Gumbo and Malty Beers

My brewing partner recently had a milestone birthday and we wanted to have him over to dinner to celebrate. He used to cook for a living and although he likes my food, he always seems to enjoy the simpler things that I do. I asked him what he wanted and he said he had no idea so I gave him some choices and he chose Cajun. I do a pretty good job with gumbo and it’s something that he’s enjoyed in the past so I decided to give that a shot.

Cajun and Creole food was one of the first types of food that I really got into in college and right after. It was during the late 1980’s when Cajun food was getting national attention and Paul Prudhomme became a national celebrity. I’ve never been to Louisiana and my cooking knowledge of Cajun and Creole food is essentially from the cookbooks that Paul Prudhomme did.

My general rule with gumbo is that you can’t have too much variety in the pot. Some purists may prefer a simpler version, but I stick to the “if it can’t run away fast enough, throw it in the gumbo pot” rule. For this batch I used home cured and smoked ham, andouille sausage, chicken thighs, shrimp and a few oysters.

The soupy base of gumbo is the most essential part of the dish. Without a properly made brown roux and good stock, the dish will be a failure. I made stock from the shrimp shells and also had some home made chicken stock from last week’s roast chicken. The roux is made from equal parts of oil and flour. It’s cooked over high heat and it’s essential to stir it almost constantly to ensure that it won’t burn or separate. I try to take it all the way to a rich chocolate brown in color. Once it’s arrived at that color, I throw in a mixture of onions, celery, cayenne peppers, and green bell pepper. This stops the roux from cooking and drops the temperature, but I leave the vegetables in for several minutes over medium high heat to ensure that they essentially get sautéed in the roux.

Once the vegetables have softened, I start adding stock and bring the whole thing to a boil and let it reduce. I’ll add more stock once it reduces and let the whole process go again because I like to concentrate the flavors. Once it’s the right consistency and richness, I turn it down to a slow simmer and season it with salt, pepper, Tabasco, and thyme.

I normally brown the ham, sausage and chicken in a pan before adding them to the gumbo pot itself. I like the extra flavor that browning them gives the dish and I normally deglaze the sauté pan with more stock and then add that to the gumbo. The whole process is essentially an exercise in building and concentrating the various flavors. The chicken, sausage and ham, normally take about 45-60 minutes at a temperature just below boiling. The seafood essentially gets thrown in at the end. Once the seafood is done, serve the gumbo with white rice and plenty of hot sauce at the table.

Beer is the natural choice with such a spicy dish, and past experience has shown me that malty beers work best with hot, spicy foods. Hops don’t cut the heat and just seem to accentuate the burn, but malt sweetness seems to mellow it out. I got a variety of beers to have with the gumbo and we split bottles and tried four different beers with the gumbo. First was Schwemler Bernstein Vienna lager, which is a lighter beer but with good malt notes. It was very refreshing and the malt did make it a nice match, but it was a little light for the complex flavors of the gumbo. Next up was a Monchshof Schwarzbier from Germany, which is a dark lager with good rich, smooth malt, and just a hint of cocoa and roastiness. It too was good and was low enough alcohol that you could drink a few throughout the meal. It was nice but not perfect. Next up was the Doppelbock from Bayern Brewing in Montana, which is their winter seasonal offering. It has an incredible malt intensity and was far sweeter than the previous two beers and really stood up to the complexity of the gumbo while simultaneously mellowing the effects of the chiles. It was a great match and my favorite of the beers we tried. Last on the list was Skullsplitter Scottish ale from the Orkney Islands. It’s an intense sweet, rich, malty strong Scottish ale that has notes of dried fruit from the intense malt character of the beer. It was sweet enough and malty enough to match but somehow the Doppelbock worked a little better and was the universal favorite. Strangely enough when I had another bottle of the Bayern Doppelbock the next day, it wasn’t the show stopper that it had been with the food. It’s tremendous how the food can change the character of the beer so much.

