Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Scottish Mince

There are many foods I hold as cherished comfort foods that I wouldn’t eat as a child. One of these is the Scottish dish called Mince, that my mother and grandmother used to cook, and that I would tolerate as a child but never looked forward to. Mince is Scottish comfort food, and seems unknown to most Americans, because we normally focus on the really scary Scottish dishes like haggis. (I like to joke that Scottish cuisine is based on the dare “Bet ya no can eat this.”) Scottish cooking, like a lot of traditional English and Irish cooking, is relatively bland but the dishes themselves are satisfying and filling and epitomize comfort food.

Mince is essentially a stew of ground beef, onions, and carrots in a sauce that is made from Worcestershire sauce, and that universal cooking liquid of the British Isles, water. It normally has a stew-like consistency, but in poorer households (like my Scottish grandfather’s), it was served more like a soup to help spread the food out over a large family. It’s normally served with potatoes, either boiled or mashed. I hadn’t eaten mince in years when I got a sudden craving for it and called my mother to get the basics of how she made it. My mother learned it from my grandmother, who had learned it from my great-grandmother, who had cooked at Sterling Castle (one of the royal castles of Scotland), although I doubt they ever cooked mince for the Royals. The recipe is incredibly basic, and although it’s tempting to “update” it or make it fancy, the simple version is always the one that I crave.

First, you brown some ground beef in oil in a pan. Don’t be too hasty to break the meat up. It really needs to brown and caramelize and if you turn it to frequently this won’t happen. Browning the meat creates a fond on the pan which helps build richness in the dish. After the meat is well browned, add a bunch of sliced onions. I normally use an equal volume of meat and onions, although the onions will cook down over time. Strangely, you don’t want to brown the onions as you did the meat. (This is why they are cooked in a seemingly reversed order). The onions will cook down and become translucent. My mother prefers larger pieces of onions (she cuts the onion into six wedges), but I normally will do somewhat smaller slices. Once the onions are translucent, deglaze the pan with water and Worcestershire sauce. Turn the heat down, cover the pot and let it simmer for about 30 -45 minutes or so. Then add a bunch of carrots cut into two inch lengths. I normally half the carrots top to bottom if they’re large. Cover the pot again and simmer until the carrots are tender, which can be another 20-30 minutes. I almost always serve it with mashed potatoes. You can also pass more Worcestershire sauce at the table.

It being a somewhat bland food (in that it doesn’t have a lot of spices or herbs), I prefer a somewhat mild beer with it. Not unusually, the beers from the region work very well. Scottish ales traditionally are very malty and sweet and have very few hops (because barley grows well in Scotland, but hops do not and had t be bought from Southern England). The standard 60, 70, and 80 shilling beers aren’t big and alcoholic, but are on par with most English pale ales. The rich malt of these beers makes them perfect with the browned, caramelized meat flavors of mince. Another good choice would be a Northern English style brown ale like Newcastle or Samuel Smiths. You want a beer with good malt and caramel flavors to pick up on the caramelized theme. English pale ale wouldn’t be bad either, but I would stay away from the hoppier ones if possible.

Unfortunately, I had none of these at home when I made the mince, so I ended up going with a homebrewed strong blonde beer that I have on tap that has some sweeter, almost honeyed malt notes (it’s like a junior barley wine, but not quite as hoppy). I knew the beer was a little big for the food, but of what I had, it was the best choice. It wasn’t bad, but I missed the smooth maltiness of a great Scottish ale, and think I may need to brew one in the next several weeks. It’s a subtle beer that’s a great food beer because its malt profile compliments so many dishes, particularly milder beef or lamb dishes. In any event, I was able to satisfy my mince craving.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Rose and almond crusted grilled chicken

Today was the last day of the Oregon Brewers Festival and I had volunteered to pour beer on the 12:00 to 3:30 shift. I was initially pouring Collaborator Bock, but there was some confusion on which taps had which beer and I ended up pouring Terminal Gravity Triple most of the time. TG’s triple isn’t a Belgian style triple, but is a more traditional American strong ale that comes ion at 8.4% alcohol and has 45 IBUs, which puts it lower than most IPA’s and pale ales. The festival must have gone well because by about 3:00 we were out of most of the beers on our trailer. After my shift, I did stick around to have a few tastes of beer, but the pickings were slim. I re-tasted the Laurelwood PNW pilsner and reconfirmed my feelings about it: it’s an imperial pilsner hopped to the higher hopping rates we like here in the NW. I’ll stick to my assessment; it’s a good beer that’s a hybrid of styles, but may be a little disappointing to pils fans. IPA and NW beer fans will likely continue to revel in it. The lines were getting long so I finished up with a Hopworks IPA. It’s a very nice beer and I look forward to tasting more of their beers when they officially open.

Being a little burned out on beer at this point (I know that sounds kind of odd, but it was true), I picked up a bottle of Esencia Valdemar Rioja Rose at the supermarket for $7. No style of wine can cause more fisticuffs among wine snobs than rose. Many wine drinkers avoid them all together, because they consider roses to be pedestrian wines made for kool-aid drinkers. There are many sweet roses on the market, typified by the White Zinfandels that came out in the 1980’s and were off-dry but did capture a new market for the wine world. But rose can be so much more than white zin, and typically they are.

I will come down strongly on the pro-rose side of the argument. I think that nothing beats a great rose with simple grilled foods. Great rose normally has several characteristics, which include strawberry or red berry fruit flavors, good acidity which makes them fruity, clean and crisp, and the very slightest hint of tannins that gives them just a little more body than your average white wine. Rose isn’t a “serious” wine, but great rose doesn’t pretend to be. Great rose isn’t for collecting; it’s for drinking.

The Esencia Valdemar is 100% Grenache from Spain’s famous Rioja region which is best known for its phenomenal red wines. This particular wine is from the same estate that produces the impressive Conde de Valdemar Riojas. This wine has wonderfully fresh strawberry and raspberry notes in the nose. On the palate it has good fruit and good acidity to help it finish crisp. The strawberry fruit lasts well into the finish. In short, it’s everything good rose should be.

I had planed on grilling some chicken breast and came up with an easy menu when I was pouring beer at the festival. The chicken breast would be crusted in almond flour, pimenton, salt, pepper, and a pinch of cinnamon. On the side, there would be the seemingly ubiquitous roasted potatoes with thyme (and also some onions this times as well) and more sautéed zucchini with garlic, basil, and the first of our tomatoes from the garden. Simple food but from quality ingredients. What better than simple, refreshing wine like good rose?

The wine and food were a near perect match. This was designed as an easy, simple meal to be enjoyed leisurely at home after a hectic weekend of attending a crowded beer festival. It wasn’t meant to be a gourmet meal that required a lot of work on the part of the cook and the diner. After this weekend I didn’t want a cerebral meal. I wanted something that was well prepared and tasted good, but didn’t demand too much. There was no “genius” in this meal and it didn’t require a culinary education to appreciate it. It was proof that a good meal needn’t be hard or original, it only needs to taste good and make everyone who eats it feel good, and that’s what this meal did.

Spanish Stuffed Potato Cake and Mas Donnis Barrica

The last two days, we had gone down to OBF and finished our day both times at Rockbottom Brewery which is a few blocks away. The food was very good and I got to try the Velvet Pale Ale on a Nitro tap, which makes it smoother and creamier than the standard CO2 tap. We were happy with the food and beer, but after two days of beer tasting and pub fare, I really needed some real food, so I decided for forgo the festival on Saturday to stay home and cook some real food.

I spent a good portion of the afternoon reading the new Casa Moro cookbook which impresses me even more as I’ve been working my way through it. The husband and wife team, Sam and Samantha Clark, own Moro in London. The food at Moro is Spanish, but is primarily Spanish food that has a Moorish influence. (I haven’t eaten there, but they point this out in their books.) Their second book, Casa Moro, widens the influence to include more Moroccan and Middle Eastern influenced food. There was a recipe for potato cakes stuffed with lamb and pine nuts that looked wonderful, but which I modified to suit what I had on hand. My wife doesn’t eat lamb and I really wanted something a little lighter, so I opted to do ground chicken and didn’t have pine nuts, so I substituted almonds instead.

The basic recipe of the cakes uses a potato dough (very similar to gnocchi dough) which is stuffed with ground meat, onions, nuts and spices. The cakes are then sautéed in olive oil and served with yogurt sauce and an arugula salad. The dough is made by boiling waxy potatoes until they’re cooked and then putting them through a food mill to make a smooth puree. Add a little bit of flour to help hold them together, but like making gnocchi, don’t add too much flour or you’ll end up with a heavy dough.

For the stuffing, I sautéed onions, garlic, and ground chicken. When the chicken was cooked, I added a little tomato paste, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, slivered almonds, and cloves and cooked it for a few more minutes. I then deglazed the pan with amontillado and cooled the stuffing. Rather than make a series of smaller cakes, I opted to cook one large one that I could cut into wedges. I took half the potato dough and formed a round about ½ an inch thick and put that in a non-stick fry pan. I added the cooled stuffing, and then put the other half of the potato dough on top. I cooked it for about 10 minutes before flipping it and cooking the other side. I pulled it of when it was browned and let it sit for a few minutes before cutting it into wedges.

I though of making a side salad but we’re about to be deluged by zucchini in the garden, so instead I just served a side of sautéed zucchini with garlic and basil. Incredibly, I was a little tired of beer so I decided to open a bottle of 2004 Mas Donis Barrica from Capcanes that I had picked up at the supermarket. This wine is from Montsant outside of Taragona in Catalonia. It’s made from 80% garnacha (grenache) and 20% syrah and is aged in new French and American oak. Garnacha is a fabulous grape that makes some wonderfully food friendly wines, but it’s still often dismissed by a large proportion of wine snobs. This is largely due to the fact that often times it’s used to produce inexpensive wines of little character. But when grown correctly and with limited yields it can be an incredible wine. This wine is brought in to the US by Eric Solomon, who, along with Kermit Lynch, is a name I normally trust when buying wines from less known regions.

