Beer Update

The Belgian Tripel that I have in the fermenter right now is going beautifully so far--not bragging or anything.  The temperature is holding at a steady 68°F which is like Disneyland for yeast.  The airlock has been steadily bubbling for the last week or so and it's been very encouraging.  So encouraging, in fact, that I've decided to bang out another five gallon batch of brew right on the heels of the Tripel.

Heather took a bread making class at Brooklyn Kitchen--an establishment at which Heather and I have taken a handful of classes, some of them beer related--and she suggested that if I were to brew another beer, I could use her 10% class discount to buy ingredients.  I said let's do it.  It wasn't until that very night that I decided on the beer to brew.  I decided on a coffee stout.

My "stout"

As loyal readers may recall, I tried my hand at a stout earlier in the year.  The result was a drinkable beer, but very pale.  I had a couple of theories about what went wrong with the color--maybe I didn't steep the grains for long enough or maybe I didn't get the right kind of malt.  A lot of things could have happened.  That beer marked the first time that I selected the ingredients myself rather than have the home brew shop assemble them for me.  I got the recipe from the Keystone Homebrew website--a great resource for extract brewing recipes--but I got the ingredients from Brooklyn Kitchen.  As a result, I had to make substitutions for some ingredients that they didn't carry.

It didn't occur to me until two nights ago--after I picked up the ingredients for this upcoming batch--that the grains need to be milled or crushed.  Every time I get my ingredients from Keystone, they prep the grains and blend them together.  Part of that preparation includes milling the grains so that the hot water can get access to the starch inside the grain and turn it into fermentable sugar.  Brooklyn Kitchen will not automatically do that for you, which explains the pale color and the low Original Gravity (1.040 as opposed to the 1.050 that the recipe estimated).  I felt (feel) like an idiot, but I am happy that it's no longer a mystery.  The code is cracked and I'm excited to move forward.

As luck would have it, Heather left her phone at Brooklyn Kitchen after her class.  She called them the next day and had them set it aside to be picked up later.  The phone retrieval gave me an excuse to go back, hat in hand, and ask them to let me mill my grains.  They were happy to oblige.

Whenever I get the kits from Keystone Homebrew, they give me the Wyeast smack packs of yeast that inflate when you burst the little bag inside.  When I go to Brooklyn Kitchen and pick out my own stuff, I get the White Labs vial of Irish Ale Yeast.  There's really not a great deal of difference between the two, but the vial makes me feel like more of a scientist.  The smack pack--while effective--makes me feel like I'm about to treat a sports injury.  Hopefully with my properly cracked grain, I'll be able to give the yeast a little more fermentable sugar to feed on.

I am very excited to return to beer brewing after this long hot summer.  I spent a good chunk of yesterday cleaning used bottles with my bottle brush and removing their labels with steel wool, which works leaps and bounds better than the scouring side of our dish sponge.  Heather is slowly getting used to the amassing of bottles in the apartment and has been putting up with it like a saint.

Bottling day for the Tripel is a week from today and I'll be able to drink it two weeks after that.  The recipe suggests that the beer could benefit from a secondary fermentation in a glass carboy.  Unfortunately, I don't own a glass carboy so I'll be skipping that step.  As far as I've come with beer brewing, there is still so far to go.  I suppose that's one of the things that keeps me interested; there's always going to be more complex and elaborate things you can do to make your beer better.

Mushroom Barley Soup

I'm not sure I'm ever going to get around to making Beef Bourguingnon. Last summer it was all the rage after the release of Julie and Julia, one of Julia Child's most famous dishes. But... it was July. Beef Bourguingnon is a heavy beef stew, one that requires leaving your oven on for four hours. In the insane heat of my un-airconditioned apartment, there was no way that was on the menu last summer. I told myself come winter I will make it. Somehow though, the winter slipped by me. I decided I must hurry up, so this last week I rented The French Chef off of Netflix, and watched the very first episode of Julia's famous show, watched her saute and chop and roast until she had a perfect dinner. It's a classic and I highly recommend you watch it.

I would have gotten down to work, but I don't know if you saw what the weather was like in NY this past weekend, but it was beautiful. Fifty degrees, sunny, birds chirping, and all I could think about were flowery dresses and Spring. Had it been rainy, hanging out in my apartment all afternoon as my dinner roasted would have been lovely, but it was sunny, and I could not remain indoors. Sorry readers, maybe some rainy chilly spring weekend I'll tackle this French comfort food, but this weekend I went to a coffee shop on the Upper East Side, read the paper and sipped an iced cappuccino.

