March 27th - Red lentil Soup and Brown Ale

March 27 – Red Lentil Soup and Brown Ale

I had to work this evening and got home a little late and didn’t feel like cooking much but luckily had some leftovers. I love legumes in general and particularly love red lentils which I use in a variety of different soups (Turkish inspired variations, Indian inspired, etc.). One of the recipes for red lentil soup from the Padma Lakshmi cookbook I had form the library was a Indian spiced red lentil soup that had chopped up prunes added at the end.

Prunes are another food that’s gotten a bad rap in this country. Many people think of them as a laxative but not as something you’d actually want to eat. I love plums and love prunes and was given a five pound box of amazing prunes from a farm in Dayton, OR by a client at work. When I cook with prunes, I normally pair them with pork (braised pork and prunes, sautéed loin chops and prunes, pork roast stuffed with prunes, etc.) and was intrigued by this red lentil recipe. Essentially it uses the prune’s sweetness to offset the heat of the spices and chiles.

I will admit, I changed the recipe to suit my own tastes and for what I had on hand. I sautéed some shallots, gingers, garlic and green chiles in oil until translucent and then added turmeric, ground coriander, ground cumin and ground fenugreek (essentially making curry powder). Next I added the red lentils, canned tomatoes, and then some homemade chicken stock. I let this cook until the lentils were soft and were starting to fall apart. I pureed it with an immersion blender and then added about 10 prunes cut up into small pieces and half a bunch of chopped cilantro. I let those sit in the soup for about three minutes and then served it.

I made the soup last week, but still had some left last night so I used the last of it and had a par baked baguette with it. The soup was considerably hotter than I thought it would be (I served it with a dollop of yogurt the first time). Anyone who’s read my blog before likely knows my love of sweeter, malty beers with spicy food. I still had some of the brown ale left and had that with it. My brown is sweeter than most of the commercial examples (because I like it that way) and is rich and soothing with very hot food. In fact, I enjoy this beer more with hot food than I do on its own, where it can seem a bit fat and too heavy. Further proof of how important matching beer with food is.

March 26th - Roasted Chicken and NW Steam Beer

March 26th - Roasted Chicken and NW Steam Beer

I have a co-worker who’s been asking if I’ve eaten for the last several weeks because I haven’t posted an actual “what I’m eating" entry, so here goes. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a huge fan of roasted chicken. Few things are as easy and ultimately as satisfying. Antony Bourdain has the best commentary about roasting a chicken in his Les Halles Cookbook. I normally brine chickens before I cook them but last night I didn’t have any time, so I just stuffed it with garlic and lemon, trussed it (you absolutely must truss a chicken) and put it in a 400 degree oven. It was a small bird; only a little more than 3 pounds. I let it go at 400 for about 20 minutes and then turned it back down to about 350 until the last 5 minutes or so and raised it back to 400 to make sure I got a crisp skin.

I had started to make stock with the neck and giblets, and used some of it, along with some white wine, to deglaze the pan to make gravy. I kept the sides simple: mashed potatoes with buttermilk and horseradish and some orange and vanilla glazed carrots. (Steam the carrots in orange juice, vanilla extract, and olive oil. When the carrots are tender and the liquid has mostly evaporated, turn the heat up high to get some color on the carrots. It smells vaguely like carrots cooked with Creamsicles, but the end result is very good. The vanilla seems to accentuate the sweetness of the orange juice and carrots.)

I had an absolutely horrid Fiddler’s Green IPA while I was cooking. Well, I tried it but didn’t really drink more than a few sips. In all fairness, it’s not the brewer’s fault. It was just old and tired and had a distinctly sharp and acidic, oxidized hop bite. Fiddler’s Green is brewed by Matt Brewing Company in Utica, NY (the makers of the Saranac brand). I’ve seen some things online referring to it as an English style IPA, but the nose was distinctly American. Again, I can’t really judge it because it was horribly oxidized and tired. It also seemed distinctly East Coast. On the west coast, it would be considered a Pale Ale because it didn’t have enough punch to be an IPA.

With the Fiddler’s Green poured out, I opted instead for a Full Sail Ltd No. 1 Lager. There’s a real knee jerk reaction to larger craft breweries amongst some beer snobs, because many seem to think you can’t be large and brew good beer. Full Sail (amongst others) disproves this again and again. This is a tough beer to nail down stylistically, but it’s a very nice beer. It’s brewed with pale malt, chocolate malt, and crystal malts, and uses Hallertauer and Styrian Golding hops. It’s dark copper and exhibits a lager-like cleanness. It’s got a restrained nose but has a distinct caramel note in the finish. It doesn’t seem to fit any historical style, but it’s a great beer. Who needs styles anyway?