A little research showed that this wine is in fact made for the American market and is a favorite of Robert Parker of the Wine Advocate. Parker is the most influential wine critic in America, but he also has a particular style of wine that he likes, and many people change their winemaking to suit his tastes because it leads to higher scores, and the possibility of selling all of your wine at a higher price. Parker tends to like big, highly extracted, heavily oaked wines but that have a lot of fruit up front (which has given rise to such terms as “fruit bombs” and “oodles and oodles of fruit”). Unfortunately, Robert Parker and I don’t always see eye to eye on wines, because I tend to like more restrained understated wines that actually go with food (foolish me). The 16% alcohol fruit bombs that he raves about are often the most unfriendly to good food. The good side of this is that he doesn’t always give great scores to wines that I like, so they tend to stay less expensive than his latest find.

The winemakers at Capcanes know Parker’s palate and know how to make a wine for the US market. The wine is very dark and has a deep, rich intense nose. There’s a lot of black cherry, raspberry, spice and vanilla from oak. The oak is fairly pronounced but doesn’t go over the top. It has rich flavors and a moderate tannic bite, but the tannins aren’t too hard. There is a huge amount of fruit in the palate and finish. This is definitely a wine from the newer school of Spanish winemaking. The old school of Spanish winemaking also used a long periods of oak aging, but generally the oak wasn’t new, so it wasn’t as pronounced. Parker loves this wine and rated it 90 points and this time I agree with him. It’s a beautiful wine and was a delight to drink. I would have preferred a little more finesses and less oak, and I suspect he would have liked it to be bigger and oakier. In any event, it’s still a bargain at about $12 a bottle. Happily it comes with a fake cork, so there’s no chance of the wine being corked, which is a subject I will save for another time.

The wine was a little big for the food, but its richness made it stand up to the spices which can often be a problem for wine (and why I often prefer beer with sweet spices like cinnamon and ginger). It’s a wine I’d happily drink again, but would serve it next time with a roast or a rich braised dish.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Oregon Brewers Festival Day 2

Here are more reviews and highlights of beers I tasted at OBF.

Hopworks Organic NW IPA: This is the new brewery from Christian Ettinger who was the former head brewer at Laurelwood. This beer has grapefruit and citrus hop aromas in the nose. The hop aromas are very intense. There’s a good malt backbone in the beer, which gives it enough body to stand up to the hopping. There’s a moderately strong hop bite in the finish. It’s a quintessential NW style IPA but is still balanced.

Bison Chocolate Stout: One of the few stouts at the festival this year. The aroma is filled with cocoa and roasted malt notes. It’s fairly big on the palate with a distinct roast malt sharpness and bite that a good stout should have. Finishes fairly dry and roasty. The hops are most noticeable in the finish.

Victory Prima Pils: This is still one of my favorite American brewed pilsners. It’s got great sweet malt body but has a spicy floral hop bite that makes it clean and crisp. A delightful beer that’s always a pleasure to drink when it’s fresh.

BJ’s C’est Bon Blonde: The brewers are BJ’s are big Belgian fans and I was happy to see that they had done a Belgian for the festival. This is a Belgian Blonde at about 6% alcohol, so it has strength and flavor but isn’t over the top. The aroma is filled with sweet malt, honey and candy notes. The hops are very restrained and play a supporting role. There’s a slight spice note from the yeast as well. It’s fairly dry, but the sweet honey notes tend to hide that a little bit. A nice change from all of the IPA’s this year.

Four + Wildfire Organic Extra Pale Ale: Four + is a new brewery to me but if this beer is any indication of their quality, I’d love to taste more. This beer was a real surprise to me. It’s a lighter colored pale that has great aroma and flavor and has enough toffee malt flavors underlying to make it incredibly well balanced. This is another beer that’s meant for drinking several pints with friends. An easy drinking, balanced, refreshing beer.

Pelican Heiferweizen: I almost missed this beer because I assume it was a German Weizen from the name, but actually it’s another Belgian wit beer. The brewers at Pelican are incredibly talented and this beer shows their mastery of different styles. This is the best wit that I’ve tasted at the Festival this tear (although the Old Market is still very good). The nose has hints of orange and some subtle spice notes. The wit yeast adds a distinctive tart note to the nose. There’re notes of lemon and citrus. It’s light bodied, as a great wit should be, and it finishes dry and crisp. The spices are present but were added using a light hand so that they don’t overwhelm the beer. A terrific beer.

Ram Brewing Double Exposure IPA: Deep caramel notes with fruity, citrus notes in the nose. There’s also a little bit of fruitiness from the ale yeast. The alcohol in this one is actually fairly noticeable, and it has definite alcohol warmth in the finish. It has more body than many double IPAs and finishes a little sweeter than some. The alcohol warmth makes it a little unbalanced to me. It’s likely a beer that would be far better with food to help reign in the alcohol.

Russian River Brewing Pliny the Elder: Still my favorite double IPA. It has a huge hops nose from extensive dry hopping. The beer has no finish hops in the kettle (just several additions of bittering hops) and the hop aroma all comes from the dry hopping. The nose is big and bold, and filled with citrus, grapefruit, and a hint of pine. The underlying malt has some toffee and caramel notes, but this is a beer about the hops. It’s well balanced and the considerable alcohol content isn’t really that noticeable. It’s still a classic.

Bear Republic Racer X Double IPA: Good caramel malt notes and a huge American hop aroma. The hops seem to be some of the old school, slightly coarser varieties, but this is a beer that delivers big hop and malt flavors like a double IPA should. The malt flavors last well into the finish to balance the considerable hop bite.

Golden Valley Quercus Red Thistle: This is a Pinot Noir barrel aged version of their popular Red Thistle red ale. I’m a big fan of Red Thistle and initially avoided this beer because I’m not always a fan of oak aged beers. I tired it on the recommendation of a friend and I’m glad that I did. It has a winey nose with distinct red berry notes. The oak is present but doesn’t overwhelm the beer, but instead adds an interesting vanilla note to the palate and finish. The underlying beer is only 5.8% alcohol and could easily have been overwhelmed if they had let it sit in oak too long. It’s actually well balanced and very good, particularly considering that this is a style I normally don’t appreciate.

Deschutes 19th Anniversary Belgian Golden Ale: I had tried this beer in bottles and felt it was a little too sweet for the style, but decided to try it again on draft at the festival. My initial reactions were confirmed. This is a big full bodied beer with a spicy, slightly candied or honeyed note, and a little bit of orange. I love the aroma and flavors, but it finishes a little too sweet for me. I like my Belgian Goldens drier and crisper. This finishes at a terminal gravity of 1.018, and I think it would be a real winner if it got down to something more like 1.012 or even 1.014. But if you like bigger Belgian styles, it’s still worth sampling because it has a lot going for it.

Silver City Whoop Pass Double IPA: I tried this last year and remember being a little under whelmed but this year it struck me as a much more interesting beer. It’s got a distinct American hop nose filled with citrus, floral, and slightly herbal notes. There’s a big caramel and toffee malt note underlying the hops that lends a little sweetness to balance all those hops. The finish has a nice hop bite but doesn’t go over board.

Snipes Mountain IPA: This one has a big grapefruit citrus hop nose with a slight grassy note. It’s actually fairly dry, but has the underlying malt to balance the hops. The balance is definitely towards the hops, but it does come across as balanced and very drinkable. Another quintessential NW style IPA.

Rogue Imperial Porter: Lots of cocoa, dark chocolate, dark roasted malt and a little vanilla in the aroma. The palate is big, rich and smooth, with good balance. Distinctly different after several IPAs. Porter is a beer of balance and finesse, and although this is an Imperial Porter that clocks in at 7.5% alcohol, it has that balance and finesse.

Mad River Steelhead Double IPA: Different from most of the double IPAs here. This beer has bigger body and a much richer malt flavor than the others. It has the hops to balance the malt, and is big and rich tasting. There isn’t the hop presence that you normally look for in a double IPA, so hard core hop heads may dismiss this beer, but the malt backbone is deep, rich and satisfying. More like a strong ale than a double IPA, but very good and complex and worth sampling.

Max’s Fanno Creek Farmer’s Daughter: This is Max’s golden saison style beer. Like a true Belgian beer it doesn’t really fit either style and is sort of its own style. It’s a slightly hazy golden color with considerable spice and fruitiness from the Chouffe yeast strain that he uses. It’s a long time favorite of mine and has become one of his flagships beers. There’s a slight note of spice and citrus in the finish as well. Finishes fairly dry for a beer of this strength.

Boundary Bay Galena Single Hop Pale Ale: This beer had severe amounts of diacetyl and was borderline undrinkable. It’s ashamed because they normally produce wonderful beers. I’m not sure if I had a taste from a bad keg or perhaps a dirty tap, but this was one of the few disappointments from an otherwise top notch brewery. I’d love to hear from someone else that it was just a bad keg and that the entire batch didn’t have the diacetyl problem.

I did go back and re-taste the Trumer pils to see if it’s diacetyl problems were a fluke. (Actually a friend took the bullet for me and tried it instead.) Sorry to say it was the same. Not sure what happened on this one, but I will still re-taste it in the future since it normally highly recommended by people whose palates I trust.

I will likely skip the festival today and instead cook something here to help clear my gut of two days of beer tasting and deep fried foods. I’ll be down there on Sunday to pour beer and then will taste a few more of the remaining ones on my list.

Friday, July 27, 2007

Oregon Brewers Festival Day 1

I was able to taste a bunch of great beers yesterday at OBF and the crowds were pretty sparse for the first several hours. There are a lot of IPAs, and Doubles (double IPA, double red, imperial golden etc.), and actually a fair amount of Belgian wit beer. There are also a lot of organic beers which is great to see. Here, in no particular order, are some highlights of beers that really stood out.

Butte Creek Organic Pilsner: The best of the pilsners that I tasted at OBF so far. It’s very clean and crisp but has enough hop snap to make it very refreshing. It’s on the lower end of the bitterness range for the style, but remarkably well made and quite delicious.

Old Market Wit: This was a surprisingly good beer. I’m not always impressed with the beers from this brewery but I thought this was their best offering at the festival in several years. It’s spiced with chamomile, orange, coriander seed and cumin. There’s a fair amount of spice, but it’s well integrated and there’s a nice touch or orange in the palate and the finish. It’s got a slight amount of tartness that a good wit beer should have but it’s not over the top. Surprising and very refreshing.