I did however, still require dinner that night. Tucking my paper into my bag, I decided to try my luck shopping at Citrellia, a gourmet shop in the East 70's. It has that fancy food shop thing where everything is arranged really pretty, which makes you suspicious that they are overcharging you. Luckily, the things I bought where comparatively well priced compared to what I've paid in other places, so I got out of there with only one impulse purchase. Good for me.

With the nice weather (and the approach of swimsuit season) I wanted veggies, and if I couldn't make stew I would make soup. A few weeks ago I took a class in soups at the Brooklyn Kitchen, and didn't even come close to fainting this time. We made three soups in class, a Roasted Butternut Squash (too autumn) an Almond Gazapacho (way too summer) and a Mushroom Barley soup. Perfect. The root veggies of winter, with a hint of what's to come with a leek. The barley would give it a fuller texture, while providing amino acids and fiber. It was healthy, and full of flavor. The class was full of good tips, like how to properly clean leeks and mushrooms (let soak in cold water for a minute, then agitate. Sand falls right to the bottom) and that if you are running around with way too much to do in the kitchen while your veggies are sweating, and you just aren't going to get to them before they burn, throw in half a ladle of stock. You're going to add it later anyway and it buys you a bit of time.

Despite my not making Julia's dish this time around, I learned something from her show, and that was how to tell how fresh your mushrooms are, and if the stem is usable. If the flesh of the mushroom cap meets the stem underneath, it is a very fresh mushroom and you can incorporate the stem. If the flesh has separated and the gills are showing (the edge of the cap should still be curled under), you should probably remove the stem and throw it away. The cap is still usable, however. If the edge of the cap is flipping out, that is not a fresh mushroom.

Mushroom Barley Soup

Adapted from Chef Brendan McDermott

Ingredients:

-2 tablespoons olive oil

-1 tablespoon unsalted butter

-1 pound of hulled barley

-2 carrots, sliced

-1 leek, diced and cleaned

-2 stalks of celery, sliced

-4 cloves of garlic, diced

- 20 oz of mushrooms, sliced

-1/4 cup of white wine (optional)

-2 Quarts of Stock or Water (The class used veggie, I used beef, go with your gut here)

-Soy Sause to taste

-1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

-3/4 teaspoon dried thyme

Directions:

In large stock pot heat oil until hot but not smoking. Add oil and butter. When bubbles subside, saute mushrooms in batches until tender (about 4 minutes per batch). Set aside.

Add carrots to the pot and sweat for 3 minutes. Add celery and garlic and sweat for 2 minutes. Add leeks and sweat for 1-2 minutes. If necessary, deglaze with white wine, and let reduce for 2 minutes.

Add barley and stir. Add the stock and the reserved mushrooms, with any liquid that might have accumulated. Simmer 10 to 15 minutes. During the last 5 minutes of cooking, and herbs and soy sauce.

That's it! If my directions seem less then scientific, you should see the notes I was given in class. That 1 pound of hulled barley? It was given to me as 1# Barley. Thank god I thought to ask. The main idea here is that it's soup, you can do whatever you want with it. I didn't use 2 carrots, I used 1, because I don't really like carrots. This recipe is a great template to do basically whatever you want. I'm thinking about deglazing with red wine next time and then replacing a cup of stock with red wine. I may even incorporate meat at some point, cause I'm just that crazy.

One other fantastic thing about the arrival of spring. As I strolled around Citrellia, looking at its fancy food, I spotted it from across the room. One of those seasonal happy moments when your taste buds are about to know it's spring. I spotted Fleur de Maquis cheese. It is entirely possible this cheese is available all year long, but my affair with it is strictly a March and April fling. It is a sheep's milk cheese, hand made in France and rolled in rosemary, fennel seeds, juniper berries, and a few chilies. It is soft and slightly sweet, and the herbs make you think of lamb and asparagus and that first breeze of the year that carries the smell of grass on it. It makes you want to pop open a bottle of wine, cut some fresh bread, and wiggle your toes in that grass, all while wearing a pretty dress with flowers on it. Welcome spring. Sorry Julia.

Those Magical Micro-organisms

As part of our ongoing quest to gain more knowledge about the world around us (funny how the world around us is usually a bar,) we decided to sign up for a brewer's yeast class at the Brooklyn Kitchen. Ever since our knife skills class, Heather has had her ear to the ground for new and interesting classes. (Since that class they have been expanding. When we took our first class the instruction happened at a crowded counter toward the back of the store, which was slightly nerve wracking as we were all using sharp objects within inches of each other. Now they have opened a completely separate space a few blocks from the original store on Frost Street, complete with two full teaching spaces and a high end butcher shop. They have also included retail sales at the new location, mostly of consumable goods but some kitchen equipment too. The bulk of their kitchen tools still remain at the old space on Lorimer Street.) The instructor was a guy named Chris who works as a brewer at the Brooklyn Brewery.

