Category: Cucina

QTN™: Oud Beersel, Oude Geueze Vielle

I’ve been holding onto this one since my first pilgrimage to Downtown Wine and Spirits. My favorite kind of beer on the planet (very broadly speaking) is Belgian, and my favorite Belgian beer style is geueze, the amazingly complex melding of young and old lambics in one wild-yeast-fermented mouth bomb. And, as of this writing, my favorite geueze might be the Oude Geueze Vielle from the Brouwerij Oud Beersel.

What to say about such a complex beer? The nose is peppery with citrus overtones, with deeper notes of earth. The flavor is a little sweet immediately followed by a yeasty sour depth, with the lingering carbonation picking up the flavor and brightening it again. It’s all in perfect balance, and spectacularly tasty. Almost as refreshing as a Flemish red, but with a bready aftertaste that inevitably recalls Champagne—fitting, as Michael Jackson calls beers in this style “the Champagnes of the beer world.”

Lisa tried a little of this and said, “Wow. That’s different. Save me some.” I regretfully complied, though not without severe temptation.

I tasted this with a non-traditional food accompaniment—a platter of burnt ends and pulled pork from Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q. Somewhat to my surprise, it was a great combination, the sweetness and smokiness of the meat playing perfectly against the breadiness of the beer, and the vinegar in the greens joustling happily against the tartness of the geueze. Belgian beers may not replace sweet tea at Southern roadhouses anytime soon, but they may well at my table from now on.

Mmmm, bacon

The Bacon Show. “ONE BACON RECIPE PER DAY, EVERY DAY, FOREVER.” Um, subscribed.

Via Metafilter, where there are some really alarming links in response, including the Baconoff, a competitive bacon-eating contest party. Surely they can’t mean “each round is one package of bacon” each, can they?

100 Barrels of fun

Boston.com: For Harpoon brewers, it’s all a barrel of fun. An article on Harpoon’s series of limited duration beers reveals that they are all made at the former Catamount brewery in Vermont (which increasingly sounds like a good place to visit). Seems like an odd

Interesting point that Harpoon has taken such care to separate these experiments from its brand, from the different bottle sizes to the new label artwork. (I seem to recall that, except for the maple-syrupy super-premium Triple Bock in the blue glass bottle, their major local competition hasn’t always been so careful.) Harpoon also hasn’t been doing any publicity for these beers at all, as evidenced by the fact that this is the first mainstream press coverage the beers have received in the two years that they’ve been on the market. Apparently they have been working on building word of mouth prior to going wider.

The Sanity Pills blog has a slightly more acerbic take on why we’re just now hearing about these beers from the Globe: “The Boston Globe is quickly becoming the saddest major daily in the nation.”

Finding beer bliss

After almost a year back in the Boston suburbs, I finally made the pilgrimage today to Downtown Wine & Spirits in Somerville. And I’m not going to tell you how much I spent, but I bought nearly a dozen different kinds of beer there.

To back up: it’s been a really nice vacation day. Lisa and I drove up to Devereaux Beach at Marblehead on the North Shore and enjoyed a quiet day on the beach and in and out of the water—mostly out, since the water was about 62°F. While there, we popped in at Flynnie’s at the Beach, and had an OK lunch—I suppose it would have been better if we had more than $10 cash to spend. We had a reasonable lunch for that price, though it is worth remembering that a “seafood salad roll” is likely to fail on two of those three descriptions at $4.95 for the roll. (In this case, the “seafood” was mock crab, and the “roll,” like all New England seafood rolls, was made in a piece of white bread (AKA New England style hot dog buns) rather than any sort of roll.)

After we came home, I decided to check out the beer store at Davis Square that I had heard so much about. I was really glad I did. In addition to the expected Northeast beers (Magic Hat twelve-packs, Dogfish, even the most recent Harpoon 100 Barrel Series beer, Triticus), I found a bunch of Belgians, including a whole shelf-full of different guezes, a number of different French bieres de garde, some unusual British beers (the familiar Entire Butt Porter), and some spectacular American beers (Stone’s Vertical Epic Ale, 2005 issue). I think we’ll be busy for a bit.

QTN™: Dogfish Head Midas Touch

It’s been far too long since I’ve posted beer tasting notes; a reflection, I think, on the limited availability of off-the-wall beers in this little corner of the Boston suburbs, if not on my actual consumption. So it’s with pleasure that I renew the series with notes on the Dogfish Head Midas Touch Golden Elixir.