With the chicken I pulled a pint of our recent Steam beer. Legally the term steam beer only refers to Anchor, who holds a copy write on the phrase, but prior to this the name referred to a style of beer brewed by German immigrants in California. Essentially, it was brewed with German techniques but adapted to new environments and conditions. Nowadays, it’s also referred to as California Common beer. The most distinctive thing about Common beer is that it’s brewed with lager yeast but at ale temperatures. As a result, it has a cleaner fermentation profile (ie, less fruity esters). The version we brewed is an updated version with a Northwest spin. We used a Munich lager yeast but fermented it around 60 degrees for the first week and then at about 66 degrees for the second week. Ours has a good malt backbone but is more bitter and has a lot more hop aroma and flavor from a hefty addition of Simcoe, Sterling, and Summit hops in the finish. It’s medium bodied but assertive. The bitterness of the beer was a nice backdrop to the sweetness of the carrots, but didn’t overwhelm the chicken. It’s still a little young, but it’s developing nicely, and may be one of our Collaborator entries this year.

March 26th - Cookbooks I've Been Reading

March 26th –Cookbooks I’ve Been Reading

At this point there’s no way to reconstruct what I ate for the last six weeks, so I’ll just talk about a few of the many cookbooks I’ve been reading.

Several months ago, I was browsing at Powell’s and came across a treasure: a used copy of Elek Magyar’s classic The Gourmet’s Cookbook, which is one of the finest books ever written on Hungarian cuisine. Magyar, by his own admission, wasn’t a cook himself, but he was a “foodie” who wrote this book in 1932. It didn’t appear in English until the 1970’s. Many people don’t think about Hungarian food when they think about refined haute cuisine, but the food of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was amongst the most ornate cuisine ever produced.

Magyar’s book is similar in many ways to earlier works like Escoffier or the Larousse Gatronomique. It’s not a book that teaches you how to cook. It’s a book that assumes you already know how to cook (and can cook well). It’s an encyclopedic collection of haute Hungarian food, in all of its fat laden glory. There are many recipes per page, because the recipes are really just outlines and often don’t list specific amounts. It’s a fascinating book to read because it covers so much and with incredible authority and surety. Modern readers and cooks may find the food too heavy and unhealthy, but it’s an incredible collection that illustrates the breadth and refinement of Hungarian food. It’s a book, like Escoffier and Larousse, which I’ll read cover to cover but will rarely cook from. (That’s not a bad thing in my eyes). It has already become one of my favorite cookbooks. It’s well worth tracking down a copy.

At the same time that I bought Elek Magyar, I finally bought a copy of Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. I’ve already plugged this incredible book on the food of the Indian subcontinent before, but their books are so good, that they deserve to be plugged on a regular basis. More cookbooks should be as informative and beautiful as theirs are. And unlike many beautiful cookbooks, their recipes actually work as well. The recipes for Pork Vindaloo and Pepper Rassam are amongst the best I’ve seen. I finally bought this book, now you should too (and all of the other fine books they’ve written).

I’m a huge fan of Mark Bittman. His How to Cook Everything is one of my favorite all purpose cookbooks. While it doesn’t have the greatest recipe for everything, it does have good ones for pretty much everything. I use How to Cook Everything often when I need to find a basic recipe as a jumping off point for something that I’m planning. I was happy to see that he now has a How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book out. I got it from the library (OK, my wife got it for me) and was sad when I had to bring it back. Bittman is full of his usual no-nonsense advice and is a champion of demystifying cooking. In particular I loved the sections on legumes and grains. It’s on my short list of cookbooks I need to go buy.

I love dumplings of all sorts and was thrilled with Brian Yarvin’s A World of Dumplings. A lot of single subject cookbooks can seem a little skimpy, but this is a great book with a wide variety of recipes from around the world. Yarvin defines dumplings as anything that’s wrapped in dough, so there are recipes for Asian dumplings, ravioli, samosas, pirogue, empanadas, etc. Although many people may still start with pre-made dumpling wrappers, Yarvin’s enthusiasm will likely convince some people to make their own. In addition to clear instructions and pictures, there are good stories about his search to find authentic recipes and instructions for all of the types of dumplings that he writes about. He had me breaking my bamboo steamer out within a day of getting the book.