Oregon Trail Wit: This wit has a lot more obvious fruit and spice. There’s a very prominent orange note on the palate and it seems a little spritzier than most which makes it lighter on the palate and more refreshing. The spices are also more noticeable and there’s a distinct coriander note in the finish. The spices are a bit heavy for my tastes, but still it’s very good and a great beer for a hot day.

Widmer Noggin Grog Imperial Wit: I was a little hesitant about this one because I don’t think that wit is a style that does well when it’s too big. This is a monster beer that comes in at 9% alcohol. It’s very spicy, but the spice flavors are very well integrated. Because of its low bitterness, the alcohol actually comes through as a slight sweetness in the finish (ethanol gives a sweet mouthfeel). It’s slightly viscous, and has a long balanced spice finish. I couldn’t drink more than a pint of it, but it’s a very nice beer that’s definitely worth trying. Widmer rarely disappoints and has done a fine job with this one.

Ommegang Hennepin Saison: Ommegang is one of my favorite breweries and Hennepin never disappoints. This is a remarkable beer and it’s rare to find it on draft so take advantage if you’re down at OBF. It’s clean, balanced with nice notes of lemon, ginger and spice (maybe a little star anise?). It has the distinctive fruit ester notes from the house yeast. One of the best American brewed Belgian style beers. A real treat on draft.

Ninkasi Believer: This double red ale is deeply colored and has a deep rich malt aroma. There’s a distinctive caramel note and a touch of roasted malt bite as well. The hops are big but well balanced and the beer has enough malt backbone to standup to the hop bitterness. The hop nose is impressive and is well balanced with the caramel malt notes. Another Oregon brewery that rarely disappoints.

Flying Fish Bourbon Barrel Abbey Dubbel: This is an interesting beer, but not really my kind of thing. The beer is delicious if you like big beers with prominent bourbon barrel notes. Unfortunately for my tastes, it leans a little too much towards bourbon barrel and not nearly enough towards the Belgian Dubbel side. But it is intensely rich with deep flavors and a long finish. It’s also nicely dry for such a big beer. If you like bourbon barrel aged beer, seek this out and savor it’s intensity.

Trumer Pils: I need to try this beer again, because it came highly recommended by Van Havig from Rock Bottom Brewery, who is an amazing brewer and has a very discerning palate. There was a slight trace of diacetyl in the nose up front, which is a flaw in this type of beer. It also seemed a little under hopped for a pilsner, because it leans towards sweet malt notes. To me it’s much more of a Munich Helles style than a pilsner, but you shouldn’t avoid it based on style-Nazi judgments like that. I will try it again to see if the diacetyl is still there or if it was a bad keg or dirty tap.

Diamond Knot Industrial IPA: A double IPA of sorts (or an XIPA as the brewery calls it). It has a distinct biscuit malt or victory malt aroma, with some caramel notes as well. There’s a citrus and floral hope notes in the aromas as well. It has good hop bite, but doesn’t seem to have as big a hop nose as I look for in a double IPA. It’s still a nice drinking beer and worth trying.

Rock Bottom Velvet Pale Ale: Van Havig has brewed a great beer. This beer is very hops forward in the aroma and flavor but doesn’t have the aggressive hop bitterness that many American Pales have. The Simcoe hops are distinctive and seem to have a slight orange note to them. It’s exceptionally well balanced and it’s aptly named because of its smooth finish. It’s a great beer that would be ideal for drinking a few pints with friends.

Alameda El Torero Organic IPA: In the past some of the beers from this Portland brewery have seemed hit or miss to me, but I was happily impressed with this beer. With more than 7% alcohol and 90IBUs, you would think that this beer would be a bruiser. It is a complex, deeply flavored beer, but is exceptionally well balanced. It’s more balanced than its profile would lead you to believe. There’s a rich malt component to the palate and rich floral and slight citrus notes from this all-Simcoe IPA. There’s good hop bitterness in the finish to make this a satisfying balanced example of the style.

Calapooia Yankee Clipper IPA: There’re good sweet malt flavors in the palate balanced by citrus and floral hops flavors. It’s got a distinct American citrus hop note to it from the use of Cascade and Centennial hops. It’s a lighter crisper style than many west coast IPAs, but it’s full of flavor and finishes crisp and clean.

Laurelwood PNW Pilsner: This beer from one of my favorite Portland breweries is aptly named. It’s a distinctively Pacific NW style of Pilsner. Fans of true German and Czech pilsners will likely be disappointed. Fans of big NW beers will likely be very happy. It’s very hoppy and doesn’t seem to have the crispness I associate with pilsner. It comes in at 8% alcohol making it more of a “double pilsner.” Still it’s a distinctive beer that is a true hybrid of styles.

Fifty Fifty Donner Party Porter: This is one of the few darker beers this year at OBF. It has an aroma of molasses, dark sugars, and caramel. It’s got sweet dark rum and brown sugar flavors, with some toasty notes and a drier finish than the palate would suggest. Nice balanced hops with a slight hop note in the finish.

I’ll be back down there today to taste a few more and will post notes on them tomorrow. See you there.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Oregon Brewers Festival

This weekend (starting today actually) is the Oregon Brewers Festival, which is one of the largest outdoor beer festivals in the country. It takes places down at Waterfront Park in downtown Portland and runs from Thursday July 26th through Sunday July 29th. There are a total of 72 commercial breweries (plus a tab for the Oregon Brew Crew’s joint venture with Widmer called Collaborator). Each brewery gets to bring one beer, so there are a total of 73 beers to try. You can try beers in 4oz tasters for $1 or in full 12oz mugs for $4. Tasters are the way to go, because there’re just too many beers to try. There seems to be a fair amount of Belgian wit beers this year judging from the list on the OBF web site, but we’ll see when we get there. I’ll be down there all four days and will post notes about the standouts that I try. It’s always a good time and it looks like we’re lucky to have all sunny days in the low 80’s, which is optimal outdoor beer drinking weather. So, it’s off to the OBF!

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Bread and garlic soup

I love a lot of simple dishes and one of my current favorites is Spanish bread and garlic soup. There are a lot of variations throughout Spain for this dish and for that matter there is an entire cuisine of Mediterranean food that uses old dried bread as an ingredient. There’s panzanella, the Italian bread and tomato salad, fattoush, the middle eastern salad of stale flat breads, tomatoes, and cucumber, the wide spread use of bread crumbs in pasta dishes in place of cheese (bread crumbs are often referred to as poor man’s cheese, because when they’re fried in olive oil they give a cheese like consistency to pastas). The list goes on. Most Mediterranean countries have several recipes for using dried bread.

The variation of bread soup that I generally make is based loosely upon Teresa Barrenechea’s recipe in her most recent book The Cuisines of Spain, which is one of my favorite Spanish cookbooks. (Her previous book is The Basque Table which is another amazing book that I highly recommend.) What I like about this variation is the addition of a poached egg.

Bread soup is a simple dish that you can make when you have very little in the house. All you need is dried good quality country bread, olive oil, garlic, a pinch of pimenton (smoked sweet Spanish paprika), and a water. Eggs and chopped parsley are optional. I love this so much that, sometimes, I actually buy bread and wait for it to get stale so that I have an excuse to make it. The preparation is simple. Heat the olive oil and 4-6 whole peeled cloves of garlic until the garlic starts to sizzle. Add slices of dried country bread until they start to turn light brown. You may need a fair amount of oil to do this because the bread will soak it up. Once the bread and garlic are browned, ass a pinch of pimenton and immediately add enough water to make it soupy. The bread will soak up a fair amount of water so you may have to add more. Season it with salt and pepper (and a pinch of red pepper if you want but it’s not as traditional). Stir it to break up the pieces of bread and let it simmer for about 15-20 minutes. If you want to add eggs, crack them over the surface of the soup, put the lid on and let the eggs cook until the white are cooked but the yolk is still a little soft. Ladle it into a bowl and your good to go. Sometimes I add a small amount of chopped parsley right at the end, but that’s optional.

It’s simple, frugal and delicious. The bread breaks down into a curd like consistency sort of like a cross between scrambled eggs or cheese. Add a salad on the side and it’s a complete meal. It’s also a great meal for late at night when you may have had a little too much to drink and want something to soak up the alcohol. For such a simple dish, it’s actually very hearty and goes well with a variety of wine and beer. You don’t want something too light with this. Inexpensive, medium bodied, slightly rustic reds are a good choice as would a medium bodied, not too crisp white. Tonight I was actually drinking beer, so I opted to try my latest beer with it which is a Belgian Dubbel, that I brewed a couple of weeks ago. The beer is a little green yet, but I wanted to taste it and it’s a robust enough beer to deal with the deep flavors of garlic and pimenton that bread soup has.

The beer is deep brown and has a fairly moussey head that lasts well. There’s a slight tan to the head, but not as deep as on a porter or stout. This beer was brewed with the Rochefort yeast and has some of the dried fruit (prune and raisin) aromas that Rochefort has. It also has a distinct note of banana and some cocoa notes as well as a touch of spice. The nose will likely come together more as it ages a little bit. The palate is a mix of fruit and malt that is medium bodied but finishes fairly dry. There’s a lingering toffee fruitiness in the finish. The beer tastes young and will get better over the next several weeks, but is very approachable now. The 6.5-7% alcohol isn’t prominent in the flavors. The beer had the deep flavors to work with the soup. It wasn’t an ideal match, but both were rich and deeply flavored and that made it work well enough. The flavors of the Dubbel make me think about grilled beef in a few weeks so we’ll see what e can plan around this beer. In any event, it was an excuse to eat bread soup and try my first tastes of this beer.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

A Dynamic Duo of IPAs and More Roast Chicken

I roasted another chicken after brewing my tripel, because I was a little tight on time and prep and it’s an easy thing to do. I actually picked up a free range from Trader Joe’s as opposed to New Season’s, which is the natural food grocer I normally like to shop at. This bird ended up having better flavor and texture, which was pleasant surprise. My wife had gotten some Walla Walla sweet onions and more fennel from the local farmer’s market while I was brewing. We’ve been having a lot of raw fennel salads so we opted to actually grill he fennel this time. It ended up being an all grilled/roasted dinner. I did the chicken, sweet onions, and fennel on the grill and roasted more red potatoes in a cast iron skillet in the oven. It’s not the kind of meal I would probably plan for guests because with everything being roasted, there wasn’t a lot of contrast or variety. I should have made some pesto for the chicken or maybe a vinaigrette for the onions or fennel, but I was feeling a little lazy.
It made beer matching a little easier in some ways because all the components of the meal had a caramel sweetness from the grill and a trace of smokiness. Playing into that theme I actually opted for a non-Belgian beer (which I haven’t recently) and went with a couple of IPA’s. IPA works well with this for a few reasons. First it has some caramel malt sweetness that plays up to the fact that all those roasted flavors, but at the same time, it also has enough hop bite to cut through all of the sweetness of the other dishes and actually make them all taste a little less sweet. In fact, using IPA for a meal like this actually makes it the contrasting sensation in the meal. I tried a bottle of Fish Tales Organic IPA, which is brewed with New Zealand Pacific Gem hops. It has moderate body (6.5% alcohol and 1.060 starting gravity, according to their website) but has enough hops on the palate to cut the sweetness of the malt and consequently the sweet, roasted flavors of everything else. It also has an amazing hop nose that is particularly inviting. It‘s a beer I’ve had before but one that I’ve never enjoyed as much before. It was remarkably refreshing with this many roasted foods.

