Sausages, Elysian Avatar IPA and Full Sail Amber

I got stuck working late and had already gotten a call from my wife saying that she was going to go out and meet some friends and wouldn’t be home when I got home for dinner. There are a lot of things my wife won’t eat, like lamb, which I love so I don’t get a chance to eat them that often. This seemed like a great opportunity for that, but I got stuck working until a little after 8:00pm and didn’t feel like getting too involved in a cooking project. Sausages had snuck into my brain and I was hoping to find some lamb sausage that would hit a bunch of my cravings. I hit the local New Seasons market n the way home, because they have a great butcher department and generally very good sausage.

I was looking for lamb sausage and found some lamb, spinach and feta sausage, but also noticed that the pork, Marsala, and fig sausages were on sale, so I got one of those as well. Both sausages had the advantage of containing fruits or vegetables so I was able to convince myself that it would be a balanced meal. I did a quick cruise through the beer aisle and was thinking about trying to score one of those beers that I almost always overlook. Of course I instead got caught up in new things and things I hadn’t tried in quite some time and opted for a bottle of Elysian’s Avatar IPA, which is an IPA brewed with dried jasmine flowers. I had tried it once, years before at an Oregon Brewer’s Fest and decided to try the bottled version.

I got home, threw the sausages in the cast iron skillet and cracked the Elysian. I like Elysian a lot. They’ve won Large Brewpub of the Year award at the Great American Beer Fest, and the honor is well deserved. Their beers are generally very good across the board. I also have a weak spot for them because the head brewer was very fond of my Collaborator Saison which was served at OBF a few years ago and told me it was his favorite beer at the festival.

The Avatar IPA pours with a slightly hazy light copper/orange color with an off-white head. There’s a good floral hop aroma, with a hint of jasmine flower sweetness. There’s an underlying sweet malt and honey aroma and a slight candy note. On the palate the beer is round and medium bodied. There’s a sweet floral taste and a good malt backbone. The hops frame the malt sweetness very well but don’t come on too strong, but there’s a lingering hop bitterness in the finish. Overall, it’s an exceptional beer. The jasmine gives it a floral sweetness that fits very well, but doesn’t overwhelm the beer. It’s a dynamic and interesting beer, but not so much so that it overpowers food. It was good with both of the sausages.

As part of my attempt to retry a lot of beers that I normally overlook (because of the abundance of great beer available everywhere in Portland), I also opened a bottle of Full Sail Amber. Full Sail Amber is one of the old school Oregon craft beers. It was one of the first beers I had when I moved here in 1993. I had always regarded it as a reliable standby that could be found even in places that had a limited supply of craft beer. But like many of the old school beers, it’s widely dismissed or overlooked by my fellow beer snobs, which is a shame. It’s not a flashy beer, but it’s well made and very flavorful. It has a beautiful deep copper color, an appealing nose of caramel malt, toffee, and a piney American hop aroma. It’s medium bodied with a good malt and hop balance and it finishes crisp and dry. It’s an understated, somewhat unassuming beer (at least by modern craft beer standards where brewers seem to push the envelope constantly) which in many ways makes it ideal with food. This is a beer that works with food because it doesn’t demand top billing. It’s full of flavor but has a subtlety that many beers lack. In matching beer and food (or wine and food for that matter), subtlety and restraint often makes for a better match than flamboyance.

Of the sausages, my vote was for the pork, Marsala and fig. I love lamb and would have expected a lamb, spinach and feta sausage to be a little highly seasoned (because feta is so salty), but strangely it seemed a little bland. Perhaps they cut back a little too much on the salt to compensate for the feta. I admit that I use a fair amount of salt in cooking and sausage making and perhaps this sausage was geared towards “modern, healthy palates” that use less salt. It was very good, but I would have preferred a little more pizzazz. The pork, fig and Marsala was quite good. The sweetness of the figs and marsala married well with the inherent sweetness of the pork. It’s a recipe I may well adapt (ie, steal) at some point.

