Food – Page 12 – A Good Beer Blog

Grill, Shed, Steak, Rain, Bieres de Garde And Saisons

The trouble with charcoal grilling is that when the rain comes you can’t turn it off. Propane, on the other hand, has a nice dial that has a “0” setting. But there is the garden shed and, when it rains and you have visitors, it can turn out to be a delightful place to while away a late afternoon hour reading last week’s newspapers in the recycling bin, listening to AM radio and comparing a few examples of bieres de garde and saisons.

We opened the Ch’ti Blonde from Brasserie Castelain à Bénifontaine first, a gold ale called a saison (though French not Belgian) by the BAers but a biere de garde by Phil Markowski in his book Farmhouse Ales under a white mouse head that resolved to a froth and rim. It was the favorite of the set with cream malted milk, pear juice and nutty grain. Very soft water. I actually wrote “limpid cream of what graininess” but I am a little embarrassed by that pencil scribble. It gets a fairly poor rating from the BAers but maybe that is because they were not in a shed when they tried it. Castelain’s Blond (no “e”) Biere de Garde was drier but still creamy fruity, not far off the greatest example of a Canadian export ale. Light sultana rather than pear. Also dry in the sense of bread crusty rather than astringency. Lighter gold than the Ch’ti but, again, the rich firm egg white mousse head and far more BAers approve. By this time the shed dwellers had decided that steak could in fact be finger food and also that these ales were an excellent pairing with chunks of rib and New York strip. The Jenlain Ambree by Brasserie Duyck was another level of richness altogether, the colour of a chunk of deep smoked Baltic amber, the richest lacing I have ever seen left on a glass. Hazelnut and raisin, brown sugar and black current with a hint of tobacco. Lately I have been thinking that amber ales are the one style that could quietly slip away and never be missed. Placing this in the glass in the hand in the shed as the rain thumped on the roof and steak was eaten was an instructive treat as to what ambers can be, though 6% of BAers hesitate to be so enthusiastic.

I think this is the worst photo I have ever posted so I will keep it tiny unless you choose to click on it for the full effect. Apparently there is a limit to the beery photographic arts and I have made it my own. The 3 Monts to the left was picked up at Marche Jovi in nearby Quebec for a stunningly low price of under six bucks. Plenty of malteser and pale malt graininess with yellow plum and apple fruitiness, straw gold with more of the thick rich head, cream in the yeast. The water was not as soft was either beer from Castelain but all BAers love it. By Brasserie De Saint-Sylvestre who also made this biere nouvelle. To the right, the Fantome Winter was one of the stranger beers I have ever had and, frankly, a disappointment. All I could taste was radish, sharp and vegetative, over and all around the insufficient malt. In my ignorance, I didn’t realize that was likely quite an aged beer as the happy BAers explain. Neither the cork or even label, with its unmarked best before portion, give a hint as to the year but that is all right as I suspect I will consider this just a lesson learned even though I generally love Fantome.

By this time there were stars and a breeze as the cold front finished moving through.

Friday Bullets For Tra-la It’s May!

I was not so much in a production of Camelot as I was part of the production. OK, I raised curtains. I sat in a closet for a week’s worth of evenings when I was 14 and raised curtains. But I heard the “tra-la, it’s may song” more than most humans have and I really don’t mind it that much. I bet Iggy is saying tra-la this weekend. It is sort of like listening to Robert Goulet, so manly and mapled. By the way, when preparing for a conference I spoke at this week, I was quite pleased to learn that, no, I did not have a head shot for the materials. Why do people lean at a 17% angle for promotional head shots?

I am not sure whether buying a bit of Chrysler is a good idea for us all. I mean, I have not been in one since the old Dodge Diplomat died around 1993 – no, not true – I drive an inherited van here in 2003 before trading that in at Ford.
How to deal with invasive species – eat them. Shows them who’s top of the food chain.
I had no idea that the Edwards Opera House was so close. Now that I have a passport I may nip over for a bluegrass Saturday night sometime. Which reminds me – we are weeks away from the Watertown Wizards.
Stephen Fry on something other than Twitter – thinking about himself at 16.
Ted Reynolds, CBC 70s and 80s sports reporter and part of my youth passes away.
Why isn’t PEI just a column in the paper every day like “your daily smile” except it would be “look what happened in PEI today!” and it would have a story like this one about the Environment Minister telling everyone how great it was when he was a kid and dynamited beaver dams. And they sell citizenships for profit, too!
The season finale of Private Practice last night was the worst hour of TV ever but it was like watching a shopping mall burn – can’t stop staring as careers are destroyed.