Birthdays normally require cakes but my brewing partner isn’t a cake person, but does have a penchant for good cheese and is particularly fond of stilton. I got a piece of stilton and several Concorde pears for dessert and we decided to try the last bottle of a Russian Imperial stout we had made more 5 years earlier (it was brewed in January 2002). Anyone who knows me knows that this isn’t my favorite style of beer because often they are unbalanced and overly alcoholic and lack the balance that a high alcohol style requires. The beer we had made had been virtually undrinkable in it’s youth and had never been a particular favorite of either of us. It had started out with an original gravity of 1.130 and finished out at about 1.030 which means it clocked in at a heady 13.5% alcohol. It poured very viscous and left a thick glaze on the glass when you swirled it. We decanted the bottled into a pitcher and tasted it. To our surprise, it actually had finally come around and was quite astounding. The abrasive hop character it had when it was young had mellowed, the alcohol seemed more in balance and it was full of coffee, cocoa, chocolate and some dark fruit notes. It was fantastic with the rich creaminess of the cheese and a good counterpoint to the ripe sweetness of the pears. It was a pleasant surprise to all of us and my brewing partner and I admitted that we were secretly dreading that it would still be the undrinkable, unbalanced beer it had been for so many years. Sometimes, those big beers do come around.

Vindaloo and Doppelbock

My wife has been sick for several weeks. She had a cold that turned into a bad sinus infection and has been suffering from it for a couple of weeks. Antibiotics didn’t help and although she’s getting better, I’ve been trying to make a lot more spicy food of late in the hopes that the heat will help to temporarily unclear her sinuses. We had done some hot and sour soups and various Thai dishes and decided today to do Indian food. I love Indian food and actually cook a fair amount of it at home, but not always in the summer since a lot of the Indian dishes I like require long simmers.

Since it’s not too hot here I decided to make a truly spicy dish that I love: Pork Vindaloo. Vindaloo, to many people, is synonymous with anything Indian that’s insanely hot, but it is a specific dish with an interesting history. The dish was developed in Goa, which was a Portuguese colony for several hundred years. Vindaloo is traditionally made with pork, which is unusual in Indian cooking and uses vinegar which is another non-traditional ingredient. It is a spicy dish, even by Indian standards, but some of the heat comes from mustard oil and the vinegar helps to accentuate the spice of the chiles. Vindaloo also uses some sweeter spices like cinnamon and cardamom, which is reminiscent of the Moorish influence in Iberian cooking.

The basic recipe calls for creating a spice blend of cumin, cinnamon, chiles, mustard seeds, fenugreek (in many versions), and black pepper. This is mixed with vinegar and the meat is marinated in the resulting paste. Later it is cooked with onions, more chiles, garlic, cardamom and occasionally ginger. The resulting dish is spicy but slightly tart form the vinegar bit also sweet from the spices. It’s a definite head clearer and I thought it would be good for my wife’s sinuses.

On the side I planned to have basmati rice, pepper rassam, a fresh mango chutney and tomato chat masala. Pepper rassam is like a thin soup made with toor dal, onions, and tomato and is spiced with chiles, cumin and mustard seeds and is soured with tamarind. It’s delicious on its won or over rice. The mango chutney would be fresh mangoes, with shallots, lime juice, chile and mint. The tomato chat masala is fresh cherry tomatoes tossed with a spice blend that consists of cumin, chiles, black salt (which has a distinct sulfur taste but is still salt, mango powder (which is actually tart), and black pepper. This would spice the tomatoes but not overwhelm them.

There’s a lot of debate about what beers or wines go with very hot and spicy food. I used to try a lot of things, like pilsners, weiss beers, Belgian goldnes and saisons, but to truly beat the spice and heat nothing beats sweeter darker beers like bocks, Oktoberfests, and Baltic porters. Sugar cuts chile heat like nothing else. The one who enlightened me to this fact was Alan Sprints from Hair of the Dog Brewing. Several years ago on our list serve, someone asked what to serve with a traditional Mexican meal. Opinions varied, but Alan insisted on dark sweeter beers. I tried it and he is in fact correct. Hoppy beers (without the sweetness) don’t cut it. Dry beers like Saison Dupont or Duvel don’t cut it. Malt sugar counteracts chiles like nothing else.

Not having any of these beers on hand, I went to look for some German Doppelbocks, as well as some Baltic porter. Both are well suited to hot food. Unfortunately, it can be hard to find fresh examples of both. I was able to find an Aktienbrauerei Doppelbock and am Obolon Porter from Lithuania. Both were good with the food. I’ll be honest the subtleties of the beer were overwhelmed by the spice, but the body and sweetness made both quite nice with the food. The Doppelbock was all about deep rich maltiness. The porter had good dark fruit flavors, as well as an intense molasses and dark sugar flavor. Both were over 7% alcohol and had enough to stand up to the spiciness of the food.

Don’t believe it? Next time you have spicy food, dump the lighter hoppy beers in favor of a good sweet dark beer. You’ll likely be surprised by how well the beer and food come together.