What to eat during a snow storm - Part 3

Spinach, Caramelized Onion, and Goat Cheese Pie

December 22

It continues to snow, which is really unusual for Portland. We got about another six inches last night on top of the ice which was on top of the previous six inches. Even the dogs think that the novelty is wearing thin.

The spinach pie turned out well. The crust uses olive oil instead of shortening and it uses considerably less oil than if you were using shortening, so it doesn’t produce as flaky a crust. The process is similar though in that you mix the flour and the oil first in order to coat the flour which keeps it from producing as many glutens. I use about a quarter or a third of a cup of oil to 2 cups of flour (which is more than enough for a normal sized pie). I add as much water as I need to get it to come together. I’m not sure exactly how much because I do it more by feel than by measurement.

For the filling I started by caramelizing four medium onions in olive oil. Once they were deep brown, I added some garlic, about a pound of spinach, a pinch of thyme and a tiny pinch of nutmeg (if you can taste it distinctly it’s too much). Once that’s all put together, you need to pull it off the heat and give it about 20-30 minutes to cool. Then add about 4-5 ounces of a soft fresh goat cheese (like chevre). You could add another kind of cheese, like feta, but I had goat cheese on hand so I used that.

I had rolled a bottom crust and put it in a pie pan, added the filling and then rolled the top crust. I put a couple of slits in the top and baked it for 25-30 minutes at 350 until it was browned. It does need a few minutes to cool before you cut and serve it. I served it with more pilsner because pilsner is crisp enough to cut through the richness of the goat cheese. It also has a hint of malt sweetness that works well with the sweetness form the onions. If I was having wine I’d go with an unoaked (or at least lightly oaked) sauvignon blanc. It can be tough to match wine to cheese (despite the fact that you always see cheese and wine served together), and a good friend doesn’t like to pair red wines with spinach dishes because the iron content of the spinach can affect the taste of the wine. But I’ve always been a fan of fresh goat cheeses and sauvignon blanc. But as always, it’s tough to beat a good pilsner with food.

What to eat during a snow storm - Part 2

December 21

The weather continues to be dreadful. We got ice on top of 6+ inches of snow and it’s back to snowing full bore again. Last night’s meal of small plates ended after two courses, because the plates weren’t as small as I had thought.

I started with mushrooms sautéed in olive oil with fresh rosemary, garlic and amontillado sherry. I had bought enough mushrooms for four but ended up cooking for two, so our first course was actually double sized. I paired it with a Sierra Nevada Celebration ale, which for those who don’t know it, is essentially an American IPA. I was thinking the piney flavors and aromas of the Cascade hops would pair nicely with piney-ness of the rosemary and it did work out pretty well. The spelt bread was good but not as crusty as I like but it was certainly loads better than the typical things that pass as baguettes or rustic breads at the average supermarket bakery (which is too often home to characterless “French” and “Italian” bread).

The second course was shrimp escasbeche. Escabeche is a family of Spanish dishes that are essentially pickled. They originate from the days before refrigeration where foods were cooked in olive oil and vinegar and then left to sit in it. The large amounts of vinegar and oil acted a preservative and allowed people to keep poultry and fish for longer periods. Today it’s still cooked because people enjoy the flavors. You can pretty much cook anything escabeche and then serve it hot, cold or room temperature. I start by heating olive oil gently and then adding onions and garlic and letting them cook down slowly and infuse the oil. Later I add some herbs (more rosemary in this case because it’s still sticking out above the snow) and then vinegar and a little white wine. Once this mixture comes together, add the main ingredient. I this case it was shrimp. Because they cook fairly quickly, I turn the heat off after I add them and pull the pan from the burner and let them finish cooking in the residual heat. If you’re cooking something more substantial, like chicken pieces, you can put the pot in the oven and leave it for 1-2 hours on a low heat.

