May 11th - White Beans with Pancetta and Foccacia

I had started some pancetta and knew it would be ready this past weekend. I couldn’t find large pieces of pork belly, so I had to make do with a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t use enough garlic in my last batch of pancetta and it did taste a little off, but was mostly fine. I use the basic pancetta recipe from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie but like most recipes, I’ve altered it a little to suit my own tastes. This go around I went a little overboard on the garlic and you could smell it through the bag as it sat in the fridge (I normally keep it in a zip lock as it cures). After curing for seven days, I washed off the cure (and garlic) and let them sit out to dry out some. Despite the intense amount of garlic, these ones came out quite nicely. The color is beautiful and the meat really tastes perfumed. Strangely, the garlic isn’t overwhelming and seems to tame the bay leaf which sometimes seems to strong. I made a pot of white beans with some cubed pancetta, onions, rosemary and parsley. On the side I made a batch of focaccia topped with basil and garlic. Beans and bread is still one of my favorite foods and this didn’t disappoint me.

While I was cooking I had a bottle of the current Full Sail Brewmaster’s Reserve Brown Ale. It’s a really impressive beer. It has full, smooth malt profile with a slightly dry, bitter chocolate note in the finish. The hops play a background role in this beer. It’s all about the malt in this one. It used to be available year round but got dropped from the line up many years ago, because, unfortunately, brown ale doesn’t sell well in the US. (Too low in hops? Too malty?). It would have been a fantastic beer with food, but it didn’t last long. At 6% alcohol, it’s bigger than many English examples, but it’s still an easy drinking beer.

With dinner I actually had a Hair of the Dog Fred, in honor of Fred Echkhardt’s birthday. This bottle had been lingering on the shelves of a supermarket for some time and was showing some age (not in a good way), but it was still a remarkably complex beer. Even though it’s intense and rich, it was a nice match with earthy, comfort food quality of the white beans and focaccia.

Homebrew Update

Homebrew Update
April 26


I had a bad cold several weeks ago and missed an opportunity to brew as well as the Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival that I had been looking forward to. But there’s still beer at home and some things have gotten brewed.

The Brown Ale is still kicking around, and with its malty intensity, it’s still my favorite current homebrew for spicy food. I am afraid it’s going to run out fairly soon however, but it’s holding well, particularly for a lower alcohol, low hopped beer.

The Biere de Garde/Biere de Noel (call it what you want) has really come into its own. It’s dried out as it’s lagered and is now crystal clear, but still pours with a rich, long lasting head. It’s still sweeter than a regular Biere de Garde should be, but it’s incredibly flavorful with great malt and light esters in the nose. It’s still something I’m considering entering into the Collaborator contest, but I have a few others I’m debating as well. It’s a little high in alcohol for a lot of hotter foods (the chile heat brings out the alcohol), but it’s fantastic with roasts. I made a pan roasted pork tenderloin with a cherry sauce (dried cherries, shallots, white wine and stock) that I served over mashed potatoes with glazed carrots last weekend and it was phenomenal with that. I’ve been tapping it so often, I’m worried there’s not a lot left, but I can always make it again).

Our updated Steam beer is still around, but I also wonder for how long based upon how good and drinkable it is now. It’s also the only hoppy beer I have at the moment, so it gets tapped pretty regularly. It’s got an intense citrus/orange hop nose from all of the Simcoe and Summit hops. It’s another one I’m considering for Collaborator, but I don’t know how it would stand up amongst all of the other hoppy styles that I expect will be in there. If nothing else, I’m enjoying it on my own.

The Belgian Golden from about a month ago is drinking well, but still needs to come together completely. We used two yeast strains in it (the Duvel strain and the La Choufe strain) and the Duvel strain takes a long time to clear. Clarity and appearance are only 3 points out of 50 on a BJCP score sheet, but it’s incredible how much clarity really does affect perception of a beer. I’m hoping it will clear soon, but it’s been kegged and chilled for the last two weeks and really hasn’t improved much yet. The nose has developed nicely and has a spicy, orange note to it. Belgian Goldens are amongst my favorite beers and I normally have one on hand because they’re food friendly, but it will be nice when this one finally clears up. I have several bottles, and strangely the bottles have cleared at room temperature, but the keg is still cloudy. We’ll see on this one.