The other IPA I tried with it is one of my reliable standbys: Broken Halo from Widmer Brothers Brewing. I’m a huge fan of Widmer, and not just because they’ve brewed some of my beers commercially as part of the Collaborator project. Rob and Kurt Widmer are both incredibly nice guys, they brew great beer, and run a great brewpub with consistently good food at reasonable prices. Some of their best beers are only available on draft at the Gasthaus, so if you don’t think much of Widmer, you need to get to the Gasthaus and try their other beers. Their Broken Halo IPA is 6% alcohol and comes in at 45 IBUs, so it’s not an incredibly bitter IPA. It’s brewed with a huge amount of hops at the finish of the boil which makes the beer remarkably aromatic, but not that bitter. As Rob once told me “No one ever complained that a beer had too much hop aroma.” The beer is copper colored and definitely seem to fall at the lighter end of bitterness and alcohol for many NW IPAs. But I think that’s why it works well with food. 45 IBUs is still enough to cut through food, but isn’t so high that it overpowers food. Broken Halo is an incredibly refreshing beer partly because of the big fresh hops aromas and flavors, and, as a result, was equally as good with the food.

While I was cooking, I actually had a bottle of Anchor Liberty Ale, which I hadn’t had in quite some time. I’m a big fan of Anchor’s beers as well, but they can be less than stellar in the Portland market because they don’t always move that quickly. (In Oregon, 11% of all of the beer sold is brewed in state, and craft beer accounts for 14% of all beer sales. We drink a lot of our own beer and out of state beers don’t always move that quickly off the shelf.) Liberty Ale is one of the early craft beers and is still true to that tradition. It was first brewed in 1975 when a lot of ingredients that we take for granted now weren’t available, including most of the high-alpha, more refined aroma hops like Columbus, Amarillo, Summit, etc. Liberty Ale has that old school citrusy American hop profile, but stands up well to the more refined hop quality of many newer beers. This was a fairly fresh bottle and was a great beer. If you haven’t had one recently, go and try one to get a taste of where American craft beer came from. It’s an old school style beer that still delivers great complexity and enjoyment. I’m glad I thought to pick one up.

Brewing Belgian Golden Ales and Tripels

I’ve been working with the White Labs Abbey IV yeast, which is reputed to be cultured from the Rochefort yeast strain, which I hadn’t used before. I normally repitch yeast from one bath to the next and generally build the strength of the beer up with each new batch since repitching also is the easiest way to build up a lot of healthy yeast. I started this run with Belgian Summer Ale and then a Dubbel and decided to finish it off with a Belgian Golden Ale. Luckily Belgian Golden isn’t as hard to brew as Dubbel. In fact it’s pretty easy. The grain bill was pretty straight forward: 80% pilsner malt and 20% sugar added to the kettle. This seems to be a good ratio because it allows you to make a fairly alcoholic beer (about 8-9%) that is also fairly dry, which makes it good with a variety of foods. The biggest problem with most homebrewed Belgian Goldens and Tripels is that they’re too sweet and don’t have the lightness on the palate that they should. Go try a bottle of Duvel or a bottle of Piraat and you’ll be amazed at the lightness of such a high alcohol beer. The key to beers like these is a low mash temperature (to make a highly fermentable wort that will have less residual sugar) and then to bump the wort up with a lot of sugar.

You also need a lot of healthy yeast to ferment this much sugar. If you don’t pitch enough yeast or if the yeast isn’t healthy enough, chances are that it will quit working before all of the sugar is gone and you’ll have a sweet beer which is nothing like the genuine article. I generally like to think that the best Belgian Goldens are made by producing a highly fermentable wort, pitching a lot of yeast, and then getting out of the way to let the yeast actually make the beer. It seems that the more neutral flavored the wort, the more the yeast can express itself. This isn’t a beer style where you want to use darker malts or crystal malts. I also think it’s best to use neutral sugars like corn sugar that ferment cleanly and don’t leave any residual flavors behind like dark sugars do (although dark sugars are wonderful in Dubbels and dark strong ales).

I tend to stick to pretty traditional hops for these beers and generally go with Saaz, Styrian Goldings, Goldings (or a derivative like Willamette), or Hallertauer (and it’s derivatives like Mt Hoods) and use a lighter hand. You want the bitterness in the 25-35IBU range, which is pretty mild by NW standards. I also don’t add a lot of hops to the finish because I don’t like too much hop aroma. F you put the later hops in about 15-20 minutes before the end you can get subtle floral and spice aromas without getting too much overt hop aromas.

These beers and their close relative, Abbey and Trappist Tripels, are great food beers because they have enough heft to stand up to a wide variety of food, but generally also have enough carbonation and dryness to cut through richer foods. The Tripels tend to be a little more elegant and refined, and the Goldens tend be drier and crisper. I normally try to keep one of them on tap all the time because they are so friendly. Unfortunately I did run out of my last one about 10 days ago and this one won’t be ready to be kegged for about 2 weeks (it will be drinkable at that point, but will mellow and round out after a few more weeks). They’re great with roasted chicken, pork, and shellfish, and could actually stand up fairly well to beef, particularly if it had a rich sauce (like steaks with béarnaise sauce). They’re also great aperitifs, but because of their alcohol content, you don’t want to have too many without some substantial food.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Pork cutlets and Condado de Haza

Because of the Spanish cookbooks I had gotten earlier in the week, I was in the mood for Spanish influenced food and maybe some Spanish wine. If you’re cooking meat and you’re cooking Spanish food, chances are you’re cooking pork. Of course, they cook all kinds of meat in Spain, but pork seems to hold a revered place sort of the same way it does in Chinese cuisine. I still had some thick cut loin chops from a whole pork loin I had bought, so I decided to use a couple of those but cut them in half to make four thin cutlets. I had been thinking a lot about the chicken in sherry sauce from my tapas menu early in the week and decided it was time for pork and piquillo peppers in a garlic sherry sauce. It was a weeknight (even if it was Friday), so I was looking for something pretty straightforward and easy and this would fit the bill. I still had some white beans salad left over from the previous evening, so that was one less thing to have to make. To bulk it all out, I opted to roast some peeled red potatoes with olive oil, salt, pepper and thyme (easy and truly satisfying if you let them go long enough to get really crisp outside and really creamy inside). I was thinking that some aioli would be nice with the potatoes, but I realized I probably didn’t want to get that involved, although the suggestion that a lot of people make of using commercial mayonnaise with some garlic, did have some appeal, even though I normally eschew such things.

I sautéed the cutlets in a pan with olive oil, took them out, added four cloves of chopped garlic and a pinch of sweet pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika, not be confused with normal paprika) and let that all cook for about 30 seconds before deglazing the pan with amontillado sherry. I added several julienned piquillo peppers and some parsley and let it all reduce. Then I put the cutlets back in and flipped them to coat them with the sauce. Then I served them up with the cold white beans and hot roasted potatoes.

I’m a huge fan of Spanish wine, and like many wine people I keep waiting for when Spain will finally become the “next big thing.” Spanish wine is tremendously undervalued even though many prices have doubled in the last ten to fifteen years. I’m not talking about the multi-hundred dollar bottles of wines from Priorat but the $10-20 bottles. There are great $5 to $10 bottles as well. Many are made from Garnacha, which is what Grenache is called in Spain. Many Spanish wines are aged at the winery for several years before release and most are ready to go when released although many of these will get better with age. Tonight’s wine was a bottle of 1995 Condada de Haza from the Ribera del Duero. Condada de Haza is made by Alejandro Fernandez of Pesquera fame, but contrary to many beliefs, it’s not the second label of Pesquera but a new property with younger vines. Fernandez’s wines have always been top notch, and considerably cheaper than those of his neighbor, the esteemed Vega Sicilia.

In all fairness, it’s probably safe to say that 1995 Condado de Haza was never really meant to be a long lived wine, because the vines are younger than Pesquera and as a result shouldn’t have the same concentration of flavor. When I poured it into the glass, I was amazed how dark and purple it still was. There was a little band of brick-red at the rim, but this wasn’t didn’t look like a wine that was way past its prime. I had tried a 1996 several months ago that hadn’t aged as well. The nose was filled with black cherries, vanilla, dark berries, a slight spice note, and the tar scents that you expect from this region. The vanilla notes form the oak aging were well integrated with the fruit and played along with it but didn’t overshadow the rich deep fruit. There was a little bit of alcohol warmth in the finish, but the wine was balanced and had a long finish.

Unsurprisingly, the food and wine went well together. This was due mainly to fact that the food and wine seemed to have an affinity for each other because they shared a common cultural heritage. Pork doesn’t normally seem to require such a big rich red, but when paired with the roasted piquillo peppers, the smoky pimenton, the garlic and the deep flavors of the amontillado, it seemed to demand a rich full red. It was also well suited to a single slice of Manchego cheese that I had as dessert. I normally prefer beer with great cheese, but the rich nuttiness of the cheese and the deep tarry fruit of the wine were a great counterpoint. Not bad for a simple Friday night dinner.