That is it. Vintage base ball tomorrow. A three team event, too. We even have hats this year. And I will be sporting a hurlihee and a part well to the side. Huzzah.

Belgium: Amber Ale, Brasserie Caracole, Falmignoul

Arrosto misto. That is what the Jamie Oliver book I was thumbing through this morning called it. Mixed roasted meats. What better way to see out January, that month that begins with a hangover and ends with February. The meats were rolled in olive oil with rosemary, lemon and a little smoky chili. They were also wrapped in lean pancetta. Including the sausages. A worthy addition to my life. All slow roasted with thick slices of onion, apple, lemon and carrot. The side dish is a sort of scalloped spud, mushroom and anise thing I made up.

I needed a beer to go with it and the earthiness of Caracole’s amber ale was just the thing. It pours still with a quickly resolved head giving it the appearance of scotch. On the nose, plenty of nutmeggy spice as well as sweet malt. In the mouth, fall apple, cream, nutmeg, raisin with a solid level of twiggy and slightly minted hopping. Really lovely and very good with the smoky, meaty, root veg meal. BAers give solid respect.

The Sort Of Pub I Wish I Lived Near

I have to admit that I am not exactly a guy with a regular pub. Frankly, when I head to the States on holiday with our pals like I will tomorrow for ten days, I am more likely to have a favorite bar I go to regularly than I would have here. But none are like the pub mentioned at the BBC today, “The Pigs” at Edgefield:

Locals at a village pub in Norfolk are beating the credit crunch by bartering home-grown produce for pints. The Pigs public house, in Edgefield, near Holt, encourages drinkers to contribute to its traditional food menu in return for free alcohol. A sign placed inside the pub reads: “If you grow, breed, shoot or steal anything that may look at home on our menu, bring it in and let’s do a deal.”

Who wouldn’t want to go to a pub where this could happen: “someone will say ‘that rabbit tasted great’ and we say ‘here, meet the person who shot it’.” But it’s not the food that particularly attracted me when I checked out the pub’s website, it’s the games. Sure there are quizzes, darts, billiards, dominoes and even shove ha’penny but right there to the lower left of the page so generously titled simply “drinking” it says you can play “I Spy“. What better indication of a genial spirit than the invitation to spy with one’s little eye something that begins with “J”.

Ron Meets Zoigl And Zoigl Meets Ron

Ron’s plate o’ meat
Ron’s Spring ’08 central European road trip with Andy has been fun to follow but today’s installment has to be the best. In it he uncovers a local brewing tradition played out in one small German region, watches people eat a lot of meat, finds a new hop-based spirit to drink and decides to spend the night. But the traditions of brewing this one beer, Zoigl, is a little weird:

Back at our hotel, Andy has a chat with the landlord. Yes, he does have Zoigl on. Hooray! Even though the official Zoigl time ended on Sunday (it’s Tuesday, if you’ve lost track). He has a little flyer with the Zoigl schedule for the year printed on it. They’re very well organised. Each of the five brewing families in Neuhaus takes it in turns to sell Zoigl Thursday to Sunday. Like I said, it’s Tuesday. Once a year (3rd of October in 2008), all five Zoigl families sell beer simultaneously. I’ll mark that date in my calendar.

It’s Zoigl-tastic! It’s so Zoigl-tastic I suspect if this beer were called Neuhausbrau or, say, zblat or something else I would not be nearly as interested. But what really amazes me is that there isn’t a TV crew following Ron around on these tours. Surely – if there is a golf channel and a world fishing network – there must be an appetite for a station that follows a group of eloquent middle aged beer hounds around rooting out the back woods beer traditions of small communities. And describing the local smoked meats that go with them. As they get snapped.