To serve it, remove the main ingredient (the shrimp in my case), and then ladle some of the sauce into another pan and reduce it by about a third or half. Then pour the sauce over the shrimp and serve it with crusty bread. I actually had some homebrewed pilsner with this one. Not for any reason other than the fact that I love good pilsner and still think it’s one of the most food friendly beer. Although Spain is considered a wine drinking country, I prefer beer with foods cooked with a lot of vinegar since vinegar can make most wines taste thin and sharp. The malt sugar and the hop bitterness of pilsner actually stands up better (but a good lambic or acidic wit bier would be very nice as well).

Tonight I’m sticking to something simple: a spinach, caramelized onion and goat cheese pie. The crust is made form olive oil instead of shortening which gives it a distinctive taste. No idea what I’ll drink with it yet, but I’m sure I’ll find something.

What to eat during a snow storm - Part 1

December 20, 2008

Last week was supposed to be our annual snow storm here in Portland, but it turned out to only be the precursor for the real storm which is going on right now. They’re predicting 6-10 inches of snow in Portland before it switches over to freezing rain and finally rain sometime late tomorrow. Lovely.

We were supposed to have friends over for dinner tonight but they cancelled because of the weather. I sort of expected that to happen but figured I’d better buy the food just in case. Of course I hadn’t actually finalized a menu, and had figured on something sort of Spanish inspired and likely served as tapas or small plates. So I have mushrooms, shrimp, a pork tenderloin, potatoes, spinach, goat cheese, some red peppers and a package of Serrano ham courtesy of my brewing partner. I’ll likely spend the day cooking a variety of tapas. Nothing better than eating great food when there’s a blizzard outside.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any adequate bread so I made some bread earlier and it’s rising now. I make adequate, but not great, bread. It’s one thing I wish I did a lot better. One problem is I don’t do it enough. Oh, and I don’t really follow recipes. I have a basic recipe that I use that can work for anything from focaccia to pizza dough to actual bread. It's roughly three cups of flour, a teaspon of salt, a teaspoon or more of yeast, and 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups of water. I just kind of vary the types of flour and add more or less water depending on what I’m making. Sometimes I add olive oil as well (particularly if I'm making pizza dough). Today’s is 1/3 spelt and 2/3 white bread flour plus water, salt and yeast.

All I’ve decided so far is that I’ll start with sautéed mushrooms with olive oil, garlic, sherry, and rosemary (I'm using rosemary since the snow has pretty much buried and likely killed my parsley). But I can’t do that until the bread is baked because eating sautéed mushrooms without bread on the side just seems wrong.

At this point all I have are ideas for the other dishes: olive oil roasted potatoes with a spicy tomato and pepper sauce on the side (kind of like the sauce that’s used for potatoes brava), shrimp escabeche served at room temperature, chicken thighs wrapped in Serrano ham braised in a sherry and garlic sauce, spinach and goat cheese empanadillas.

Drinking a lovely home made lambic right now but I’ll need to decide what to drink with everything else later. Stay tuned.

Cooks vs Chefs and Craft vs Art

It seems that in many people’s minds, there’s little difference between and cook and a chef. The phrase chef is bandied about pretty routinely and many home cooks and amateurs don’t think twice before calling themselves a chef. This is wrong, and a little insulting to the people who have put in the time and effort to rise to the level of Chef.

“Chef” is a title that’s earned. It’s French for chief and traditionally a Chef heads up a kitchen brigade. The fact that brigade has a military meaning wasn’t coincidental and it’s not lost on a Chef. Most kitchens are run very similar to the military. There’s hierarchy and the classical kitchen demands absolute discipline from its workers. Although the Kitchen Brigade goes back several centuries, credit for its modern organization goes to August Escoffier, who simplified and codified haute French cuisine in the early 20th century. (If you’ve read Escoffier’s books and looked at his recipes, you may flinch at the idea that he simplified cooking since there’s nothing simple in his cooking.)


Auguste Escoffier, doubtlessly thinking of new ways to put fear into his Brigade

At the top of the kitchen is the Chef de Cuisine, who runs the kitchen. He creates the menu and oversees all personnel. The Chef de Cuisine may not even cook anymore and may be strictly in an administrative role. He has the last say on every matter. What he says is the Law in the kitchen. Disobeying him results in thrown shoes, shouting matches, humiliation of subordinates, immediate firing and other un-pleasantries.

