February 3rd - Black Bean, Potato and Corn Cakes with Mango Salsa

February 3th – Black Bean, Potato Corn Cake with Mango Salsa
I’ve been trying to cook more vegetarian food of late (ironic at a site called Meat for the Masses) and had an idea early in the morning on what to try for dinner. (I find myself thinking about what to cook for dinner pretty early in the day). We had some leftover black beans in the fridge and I thought about beans cakes but wanted something with more flavors in it and thought about black beans, corn, and potatoes as a base and figured I would add some other things to it as well. Since all of those are pretty hearty flavors, I figured something brighter tasting like a fruit salsa would be a nice contrast.
I made the salsa from mango and added a little diced onion, diced green chili, lemon juice and mint to it and let it sit for about 45 minutes so the flavors could blend. It had good sweetness from the mango and mint and the lemon juice added a balancing acidity. The onion and chili gave it some punch but nothing too extreme.
For the actual cakes, I used some crushed black beans (I just crushed them roughly by hand), some thawed frozen corn (it being February and all), diced onion, garlic, some Mexican oregano, some diced bell pepper, dried red chili, and some ground cumin. I tossed all of this together and then heated a pan. As the pan warmed up, I grated a few russet potatoes and then squeezed the liquid out of them before adding them to the black bean mixture. (Grated potatoes turn black quickly, so I like to prep everything before I do that to minimize the oxidation.) I added some corn starch as well to the mix to help it stay together. I realized that the mix was a little loose and may be tough to flip, so I decided to make one large pan sized cake that I would cut into wedges (and that could be flipped easily with the help of a plate). I cooked it on medium heat to get a good crust but also to allow it enough time to cook everything all the way through.
When it was done, I slid it out of the pan and cut it into wedges and served the mango salsa on the side. The flavors were awesome and the salsa was a great contrast to the crusty cake. I would like to figure out a way to make the mix a little more solid so I could do smaller cakes as opposed to one large one, but I’d want to minimize the use of flour or anything else that might mute the flavors. None of the flavors in the cakes overwhelmed anything else. You would get bites where you tasted different components clearly but everything was a good mix. You could pick out individual flavors of each component but everything was well balanced. The salsa was a bright contrast to have on the side.
I had initially thought about doing a darker sweeter beer with this, but still had most of a pint of English bitter that I had poured while I was cooking, so I just kept to that. This is the same homebrewed bitter I’ve written about in the past, but it’s in a nice phase right now. Some of the fresher flavors have diminished but the caramel and nutty flavors seem better integrated and the hop aroma has taken on a nice slightly flora and tea-like aroma. The beer actually seems better integrated now than it did a few weeks ago, although I normally think of this as a style of beer that is best drunk young. It was a refreshing beer with the food, and complimented the flavors. The slight sweetness picked up the caramelized notes of the crust and the sweetness of the corn. It was a happy accident that I ended up drinking this beer instead of the brown ale or porter that I had initially thought about.

February 2nd - Roasted Chicken

February 2nd – Roasted Chicken
I haven’t roasted a chicken in a couple of months, which is weird for me since I like to roast one at least every two weeks. When the stove went out on New Year’s Eve, the thermostat also went out, which makes roasting or baking a little challenging since it requires a manual process of checking the temperature and turning the oven on and off at the right time, but it can be done. I brined a chicken, like I normally do because it leads to a juicier bird that is also far more forgiving if you overcook part of it. I made some stock with the neck so I would have something to deglaze the roasting pan with to make gravy. I stuck to simple stuff on the side: mashed potatoes and a few onions and carrots in the roasting pan with the chicken. I stuffed the chicken with sprigs of rosemary and some sage leaves out of the garden and then cut a lemon in half and squeezed it into the cavity and then put the squeezed out halves in the cavity as well before trussing the chicken.
A lot of people don’t truss a chicken or just tie the legs together, but trussing is an important step. It helps to make the bird more compact and round for roasting. If you do it right, it brings the wings up slightly over the breast which keeps them from cooking too quickly and getting dried out. Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook has great directions on roasting a chicken including how to truss it. If you don’t know, check the book out. It really is an important step.
It seems that I always drink wine after a day of brewing (and, let’s face it, drinking beer). I pulled a bottle of 1995 Chateauneuf du Pape La Bernadine from Michel Chapoutier. I love Chateauneuf du Pape in general. The wine contains a large amount of Grenache, but is also blended with many other grapes, including some white grapes. Chapoutier is an older producer in the region but the wines in the last 15+ years are now amongst the best wines in the entire Rhone Valley. The La Bernadine had deep rich aromas of cherry fruit and spice, but had a little less spice than Vieux Telegraphe, which is still my favorite Chateauneuf du Pape. It was bigger and richer than a lot of other wines that I’ve had from the region. But the roasted flavors of the chicken and vegetables worked well with its intensity. Luckily my friend Colin is the executive chef for the US distributor and has been stock piling the Chapoutier wines for several years, so with luck I can have another one when I go to Chicago to visit him next.

