Mussels and Carbonade Flamande

We were having a friend over to dinner and I was wondering what to make. I didn’t know how sophisticated a palate he had but it was clear that he liked good beer so I decided to cook something that would be easy to match with beer. I don’t normally require a lot of convincing to drink Belgian beers, so I thought that was Belgian inspired food might be nice.

A lot of people aren’t that familiar with Belgian food, and I must confess that I’m no expert, but it’s fair to say that there is a big French influence in Belgian food, although the food is by no means a knock off of French food. There is a big reliance on butter as a cooking fat, and beer is used extensively in cooking. Belgium is far enough north that grapes don’t really grow there but beer has replaced the central role that wine has in some much traditional French food.

For an appetizer, I decided to go with mussels because of their prominence in Belgian cuisine. Mussels are easy to cook and I decided to stick to a pretty basic preparation. I sautéed some shallots and garlic in butter and then added some Belgian golden ale to the pot and reduced it all. Then the mussels went in and they streamed open in about 3 minutes or so. I served them family style with some parmesan toasts to soak up the juices.

To go with the mussels, I served Duvel, one of the quintessential Belgian Golden ales. Duvel is light in color but clocks in at about 7.5% alcohol. But it’s very floral and fruity with a distinct citrus note that makes it perfect with seafood. Despite its alcohol content it’s very crisp and very dry. It also has incredible carbonation to help it feel light on the palate. It was a great match to the simply prepared mussels.

For the main course I opted to go with Carbonade Flamande, a traditional Belgian beef stew made with dark beer. If you look at Carbonade recipes there’s very little consensus as to what’s traditional, but everyone seems to agree on beef, onions and dark beer. For mine, I used a homemade Belgian Dubbel which is very fruity and low hopped. I browned the meat first in butter and removed it to a plate. Then I added about 4 large onions (to about 2 pounds of beef). I cooked the onions down some allowing them to caramelize slightly, added some garlic and the deglazed the pan with the beer. I let the beer reduce some, added some beef stock and added the meat back in. I also added a bouquet garni of parsley, bay leaves and thyme sprigs. I like to do braises and stews in the oven and like to cook them long and slow. Generally 200 to 250 degrees max. You don’t want stew to boil at all. It leads to stringy meat. The key is long slow cooking.

I had debated dumplings or spaetzle on the side but went for mashed potatoes instead partly because they’re so easy and everyone likes them. With the carbonade, we had Unibroue Trois Pistole, a Canadian brewed Belgian dark beer. Its fruity notes and rich intensity matched the dish and the underlying flavors of the Dubbel I had used in cooking. Trois Pistole has rich dark and dried fruit flavors similar to a great tawny port, but, unlike port, it’s very dry. For a second glass of beer, we tried the homemade Dubbel and it was also a great match.

For dessert, I broke the Belgian mold and went with a simple apple crostata. Again easy on the cook and something that showcases the great apples we get here in the Northwest. We had a homemade strong ale with the dessert, because it has some nice honeyed notes. It was OK with the crostata but not really the right beer. Not being easily discouraged, we went back to the Dubbel for after dinner conversation.

Chanterelles and 1993 Beaux Freres Pinot Noir

I’m currently teaching my homebrew club’s annual Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) prep classes. The other member who is running the class has a relative who’s a mushroom forager and every fall I try to get some chanterelles from him. I was ale to get about a pound of them from him last week and was looking forward to making a meal that featured them.

Oregon is renowned for wild mushrooms and chanterelles are my favorite of the bunch. I had initially thought about making a steak and mushroom type of thing, but frankly, chanterelles are that good that it seemed wrong not to have them be the centerpiece of the meal. I thought about some kind of mushroom stew, but ended up making a quick sauté of the chanterelles, garlic, shallots, parsley, and amontillado sherry, served over plain polenta.

I will confess that I used to make polenta with lots of butter, cream and mascarpone cheese in it. In fact it was safe to say that the polenta was really just a vehicle for all of the fat, but in the last several years, I’ve found that I actually like polenta that tastes like, well, polenta. So now when I make it all I use is a little salt but otherwise serve it unadorned so that you can actually appreciate its flavor. It’s a good base for richer stews and a natural with a mushroom sauté.

I was also in the mood for good cheese and got a small piece of garrotxa, a goat’s milk cheese from Catalonia, and a piece of an Italian blue cheese with a red wine washed rind, the name of which I didn’t know and was too stupid to write down, alas.