Below him is the Sous Chef, who is essentially second in command. He gets his orders direct form the Chef de Cuisine, and fills in for the Chef de Cuisine when he’s absent form the kitchen. Below the Sous Chef are the Chef de Parties. There is one Chef de Partie for each station or section in the kitchen: Saucier (sauces and sauté station); Rotisseur (roast station) which may contain sub sections for grill and fry cooks; Poisonnier (fish station); Entremetier (entrée station), which may contain separate stations for soups and vegetables); Garde Manger (cold station which includes hors d’oeuvres, salads, terrines and other
Charcuterie); Patissier (pastry/dessert station); and Boucher (butcher).

Under each Chef de Partie on each station, there are numerous Cuisiniers (cooks) and Commis (junior cooks) as well as apprentices. Historically, you started as an apprentice, worked up to a Commis, then a Cuisinier, and with luck you made it to Chef de Partie. You also would work through different stations in order to learn the basics of the kitchen as a whole.

With many years of work and effort you may become a Sous Chef and with even more you may become a Chef de Cuisine. Working to this level took years. Even becoming a Chef de Partie in a good kitchen took years of work and dedication. It was something that was earned and being called Chef by your cooks and commis was a sign of respect for the time, effort and level of mastery you had attained.

So don’t throw the word chef around like it doesn’t matter. If you cook at home, you’re a cook, not a chef. There are no home chefs. We’re all just cooks, no matter how talented we are (or think we are). Give these real Chefs their due; they’ve earned it.

With the rise of celebrity chefs in this country, there’s another trend that’s developed that I find a little bothersome. It seems that all fine cooking, and winemaking and beer making is starting to be called an art and not a craft. Generally this isn’t being done by Chefs themselves, but by their admirers.

But cooking (and brewing for that matter) is a craft. Look at the whole Brigade system and the way that people advance. It’s years of dedication, and there’s an awful lot of repetition along the way. Bakers learn to make baguettes by making them day after day and year after year. A commi learns to make brown stock and demi glace and makes it every day for years. Cooks learn to make a dish correctly by making it day after day under the eye of a chef who makes sure it’s consistent every day.

There are creative elements, but those are mostly enjoyed by the people designing the dishes and not always by the cooks who make them. Cooks turn out the food that they’re told to make. And good cooks do it well and consistently. That alone makes it a craft and not an art.

The same thing goes for brewing and winemaking. Most brewers have to brew the same recipe and have it come out the same each time, because customers demand consistency. There are skills in cooking and brewing, and you need quite a lot of knowledge to do them well. But let’s remember that it’s a craft.

That’s why the only way to become a better cook is to cook more often. Make the same thing over and over until you know how to make it. Why do Italian grandmothers make the Sunday ragu so well? Because they’ve done it every week for 50 years, which means they’ve made it 2600 times. If you did it that often you’d be good at it too. (If you worked as a professional cook and did it five times a week, it would still take you 10 years to get that much experience.) You would know what worked best. So stop reading this and get cooking. Your food will only get better.

Vegetarianism, Fish, Lamb, Scallops and, strangely, Gordon Ramsay

My wife has returned to vegetarianism. This was kind of an unexpected turn. I wanted to explain to her that vegetarianism can be cured by eating meat, but this seemed like a bad idea. Luckily she isn’t expecting me to become a vegetarian as well, although there are a lot of vegetarian dishes that I love and cook on a regular basis, and she will still eat fish occassionally. Initially, I thought this would be a huge drag (especially since I just bought a whole 12 pound NY strip loin that I cut into steaks), but so far it’s working out well. She did tell me that she feels better already (after about ten days) and she said it without sounding smug. (Nothing worse than a born-again vegetarian.)