Februrary 2nd - Brewing Lambic

February 2nd – Brewing lambic

We brewed another 10 gallons of lambic today and also packaged the molasses porter from last time. The porter is fairly sweet (which is what we wanted) and has a subtle molasses flavor. It’s just enough to taste it but not so much that it overwhelms the other flavors. It’s still a little young, but it has some roastiness and a nice bitter chocolate quality. In addition to the molasses, there’s a caramel sweetness as well. It’s got a big rich, round mouthfeel and should be good in the cooler weather.

We hadn’t brewed lambic in a while (maybe four months or so). Our stocks of it were down to about 80 gallons which are all between 4 months and 4 years old. We had picked up the production of these a couple of years ago once we had a chance to taste the first ones and decide if it was all worth it. Sour beers are getting more popular and it’s good to see that more and more breweries are making them.

Our “lambic” is modeled on the real ones from the Senne Valley in Belgium. The grain bill is fairly simple: 2/3 pilsner malt and 1/3 flaked, unmalted wheat. Hops are used for the aseptic properties but not for their bittering qualities and brewing lambics requires the use of old hops. Hops are best at a couple of years old, but you don’t want them cheesy or moldy smelling. Ideally, they should be totally dry and reminiscent of dry hay in aroma. The traditional mash for lambics is a turbid mash which is a complicated process and is sort of similar to a decoction mash, except that in a turbid mash, you pull the liquid from the mash and then boil it and add it back in to raise the temperature. In a decoction mash, you pull the thickest part of the mash out and boil it. The enzymes that convert starch to sugar are water soluble and are in the water that you boil in a turbid mash and that essentially denatures the enzymes and deactivates them. Unlike most other types of brewing, you actually want unconverted starch in a lambic base because it will be consumed by one of the types of wild yeast down the road.

We don’t use a traditional turbid mash, but do a step mash instead. We mash in at about 122 for a 30 minutes protein rest to help break down some of the excess protein in the flaked wheat. Then we raise it up to about 156-160 in order to get a wort high in dextrins. Dextrins are a complex sugar that aren’t digestible by standard brewing yeast, but can be broken down by wild yeasts. The idea is to make a wort that has some easily fermentable sugars for the brewing yeast, but also has a fair amount of starch and complex sugars for the wild yeasts and bacteria that grow later in the process.

This time we ended up with a stuck mash which made for a long brewing day, but we made our way through it and ended up with 10 gallons of cloudy wort (cloudy than normal, but these beers will sit for about 2 years before being bottled). We added standard brewing yeast and will that work for about 1-2 weeks before we rack it into carboys and then add the wild yeasts and bacteria. We’ve gotten some Belgian Sour blend from White Labs and a tube of pure Brettanomyces lambicus. The major souring bugs in lambics are lactobacillus or pediococcus, both of which are bacteria and produce lactic acid, and brettanomyces, which is a wild yeast which gives some sourness as well as the characteristic barnyard and “funk” aromas to these beers. Lactobacillus can take several months to really grow, but Brett can take 6-12 months. The Brett aromas and complexity will grow over several years and the beer will become increasingly dry and steely.

The problem in brewing with all of these bugs is that they’re unpredictable. There’s no guarantee that all of them will grow and no way to tell which “bug” will become the dominant one. Each 5 gallons carboy is its own ecosystem and each one will taste slightly different, even if the base beer and bugs were the same. As a result, blending is a critical part of the process. We normally blend beers to roughly 25% one year old, 50% two year old, and 25% three and four year old. We can use as many as ten lots to make a single batch. Since having different lots of beers seems to add complexity to a blend, and since most of the bugs are available as blends and as single species, we’ve gotten in a habit of adding different bugs to different carboys to create as wide a variety of underlying beers as possible (even though they all use the same grain bill and old hops). Oftentimes, we combine leftover partial lots together increasing the complexity of the individual carboys and have found that the more lots you have, the better chance you have of making a successful blend. Currently we have a little more than 20 carboys of different sizes sitting around. Our blends are normally about 8 gallons, because that’s the largest bucket we have for blending and it gives a decent size batch.

Each batch we’ve blended has been different but there is a somewhat of a “house” style that we’re developing. Our beers are not as tart and sour as some of the traditional lambic houses, like Cantillon, but at our best, the beers have the right taste and characteristic aromas. I would like then a little tarter, but they’re tart enough to be refreshing and are generally equivalent in acidity to an average white wine. We’re working on getting the carbonation level high enough to really emulate the best commercial examples and aren’t quite there yet.

We don’t have any fruit batches going right now but will be investing in raspberries in a few months to make some framboise for the fall. Normally the beers need to sit for 4-8 months with fruit before being bottled. It’s best to let the beers age at least a year before adding fruit, since they still need the underlying complexity. We’ve done both raspberries and cherries, but so far the raspberry is the clear winner to me.