In general, I’m wary of most East/West fusion cookbooks because many of them are so bad and have recipes for food that just doesn’t work. (Afterall, not everyone can be Jean-Georges Vongerichten.) I was wary when my wife got Padma Lakshmi’s Tangy Tart Hot and Sweet from the library. After all, Padma Lakshmi is a former super model and had a role in the Mariah Carey movie, Glitter, both of which wouldn’t lead me to believe that she could actually write a decent cookbook. But the book is actually quite good. I didn’t really test many recipes but read through most of them. Many of the recipes are Indian inspired (not surprisingly since she’s Indian), but have clever fusion twists. In general the soup recipes intrigued me the most, although a bunch of the other recipes read well. I was happily surprised with this book.

March 25th - Beer Update

March 25, 2008 - Beer Update

OK, I haven’t added anything here in quite some time and for no good reason other than laziness. Just to get going again I thought I’d start with some beer related updates.

On February 14th, we were able to brew our Belgian Golden Ale at Hopworks Urban Brewery with owner/brewer Christian Ettinger and assistant brewer Ben Love. The grain bill recipe was pretty straight forward: 86% pilsner malt and 14% organic sugar (by weight, but that means about 25% or more of the fermentables are coming directly from the sugar). We mashed in somewhere around 146-148 degrees or so because we wanted a very dry style of beer. They used Magnum hops for the bittering (about 10 IBU’s there) and then two later additions of French Strisselspalts for flavor and aroma (total of about 10 IBU’s between the later additions). The yeast was the Chouffe yeast which is one of my favorite strains. The original gravity was around 18 plato and I haven’t heard what the terminal gravity was, nor have I been able to taste the beer yet. But Hopworks opens today, so I’ll taste it soon. What we were designing was a very dry, almost Duvel-like beer but with more of the Chouffe spiciness to it. They started the fermentation in the mid-60’s and were going to let it rise naturally to whatever temperature it wanted. They also under oxygenated it to push for more esters. My brewing partner and I had a great time and want to thank Christian and ben for putting up with a couple of homebrewers in their way all day. They also fed us a bunch of their pizzas which their chef, Andy, was still in the process of perfecting. Andy is a talented chef and definitely knows how to make great pizzas (maybe because he’s originally from the East Coast).

Assistant brewer Ben Love came up with the name El Diablo, which I think is a great name for it. It will be available at Hopworks on draft and was used as one of their entries into the World Beer Cup which will be held in San Diego in mid-April. El Diablo will also be Hopworks entry into the local Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival to be held at Roots Organic Brewery on Saturday April 5th. The Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival is an interesting idea. About a dozen different breweries all brew a Belgian style beer but use the same yeast strain and then go and taste each other’s beers. It gives everyone an opportunity to learn more about that yeast strain and how it behave with different malts, fermentation temperatures, etc. It’s all done in fun and proceeds go to charity.

On the homebrewing front, I have a couple of new beers on draft. The English bitter and all the Belgians are gone, and the molasses porter is down to the last gallon or so. We brewed a Bier de Garde several weeks ago. Bier de Garde is an obscure and fairly misunderstood style of beer. It’s French in origin and comes from the farmhouse brewing tradition of Northeastern France (French Flanders). It’s a style that had almost completely died out but is having a bit of a Renaissance thanks to the growing popularity of craft beer. Bier de Garde’s are generally amber beers with a full malt flavor, but with a dry finish. They often have some subtle herbal notes as well, but the big malt nose and flavor are in the forefront. They are often brewed with lager yeasts but at fairly warm temperatures (58-60 degrees), so they have some esters, but still have that clean lager crispness. Ours is brewed with pilsner, Vienna and Munich malts, with a small portion of aromatic malt. It ended up slightly sweeter than I had hoped but is still a very good beer. It’s slightly alcoholic (about 8%) and is drying out a little bit as it sits and lagers. In competition it may do better as a Bier de Noel, which is stronger and often sweeter seasonal version of Bier de Garde.

Using the same lager yeast, we brewed an updated Portland style steam beer. The grain bill is similar to the legendary Anchor Steam Beer, but we used a combination of Centennial, Summit, and Sterling Hops. It has a little more bitterness than the Anchor version, plus a lot more hop aromatics. It was just kegged a few days ago, so it will need a few more days to come around, but is already, a nice, moderate strength beer with a great hop nose. Since we were completely out of Belgian beers, we had to brew another Belgian Golden Ale (since it is one of my favorite styles and a great food beer). This version is being brewed with the same combo of the Chouffe and Duvel yeasts that we used last time. Next up with in the brewing queue is a Saison using the same yeast. We won a Widmer Collaborator competition with our Saison several years ago and realized we hadn’t brewed that recipe in about two years or more, so it’s time. Plus Saison is another favorite style and a versatile food beer. That’s a quick update on the beer front. I’ll try to get something about food up here soon as well.