The wine was better than I had expected, and although maybe past its peak by a couple years, was quit remarkable (this bottle had been stored at temperature controlled conditions since its release). In an age when too many wines are drunk too young, it’s nice to drink a wine that’s been carefully aged. Even after a couple of hours of being open it didn’t start to show the oxidized flavors of a wine that was way past its peak. If I had more I would drink it up soon, but if you had more I would gladly cook you a good Spanish influenced dinner if you’d share it with me.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

More lambic and Mediteranean food

Because I had gotten home a little early from work (even though I still had to do some work remotely), I took advantage of the extra couple of hours being home to make some white beans. I love beans in general, and generally try to cook them from scratch. This doesn’t really take that long, but it can be a little longer than many of us ware willing to wait on a regular weeknight. I’m a big fan of white beans so I decided to start some out. The secret to making good beans is to cook them slowly at barely a simmer. Cooking beans over a rolling boil will only lead to broken, exploded beans and won’t really take that much less time. I normally bring them to a boil and then turn them down to a bare simmer. If you see bubbles coming up, the heat is too high. Cooking them this way leads to great, creamy texture and illustrates why crock pots are so perfect for beans. Despite the opinions of some people, beans should be creamy and never al dente, but remember, creamy doesn’t mean mushy.

There’s a controversy about cooking beans with or without salt, because salt, and acidic ingredients, like tomatoes, can make beans tough, or cause them to take longer to cook. I normally cook my beans for a little bit of time with no slat, but like to add salt halfway through because beans need to absorb salt. Given a choice between salting them at the beginning or not at all, I’d take at the beginning. There’s anecdotal evidence in Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything, that the whole salt controversy is an old wife’s tale. He did experiments with two pots of beans, one with salt and one without salt, and found that after the same amount of cooking, one pot tasted seasoned and the other one didn’t.

He problem that I had this night was that the beans were cooked, in a few hours, but I really didn’t have any plan of what to do with them. By the time that the beans were done, nothing else was done and I had no plan. I had some vague idea of grilling something and serving it over a white bean salad but otherwise had no real idea. I asked my wife what she would like and got a response of “something with pesto since we have so much basil.” I still had the amazing fennel I had bought last weekend so I opted for another simple Mediterranean inspired dinner: grilled chicken breast with basil pesto served over white beans in a sherry vinaigrette with a fennel salad with a tomato vinaigrette on the side. Overall pretty simple if you have the beans cooked,

I made a sherry vinaigrette by chopping some shallots and garlic and letting them marinate in sherry vinegar with a little salt for about 10 minutes. Doing this helps to pull some of their flavor into the vinegar (it’s a trick I stole from an Alice Water/Chez Panisse cookbook). I added some olive oil and chopped parsley and then tossed it with the still warm, drained beans so they had a chance to absorb the dressing. The fennel was sliced on a mandoline and tossed with a tomato vinaigrette and some salt. The chicken breast was grilled over charcoal with salt and pepper and nothing else,

I was going to open a bottle of wine with this, but thought that the dual vinaigrettes may be too much for wine. I had a glass of homebrewed Belgian amber while cooking and opted to stay with beer. The Belgian amber is tough to compare with a commercial example. If I had I ad to find a rough comparison, I’d say it was like a Pauwel Kwak with more fruit esters (I’m not saying it’s as good as Kwak, I’m saying it’s similar in body and roughly in style.) This is a nice beer with a lot of things, but this didn’t seem a great meal for it. Instead, I pulled out a homebrewed Geueze. This one was a blend of 6 or different lots. It was about 15% three year old (from three different lots), 60% two year old (from two different lots), and 25% one year old (from one lot). These were the ages of the lots when it was bottled, but it’s been bottles for about 10 months now. It’s not as tart as most commercial Geuezes nor does it have the smoky, phenolic character of many, but it had great barnyard, peach and apricot, and citrus aromas and flavors. Despite being very dry, it had a very full, rich mouth feel. Because of its age it was brilliantly clear. It was tart enough to be a good match to the vinaigrettes, and in fact, helped to tame their acidity, but not so acidic as to clash with the fresh sweetness of the basil pesto. Another good match and further proof of lambic’s versatility with a wide variety of foods, and proof that you can make good lambic-style beers at home if you’re willing to blend and age the beers properly.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Tapas

I became intrigued by Spanish tapas in the late 1980’s when Penelope Casas released her first edition of Tapas. I had no idea about tapas previous to that, but was immediately taken by the idea of eating a vast array of small plates. Strangely, the idea never took off in the US, although a lot of foodies kept saying that it would. There was a great, traditional Spanish restaurant in the town where I grew up called Maison Catellano that had a few traditional tapas as appetizers, and the owners were smart enough to not push the idea that tapas aren’t appetizers but an entirely different way of eating. Though they’ve since closed, they had perhaps the best garlic shrimp I’ve ever had. Their sauce was richer and thicker than what you normally see. It wasn’t a light olive oil and garlic type of sauce but a richer, Catalan-like brown sauce that I once heard the owner describing as taking all day long to make. In fact the shrimp were almost an afterthought in this dish. I could have eaten the sauce with crusty bread and never missed the shrimp (which were in fact always perfectly cooked).

There were a few tapas places in Portland at times, but again, they never seemed to catch on, and they had the drawback of also being fairly expensive if you wanted to eat enough tapas for a meal. There was one place, however, called La Catalana, that had great Catalonian food and also great tapas (again served mainly as appetizers). They were reasonably priced, and had a great Spanish wine list. Alas, they too, have closed and now my tapas cravings are normally satisfied at home. It’s ironic. In Spain, no one cooks tapas at home. Tapas is something you eat a tapas bar with friends, but in Portland, I have to cook them at home.

The secret to making tapas at home is to start early. Tapas is something that’s leisurely. You eat a plate of something now and have a drink. Then you eat another one a little later and have another drink. If you don’t start until you’re starving, you push yourself into making half a dozen small pates at once. I prefer to do them spread out over time, so I can still relax and enjoy the company and the drinks. It being my birthday, I took the day off and ran around with my wife to several stores to get the requisite battery of Spanish staples: Serrano ham, garlic, shrimp, tomatoes, potatoes, sherry vinegar, Manchego cheese, pickle Piquillo peppers, mushrooms, etc. I was also picked up a bottle of Saison Dupont and a bottle of Rochefort 8 (see my previous post about Rochefort 10). Many people think that you’re supposed to have sherry with tapas, but I’ve read that the only people who drink sherry with tapas in Spain are tourists. Most Spaniards actually drink wine or beer with tapas, and I think that both are great choices, as is sherry even if it‘s only for tourists. I love good sherry and like to have an excuse to drink it. Even though the prices have gone up in the last decade, the sherries from Emilio Lustau are still incredible values. They are some of the finest wines in the world and are generally still below $20 a bottle (even though they were under $10 only 10 or 15 years ago). If the only sherry you’ve ever had is Harvey’s Bristol Cream or Dry Sack, you need to track these down and taste them. They’ll show you that sherry is world class and isn’t some tipple for old ladies and club members.

I didn’t have a definite plan of what to make, but it being my birthday we also stopped at Powells (http://www.powells.com/) so I could buy a copy of Jose Andres’s Tapas: A Taste of Spain in America and Casa Moro by Sam and Sam Clark. I’ve never had Jose Andres’s food but his book is phenomenal and shows the upscale side of the tapas that Penelope Casas introduced us to almost 20 years ago. It’s great source for inspiration and well worth it for anyone who loves Spanish food. Moro is a Spanish restaurant in London that makes Spanish food that shows the Moorish influence in Spanish food. This is the second cookbook by the husband and wife team and a more pan-Mediterranean one than the first one, but it still has a lot of traditional Spanish influenced food. I popped open a Pelican IPA (http://www.pelicanbrewery.com/) which is still one of the great NW IPA’s and got started.

The first course wasn’t a traditional tapa, but one of my own invention whose ingredients and method was thoroughly Spanish. I fired slices of red potatoes in olive oil until they were browned and crisped. I put a slice of Manchego cheese and a slice of piquillo pepper on the top and then topped it with a black olive half. I served three potatoes rounds per serving and we had a quick bite before my wife went back to making the overly complicated chocolate cherry roulade that she knows is my favorite (more on that later). Although the IPA wasn’t the best choice from the beers I had on had, it was open and worked well to cut trough the richness of the cheese and olive oil.

The next tapa was sautéed mushrooms with garlic, thyme, and olive oil, which is a pretty traditional tapa. It’s white button mushrooms sautéed in olive oil until they’re browned. Then you add some garlic and thyme and sauté it briefly (don’t burn the garlic). Finally you deglaze it with sherry and add the parsley. I served them over slices of country bread to soak up the juices. In a perfect, non-lazy world, the bread would have been toasted, but it was till wonderful. Simple and straightforward, but with clean, pure flavors. I opened the Saison Dupont to go with it, which was remarkable. Its crisp spiciness makes it one of the most versatile beers with food. The mushrooms could use a bigger beer, but the Dupont will work with the next few dishes as well.

Third up was a small tomato salad with sherry vinaigrette, blue cheese, shallots, and basil. The tomatoes were orange Italian sweets from the farmers market and ere incredibly sweet, so they stood were a natural foil to the vinaigrette. The basil isn’t traditional, but I have a lot of basil and it’s a natural with tomatoes. It was nice to have a more acidic cleaner flavored dish at this point to help clean our palates. The Dupont’s crispness was a perfect match.

Fourth was chicken thighs cooked with garlic, piquillo peppers, Serrano ham, and sherry. They were basically sautéed and had small amount of sauce which required a small amount of the country bread to soak up. Again, it wasn’t complicated, but was reminiscent of some of the most fundamental flavors of Spanish food. I switched to the Rochefort 8 for this one, because I wanted to finish with the bigger beer. The chicken was remarkable. The sherry, chicken fat, and olive oil emulsified into a remarkable sauce. The chicken was tender and juicy and the peppers and ham added to the complexity of the dish. Rochefort 8 may not have been perfect with it, but it’s hard to go wrong with any deeply flavored dish and this beer.

