchant for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I have also been told about a local French chef who after a large service at the International Pinot Noir Celebration (and apparently many glasses of wine) was seen a couple of hours later in a tavern scarfing down a plate of chicken wings and drinking a beer. There’s a lot of snobbiness in the food world, and probably more in the wine world (and there are certainly more than a few beer snobs around, including myself). In this upscale world of cuisine, there doesn’t seem to be a place for garbage plates, Goldfish, Buffalo wings, or bottled mayonnaise. But no one can deny how good some of these foods can be. I wouldn’t expect to see a garbage plate at Le Circe, but that doesn’t mean you can deny how good it tastes. Pick up a copy of Rosengarten’s book and he’ll help you rediscover that a lot of those foods you love but don’t like to admit to, are really that good when they’re made right. After all, if they had never been good, they would never have become so popular.

Skillet roasted chicken on a potato bed

Although I have some of the key ingredients to make a garbage plate, I opted to make something a little lighter after yesterday’s barbecue. I was thinking of a dish a friend of mine had made once which was a simple roasted dish of chicken, potatoes, mushrooms, and fennel. It was simple, but perfectly done. The vegetables had cooked down and created a wonderful sauce. The chicken which sat on top of it, was moist, but had incredibly crunchy skin. It didn’t hurt that my friend is a professional chef and is the executive chef for a large Italian wine importing company on the Chicago area. He also served me some incredible wines (including a Gaja Sori Tilden Barbaresco, a Ch. Leoville Las Cases, and a limited bottling of a Guigal Gigondas), but in many ways, it was the incredibly simple but perfect food that I remember best.

I was also thinking about a widely used technique in Western Mediterranean food that roasts food on top of a bed of potatoes. Generally, it’s fish roasted over potatoes, but meat and poultry work fine as well. It would be a simple one dish meal but would be lighter than the aforementioned garbage plate (which I will eat within a few days). I opted to go the chicken route and decided a cut up chicken was the way to go. I peeled several potatoes and cut them into thin rounds and placed them in layers in the bottom of a well oiled cast iron skillet. I also added a top layer of sliced onions. I added salt, pepper, thyme sprigs, and another splash of olive oil and placed the skillet into a hot oven without the chicken to allow the potatoes and onions a chance to cook a little. About ten minutes later, I pulled it out and added the chicken pieces, which I had brined for about an hour.

Food like this belongs to a category that I always think of as “French Grandmother food.” It’s a particular type of comfort food that’s based upon simple French country and bistro food. I don’t have a French Grandmother, and I’ve never been to France, but it’s a style of food that I crave. I opted to go with wine instead of beer to go with the whole French country food theme. I pulled out a bottle of 1995 Prieure de St. Jean de Bebian (which, granted, most French Grandmothers probably don’t break out with roasted chicken).

Prieure de St. Jean de Bebian is from the Coteaux de Languedoc region of France. Although it’s not in the famous Chateauneuf du Pape region, the grape varieties that are used are the traditional grapes of that region. There are three main varieties, Grenache, Syrah, and Mouvedre, which are blended in slightly different amounts depending upon the vintage. There is also a section of the vineyard which is planted to a mix of the thirteen varieties of Chateauneuf du Pape, and a small amount of this field blend is also used. It’s one of the top wines of the entire Languedoc region.

Even at 12 years old, this wine is still incredibly dark and purple. There’s no sign of browning at the edge yet as you would expect. The nose is big and rich with dark berry aromas, an earthy tarry quality, vanilla, spice and a hint of bacon. With a blend so close to a Chateauneuf du Pape, you wouldn’t expect the wine to be this big. I haven’t had this wine since its release, and was amazed at how youthful it still is. The fruit flavors are very big, and the tannins are still fairly aggressive. The wine has good acidity and seemed a little tart initially, but with time it opened up more and tartness faded. I worried that it may be a little big for chicken, but was hoping for the best. Luckily I had opened it a little early and there was a chance that it would soften as it sat.

Like most great wines and beers, this one revealed a new side with the food. The harsh side of the tannins and the tartness vanished. It wasn’t too rich or too big for the food. The potatoes and onions had melted into an almost gooey layer and had an almost gratin-like quality. The drippings from the chicken had flavored it and thickened into a rich, viscous sauce. This would be an easy dish to gussy up. A few slices of black truffle in with potatoes or an herbed butter stuffing under the chicken skin (or both) could be the basis for creating a fancy, haute cuisine dish, but this dish shined in its simplicity and once again illustrated the point that it’s hard to improve upon simple dishes, and it’s tough to beat a roasted chicken.