Friday, June 20, 2008

Vegetarianism, Fish, Lamb, Scallops and, strangely, Gordon Ramsay

My wife has returned to vegetarianism. This was kind of an unexpected turn. I wanted to explain to her that vegetarianism can be cured by eating meat, but this seemed like a bad idea. Luckily she isn’t expecting me to become a vegetarian as well, although there are a lot of vegetarian dishes that I love and cook on a regular basis, and she will still eat fish occassionally. Initially, I thought this would be a huge drag (especially since I just bought a whole 12 pound NY strip loin that I cut into steaks), but so far it’s working out well. She did tell me that she feels better already (after about ten days) and she said it without sounding smug. (Nothing worse than a born-again vegetarian.)

The unexpected upside is that I’m now allow to eat whatever I want so long as there are enough things to make up an adequate vegetarian meal for her. I’m normally against cooking multiple entrees, particularly on a week night, because it takes more time, dirties more pots, etc. But I’ve done it a few times and am actually excited about the possibilities. As I mentioned, she will eat fish occasionally, but the big issue is that she doesn’t really like fish that much, and tends to prefer the milder sorts of fish. I, on the other hand, love fish. In fact I love all kinds of fish including a lot of the darker and oilier ones that a lot of people find too strong and some of the scary things like skate wing. So now I find myself with an opportunity to cook fish more often and so far I’ve been taking advantage of it. Recently, I made her a mushroom stew, with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and thyme, which I served over polenta. I sautéed a piece of orange roughy for myself, served it on polenta and stole just enough of the mushrooms to use as a topping to the fish. We both had some sautéed yellow and green baby zucchini with basil and garlic on the side. We were both more than pleased with the results. (The baby zucchini were from the farmer’s market and were incredibly good.)

The next night was faux-Chinese. I made tofu in black bean sauce, stir fried Italian kale with red chiles, ginger, and garlic, steamed rice, and steamed fish with scallions, ginger, soy and sesame oil. It’s one of the simplest fish preparations and also one of the best. You get subtle flavoring from the aromatics and the purity of the fish comes through. I hadn’t steamed a fish in ages and it was so incredibly good. Now, I need to track down some oily fish or skate wing.

The other thing that I’ve missed for a long time is lamb. It’s absolutely my favorite red meat. But my wife would never eat it because it was in the “cute animal” food group (along with duck, venison, rabbit and other furry and cuddly things). Tonight, I’m having lamb. At least I think so. I’m not going shopping until later and I don’t know if I’ll find something that’s up to snuff. I’m hoping to get some kind of lamb that I can marinade quickly and grill, but I can get her Portobello mushrooms. (That’s the other interesting thing. I like mushrooms a lot, but she loves mushrooms and is more than happy to eat more of them). So this may really work out after all. The irony is that she’s told me all along that I could cook whatever for me and she’s fine with something else, but I was always the one to refuse. Now it’s opened a whole new door.

I’ve made a whole lot of other great things of late as well, but haven’t written about them. One of them was something that my wife loved and may be requested for her birthday, so she asked me to write about it so I don’t forget it. I was heading home a little late from work and didn’t want to cook anything too involved because I didn’t want to wait. I had some scallops at home (big sea scallops) and stopped to get some white mushrooms but they were out. So I picked up some shitakes instead and a loaf of bread. I cut a carrot and an onion into brunoise (tiny dice for you non-geeks), sweated them in olive, cut the shitakes in half and then sautéed them quickly, deglazing them with a little white wine and the juice form half and orange. I seared the scallops in a pan with a little olive oil, plated the vegetables in the center of two plates, and then put the cooked scallops on top. I had the other half of the orange left, so I deglazed the scallop pan with orange juice, reduced it and then added a dab of butter to mount it. The sauce went over and around the scallops and I served the bread on the side. I don’t know why I decided to use orange instead of lemon, but it made all the difference. It was incredibly simple, but shows what you can do quickly with good ingredients.