The final tapa was the most simple and the probably the best: Grilled shrimp wrapped with Serrano ham. It had no added salt, pepper, or olive oil. It was just Serrano ham and giant shrimp. It was cooked just enough to crisp the ham and to cook the shrimp through. I served it with a squeeze of lime and it was amazing. More proof that sometimes the simplest dishes are the best. The Rochefort had warmed up and the brown sugar and fruit cake flavors (as my wife described it) worked with the smoky, salty, rich flavors of the shrimp and ham. A dollop of aioli would have been nice, but, frankly, would have masked the pure flavors. It was a memorable three hours and five courses.

A cake is a requirement on a birthday and my wife had made my favorite cake, which is chocolate cherry roulade from the incredible cookbook Kaffeehaus by Rick Rodgers, which is one of the great dessert cookbooks of all time. Rodgers has chronicled some of the most decadent desserts from the Austro-Hungarian coffee house tradition. We were able to score an autographed copy several years ago. This cake is from the “simple cakes” section, which should put a shudder into anyone who wants to venture into the “complex cakes” section. This cake is a thin chocolate cake rolled up as a roulade with a stuffing of gelatin thickened whip cream and pitted cherries (which are at their peak right now here in Oregon).

I picked up a De Boomgaard Framboise which is a sweet, raspberry beer with a distinct sweet cinnamon note as well as a nutmeg-like spicy undercurrent. It’s as wonderful for dessert as the sweetened lambics from Lindemans, but has the advantage that it doesn’t try to pass itself as lambic (it’s labeled as Belgian beer with spices and raspberry juice). The cake is amazing. The chocolate layer is flavored with cocoa and is egg rich and toothsome. It’s sturdy enough to wrap the cream and cherries, but is still supple, and more importantly, it isn’t too sweet like many cakes. The cherries were organic cherries from the farmer’s market and were perfectly ripe so they didn’t need any additional sweetening at all. It was perfect with the beer (or rather the beer was perfect with the cake which was the real star). It’s one of the best cakes I’ve ever had and I look forward to it every year. Overall it was a remarkable meal that took four, leisurely hours to eat and embodied what the entire tapas lifestyle is about.

Steaks and Red Bordeaux

A lot of my favorite foods are bistro standards, and Steak Frites certainly ranks amongst my favorite Bistro foods. I wanted something like this but didn’t want to go through the frites process, so I decided to grill some steaks and do some oven roasted potatoes instead. Steak Frites are traditionally made with hangar steak, which is a chewy but tremendously flavorful cut from the end of the ribs (it’s actually part of the diaphragm). Anthony Bourdain describes it as being faintly kidney like and there is richness to it that makes that an apt description. It’s a great cut, but can get tough if it’s cooked beyond medium rare (although I have to wonder why anyone would cook a steak beyond medium rare.) Unfortunately, hangar steak is hard to find and is normally only available by special order.

I was in the mood for a bistro steak but also didn’t want to get bogged down in the whole frites issue, since good frites need to be deep fried twice. So I kep the bistro idea but changed the menu slightly. I found two sirloin tip steaks that were about 8 ounces each, that were from naturally raised corn-fed cattle. Sirloin tip is actually part of the round, and has great beef flavor, but, partly because of its leanness, it does tend to be a tougher cut, so it’ll never be the tenderest steak you’ll eat. I picked up some gorgonzola cheese, because I really like good blue cheese with grilled beef. I opted to roast some potatoes with olive oil and thyme and made sure that they got a good crust on all sides. On the side we had a roasted beet salad with some organic yellow beets. The were roasted until tender, then peeled, cut and tossed with sherry vinegar, olive oil and grated fresh ginger, which is a recipe I stole from a Jean-Georges Vongerichten recipe. We had some zucchini in the garden, plus a plethora of basil, and I had a few tomatoes from the farmers market that I sautéed all together to make a vaguely Provencal side dish. I grilled the steaks for about 4 minutes total (2 minutes per side) over high heat to get a decent char. They were medium-rare and had great taste.

With most bistro food, I’m generally partial to wine and I pulled out a big gun for this one: 1989 Ch Troplong Mondot from St Emilion in Bordeaux. I started with Bordeaux when I started collecting wine but after awhile I got into other wines, like Pinot Noir, and Rhone wines instead and for a while even eschewed Bordeaux. But I still have some 1986 and 1989’s stashed away, and it’s tough to beat great beef with Bordeaux. St Emilion is one of the areas of Bordeaux where Merlot takes precedence over Cabernet Sauvignon (Pomerol is the other one). 1989 was hot year and the wines tend to be very ripe flavored and a little alcoholic. This wine was still holding up well, but it seemed to be on its downward side of its peak. The nose opened up after about 20 minutes and was full of plum fruit, with some cedar notes as well. You could pick up a little bit of alcohol on the nose, but there was still enough ripe plum and dark currant fruit on the palate that the higher alcohol didn’t seem too noticeable. It had a very nice balance and, like many 1989’s seemed to have lower acidity than your typical Bordeaux. 1989 was a much hyped vintage and a lot of the wines tend to be big and overripe by Bordeaux standards but most of the1989’s I’ve had have been very good. This was a very good bottle, and while memorable, won’t go down as one of the best I‘ve had (although I’d gladly drink it again if I were ever offered it.) If I did have more of it, I would likely drink it fairly soon, because I don’t think it will get better with age. But, it was delicious with the steak and did make for a memorable meal. Tough to beat mature Bordeaux and grilled beef.

Tripel and roast pork

After brewing, I went to get some produce and to search for a bottle of Dubbel. Unfortunately, I could only find Westmalle Tripel and not the Dubbel but somehow I knew that I’d make do. I had a small pork loin roast that I brined but needed to figure out what else to do with it. There have been a lot of great spring onions (even this late), so I picked a bunch of them to roast on the grill as well as some remarkable fennel. I wanted some kind of grain pilaf and opted to go with spelt, which I had never cooked but had in fact brewed with. I ground up some fennel seeds, black peppercorns and mixed those with salt and dried mustard to make a crust for the pork roast. I coated the roast in olive oil and then crusted it with the spice blend and roasted it in the grill along with the spring onions and some carrots. I tossed the onions and carrots with a basil sherry vinaigrette. The pilaf was just onions, garlic, spelt and chicken stock. The spelt pilaf was a bit over salty, but the bite of the sherry vinaigrette helped to cut that somewhat. I had a Monchshot Schwarzbier during the prep work and it continues to be one of my favorite beers. I’ve become more of a hop head through the years, but every time I have great German beer, I realize that the defining and uniting element of most German beers is a real purity of malt flavor. German beers seem more malt driven than any other nation’s beers. You can taste it from the lightest pilsner to the biggest doppelbocks. The Monchshof is no exception. The malt is rich and deep with a long lingering finish. Kostritzer may have the reputation of being “the” schwarzbier, but Monchshof, to my rtatses, is much richer and doesn’t have the slight black malt bite that Kostritzer sometimes seems to have. Overall, it was an exceptional beer and ranks as one of the world’s best beers.

With dinner, I had the Westmalle Tripel. Westmalle is my favorite Tripel and is the benchmark that I use to judge all the others (even though they’re all slightly different). The aroma is all candy, spices and the distinctive orange note that Westmalle’s yeast seems to impart. It’s highly carbonated which helps hide its 9.5% alcohol content. It was dry enough to cut through the overly salty pilaf and the spice was a nice compliment to the spice crust on the pork. The sweetness of the roast onions and carrots was offset by the sherry vinaigrette and it was a great match with the Tripel as well. Tripel seems to work well with roasted pork and chicken. It has enough heft to standup to the food, but also has enough carbonation to cut through the other flavors. The spicy and sometimes herbal aromas also compliment a variety of preparations, although I normally avoid tripel with very spicy foods, like Mexican or Thai. Good Tripel, like Westmalle, has a certain elegance which seems to get lost with overly spicy food. (One of the worst beer and food combos I ever had was Tripel Karmeliet with pork braised in salsa verde. The spices in the salsa verde fought with the spiciness of the beer and created quite a trainwreck.) Save your Tripels for roasted bistro-type chicken and pork dishes, but break the Dubbel or other dark abbey beers out for the braised short ribs or lamb shanks.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Brewing Belgian Dubbel

I brewed a Belgian Abbey Dubbel today, which is one of my favorite styles of beer and also one of the most aggravating to try to make at home. Dubbel comes out of the monastic brewing tradition in Belgium and was invented at the Westmalle Brewery, one of the six Trappist monasteries that brew beer. The most famous Abbey styles are Dubbel and Tripel (Double and Triple) and were both invented at Westmalle. The Westmalle Tripel is a classic and, for my tastes, the absolute pinnacle of what Tripel should be. The Dubbel is also a classic and very good, but I actually prefer Affligem, which I think is a little richer and maltier. In any event, I would never turn down a bottle of Westmalle Dubbel.

Dubble is an amber-brown beer that’s generally around 6.5-8% alcohol and has a rich malty flavor, subdued hop bitterness and flavor, and generally has dark, dried fruit favors like raisin and prune from the use of dark crystal malts. The beers have wonderfully, complex aromas of dried fruit, spice, dark sugar, and spice. They have a deep, rich malt flavors intertwined with fruit and spice. Unlike other rich, dark beers, like Old Ales, Dubbles actually finish fairly dry, which is what makes them so dastardly hard to brew. A great Dubbel balances rich malt and complex flavors with a dry, but lingering finish. The secret to producing the style is to use enough richer malts, like Munich and some Belgian Special B (a dark crystal malt that helps to create the dried fruit flavors) and also to use some sugar to help boost the alcohol and to dry the beer out.