The unexpected upside is that I’m now allow to eat whatever I want so long as there are enough things to make up an adequate vegetarian meal for her. I’m normally against cooking multiple entrees, particularly on a week night, because it takes more time, dirties more pots, etc. But I’ve done it a few times and am actually excited about the possibilities. As I mentioned, she will eat fish occasionally, but the big issue is that she doesn’t really like fish that much, and tends to prefer the milder sorts of fish. I, on the other hand, love fish. In fact I love all kinds of fish including a lot of the darker and oilier ones that a lot of people find too strong and some of the scary things like skate wing. So now I find myself with an opportunity to cook fish more often and so far I’ve been taking advantage of it. Recently, I made her a mushroom stew, with mushrooms, onions, garlic, and thyme, which I served over polenta. I sautéed a piece of orange roughy for myself, served it on polenta and stole just enough of the mushrooms to use as a topping to the fish. We both had some sautéed yellow and green baby zucchini with basil and garlic on the side. We were both more than pleased with the results. (The baby zucchini were from the farmer’s market and were incredibly good.)

The next night was faux-Chinese. I made tofu in black bean sauce, stir fried Italian kale with red chiles, ginger, and garlic, steamed rice, and steamed fish with scallions, ginger, soy and sesame oil. It’s one of the simplest fish preparations and also one of the best. You get subtle flavoring from the aromatics and the purity of the fish comes through. I hadn’t steamed a fish in ages and it was so incredibly good. Now, I need to track down some oily fish or skate wing.

The other thing that I’ve missed for a long time is lamb. It’s absolutely my favorite red meat. But my wife would never eat it because it was in the “cute animal” food group (along with duck, venison, rabbit and other furry and cuddly things). Tonight, I’m having lamb. At least I think so. I’m not going shopping until later and I don’t know if I’ll find something that’s up to snuff. I’m hoping to get some kind of lamb that I can marinade quickly and grill, but I can get her Portobello mushrooms. (That’s the other interesting thing. I like mushrooms a lot, but she loves mushrooms and is more than happy to eat more of them). So this may really work out after all. The irony is that she’s told me all along that I could cook whatever for me and she’s fine with something else, but I was always the one to refuse. Now it’s opened a whole new door.

I’ve made a whole lot of other great things of late as well, but haven’t written about them. One of them was something that my wife loved and may be requested for her birthday, so she asked me to write about it so I don’t forget it. I was heading home a little late from work and didn’t want to cook anything too involved because I didn’t want to wait. I had some scallops at home (big sea scallops) and stopped to get some white mushrooms but they were out. So I picked up some shitakes instead and a loaf of bread. I cut a carrot and an onion into brunoise (tiny dice for you non-geeks), sweated them in olive, cut the shitakes in half and then sautéed them quickly, deglazing them with a little white wine and the juice form half and orange. I seared the scallops in a pan with a little olive oil, plated the vegetables in the center of two plates, and then put the cooked scallops on top. I had the other half of the orange left, so I deglazed the scallop pan with orange juice, reduced it and then added a dab of butter to mount it. The sauce went over and around the scallops and I served the bread on the side. I don’t know why I decided to use orange instead of lemon, but it made all the difference. It was incredibly simple, but shows what you can do quickly with good ingredients.

I think the scallops were influenced by reading Gordon Ramsay’s A Chef for All Seasons. Many (most?) people know him as the loud, rude chef from Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, but the guy can cook, really cook. His book has a lot of the things you would expect form a top chef: cook things that are in season, buy great ingredients, etc. Nothing new in that. Every celebrity chef gives that same advice (because it’s true). But his food is really well done. It’s clever without being ostentatious and doesn’t get overly complicated (well for the most part). He also cooks a lot of fish. In fact he likely has more recipes for fish than for various meats. It was interesting to see that his food really is as good as his reputation would suggest. He has a talent for creating dishes that look good, are relatively easy to make and make sense. There’s nothing done for flash or show. All the elements of his dish make sense, even when he mixes seemingly unrelated ingredients. I really should look at more of his food.

Charcuterie Update - Making Hams at Home

I’ve been doing a fair amount of charcuterie at home of late. Although I always do some, it seems that recently, I’ve always had a project going. I’ve been making bacon and pancetta on a regular basis for more than a year and had dabbled with some brine cured hams and things like tasso, but hadn’t really done much curing of other cuts of pork.