The last beer we brewed was a Saison. The grain bill is the same as our Saison that won Collaborator, but the yeast is the same mixed strain we used of the golden ale (as a way of saving money and re-using yeast). We realized that we hadn’t made this recipe in about 2 years although it’s a favorite of both of ours. It’s still in secondary, but it could be kegged at any point and I may try to get to it soon just to have a little more variety.

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.

January 29th - More Indian Food and Brown Ale

January 29th – More Indian Food

So I appear to be on the ground beef roll here. It’s been three nights in a row where ground beef is the cornerstone of the meal. I still had some cabbage and carrots leftover from last Sunday and needed to use them so I decided to make some keema, the ground meat Indian dish, to go with it and to make a meal out of it.

I started by sautéing onions in oil until they were browned and then added ginger, garlic, ground coriander, cumin, fenugreek, turmeric, green chili, dried red chili and garam masala. Once all of the spices had cooked a little, I added the meat and browned it. I added some water and turned it down to a simmer. The dish smelled great but was a little bland looking. I wished I had some peas to add to give it some color but only had some spinach on hand. It’s not traditional, but there are keema saag dishes, so I figured it would work and it did add a nice note of color to the food. I served the keema, the reheated cabbage and the carrots (which I served room temperature) with some rice and pulled a pint of Brown ale, which has turned out to be a great beer with spicy food. Quick and it helped me clear out the fridge.

January 23rd - Tempeh in Chile Garlic Tamarind Sauce

January 23rd Tempeh in Chile Ginger Tamarind Sauce
I like tempeh but confess that I don’t know a lot of ways to cook it. Tempeh, for those who don’t know, is a fermented soy product that originated in Indonesia, but doesn’t seem to be used much in many other Asian countries and seems virtually non-existent in traditional cooking from China, Thailand and Japan (as far as I can tell). It comes in small cakes of about 8-10 ounces and seems to be best when it’s sliced and cooked in oil before adding it to anything else. A lot of people say it has a mushroom-like flavor and it’s a good comparison, although it has its own flavor to me.
Because of its obscurity, there don’t seem to be many “authentic” (ie, Indonesian and Malaysian) tempeh recipes around. Most that I’ve seen come out of what I like to call the “hippie vegetarian” school and don’t’ sound very appetizing to me (tempeh-topped pizza or tempeh tacos, anyone?). My tempeh repertoire is pretty straight forward at this point and most of it comes from James Oseland’s Cradle of Flavor, which I’ve written about earlier. The recipes he lists are authentic and delicious.
Like all cooks, I substituted what I had on hand for what I recalled his recipe used. I started by cutting the tempeh into strips and then browned it in oil on both of the cut sides. I pulled it out of the pan, then added some red onion, green chili and ginger and sautéed them. Like many Asian dishes, it has a balance of sweet, sour and hot. To add the sour element, I degalezed the pan with some tamarind paste dissolved in water. Then I added some jiggery to give the contrasting sweet flavor. The original recipe called for galangal root, but I didn’t have any and used ginger (though I will agree with James Oseland that the two are not interchangeable and have very different flavors). I added the tempeh slices back in and let it reduce to a sweet sour syrup.
For a side dish, I stir fried some cabbage with garlic and red pepper and then served everything with basmati rice. I had a pint of the brown ale and it went nicely. The malt sweetness worked well with the chilis and was a nice contrast to the tanginess of the tamarind and the earthy notes of the tempeh. I need to learn to make other tempeh recipes, but so far this one has been a nice addition to my vegetarian repertoire.

January 20th - Vegetarian Indian Food

January 20th – Vegetarian Indian Food

After eating a fair amount of pork the last two days, I decided I wanted something vegetarian. I still had some of the Palak Paneer from earlier in the week. I wasn’t sure if it was enough for an entire meal but decided to make a few other dishes. I had bought a couple of heads of cabbage because I decided to try and make homemade sauerkraut (much to my wife’s terror). I couldn’t get as much into the bucket I was using as I thought I could, so I had some cabbage to work with.

There is a great cooked cabbage salad recipe in Mangoes and Curry Leaves by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which consists of cabbage, shallots, curry leaves, turmeric, cumin seeds, green chilis, coconut and lime juice. It’s easy to make and straight forward, and although it’s spiced, doesn’t mask the naturally sweet flavor of the cabbage. It doesn’t require any sautéing. You cut and wash the cabbage and put it in a pot with the other ingredients (minus the coconut and lime juice) and cook it on high for about 2-3 minutes and then turn it down to a simmer for about 10 minutes. The water that clings to the cabbage is enough to cook the whole dish. At the end you add the flaked coconut which absorbs any liquid left ad then squeeze lime juice over it. You can make it start to finish in about 20 minutes and it’s a great side.