We need to put out nickels together and make this happen.

Three Days And Three Side Orders Of Onion Rings

I got to tick two new to me diners off the list during this weekend’s central New York, The Glenwood Pines Restaurant in Ulysses down near Ithaca as well as the Crystal Restaurant in downtown Watertown. I think the first place dates in part from the late ’40s while the second is an all-1920’s kinda spot. I never did take a photo of the quite admirable onion rings at Shorty’s, also in Watertown, though. On Friday night, on the way south, we walked into selection of NY state fish fry specials. I had a slab of haddock on a bun the size of your forearm. I wonder where they got the fish? Maybe Norway.

Saturday at noon, the double Pinewood special, as illustrated, set me back $8.95 and I had onion rings and battered corn nuggets, too. I had no idea what a battered corn nugget was but that was even more reason to try. Turned out to be a little lump of creamed corn in a sweet dough. Dandy stuff. I was seriously doubtful of my capacity to suck back the burger but it was delightful with a Genny Cream as the kids played the bowling game. A good place for having a beer as kids run around and the food was particularly good diner grub. Again, very reliable onion ring action.

The Crystal Restaurant was a different kind of experience but certainly still a good joint. As I mentioned, it is pushing 90 years and the interior is all original wood panel and tin ceiling with a deep patina of most of those 90 years worth of smoking. Warning: the angle of the backs in the wooden booths is particularly Presbyterian. Best diner coffee ever anywhere ever. Great smoky bacon and my hot pork sandwich was as creamy bland as the dish demands. The only way you can get me to eat canned peas is on a hot chicken or pork sandwich. A solid finale to a weekend of onion rings, too. The place is also a little quirky, enhanced to a certain degree by the young soldier, an assistant chaplain no less, who was talking on his cell phone in too loud a voice about how he was going to marry someone just to get an increase in his army pay. He seemed to have it all figured out even though the girl, astonishingly, seemed (according to the tale to which all were subject) to actually get wed to the heel.

The pre-school girls of one family in their church clothes asked to help the waitress clear the table and they carried their own glasses and plates to the kitchen wearing big excited smiles, maybe like they did every weekend. Anyway, even though the place serves a solid all day breakfast and burgers and such, the bar was a stream of cocktails on a Sunday noon. Manhattans and whiskey on ice were the main drinks. Apparently the Crystal makes an old style hot egg nog or flip sort of thing at Christmas that the locals swear by. Here is an archived NCPR report on the place.

Sour Beer Studies: Sweet, Sour And… The Brewmaster’s Table

I have been a bad beer blogger. I just got a copy of Garrett Oliver’s The Brewmaster’s Table. One baaad beer blogger. And not bad like ManRam says either. The fact is, I thought it was really more like The Brewmaster’s “Kitchen” and had expected it was more like a recipe book. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Lucy Saunders obviously does a great job at telling us how to cook with beer. But I didn’t feel drawn to another similar one.

How wrong I was. How shallow the uninquisitive mind. This is a great and valuable text. No wonder everyone recommends it. Let me be a guest late to this party. It is well laid out with sections of the traditions of the great brewing nations, a discussion of the major styles found in each, examples and their properties as well as a description of the foods that go with each. It is the table because it is what a craft brewer would (and does) place place before himself in terms of food and drink. Good. Handy.

For present purposes, though, the book provides me with one thing that no one else in my meager span of attention had mention. Many traditional sour beers – and especially the sourest – were not intended to be consumed without sweetening. See, this is what has always bugged me about lambics and gueuze. We do the medievals and thems that followed a disservice when we say that the pure raw lip puckering drink is what they would have consumed. First of all, most of them would have consumed mostly unhopped ales bittered with gruit made and swallowed within a few days. Then, few would have had access to the resources required to buy aged ale, including any which might have been aged for souring. Additionally, those that were aged were likely aged within the annual cycle as is most every other agricultural product. These general observations seem both logical and consistent with the histories by Cornell, Haydon, Hornsey and Unger. Plus I have another pet theory – no one drinks extremely sour things without a certain purpose and sour in beer has long standing recognition as a failing in brewing.