The backstory of this beer is almost reward enough: analyzing the residues found in drinking vessels in a Minoan grave site, archaeologists found they comprised a mix of grape wine, barley beer and honey mead. Dogfish Head took the finding and ran with it, creating a barley-based beer in which the yeast was fed with honey and Muscat grapes, with a little saffron added for color and bitterness. But the taste of the beer is almost as complex as its origin. Starting with a nose a bit like a Duvel (or other golden Belgian ale), the taste is sweet without a hint of the complex esters (banana or bread flavors) normally found in more complex ales. But a second after the first swallow, you get the part that balances the sweetness: the 9% ABV that provides the counterpoint to the up-front sweetness. There is a little bit of dry-cracker taste, as with more expensive wines made with méthode champenoise, providing the other counterpoint to the honey flavor.

This is one sophisticated beer. And as the alcohol content suggests, it should be drunk accordingly: in small quantities, preferably with friends about with whom you can share your reactions.

Potboiler

To paraphrase something that Fury wrote this weekend: if there is anything more exciting than boiled dinner, it’s making boiled dinner; and if there is anything more exciting than making boiled dinner, it’s blogging about making boiled dinner. “Lucky you!”

Ah, but the line between New England boiled dinner and a celebratory corned beef and cabbage is very fine—mostly it depends on the presence or absence of horseradish and turnips, apparently. And on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to cheerily conflate the two. So, having packed Lisa and her mom off to the New England Flower Show, I started getting things ready.

I had a few other things I wanted to cook at the same time. We had roasted a chicken the previous night, and I wanted to get rid of its carcass (plus the other two carcasses in the freezer) by making stock. Also, Lisa’s dad had put in a request for Boston brown bread, which turns out to be made by steam-cooking a can filled with batter consisting of graham flour, cornmeal, and rye flour (mixed with buttermilk, molasses and baking soda) for several hours. So that turned out to be three large stockpots atop a stove that could really only comfortably fit two.

I started the stock first (dead easy, incidentally: tie a carrot, several parsley stems, a celery stalk, and bay leaf together with cooking twine; add an onion in large chunks; throw in whatever chicken bones and odd scraps you have handy; cover with water; simmer for several hours, skimming as you go; remove the solids and simmer a little longer to concentrate the stock and skim off any remaining fat) and then got the bread steaming. Somewhat to my surprise, the bread came out beautifully, sliding out of its can (I used a butttered pannetone mold covered with foil) with no resistance, and just needing a few minutes in a 350º oven to firm up the sticky top.

So that was one big boiling pot off the stove, leaving enough room to start the boiled dinner. Which was good, since the recipe I consulted suggested simmering the corned beef for five hours and it was almost 1 pm. I plopped two corned beef briskets (thank you, Costco, for cheap meat) and their spice packets in a big stockpot, covered with water, and brought the thing to a boil, then backed it down to a simmer. And that’s all I really did, except for pouring a can of Guinness into the pot an hour in.

The beautiful things about the meal were: 1) the boiling. On a wetly snowy winter day, as many things should be boiled as possible; 2) the lack of interference needed. I was able (with Lisa’s dad’s assistance) to remove a door that normally goes sticky in summertime when it swells with humidity and get the bare wood top and bottom of the door painted, hopefully mitigating the problem, while the corned beef (and my stock) simmered; 3) the flavor. The vegetables, added in the last hour or so, were good, but the corned beef was spectacular—falling-apart moist and flavorful without being overly salty. And Lisa declared the Boston brown bread her new favorite.

Valentine’s Day = Duck

Or at least it has for us for the past eight years. I proposed to Lisa eight years ago after a meal of duck and angel-food cake. This year the variation was in the sauce, and the source of the duck. The duck breasts were from Wilson Farm (I think technically from Maple Leaf Farms), and the sauce was a blood orange sauce courtesy of the Boston Globe. I think the blackberry and maple sauce was better, but Lisa really liked the blood orange sauce. So now we have options. And, once again, we learned that angel food cake from scratch, while romantic, loses something compared to the kind out of the box.