Some people find it difficult to imagine that sugar actually dries a beer out, but the science behind it is fairly simple. Plain sugar is 100% fermentable by brewers yeast. Corn sugar, candi sugar and even regular table sugar, are simple sugars and brewers yeast can eat and ferment all of them completely. The sugars produced by mashing malted barley and much more varied and some of them are complex types of sugar which yeast can’t ferment. The typical mash made from100% malted barley is about 75-85% fermentable by the yeast, and as a result 15-25% of the sugar is left over in the finished beer, which is what gives beer it’s richness and sweetness. To make higher alcohol beer, you normally use more barley to extract more sugar, and if 15-25% of the sugar is left in the finished beer, then the more barley, the more leftover sugar, and the sweeter the beer. If you make a high alcohol beer and use sugar and malt, you increase the amount of sugar in the wort, but the percentage of residual sugar in the beer is lower, because you started with a higher percentage of fermentable types of sugar. The use of sugar is what makes a 9% alcohol Belgian Tripel a drier beer than a 9% alcohol barley wine, which is typically brewed from all malt.

This Dubbel will be on the lighter end of the scale, more around 6.5%. I’m using the White Labs Abbey IV yeast (WLP540), which I believe is cultured from Rochefort. If it is a Rochefort derivative, like Wyeast’s 1762 Abbey II, then it normally requires higher temperatures to get the characteristic Rochefort fruitiness. Luckily it’s fairly warm, so we’ll see how this one goes. The grain bill was roughly 50% pils, 15% Vienna malt, 15% Munich malt, 10% Special B malt, and 10% corn sugar. The hops are Palisades for bittering and a small amount of Saaz in the finish for a little extra spice.

I brewed a batch two weeks ago with this yeast in order to help prop up the yeast. The first beer is what I’ve decided to call a Belgian Summer Ale (since so many Belgian beers generally don’t fit any real style, you’re free to call it what you want). The Summer Ale was 80% pilsner malt and 20% wheat and was rather aggressively hopped for a Belgian style beer. It uses Palisades hops throughout, which are slightly spicy, and are derived from an open pollinated Swiss variety of Tettnanger. It’s about 5% which is fairly mild for Belgian beer, but it’s crisp, spicy, and light which makes it a perfect summer quaffer. It was kegged today so I’ll be drinking it in a few days.

I’ll report back on this beer when it’s ready in about 2-3 weeks. In the mean time, I should try and track down and bottle of Westmalle or Affligem for research.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Burgers and beer

Some of my favorite foods are in fact simple foods. (Like the roast chicken in my previous entry). But the key to simple foods is that they have to be made correctly. Like Norton used to say to Ralph in the Honeymooners, “It’s the little things, Ralph.” Burgers are another one of these foods.

I love a good burger. As a kid, it was one of the few things I could always be counted on to eat. Nowadays, I don’t eat as many of them except at home, because it seems that a lot of places don’t know how to make a decent one. The tendency in too many American restaurants to “supersize” every entrée hasn’t helped the state of the hamburger. Nor has the trend towards lower fat, leaner cuts of meat. A burger that’s too big, takes too lng to cook and requires longer cooking over low heat. I like to cook burgers over searingly high heat to get a good caramelized crust, but want the meat medium rare (actually n the rare side of medium rare). I tend to keep my burgers to about 5-6 ounces (pre-cooked weight) which means you can shape it to about 3/8 to ½ an inch thick. I normally try to cook them on a super hot charcoal grill if possible, or if the weather doesn’t cooperate, I use a cast iron skill on high heat. I think you should be able to cook a burger this size in about 3-4 minutes total. Start with about 2 minutes on one side and then flip it and let it go another 1-2 minutes. Pull it off and you’re done (you can add cheese if you want, but don’t get too foofy with it.) And for God’s sake, don’t flatten the burger with the spatual while it’s cooking. All that stuff that comes out and makes it sizzle is also what keeps your burger moist.

The cut of meat is important. A good burger should be juicy and what makes a burger juicy is fat. Don’t kid yourself. Fat tastes good and gives food a terrific richness. My favorite cut of beef for a burger is chuck, but very few stores sell it anymore because it can gum up a meat grinder pretty quickly. If you have to, buy a chuck roast, partially freeze it to firm it up and grind it yourself. (You do have a meat grinder, don’t you?) It’s worth it. Don’t buy that super low fat ground beef (l10% or less fat). Get the meat with 20%+ fat. Worried about your cholesterol and health? Then don’t eat a burger every day and keep the serving size down. Low fat meat makes a low fat, dry burger. Better to have a 5 oz ground chuck burger than an 8 oz low fat burger. Go for quality over quantity. Garnish it how you want, but don’t go over board. A burger is still about the burger. You don’t want to top it with so many things that you don’t remember what you’re eating (unless you didn’t heed my advice and made the supersized low fat burger, in which case you should garnish it with as many things as you can to cover up the fact that you’re eating a horribly dry burger).

But what to drink with a good burger? In the wine business we used to talk about foods that are good with burgers, which essentially meant easy drinking not-overly-complex wines. I will admit I like those but why have an ordinary wine when for the same money you could have a great beer. I tend to like pale ales, IPA’s, and brown ales with burgers. You need a beer with some malt flavors to match the char and caramelized flavors of the meat. I also like at least a little hop bite to cut the fat in the meat. Most brown ales don’t have that many hops, but they still work well (and they’re terrific with a proper roast beef sandwich). It’s pretty easy to pull off a good match. Look for a beer with good malt flavors to marry with the charred beef, and enough hops to help cut the fat.

Tonight, we grilled because it was too hot (about 100, which is incendiary for Portland). I went the homebrew route and chose the IPA that I rejected with the roast chicken. It was brewed from about 92% two row pale malt and about 8% English Carastan malt, which is a crystal/caramel malt that gives the beer a subtle toffee-like malt flavor. It’s hopped with Centennial, Amarillo and Summit hops. Centennials have a distinct citrus grapefruit aroma, while the Amarillos lend more of a tangerine flavor. Summits are pretty remarkable and are amongst my favorite new hops. Their aroma is an incredible an incredible mix of fresh hops, spice and citrus. The beer’s toffee malt flavor is balanced by a medium hop bite, and finishes a little drier than the mouthfeel would suggest. This IPA isn’t as bitter as most NW IPA’s, which have a tendency to be aggressively hopped. It’s also dry-hopped with more Summits to give the aroma a little more punch. It was a great match with the burger and proved that a completely satisfying meal doesn’t have to be hard, complex, or expensive. Simple food and simple beer, but done right. “It’s the little things, Ralph.”

Sunday, July 8, 2007

Roasted chicken

A roasted chicken is still one of the best meals that you can have. It’s simple to prepare and few things are as satisfying. You can easily feed 4 or more people, plus you get a carcass that makes amazing stock (you do make stock from scratch, don’t you?). In my house it’s only my wife and I so we noramlly get 2-3 dinners out of the actual chicken. If you’re serious about cooking, you really should be roasting a chicken every week or so because you get enough bones to make good several quarts of good rich stock. In fact, some friends of ours had to listen to one of my drunken diatribes about this same subject a while ago, and now, as a result of politely listening to a raving lunatic, I owe them, what else, but a roasted chicken dinner.

For something so easy, a fair amount has been written about how to roast a chicken because it seems that many people just don’t get it. For my favorite method and commentary, I would direct you to Anthony Bourdain’s wonderful Les Halles Cookbook. In there he goes into great detail about what makes a great roasted chicken and how to prepare one. Since he covers this is such great detail, I won’t go into too much detail, but there are a few things to point out.

First, get a good chicken. I’m certainly guilty of buying commercial chickens at the supermarket when they’re on sale, but most commercial birds don’t have much flavor and can be pretty dry. If you use a commercial chicken, brine the bird with about ¾ cup of kosher salt and 3/8 of a cup of sugar in enough water to cover the bird. Let it sit for a few hours (but probably not more than 4-5 hours), but even as little as 30-60 minutes can make a big difference. If you can, get a naturally raised free-range or organic bird.

Wash it well and stuff the cavity with a good handful of fresh herbs. Pretty much anything will do, but I normally stick to sage, rosemary, and thyme in any combination. Salt the cavity and add either a halved lemon, a halved onion, or an entire head of garlic that’s been halved. Next, you absolutely must truss the bird. If nothing else, tie the legs shut, but what you really need to do is truss it in such a way that the wings and legs are flush to the body. The bird should be compact and shaped vaguely like a football.. This helps the bird cook evenly and ensure that the legs or wings don’t jut out and burn. If you do it correctly (and again read Anthony Bourdain for details), the wings will also partly cover the breast so they don’t receive too much direct heat.

You can cook it inside or outside. Most people prefer a crisper skin and there several competing methods to do this. I normally stick to a fairly high temperature like 400-450 to ensure and use a small enough bird that I can cook it through at this temperature without overcooking anything. When the thighs register about 155 or so, it’s done. Take it off the fire and let it rest for 10 minutes. You need to do this. It’s not option all, unless you want a dry bird.

Today, I’m cooking it outside because it’s hot and nothing beats a roasted chicken over a real fire. On the side, we’ve got grilled spring onions and baby carrots from the farmers market. Also we have more potatoes cooked in a foil packet with garlic, olive oil and herbs.

Roasted chicken is such quintessential bistro fare that nothing beats an uncomplicated easy drink red with it, but beer’s a great choice as well. Today, it’s homebrewed beers. I normally have five homebrews on tap. Because I love Belgian beers, I normally have 2-3 of those. At this point, I’m stuck between a fairly fruity Belgian amber and a NW IPA. It may require a half glass of each to make the final decision. The Belgian amber is about 20% Vienna Malt, 20% Munich malt, and 60% Pilsner malt, plus some sugar to boost the alcohol but lighten the body. It’s a light amber, with a lot of yeast fruitiness and a nice compliment of spice from the combo of Saaz hops and Styrian Goldings hops. The alcohol is about 6.5-7%, so it’s hefty, but not over board. The IPA is similar light amber, with a solid malt backbone, and hopped with Centennial, Amarillo, and Summit hops. Most of the hops are in the finish, so it has a lot of hop flavor, but isn’t overly bitter. The Belgian is the more alcoholic of the two but also the drier because of the sugar (which ferments completely and doesn’t leave any residual sugar).

The choice ended up being the Belgian Amber, because it was dry, with nice fruity aromas but also had a nice flavor of toffee from the Munich and Vienna malts. It was the more understated of the two but also the more complex of the two. It was a good match to the food, although it was a little too dry for the amazing peach I had for dessert. Tough to beat Belgian beers with bistro food, but I’d still take a great pale, IPA, or brown ale with a burger or a roast beef sandwich. I’ll save my diatribe about a proper burger for another time.