I think the scallops were influenced by reading Gordon Ramsay’s A Chef for All Seasons. Many (most?) people know him as the loud, rude chef from Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, but the guy can cook, really cook. His book has a lot of the things you would expect form a top chef: cook things that are in season, buy great ingredients, etc. Nothing new in that. Every celebrity chef gives that same advice (because it’s true). But his food is really well done. It’s clever without being ostentatious and doesn’t get overly complicated (well for the most part). He also cooks a lot of fish. In fact he likely has more recipes for fish than for various meats. It was interesting to see that his food really is as good as his reputation would suggest. He has a talent for creating dishes that look good, are relatively easy to make and make sense. There’s nothing done for flash or show. All the elements of his dish make sense, even when he mixes seemingly unrelated ingredients. I really should look at more of his food.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Charcuterie Update - Making Hams at Home

I’ve been doing a fair amount of charcuterie at home of late. Although I always do some, it seems that recently, I’ve always had a project going. I’ve been making bacon and pancetta on a regular basis for more than a year and had dabbled with some brine cured hams and things like tasso, but hadn’t really done much curing of other cuts of pork.

Recently, my wife bought a few boneless pork sirloin roasts at a good price. They were about a pound and a half each. My wife isn’t that familiar with various cuts of meat and is apprehensive of buying cuts that she doesn’t specifically know about lest I disapprove and give her a meat lecture using one of the dogs to model where different cuts are from, which normally gets me in a bit of trouble, (though the dog doesn’t seem to mind his part). But the price on these was so good, she decided to give it a shot (after all, they’d make fine dog food if I didn’t want to use them). Sirloin is normally roasted or cut into chops. I did a bunch of research and couldn’t find anyone who had recipes for curing sirloin. The two pieces were about two inches thick and I thought that they’d be fine for curing in a similar manner to pork belly, so I decided to give it a shot.

I coated the outside of one of them with molasses and then added the basic salt/pink salt/sugar cure I normally use. Then I put it in a zip lock bag in the fridge. One thing I have learned in salting and curing is that it’s easy to overestimate how much salt you need. The first few times, I completely coated the cuts which lead to incredibly over salted finished products. It’s hard to describe how much to put on. It’s something you really need to learn by doing it, but eventually I realized that time is more important than the quantity of salt. I light coating will penetrate the meat given enough time. Cuts 2-3 inches thick normally cure in about a week for me. So, you can start it one weekend and finish it the next.

I took my “ham” out of the ziplock after a week, and then washed it well to remove the surface salt. The color had changed and the meat had firmed up. I left it on a cake rack to dry for about 90 minutes before I put it on the smoker. I have a small smoker. It’s nothing fancy. It’s essentially a small metal box with an electric burner in the bottom. You put a small metal pan filled with wood chips on the burner and eventually you get smoke. Because it’s outside, the temperature in the smoker is largely dependant on the ambient temperature outside. In the winter, it gets to about 80-90 degrees inside. On a hot summer day it gets up to about 125 or so. It was a decent spring day (one of the few we’ve had so far) and I put it in the smoker and added some apple wood chips.

Smoking is an art, and it’s not one that I think I’ve mastered by any means. I have found that I prefer fruit wood for most of the things I smoke. I also like hickory for more traditional barbecue type of things. Apple has become the de facto wood for so many small bacon producers (just check out the bacon at any high end retailer and it’s likely apple smoked), but I’ve also used cherry with nice results. This being the northwest, I also have some alder, but it’s something that’s traditionally used more for fish than anything else.

Smoking does a couple of things. Most of us just think about the actual smoke flavor that it gets, but from a curing and preserving stand point, there’s another more important process that happens during smoking. Smoking helps to reduce the water content, which is essential for long term preservation of meat. As meat smokes, it loses water weight and the texture of the meat firms up. That’s why hams are firmer than fresh cuts. For the small scale curing that I do, where I rarely cure anything more than about 4 or 5 pounds, I can smoke things in a single day. I generally give things between 6-12 hours on the smoker. I’d like to say it’s dependant on the cut, size, etc, but just as often it’s determined by how early I get the meat in the smoker.

In my early attempts at smoking, I always over smoked everything by using too much wood. You don’t need a constant stream of smoke. If the chips in the pan burn away, it’s fine. I will refill it partially every few hours, but even if the pan is empty, the drying process continues. The gentle heat from the burner creates an updraft in the burner, which helps to carry away moisture form the meat. If you over smoke the meat, you can end up with a bitter coating on the outside of the meat. Again, time is more important than the amount of chips. Both curing and smoking aren’t things you can rush. Using extra salt and or more chips won’t compensate for the lack of time.

