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.

January 13th

January 13th

I tend to get a little obsessive about certain foods, especially when I’m learning how to make something and haven’t mastered it. As a result, it should come as little surprise that I tried to do more Ethiopian food again because I just can’t get the injera correct. The original recipe I tried called for using buckwheat and wheat flour saying that the buckwheat was a decent stand in for teff, but it didn’t cut it and the breads were also too thick. The last two times I tired 75% wheat flour and 25% teff but the batter was very thin and a little tough to work with. I’m waiting for a book on Ethiopian food from the library but did some research on the internet and did find some interesting recipes and resources (including a series of videos on Youtube) and worked a method based upon that.

Injera is a sour dough bread and there’s really no way to duplicate that if you don’t do a sour dough starter. Luckily, I kept a small amount of the last batch I had done about three days ago and let it sit on the counter where it got sufficiently sour. I fed this with some wheat flour and water to increase the size. I did stick to pretty close to a ratio of 75% wheat and 25% teff, because that seemed to give the right flavor before and the teff that I have is whole and needs to be ground which is kind of a pain. I let the dough sit until it was bubbly. I made the dough slightly thicker this time so it was somewhere between crepe and pancake batter. But the real key was reading the directions a little closer in some of the recipes. Injera is always cooked covered, which I had been doing, but it’s not flipped, which I just kind of assumed it was (most pan cooked flat breads, like tortillas and chapattis are flipped). Flipping them had been the issue but if they’re not flipped it’s easy (and has the right texture). It was kind of an embarrassing thing to realize, but it made sense when you think about the texture of proper injera.

This batch turned out fine, but you really need to take care when they’re cooling because they stick to things like plates really easily. If you rest them on a clean towel and move them every 20-30 seconds until they’re cool, they tend to stick less.

I did more chicken wat, but didn’t use a specific recipe as a guideline and just worked with spices that I had seen in other recipes. The sauce was pretty close to the Beef Wat from a few weeks ago and consisted of onions, tomatoes, berbere, ginger, garlic, cardamom and cinnamon. I did more red lentils and also had braised collard greens which were good but had too much ginger, which kind of overwhelmed them. But it was nice knowing that I had kind of mastered a passable injera recipe. I was also smart enough to keep some of the batter in the fridge as a sour starter for next time.

I like malty beers and spicy food and was happy with a few things that I picked up at a local store. The Widmer 08 Brewmaster’s Reserve Crimson Wheat is a lovely beer. Hops are in short supply this year and Widmer cleverly released a lower hopped beer with a great malt backbone and a subtle hop spiciness. It’s another great beer in their Brewmaster’s series and very different from most other beers out there. On their web site they say it goes well with burgers and sandwiches, but it’s malty profile makes it a winner with spicy food as well. I only bought the one bottle but will definitely be buying more. I also like the fact that it’s only 4.1% alcohol so you can actually drink a few of them. I also tried the Anchor Bock which was also a lovely beer. It’s darker than a lot of bocks, but still malty with good body. I preferred the Widmer with the food, but I wouldn’t turn the Anchor down.

While cooking I also tried a Baltika 9 Extra Lager. I like Baltika’s beer but have mostly had their porters. The Baltika 9 is a golden lager at about 8% alcohol. It’s not heavily hopped so there’s a fair amount of malt sweetness to it. It’s not as rich as a Maibock, and seems to fall halfway between malt liquor and maibock. It’s an interesting beer, but a little heady on its own. It’s probably better with food, so I may need to try it that way n the future.

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.