But I have gone over that before in these sour beer studies. What is new is the mention made of one tradition of Belgian lambic drinkers – as opposed to its brewers – described in The Brewmaster’s Table. At page 71, comparing dry lambics to their sweet siblings, Oliver states:

Lambic afficiandos are given to frothing at the mouth when the latter versions are mentioned, but I feel both types have their place. Don’t forget that some people always sweetened their beers, when they could afford it – sugar was once a luxury.

Sadly, I can not longer wallow in vindication dancing the merry jig as these studies have given me both respect and a taste for the sour beers of Belgium. I still find Cantillon too stark but that is like saying Guinness is too dark. It simply is. And sour for me now holds an interesting and worthy place in the beery pantheon.

But, still, there is comfort knowing that now and likely in the past people did not suffer austere acidity except as a mild fetish or a consequence of poverty. Two traditional styles, neither of which I have tried as they are quite localized, confirm how sweetening may have been undertaken, Berliner weisse and faro. Berliner weisse is a German sour brew uniformly taken with a sweet fruity syrup and preserving sweets is entirely reasonable as a form of storage though the centuries. I would expect that facing another pitcher of dry lambic before him on the table, your average 16th centurian may well have had a spoon in the jelly or honey jar next to it. In addition to Berliner weisse, Belgian faro is described as a “low-alcohol, slightly sweet table beer made from lambic to which brown sugar has been added” – taken on draft, again, it is a reasonable approach to making a rather restrictive brew more approachable for the many.

Point? I am relieved to find this confirmation from somewhere that lambics were sweetened by drinkers in much the same way as the old guys shook the salt over their draft in the Nova Scotian taverns of my youth. People, as we learned from Depeche Mode, are people. Other point? Buy The Brewmaster’s Table.

Baltimore Pit Beef For Christmas

Highlight of the last bit of 2007 (and have you realized that we are 3/4s though the first decade of the 21st century?) is going to be a trip to Baltimore. I got invited last Christmas to write a chapter of a book called Beer and Philosophy and now we are invited to the book launch.

Being a 20 watt bulb in the brightly lit world that is beer writing has a few perks and none is so perkier [Ed.: wow, did that came out wrong!] than the genial clan of more senior writers who will answer important questions like the one I posed to Lew Bryson about where to find the best BBQ in Baltimore:

The thing you want in Bawlmer is pit beef, a sinfully delish pile of rare, juicy beef piled high on a roll. There are several of these joints out on Pulaski Highway (like in this catty review: I liked Chaps, so there, nyah. I understand Big Al’s is closed now…sigh. More at this Chowhound link which also makes reference to the Double T local chain of diners (WELL worth your time for breakfast, my friend) and while some of them are not in the most savory of locations, the beef is nothing but. Pit beef is kinda like spiedies in that for some odd reason it’s never really traveled, but is definitely worshipful in situ.

Fabulous. Having already, in 2007, checked the wonderful western NY sandwich called a “weck” off my list of local US foods, the prospect of pit beef adds another layer of glowing orange to my vision of the next Yule. I found a great article from 2000 in the New York Times that further elaborates the concept:

Pit beef is Baltimore’s version of barbecue: beef grilled crusty on the outside, rare and juicy inside and heaped high on a sandwich. Several things make it distinctive in the realm of American barbecue. For starters, pit beef is grilled, not smoked, so it lacks the heavy hickory or mesquite flavor characteristic of Texas- or Kansas City-style barbecue. It is also ideally served rare, which would be unthinkable for a Texas-style brisket. Baltimore pit bosses use top round, not brisket, and to make this flavorful but tough cut of beef tender, they shave it paper-thin on a meat slicer.

Then there’s the bread: the proper way to serve pit beef is on a kaiser roll or, more distinctively, on rye bread. The caraway seeds in the rye reflect the Eastern European ancestry of many Baltimoreans in this part of town and add an aromatic, earthy flavor to the beef. Finally, there is the sauce. No ketchup, brown sugar and liquid smoke, as you would find in Kansas City. No Texas-style chili hellfire or piquant vinegar sauces in the style of North Carolina. The proper condiment for Baltimore pit beef is horseradish sauce — as much as you can bear without crying. And speaking of crying, you need slices of crisp, pungent white onion to make the sandwich complete.