We at the breasts of the chicken for dinner but saved the wings, thighs and legs for another day. It was supposed to get hot, and the leftovers would work well in a salad and give me an opportunity to put something together quickly for dinner without having to turn a burner or the oven on. Got to love roast chicken.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

Riesling and pork

100 years ago, Riesling was regarded as the king of white wines. Today, that role is held by Chardonnay and Riesling has largely been relegated to the shelf for other less popular varietals like Gewurztraminer, Chenin Blanc and others. Part of Riesling’s decline was probably due in large part that many of them are not bone dry, and most people think that they[re supposed to like dry wines and eschew off-dry and sweet wines. The real irony in this is that many of the top selling, inexpensive brands of Chardonnay are in fact fairly sweet. When I was in the wine business in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Kendall Jackson was a top selling brand of Chardonnay and it was decidedly sweet, but the average consumer who bought it didn’t know it and felt good about themselves for being sophisticated enough to be buying a Good dry” wine like Chardonnay. Further proof that the majority of us like dry wine because we’re told we’re supposed to.

I am not anti-Chardonnay, although it is a relief to see that people have branched out into other varietals. Who would have dreamt 15 years ago that Viognier would become a popular wine? But Riesling still sits in the side lines waiting for to get back in the game. The honest truth is that Riesling’s sweetness and i’s balancing acidity make it an incredibly friendly wine with so many types of food. It’s often recommended for spicy and hot food, which isn’t a bad call (although I’d still opt for a good beer with most hot and spicy dishes), but it also goes very well with more traditional fare. Pork and Riesling is a classic (perhaps because of the importance of both in German and Alsatian food). It’s also interesting to note how pork has fallen from favor in American Haute Cuisine, Next time you’re perusing a cookbook by a famous chef from a famous restaurant, look for the pork recipes if you want to get an idea of the regard that pork has.

I felt like doing some real cooking today. Nothing too fancy but involved enough so I felt like I was cooking. Of course the temperature had started to creep back up so it required food that needed little indoor cooking. I had bought a whole pork loin recently and had sliced most of it into thick loin chops but kept two pieces as smaller roast. Chops sounded like a good idea. Since they were thick enough I decided to stuff them ith a combination of fresh sage, grana padano cheese, toasted almonds, and garlic. The ingredients were all minced and I added a little bit of olive oil to help bind it.

We made a quick trip to the supermarket to get some much needed produce and bought some beautiful fennel, some apricums (I assume a cross of apricot and plums), and scallions. The fennel would be thin sliced on a mandolin and tossed with lemon juice and olive oil, and served raw. I thought about tossing the scallions with olive oil and giving them a quick car on the grill (similar to how spring onions are cooked in Spain). The apricums would become a chutney. I took equal parts of white wine vinegar, water, and sugar and added it to a pan along with a cinnamon stick, a couple of cardamom cloves, and a hole allspice. I reduced this to a syrup and let it cool and then grated some fresh ginger into it and tossed the cut up apricums with that. I decided to toss some cut up red potatoes in olive oil, rosemary and garlic and wrap them in a foil packet on the grill.

What to drink with all of this? Riesling, naturally. I picked up a 2006 Barnard Griffin Washington Riesling and also had a special one to pull out: a 1989 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Spatlese from J.J. Prum. I’ve had this wine since its release. It had been properly stored. Many people would be skeptical of such an old Riesling but JJ Prum makes some of the longest lived German Rieslings, and I’ve had similarly aged ones from great vintages that were quite remarkable. Spatlese is actually fairly sweet, but is still considered a dinner wine and not a dessert wine. I thought that the natural sweetness of the pork and the sweet sour flavors of the chutney would make it work. The fennel had its own sweetness but would also have the slight tartness of the lemon to work as counterpoint. The typical peach and honey aromas and flavors of the Riesling would also work the fruit in the chutney. It sounded like we had a winner, so I went and lit the Weber and started to get it all together.

The two Rieslings couldn’t have been more different, but they also show two distinctly different aspects of this grape. The Barnard Griffin was from 2006 and was light, vibrant, and full of intense fruit and honey aromas. It had good acidity to balance the slight sweetness. It wasn’t a “serious” wine but it was a quite delicious wine. It was approachable and good drinking for hot weather. The JJ Prum on the other hand was very complex and had a lot more going on. It was pale gold and had a rich aroma of
honey, apricot, vanilla, slate, and a hint of smoke that was vaguely reminiscent of a great Sauternes. It was still distinctly Riesling, but had a complexity that younger wines just don’t have. On the palate it was rich and slightly sweet with rich honeyed fruit flavors but still had enough acidity to finish that it didn’t seem like I as drinking a dessert wine. It was a classic expression of German Riesling and one of the most remarkable white wines I’ve ever tasted. The only other white wines I’ve ever had that had the same complexity that comes with age were several vintages of Marquis de Murrieta White Riojas from the 1940’s and 1950’s that I was lucky enough to taste in a tasting in the late 1980’s. All this from a bottle I bought for under $15 in 1991. But how would they hold up to the food?

Not surprisingly, the JJ Prum won out but not for the reason I thought it would. It was the more complex and profound wine, but it was the sweetness that made it work with the food. The chutney was sweet and a little spicy from the ginger and the sweetness of the wine worked with that. The chutney was such an important part of the meal that it required a sweeter wine. The Barnard Griffin is a very good wine and I would absolutely buy it again, but this is an example of a meal where sweet wine worked better than drier wine. On paper, this wasn’t an exotic type of meal that would normally point people towards a sweeter wine, but this time it worked.

Should you age most Rieslings? I’d have to say no, but it’s a good reason of why you should stock up on great Rieslings from great producers in great vintages. Stash them away and then show your “dry wine” loving friends what a great sweeter wine can do for a meal.

Middle Eastern Food

Finally got around to the Middle Eastern food I'd been planning for a few days. "Middle Eastern" is a ridiculously wide and varied cuisine, so I should probably find a better descriptor. Most of my food is strongly influenced by the various Mediterranean cuisines, but I don't think of them as a single cuisine, so it's unfair to group Eastern Mediterranean food together under the moniker "Middle Eastern," but I will confess that I don't know the various regional cuisines of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Israel, Egypt, etc. well enough to really break them out into individual cuisines the way I can with regional French, Spanish, and Italian cuisine. The food I cook that's influenced by these cuisines is still largely "pan-Middle Eastern," and as a result, not really "authentic" as true regional cuisine.

There are a few things that I will profess strongly about this food despite the fact that I don't think I'm as well versed in it as in other areas. The first one is about Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a traditional Lebanese salad that has become a mainstream food in America. Unfortunately, many of us were first exposed to boxed, instant versions that are just plain wrong. As a result, too many Americans think of Tabbouleh as a bulgur salad with parsley and mint. But Tabbouleh is actually a parsley and mint salad with bulgur. The distinction may not seem important, but the dominance of herbs instead bulgur changes the salad completely. There are good recipes available to American cooks though sources like Claudia Roden's authoritative The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, but too many American versions of Tabbouleh stray too far from the real Lebanese version. These bulgur heavy versions rob this salad of its lightness and change the whole nature of the salad. If your Tabbouleh isn’t predominantly green, it’s not right.

Luckily, this year, I have a plethora of parsley. Being an essentially lazy gardener, I never pulled my parsley last year as it went to seed. As a result I now have a 3' x 3' patch of garden of solid parsley plants. It'll be a good year to make Tabbouleh.

One of the other big issues I have with this cuisine as it's normally presented in the US is with the typical Pita bread available in the US. Although there is some white pita bread in the Middle East, much (most?) of the common everyday pita bread served there is in fact whole wheat or partial whole wheat bread. Because of the ease of making this bread, it's a little tough for me to stomach the often cardboard like white pitas available in US stores. Don't know how to make these great breads? Start with a 50/50 blend of white and whole wheat flour (or go all whole wheat if you like heartier bread). I normally use about 3 cups of flour total. Add about 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 cup water, about 1 teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon of salt, and a splash of olive oil. Knead it all together and let it rest and rise. Roll them out thin and bake them at 450 for a few minutes. Flat breads like this are great for most of because you can whip up a batch of dough in the morning, leave it to rise all day and then come home from work, roll then and bake them in a few minutes. It's a better alternative to anything you can buy, and it's relatively easy.

For more on flat breads, I’d heartily recommend you get a copy of Flatbreads by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It’s a great cookbook featuring flatbreads from around the world. The recipes are not just bread recipes. There’s also a variety of foods that traditionally go with flatbreads from various cultures and cuisines.

Since we had been down at Higgins snacking on charcuterie, we decided to just do a few salads, dips, and fresh baked pitas for dinner. We had hummus (and for God’s sake don’t use canned beans!), taboulleh, and a dip called zhoug, which is a pesto like mix of cilantro, parsley, mild green chilies, cumin, and cardamom.

I didn’t really worry about trying to find the correct beer with this, and opted for a Full Sail Sunspot, which is one of their Brewmaster series that comes in 22 oz bottles, and is billed as a bright IPA. It was a moderately hoppy IPA, but wasn’t over the top and had a good malt backbone. The balance of malt and hops was quite nice and the bitterness went well with the food without going over the top. The solid malt backbone gave the beer enough body to standup. Overall, it’s a nice beer with food and a decent enough match for an easy dinner.

After dinner, I decided to open a Deschutes 19th Anniversary Golden Ale, which is a moderately strong Belgian style Golden Ale. It had the requisite Belgian aromas of fruit and spice and a deep gold color. It’s very cleanly made but for my tastes is a little sweet for the style. I like fairly dry Belgian Golden Ales, and with an alcohol content over 8%, this normally requires a fair amount of sugar in the recipe to boost the alcohol but to keep the body light. I think this beer needs to be a little lighter, but the flavors were right on. Belgian brewers use sugar in quantities that generally scares American brewers who fought so long against adjuncts in beer. As a result very few are willing to brew beers using 20% sugar, but for a light bodied Belgian Golden, I think that’s what you have to do. In any event, kudos to Deschutes for even brewing this beer. It’s nice to see quality Belgian style beers being brewed more often by US brewers.