Recently, my wife bought a few boneless pork sirloin roasts at a good price. They were about a pound and a half each. My wife isn’t that familiar with various cuts of meat and is apprehensive of buying cuts that she doesn’t specifically know about lest I disapprove and give her a meat lecture using one of the dogs to model where different cuts are from, which normally gets me in a bit of trouble, (though the dog doesn’t seem to mind his part). But the price on these was so good, she decided to give it a shot (after all, they’d make fine dog food if I didn’t want to use them). Sirloin is normally roasted or cut into chops. I did a bunch of research and couldn’t find anyone who had recipes for curing sirloin. The two pieces were about two inches thick and I thought that they’d be fine for curing in a similar manner to pork belly, so I decided to give it a shot.

I coated the outside of one of them with molasses and then added the basic salt/pink salt/sugar cure I normally use. Then I put it in a zip lock bag in the fridge. One thing I have learned in salting and curing is that it’s easy to overestimate how much salt you need. The first few times, I completely coated the cuts which lead to incredibly over salted finished products. It’s hard to describe how much to put on. It’s something you really need to learn by doing it, but eventually I realized that time is more important than the quantity of salt. I light coating will penetrate the meat given enough time. Cuts 2-3 inches thick normally cure in about a week for me. So, you can start it one weekend and finish it the next.

I took my “ham” out of the ziplock after a week, and then washed it well to remove the surface salt. The color had changed and the meat had firmed up. I left it on a cake rack to dry for about 90 minutes before I put it on the smoker. I have a small smoker. It’s nothing fancy. It’s essentially a small metal box with an electric burner in the bottom. You put a small metal pan filled with wood chips on the burner and eventually you get smoke. Because it’s outside, the temperature in the smoker is largely dependant on the ambient temperature outside. In the winter, it gets to about 80-90 degrees inside. On a hot summer day it gets up to about 125 or so. It was a decent spring day (one of the few we’ve had so far) and I put it in the smoker and added some apple wood chips.

Smoking is an art, and it’s not one that I think I’ve mastered by any means. I have found that I prefer fruit wood for most of the things I smoke. I also like hickory for more traditional barbecue type of things. Apple has become the de facto wood for so many small bacon producers (just check out the bacon at any high end retailer and it’s likely apple smoked), but I’ve also used cherry with nice results. This being the northwest, I also have some alder, but it’s something that’s traditionally used more for fish than anything else.

Smoking does a couple of things. Most of us just think about the actual smoke flavor that it gets, but from a curing and preserving stand point, there’s another more important process that happens during smoking. Smoking helps to reduce the water content, which is essential for long term preservation of meat. As meat smokes, it loses water weight and the texture of the meat firms up. That’s why hams are firmer than fresh cuts. For the small scale curing that I do, where I rarely cure anything more than about 4 or 5 pounds, I can smoke things in a single day. I generally give things between 6-12 hours on the smoker. I’d like to say it’s dependant on the cut, size, etc, but just as often it’s determined by how early I get the meat in the smoker.

In my early attempts at smoking, I always over smoked everything by using too much wood. You don’t need a constant stream of smoke. If the chips in the pan burn away, it’s fine. I will refill it partially every few hours, but even if the pan is empty, the drying process continues. The gentle heat from the burner creates an updraft in the burner, which helps to carry away moisture form the meat. If you over smoke the meat, you can end up with a bitter coating on the outside of the meat. Again, time is more important than the amount of chips. Both curing and smoking aren’t things you can rush. Using extra salt and or more chips won’t compensate for the lack of time.

I left this first “ham” on the smoker for about 8 hours and then finished it on the Weber grill where I let it get to an internal temperature of about 155. It was completely firm and when I cut into it, it was a beautiful red color all the way through. The outside had a mahogany patina to it. It tasted wonderful. It was a little saltier than I wanted but not overdone. The smoke flavor was prominent but the outside pieces didn’t taste bitter or resiny. It was certainly better than anything you could buy at the normal supermarkets. You could order a real country ham that was better, but for $1.48 a pound I was pretty well pleased. (And the leftovers made great omelets.)

