Brewing on a Cold Day and Yellow Split Pea Soup

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

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

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

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

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

Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quick pasta for a weeknight

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

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

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

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

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

Roast Pork Loin and Pilsner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gumbo and Malty Beers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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