I left this first “ham” on the smoker for about 8 hours and then finished it on the Weber grill where I let it get to an internal temperature of about 155. It was completely firm and when I cut into it, it was a beautiful red color all the way through. The outside had a mahogany patina to it. It tasted wonderful. It was a little saltier than I wanted but not overdone. The smoke flavor was prominent but the outside pieces didn’t taste bitter or resiny. It was certainly better than anything you could buy at the normal supermarkets. You could order a real country ham that was better, but for $1.48 a pound I was pretty well pleased. (And the leftovers made great omelets.)

I have another one curing now and will smoke it this weekend. Last weekend, I finished some maple cured bacon. I used maple syrup as a base and then salted the meat. It was left on the smoker for about 10 hours and came out perfectly. It’s probably the best bacon I’ve made. Unfortunately, the finished weight was only about a pound and a half. It’s interesting using different sweeteners in the process. Even after a week of curing and 10 hours of smoking, you could still smell the maple syrup on the bacon and it still had a slight maple flavor as well. The molasses cure is a little heavier, but works well with ham. I think it might be a bit much for bacon tough.

The most recent Saveur magazine had an article of curing salmon, which I’ve never done but may in the next few weeks.

Sunday, June 8, 2008

Blending Lambic

June 7th

Blending Lambic

We’ve been meaning to blend up some more lambic for the past several weeks, but circumstances didn’t work out and things were delayed. We finally did get around to blending and bottling yesterday and it seems like a really good blend. It might be our best batch of Gueuze yet. Blending is incredibly difficult and I don’t think we’re master blenders, and we don’t try to create a consistent style from batch to batch. But we’ve seen that the final blend is always better than any of the single batch.

As a general rule, we try to create a blend that is roughly 25% three year, 50% two year old and 25% one year old. The older beers generally have considerably more character, but we’ve found that you need some young beer as well to give the final blend some freshness and more depth. The base beer is always 67% pils malt and 33% flaked wheat and we use a normal beer yeast for the first week or two, before we put the beer into carboys for aging. The blends of bugs are added to the carboys and we try to mix it up so that each carboy takes on a different character. The more variety in the base beer, the more possibilities in blending. Often we combine left over parts of older lots and consolidate them into gallon jugs or three gallons carboys. We’ve ended up with two jugs which have small portions of all of the first beers we made five years ago. As a general rule, we use half a gallon from each one, then combine them together and fill the other one with whatever is left over from our other older lots. The next time we blend, we’ll use half of each and then combine them again. It’s similar to a solera in that there’s always a portion of old beer in it.

Our normal blending batch is 8 gallons (based upon the size of our largest bottling bucket). We normally use one gallon of this old, solera style blend to add some backbone and complexity. This batch had the following lots blended into it:

1 Gallon of the Super Old “Solera Style” blend (average age about 4 years old)
1 .5 Gallons from a batch from March 2005
1 Gallon from a batch from February 2006
1 Gallon each from two different batches from December 2006
2.5-3 Gallons from a batch from November 2005

The “solera” blend was quite astounding on its own. The oldest lot was incredibly austere with moderate acidity and good length. It had a lot of peach and apricot flavors plus a good dose of horsiness. The March 2005 beer had more lemon/citrus flavors, more acidity, and a distinct smoky note. The February 2006 lot had a lot of pineapple and orange notes. It almost had a tropical fruit type of thing to it and it was considerably softer and less tart than the other batches. It would clearly add some interesting notes to the final blend, but it was my least favorite batch on it’s own. The two different lots from December 2006 were quite interesting. They had been stored indoors as opposed to in the garage. Although they both used different combinations of bugs, they were both incredibly tart and were the most acidic of all of the batches we tasted. Clearly the warmer temperatures from being aged indoors had favored the growth of the lactobacillus. They both had some smokiness as well and some lemon flavors. One of them had a distinct horsiness as well. They were as tart as anything form Cantillon and each sip made my eyelids quiver slightly (seriously). The final batch from November 2005 was interesting. It had the best overall aroma of any single lots. It had a great mix of horse, smoke, peach, citrus and apricot. On the palate, it seemed very sugary and candy-like. The palate and nose were completely different from each other. The final blend had a little bit of everything. It had good, noticeable acidity, and intriguing nose of citrus and stone fruits, smoke and horsiness. The palate had good depth and great length. The deep flavors of the older lots were nicely balanced by some of the younger, rounder, fruitier and sweeter lots. All this could change as it sits and develops in the bottle. I will likely try a bottle in about 2-3 weeks to see if the flavors are holding or if it’s changing. We’ve had some lots that change completely with six months of aging. We’re hoping this one keeps its general balance because it was so good at the time.