This is all so excellent. One of my gripes as a Canadian is that there are few actual local foods. We can speak of Quebec cuisine (whether lowly comforting poutine or the selection of game that you do not get in English speaking Canada) and we can think of the seafood of Atlantic Canada but these are entire ranges of food based on local resources. A phenomenon at far too high a level. No, what I love about traveling in the US is that local thing on a bun that is made only in that neighbourhood or those couple of counties: Rochester’s garbage plate or the various regional BBQs of the Carolina, the pinnacle of one of which Lew encountered this week. Where is our Fat Boy fish sandwich with a wild blueberry frappe? Our humble hot or our bap and square? Where is our Chocolate Boston – which I have learned is made even more over the top at Purity Dairy by placing an entire sundae on top of a milk shake?

Session 8: Food and Beer With Lucy Saunders

Most excellent! I forgot it was session day today and the topic is food and beer as picked by the poetical industrial complex behind Beer Haiku Daily. As it happens, a few weeks ago…or more likely months…beer cook extraordinaire Lucy Saunders was kind enough to forward a review copy of her handy book Grilling with Beer – with, I just noticed, a very nice inscription. And, as it turns out, I took today off to make an extra long weekend and as it turns out it is the last stinking hot day of the year here at the east end of Lake Ontario. So it is time to BBQ and we are ‘cueing and brewing with Lucy.

Updates throughout the day as I review my options, pick my victims and start the fire.

Later: OK. Things can take surprising turns as I seem to have wanted to deal with (by which I mean “eat”) the entire ark with a shoulder and center roasts of pork, beef and pork rib and lamb sausages – and corn…and bunch of peppers, too. My theory of BBQ is that if you are going to spark the dang thing up you may as well cook from match to the final orange glow. Going through Lucy’s book, I decided to do a dry rub and a beer mop for the most of it and cook everything on a slow smoke.

So I got out a bottle of Black Irish Plain Porter, chopped up some cilantro, red pepper and green onion for the mop. For the rub, I put together kosher salt, paprika, cayenne, ginger, cumin, fennel seed and a few other things. An hour and a half on the dry rub and then on to the grill with a steady supply of dampened smoking wood added as I went along.

In the end we were left with an insane amount of meat…unless you believe that is something of an oxymoron. As I mopped, I had a Southern Tier IPA as well as a Great Lakes 666 Devil’s Pale Ale, a new LCBO listing here in Easlakia. Both were solid BBQ brews for the last hot day of the year.

So was I cliche going with the BBQ? Should I have made beer ice cream or a lager and partridge tarte? Not a chance. Beer is the partner to the flaming pit and is where the sweet notes and smoky tones play out best. And that porter mop added a layer chocolate espresso over the bite of the pepper adding even more depth. Even though I didn’t follow a particular recipe, Grilling with Beer is a source of great inspiration if you are into this sort of thing and a book I will return to again and again for great ideas for cooking with beer outdoors.

Trying To Recall Cafe Wim

I don’t know why I woke up and asked myself what it was I liked to order at the long shut Cafe Wim on Sussex near the market in Ottawa in the mid-90s. I was awake the best part of an hour involuntarily trying to remember. There are enough references on the internet but I can’t find a picture of the large Dutch flag flapping out front facing the HQ of Revenue Canada. I think it might have just been the pot…no, basin of cafe au lait, open faced sandwishes on rye with thin onion, the college lassies in black and bulky sweaters reading and smoking, pre-wi-fi, the mismatched furniture and the staff who exuded accusations of poserism as they themselves posed. In the back there was the semi-abandoned odd dark split levels of Expo-67-meets-Holland furnishings, beyond that a patio. I was there the weekend before the last Quebec Referendum. It was like this but this is not it. It was a stage on a Saturday afternoon before ending at Irene’s.