The other dish was a cooked carrot dish from Kerala. For this dish, you sauté cumin seeds, black mustard seeds, onion, garlic, green chili, and curry leaves briefly. When they’ve softened but not browned, you add a bunch of grated carrots and toss it all together. Let it cook for about 30 seconds and then turn the heat off and stir in some yogurt. The carrots should be partly cooked, but not completely. As simple as it is, it’s something that never fails to blow me away. It’s another dish that you can throw together in a few minutes, but is substantial and satisfying.

I made some basmati rice and mounded that in the center of the plate and put a portion of the other dishes around the rice. Between the palak paneer, the cabbage and the carrots, we had an incredibly filling meal. The colors were beautiful as well. The carrots were deep orange, the cabbage yellow from the turmeric, and the palak paneer was a deep bright green.

A couple of the dishes were hot and I was ready to try out my newly kegged brown ale with it, but had picked up a bottle of the Deschutes Buzzsaw Brown Ale and wanted to try that. It’s a very nice brown. It’s 30 IBU’s and only 4.8% alcohol. It’s very clean with a decent malt backbone. It’s a terrific session beer but lacks some of the malty sweetness I like in brown ale. Theirs is a different interpretation of brown ale than mine. Mine is sweeter than Newcastle Brown, but theirs is less sweet. When you bit into the chilis, I preferred the sweet malt of mine instead of the Buzzsaw Brown, but the Buzzsaw Brown is a well made and delicious beer (and probably better with a host of other things where you don’t want or need a sweet malt finish). With the recent hype over Deschutes’s Abyss Barrel Aged Imperial Stout on my brew clubs list serve, the Buzzsaw Brown seems to have gone completely unnoticed, which is a shame because it’s a beer of great subtlety and finesse.

January 19th - Brown Ale and Brewing Molasses Porter

January 19th –Brewing Molasses Porter

We brewed our brown ale a few weeks ago and it was ready to rack off and keg. Brown ale is a tough sell in the US. It used to be more popular in craft brew circles, but not many breweries are actually brewing one on a regular basis any more. It’s still an incredibly good beer with food, but it’s somehow dropped off most craft beer drinker’s radar screens. I like browns that are malty and slightly sweet and I generally prefer them in a moderate alcohol range. We generally make ours fairly low hopped and use a combo of English pale malt, 55L and 120L caramel malt, and some chocolate malt. We mash it fairly warm, maybe around 152-154, to emphasize the malt body. We tasted it when we racked it and it had a distinct smoky note, although we hadn’t added any smoked malt. Smoky aromas are often caused by phenols, and I was a little worried about the beer because of the phenol level. It appears to be dying down now that it’s kegged, but it’s not as clean as I’d like it. But it does have a faintly fruit estery note that you expect from a good English ale strain. On the palate, it’s got good body and a round sweet caramel character. It tastes bigger than it is (it clocks in around 5% alcohol). If the smoky note dies down, it’ll be a good session beer and a great beer for spicy food, since it’s got that great sweet caramel finish.

The brown ale was the second batch of beer with a London Ale strain that we were using (reputed to be the famous Young’s strain) and decided to repitch the yeast one more time. We were both almost out of stout, so we opted to do porter this time. By the BJCP, porter is broken into Brown Porter vs Robust Porter. The major difference between the two is gravity and roastiness. The brown porters are more English style. They tend to be lighter in alcohol, and have less roasted malt flavors, which tend to add a roasted astringency to the palate. The robust porters are more American in style and tend to be bigger, hoppier, and have more roast intensity. Our beer is kind of in the middle. We did lower hops, and less roast/black malt, but went for a moderately higher gravity that should give us a beer around 6-6.5%. We used a fair amount of crystal and caramel malts as well as chocolate, brown, and black malts, and mashed hotter again to get more body. We also added a couple of cups of molasses at the end of the boil. We’re hoping to get some dark, dried fruit flavors (like a raisiny quality) out of it. Should be ready to package in about two weeks. After that it’ll be time to brew more lambic.