I generally consider beer better with cheese, but really wanted a good red so I pulled my last bottle of 1993 Beaux Freres Pinot Noir. I didn’t buy a lot of 1993 Oregon Pinot because at the time I thought it was a mediocre vintage without the forward fruit of 1992 and 1994. In retrospect I missed the boat. A lot of the local winemakers actually preferred their 1993’s to the overripe 1994 and this wine showed just how right they were. It still had remarkable intensity of fruit but had wonderful acidity that cut through the layers of fruit. If you have any of it, I would likely drink it soon, because it’s on the downward side of its curve. It had a brick red edge, but had amazing cherry fruit as well as some mushroomy, meaty and earthy notes. Several years ago I had a vertical tasting of six vintages of Beaux Freres (1991-1996) and the 1993 was the clear winner. In may have been in decline but it was remarkable with the mushrooms and actually quite good with the cheese (the acidity helped cut through the richness of the cheese).

Now if I can only manage to get more of those chanterelles.

Indonesian Food

Strangely enough, I grew up eating a fair amount of Indonesian food. My parents had lived there before my brother and I were born and my mother has a fairly solid range of dishes that hit a lot of the culinary highpoints. But it’s never been something that I cooked a lot of on my own. James Oseland’s book, Cradle of Flavor, may change all of that. This is a fairly recent book that covers food from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore and is terrific at pointing out the regional differences in all of these cuisines. The recipes are well written and clear, and the whole book is an entertaining read.

I read through various parts of the book the last few weeks and actually got around to cooking some dishes from it last weekend. I opted for three different recipes and actually followed the recipes, well more or less, but certainly more than I usually do, because it’s a cuisine whose subtleties I don’t understand well enough and wanted an “authentic” flavor in order to help get a handle on the flavor combinations. For this meal, I chose the chicken rendang, a Malaysian chicken curry with coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, fresh turmeric, and lime leaves, caramelized tempeh and chiles, and stir fired greens with chili and garlic, all served with rice.

The chicken rendang was a rich dish with deep flavors of coconut with the punchier citrus notes of the lemon grass, and lime leaves. It was a terrific dish but I was happy that I made other dishes as well, because it might have been too rich on it’s own. The tempeh was a complete winner. My wife was a little wary of it because many tempeh recipes from “hippy” type of vegetarian cuisines are, quite frankly, a little scary. They seem to view tempeh as a meat substitute and think you can simply use it in place of meat, but it can be too earthy and funky in many dishes. This recipe calls for frying the tempeh and then creating a sauce of shallots, galangal, chiles, garlic, tamarind and palm sugar. The end result is a sweet sour and slightly hot glaze that works well with the earthier flavor of tempeh, but also doesn’t mask its actual flavor. It was a terrific recipe and changed both of our minds about tempeh. The stir fried greens, I chose baby bok choy, were simple. It’s a quick stir fry of greens in a chili and garlic scented oil. We’re lucky enough to have a great Asian grocery store near us with very good produce. The preparation was simple, and it enhanced the natural sweetness of the bok choy.

All three dishes worked well and all of the recipes were clear and easy to follow. The book is quite good in explaining certain flavor combinations and with more reading I hope that I start to understand the underlying combinations of the food from this area of the world. It’s a terrific book on a region that is under represented in my cookbook collection.

Bistro Seafood

We had a friend over for dinner lat night to celebrate her birthday which was actually a couple of days ago. We asked her what she wanted for dinner and she said she didn’t know. When we said if you could go to dinner anywhere where would you go she said Southpark, which is a Portland restaurant and wine bar that does a lot of Mediterranean seafood. Mediterranean food is probably the most solid cuisine I know so this actually worked out well for me. What I decided to do was a bistro inspired meal, which is something that I love, and something that I do better than haute cuisine. I like the homey honesty of good bistro food and it’s fun food to share with friends.

I thought about different ideas, but finally decided to do an appetizer with clams and a main course of tuna steaks. For the clams, I went with a Basque influenced base. I sautéed some shallots, garlic and tomato in a little olive oil and then added the flesh of two dried New Mexico chiles that I had soaked in hot water for about 30 minutes. I split the chiles open, removed the seeds and veins and then scraped the thin amount of flesh from off the skins. This was minced and added to the pot. I let all of this cook down a little and then deglazed it with white wine. When we were ready to eat, I threw the clams in turned the heat up high and waited for them to open which took about three minutes. I served the clams in individual soup bowls with some parmesan toasts on the side that could be used to soak up the juices. I sprinkled some chopped parsley over the entire thing right before serving.

To keep the whole bistro like effect I was looking for, I served an inexpensive chardonnay in tumblers as opposed to stem ware. This was a meal about the food, and I wanted softer, easy drinking wines to go with it. The sauce had a little bit of chile bite, nothing too extreme, but still enough to kill an expensive bottle of wine. An easy drinking fruity white like this was perfect and it captured the easy going nature of a great bistro meal.