So we brewed ten gallons and built the stocks back up, but this beer will likely sit for at least 2 years before it’s bottled. We are planning on blending another lot in the next month or so, because we’ve built up enough stock that we should be able to bottled 2-3 batches a year without depleting our stocks too much. The main issue is making sure you keep enough of the beer back to get sufficient stocks of three year for blending. Strangely, the older lots, while incredibly complex, aren’t very good on their own. By 3-4 years, the beers are very austere and bone dry. They get a kind of steeliness to them as well. They add great depth of character to a blend but need younger beer as well to soften them. We had debated bottling some straight three year old but, on tasting it, realized it wouldn’t be the best thing to drink on its own.

February 1st - Pork Chops with Spicy Tomato Sauce and Roasted Potatoes

February 1st – Pork Cops With Spicy Tomato Sauce and Roasted Potatoes

I had more pork chops and wanted something vaguely Spanish for dinner, but also wanted something kind of quick. I brined the chops in salt water while I thought about what to make. My wife suggested romesco sauce, but I didn’t have any red bell peppers but thought I could a sort of similar sauce just using onions, tomatoes, garlic, almonds, pimenton, and crushed red pepper, but that wasn’t emulsified. I was envisioning something between romesco and the spicy tomato sauce that’s used for patatas bravas. With that in mind, I peeled some Yukon gold potatoes, tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper and then roasted them in a cast iron skillet in the oven.

I browned the chops in olive oil in a pan and then pulled them out and left them on a plate. I added some finely diced onions and cooked them until they turned light brown and then added garlic, pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika), and almonds and let them cook for a few minutes. Then I deglazed the pan with fino sherry and added some tomatoes. I let it cook down for about 10 minutes and then pureed the sauce with an immersion blender to make a smoother sauce. (It had some small chunks for texture but nothing very large.) Then I added some more olive oil and whisked it in to enrich the sauce before turning it down and letting it simmer for a few minutes more. When the potatoes were almost done, I added the chops back to the pan with the sauce and let them finish cooking in the sauce.

I spooned some of the sauce onto plates, put a chop in the middle of the sauce, and added the potatoes to the side and then added a little more sauce on the side to use a s a condiment for the potatoes. Though it wasn’t a traditional Spanish dish, it had Spanish flavors. The sauce was wonderful and just spicy enough with the potatoes.

I’ve had a few bottles of Sierra Nevada’s ESB of late and really like it. It’s distinctly an American ESB but it’s a wonderful beer. It’s made with a combination of American and English hops and malts (see the website for the breakdown). It seems less hoppy than their pale ale, although their website states that it’s actually a little higher in IBU’s, but has a great hop aroma and subtle hop bite. There’s good malt to it with a slight caramel sweetness but it’s a well balanced beer that finishes very clean with a nice hop/malt balance. It’s a seasonal beer so it’s not around for too long but I’d encourage you to pick some up if your can find it. It was a great beer with this meal because it had enough body to stand up to all of the flavors but wasn’t so big that it tried to overwhelm the food. Although it clocks in at 5.9% alcohol, it has an easy drinking quality to it. Its balance makes it a great beer for food, but I could easily drink a few pints of it on its own as well.

January 31 st Spaghetti and Comments on Boxed Wines

January 31st – Spaghetti and Meat Sauce (Again) and Comments on Boxed Wine

I had some sauce leftover from the other night so I decided to just use it up and make spaghetti again. Not surprisingly, the sauce was better than a few days ago and made me sit and think, why don’t I make this more often? I did break down and get some inexpensive red wine to go with it. It was a California Malbec that had pleasant fruit but had a weird oakiness that made me think it probably spent a lot of time sitting on oak chips. At $6 it definitely hadn’t spent time in real oak. But with the food, the fake oak quality was subdued and it had a slightly rustic quality I like in wines with tomato sauce.

One of the better cheap wine alternatives I’ve found, actually, is boxed wine, particularly those from Australia, which is where boxed wine was invented. Other wine snobs may cringe at the thought, but it seems that the average box of Australian wine is generally head and shoulders over many other $6 wines. Plus it keeps longer than anything in a bottle. Sometimes you just need an inexpensive but drinkable glass of wine. Most of the Australian wines in boxes are softer styles that accentuate fruitiness and easy drinkability. They are not profound wines and they’re not meant to be. For reds, shiraz and cab seem to be the best bets. For whites, chardonnay and semillon seem the most common. It’d be nice to find a good sauvignon blanc, with it’s melon fruit and crisp acidity, but I haven’t come across any. Most of the brands I’ve tried, Hardy, Jacob’s Creek, and Banrock Station have all been fine. Again, these are everyday drinking and cooking wines, but they have their place and are actually a good buy. There are more and more boxed brands available from other parts of the world and some that I’ve tried have been quite good, but as a general rule, I’ve been happiest overall with the ones from Australia. This last bottle of malbec made me realize I should have invested in one of the boxed alternatives. And yes, I still consider myself a wine snob.