I have another one curing now and will smoke it this weekend. Last weekend, I finished some maple cured bacon. I used maple syrup as a base and then salted the meat. It was left on the smoker for about 10 hours and came out perfectly. It’s probably the best bacon I’ve made. Unfortunately, the finished weight was only about a pound and a half. It’s interesting using different sweeteners in the process. Even after a week of curing and 10 hours of smoking, you could still smell the maple syrup on the bacon and it still had a slight maple flavor as well. The molasses cure is a little heavier, but works well with ham. I think it might be a bit much for bacon tough.

The most recent Saveur magazine had an article of curing salmon, which I’ve never done but may in the next few weeks.

Blending Lambic

June 7th

Blending Lambic

We’ve been meaning to blend up some more lambic for the past several weeks, but circumstances didn’t work out and things were delayed. We finally did get around to blending and bottling yesterday and it seems like a really good blend. It might be our best batch of Gueuze yet. Blending is incredibly difficult and I don’t think we’re master blenders, and we don’t try to create a consistent style from batch to batch. But we’ve seen that the final blend is always better than any of the single batch.

As a general rule, we try to create a blend that is roughly 25% three year, 50% two year old and 25% one year old. The older beers generally have considerably more character, but we’ve found that you need some young beer as well to give the final blend some freshness and more depth. The base beer is always 67% pils malt and 33% flaked wheat and we use a normal beer yeast for the first week or two, before we put the beer into carboys for aging. The blends of bugs are added to the carboys and we try to mix it up so that each carboy takes on a different character. The more variety in the base beer, the more possibilities in blending. Often we combine left over parts of older lots and consolidate them into gallon jugs or three gallons carboys. We’ve ended up with two jugs which have small portions of all of the first beers we made five years ago. As a general rule, we use half a gallon from each one, then combine them together and fill the other one with whatever is left over from our other older lots. The next time we blend, we’ll use half of each and then combine them again. It’s similar to a solera in that there’s always a portion of old beer in it.

Our normal blending batch is 8 gallons (based upon the size of our largest bottling bucket). We normally use one gallon of this old, solera style blend to add some backbone and complexity. This batch had the following lots blended into it:

1 Gallon of the Super Old “Solera Style” blend (average age about 4 years old)
1 .5 Gallons from a batch from March 2005
1 Gallon from a batch from February 2006
1 Gallon each from two different batches from December 2006
2.5-3 Gallons from a batch from November 2005

The “solera” blend was quite astounding on its own. The oldest lot was incredibly austere with moderate acidity and good length. It had a lot of peach and apricot flavors plus a good dose of horsiness. The March 2005 beer had more lemon/citrus flavors, more acidity, and a distinct smoky note. The February 2006 lot had a lot of pineapple and orange notes. It almost had a tropical fruit type of thing to it and it was considerably softer and less tart than the other batches. It would clearly add some interesting notes to the final blend, but it was my least favorite batch on it’s own. The two different lots from December 2006 were quite interesting. They had been stored indoors as opposed to in the garage. Although they both used different combinations of bugs, they were both incredibly tart and were the most acidic of all of the batches we tasted. Clearly the warmer temperatures from being aged indoors had favored the growth of the lactobacillus. They both had some smokiness as well and some lemon flavors. One of them had a distinct horsiness as well. They were as tart as anything form Cantillon and each sip made my eyelids quiver slightly (seriously). The final batch from November 2005 was interesting. It had the best overall aroma of any single lots. It had a great mix of horse, smoke, peach, citrus and apricot. On the palate, it seemed very sugary and candy-like. The palate and nose were completely different from each other. The final blend had a little bit of everything. It had good, noticeable acidity, and intriguing nose of citrus and stone fruits, smoke and horsiness. The palate had good depth and great length. The deep flavors of the older lots were nicely balanced by some of the younger, rounder, fruitier and sweeter lots. All this could change as it sits and develops in the bottle. I will likely try a bottle in about 2-3 weeks to see if the flavors are holding or if it’s changing. We’ve had some lots that change completely with six months of aging. We’re hoping this one keeps its general balance because it was so good at the time.