For the main course, I thought about ideas all day long but had a hard time focusing on a single idea. I knew the tuna steaks would be seared quickly on both sides but hadn’t really come up with any thing definitive. I finally decided to make a white bean puree, with just a little olive oil, garlic, and lemon juice and then serve the tuna steaks on top of the puree. I found some beautiful orange, red and yellow peppers and decided to sauté those with garlic and a little tomato to serve on top of the steaks, which is a rough adaptation of traditional Basquaise preparations from traditional French cooking. Instead of deglazing the peppers and tomatoes with white wine, I opted instead to use sherry because I thought the more intense nutty flavor would work well with the tuna.

I debated the wine choice for a long time, because I wanted to serve a red, but this needed a light, fruity red. I had looked for a gamay or Beaujolais, but the place where I was looking had a limited import section. Most of the field blends I found where a little too robust. What I needed was gamay or a soft grenache, and finally settled on a Cotes du Rhone, which although it had some nice spice, also had good fruit and was soft enough to not overpower anything. It worked well and there was a good bistro sensibility to the match.

For dessert we had a spice pound cake and vanilla ice cream. My wife had made the cake and it was moist, intense and very rich, with a deep brown sugar intensity. It was so good, that it was very hard not to eat too much of it, so we did. After all it was a birthday celebration.

Pumpkin Ravioli and Fresh Hop Beers

So I’m been way behind in blogging and in the interim, we’ve gone from summer to fall here almost overnight. Normally we get a gradual change into fall but the change this year was pretty sudden from mild sunny days to cooler, overcast, drizzly ones. So I’ve been thinking more about some seasonal fall foods and vowed to make one of my favorites, pumpkin hazelnut ravioli, this weekend.

The ravioli themselves aren’t that unusual. The stuffing is pumpkin, chopped, toasted hazelnuts, and a little parmesan cheese. But for a sauce I normally do a savory pear and apple sauce, which consists of chunks of sautéed pear and apples in a sage scented apple cider “broth.” I also decided to add some bits of smoked homemade bacon to richen the sauce and add a subtle smoky note. To make the sauce, brown some bacon and then drain it and remove most of the oil from the pan. Then add several chopped, seeded and skinned pears and apples. I normally add the pears in a two to one ration to the apples. When they soften and give up some juice, add some sage and then apple cider, or better yet, apple and pear cider. Let it reduce and add a splash of sherry vinegar to help balance the sweetness. The sauce should be fairly thin but should have noticeable chunks of fruit. The whole dish is filled with flavors that the archetypal flavors of fall.

Fall is also the time for fresh hopped beers here in the Northwest, where almost all domestic hops are grown. Most beers are made with dried hops but fresh hop beers have become a specialty in many breweries in this area because they can get hops that were literally picked a few hours earlier. Because the hops are wet and fresh, this can require a huge amount of hops, generally about 8 to 10 times more by weight, but the results are unlike anything else. Let the French keep their Nouveau Beaujolais as the special libation of autumn. In the NW we’ll stick to our fresh and wet hop beers.

There was a festival in Hood River to celebrate these beers this weekend, and although I didn’t attend, I was able to buy several fresh hop beers. Sierra Nevada makes one and less than 30 cases where shipped to the Portland area, but I managed to grab a few bottles. Deschutes and Bridgeport also make versions. These are not beers for keeping, but for quick consumption to capture the fresh hop quality of the beers. Frankly, most of them are better on draft since that tends to be fresher and hit the market faster. In any event these are beers to enjoy now for their incredibly complex hop character.

None of the beers are incredibly bitter. Instead all of the brewers chose to showcase the complex and intense aromas of the fresh hops. I liked all three but the Deschutes was my favorite with the food. The Sierra Nevada was typical of the brewery’s style: hop intensive and assertive with a good malt backbone to make for an excellently balanced beer. The Bridgeport seemed to be the biggest of the bunch and clocked in at 7% alcohol. Its nose had a little more grapefruit and citrus but also had some wonderful tropical fruit notes than tied in nicely with the fruit notes of the food. I think the Bridgeport was my favorite on its own. But with food the Deschutes somehow nailed it. The spicy hop aroma seemed to be the perfect foil for the sweet intense fruitiness of the sauce and the slightly earthy notes in the ravioli fillings. It also had enough malt and body to stand up to the richness of the dish. It had cutting power from the hop bitterness but also had malt to marry with the fruit sweetness of the sauce. I would have been happy with any of the three beers, but at that time and place, the Deschutes seemed to be the best.

Although I hadn’t thought of fresh hop beer for the ravioli to start, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea, because it fed into the seasonality of the entire meal. I had initially thought about a great bottle of wine, but the fresh hopped beers proved better than any wine I had served in the past with this same dish. Further proof that you can’t beat seasonal foods from the same region.