Middle Eastern Food

Finally got around to the Middle Eastern food I'd been planning for a few days. "Middle Eastern" is a ridiculously wide and varied cuisine, so I should probably find a better descriptor. Most of my food is strongly influenced by the various Mediterranean cuisines, but I don't think of them as a single cuisine, so it's unfair to group Eastern Mediterranean food together under the moniker "Middle Eastern," but I will confess that I don't know the various regional cuisines of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria, Armenia, Israel, Egypt, etc. well enough to really break them out into individual cuisines the way I can with regional French, Spanish, and Italian cuisine. The food I cook that's influenced by these cuisines is still largely "pan-Middle Eastern," and as a result, not really "authentic" as true regional cuisine.

There are a few things that I will profess strongly about this food despite the fact that I don't think I'm as well versed in it as in other areas. The first one is about Tabbouleh. Tabbouleh is a traditional Lebanese salad that has become a mainstream food in America. Unfortunately, many of us were first exposed to boxed, instant versions that are just plain wrong. As a result, too many Americans think of Tabbouleh as a bulgur salad with parsley and mint. But Tabbouleh is actually a parsley and mint salad with bulgur. The distinction may not seem important, but the dominance of herbs instead bulgur changes the salad completely. There are good recipes available to American cooks though sources like Claudia Roden's authoritative The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, but too many American versions of Tabbouleh stray too far from the real Lebanese version. These bulgur heavy versions rob this salad of its lightness and change the whole nature of the salad. If your Tabbouleh isn’t predominantly green, it’s not right.

Luckily, this year, I have a plethora of parsley. Being an essentially lazy gardener, I never pulled my parsley last year as it went to seed. As a result I now have a 3' x 3' patch of garden of solid parsley plants. It'll be a good year to make Tabbouleh.

One of the other big issues I have with this cuisine as it's normally presented in the US is with the typical Pita bread available in the US. Although there is some white pita bread in the Middle East, much (most?) of the common everyday pita bread served there is in fact whole wheat or partial whole wheat bread. Because of the ease of making this bread, it's a little tough for me to stomach the often cardboard like white pitas available in US stores. Don't know how to make these great breads? Start with a 50/50 blend of white and whole wheat flour (or go all whole wheat if you like heartier bread). I normally use about 3 cups of flour total. Add about 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 cup water, about 1 teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon of salt, and a splash of olive oil. Knead it all together and let it rest and rise. Roll them out thin and bake them at 450 for a few minutes. Flat breads like this are great for most of because you can whip up a batch of dough in the morning, leave it to rise all day and then come home from work, roll then and bake them in a few minutes. It's a better alternative to anything you can buy, and it's relatively easy.

For more on flat breads, I’d heartily recommend you get a copy of Flatbreads by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. It’s a great cookbook featuring flatbreads from around the world. The recipes are not just bread recipes. There’s also a variety of foods that traditionally go with flatbreads from various cultures and cuisines.

Since we had been down at Higgins snacking on charcuterie, we decided to just do a few salads, dips, and fresh baked pitas for dinner. We had hummus (and for God’s sake don’t use canned beans!), taboulleh, and a dip called zhoug, which is a pesto like mix of cilantro, parsley, mild green chilies, cumin, and cardamom.

I didn’t really worry about trying to find the correct beer with this, and opted for a Full Sail Sunspot, which is one of their Brewmaster series that comes in 22 oz bottles, and is billed as a bright IPA. It was a moderately hoppy IPA, but wasn’t over the top and had a good malt backbone. The balance of malt and hops was quite nice and the bitterness went well with the food without going over the top. The solid malt backbone gave the beer enough body to standup. Overall, it’s a nice beer with food and a decent enough match for an easy dinner.

After dinner, I decided to open a Deschutes 19th Anniversary Golden Ale, which is a moderately strong Belgian style Golden Ale. It had the requisite Belgian aromas of fruit and spice and a deep gold color. It’s very cleanly made but for my tastes is a little sweet for the style. I like fairly dry Belgian Golden Ales, and with an alcohol content over 8%, this normally requires a fair amount of sugar in the recipe to boost the alcohol but to keep the body light. I think this beer needs to be a little lighter, but the flavors were right on. Belgian brewers use sugar in quantities that generally scares American brewers who fought so long against adjuncts in beer. As a result very few are willing to brew beers using 20% sugar, but for a light bodied Belgian Golden, I think that’s what you have to do. In any event, kudos to Deschutes for even brewing this beer. It’s nice to see quality Belgian style beers being brewed more often by US brewers.