Winter foodathon

I hinted in the last post that I would be cooking today. In fact, the winter foodathon actually started earlier this week. The first salvo was a butternut squash soup. We haven’t done a lot of squash stuff generally—but this was fabulous. Roast a squash split in half, cook onions and ginger in butter, add squash and broth and cook, puree, add more butter, serve. Wow.

I actually made bread on Friday, albeit in a microwave. Whaa…? you cry. Yep. My working recipe was from James Beard, but most of the ones that Google finds are pretty close.

Saturday was a no-cooking day. We did go to the Beer Summit—despite the impending snowstorm—and made a couple of discoveries. To wit: Never complain to a brewfest volunteer that a keg is skunked (they can’t do anything about it); always seek out the tables manned by people from the brewery; and when you’re tired of high-octane American brews, their cousins from the continent will provide some well needed balance. For instance, this jewel—Kriek de Ranke, which includes yeast strains that came from Rodenbach; the Jopen Koyt Gruit Beer, hopless but spectacular; the Paulaner Salvador doppelbock, always a favorite; the Moretti La Rossa, an unexpected Italian delight; North Coast’s Old Stock Ale, just about a dead ringer for Thomas Hardy’s Ale; and the various offerings of the Konigshaven brewery, including a winter-ale spiced Quadrupel which became a favorite of our crowd. Never fear: the samples were all small, and the long blizzardly walk back to the T plus the ride back to Alewife were sufficient to strike sobriety into anyone’s heart prior to the short drive back home.

Today: snow—as discussed in the previous post—and food. Pancakes and bacon in the morning. Pancakes reminded me that I need to level our stove—instead of round pancakes, I got oblongs because of the slight front to back tilt—and change our baking powder, which we’ve had for six years and appears to have gone stale, accounting for our flat rubbery pancakes. Ah well, the coffee and bacon were good. Lunch was skipped in favor of dinner—homemade pappardelle with a Renaissance inspired ragú made with beef, onion, cinnamon, black pepper, and broth. And we haven’t seen the last of the snow yet. Tomorrow: broccoli risotto, probably, and a roast chicken, and… and maybe a thaw before I gain twenty pounds.

Ah well. It beats the blizzard of 1996, when my housemates and I found that the foods that lingered were year-old horrible brews from departed friends (the “cider” in particular was pure nasty) and a massive bowl of handmade whipped cream.

To drive the cold winter away

There’s something about cold winter days that makes me yearn for a good, strong, flavorful beer. (Of course, I feel that way on cool spring and autumn days, too, but work with me on this for a second.) The fine folks at BeerSummit.com are catering to that with a beery Winter Jubilee at which I will be tasting from a range of beers from over 30 brewers, including some famous and less famous Belgian, English and American producers. The producers wisely recommend not driving to the event, as none of the beers served will be less than 7% ABV.

Tip o’ the hat to Niall for finding this gem. I’ll report my observations sometime this coming weekend, after we find our way home.

Campania gets respect

lisa, antonio mastroberardino, and me

New York Times: Modern Love for Ancient Vines in Southern Italy. The article provides an outstanding introduction to the viticulture of Campania, including all the usual suspects: Feudi, Mastroberardino, even Riccardo Cotarella. The article talks about the growing recognition of the importance of wines made with the indigenous grapes: aglianico, fiano, falanghina, and greco.

Now seems an appropriate time to post the pictures from our 2000 visit to Mastroberardino, including our meeting the Marchese (right).

Words of advice

When cooking pork tenderloins that have been brined, rinse the meat before cooking it, and don’t bother adding salt to the sauce.

That’s all, really.

Oh, I’ll have some words about the Mac Mini later, but I have to go drink a lot more water. Fortunately my guests are pretty understanding.

Cotechino? Cotechini? Zamponi?

We had Charlie and Carie over last night for a traditional New Year’s meal of cotechino and lentils—we upped the ante by serving them over homemade pappardelle in a sauce that also featured fresh sage, onions, and pancetta. (Skip’s Italian Food Blog: Felice Capo d’Anno talks a little more about the tradition).

Interestingly, Lisa had trouble communicating with our normally simpatico Abruzzese butcher to get the cotechino. They went back and forth for three or four different dialect variations until they settled on cotechini—which I suppose is just a plural, after all. But it didn’t resemble what we remembered—the sausages were much smaller, while we remembered great big 2-inch-diameter sausages. I think what we had had before was zampone, which is the same filling in a larger skin. It was delicious anyway.