The class was close to three hours long, but I found it pretty helpful. Even if I'm hearing a lot of the things that I've already read about in my beer book, it's good to hear it from an actual human being. It give me reassurance that people actually do these things. Much of the class was practical advice about the role of yeast in brewing, specifically home brewing--the history, the science behind fermentation, the differences between strains, the flavors it can add or subtract from the beer, the ideal conditions for yeast to remain healthy, and so on. Some of the specific subject matter was a little over my head but much of the class was made up of neophytes like me, so many of the questions were ones that I had too.

A fringe benefit for taking this class was the tastings. In order to illustrate a point about a flavor or a style of beer, we were given small glasses of a beer that demonstrated that quality. For example, to show the difference between a lager and an ale, we were given Brooklyn Pennant Ale and Brooklyn Pilsner. He also gave us tastes of some of Brooklyn's premium beers called Local 1 and Local 2. Earlier that day, he took some of each from the tank at the brewery and allowed us to try those against the finished product of each. These particular styles are fermented in the bottle with a different yeast than it's first fermentation. This illustrated the significance of secondary fermentation. We also tried a hefeweizen and a beer called "The Wild One" made with a strain of wild yeast called brettanomyces. He mentioned before we tried it that it had kind of a hay, barnyard, horse blankety kind of flavor. It was hard not to notice it after he said it. It was interesting and kind of good, but was not my favorite. My favorite--for the record--is the Local 2.

Midway through the class we took a five minute break to wander around and go to the bathroom. Before we started again, Heather asked about a bacon flavored beer that Brooklyn Brewery put out. An impish smile crept across his face as if to say, "Yes, we did that." He briefly outlined the process of doing that, adding, "It was pretty good, but you wouldn't want to drink a lot of it."

Towards the end of the class, Chris showed us how to calculate the viable yeast cell count by looking at a sample under a microscope. Now I can delude myself into thinking that I will put the effort into many things, but I can't imagine ever caring enough to actually do this. I suppose in a yeast class we're bound to get around to cell division and such. I peeked over at Heather's note but all she had were doodles of lightning bolts and smiley faces.

After the class, our instructor stuck around to answer questions. I stuck around to hear some responses and then joined Heather in the store. The Brooklyn Kitchen sells a fairly large amount of brewing supplies and ingredients. They have an entire corner dedicated to home brewing along with a big ass fridge at the other end of the store filled with yeast and hops. The beer bottles they sold caught my eye. They have the standard 12 and 22 oz. sizes along with the swing top or grolsch style bottles but they also sold these tops with little metal straps to convert a regular bottle into a swing top. I bought one and attached it to a used champagne bottle I've been saving and it fit like gangbusters.

Heather and I caught Chris before he left and I told him I was brewing an IPA. He thought that was a good beer to start with and told me to e-mail him and let him know how it turns out. (The people at Brooklyn Kitchen all have a great friendly vibe, they know a lot about food and drink and are excited to discuss it with like minded people. It certainly keeps us coming back.) To make the night complete, we topped the experience off with a pint at Barcade. We never miss an opportunity to take advantage of all Williamsburg has to offer--at least when it comes to beer and video games.

Cause I'm a Ninja

I am a woefully untrained chef. I have always wanted to take a class or two--actually have an expert teach me some technique rather then just making it up and watching YouTube videos. Unfortunately the most visible cooking schools in NY involves words like "French Culinary" and "Institute" with the prices to match.

A few weeks ago while researching a butchering class I had read about, I learned of The Brooklyn Kitchen. A small store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, they offer a rotating roster of classes every month at prices that even I can afford. Pretty much every month, it appears, they offer a few sections of a knife skills class for $25 a person. Two hours to improve my abilities and play with big knives? Sign me up! But what good would it do to improve my own skills if the sous chef, my beloved fiance Will, was still lagging behind? As I pick these crazy meals, he is usually in charge of most of the prep work. I usually have him chop my ingredients as I work on steps 6 through 32 of any given recipe. Neither of us is trained at cooking, making it up as we go along, so it can take quite a bit of time for him to get through the list of onions, tomatoes, peppers, and whatever else I line up for him. The 9pm dinners are somewhat common. Nope, it would not do to go to the class on my own. "Hey honey, guess what we're doing!" Okay, so the big knives helped sell him on the prospect as well.

The class was BYOK, or bring your own knife, specifically a chef's knife, 8" or better. To illustrate how woefully uneducated I can be in the area of cooking, I had to look up the definition of a "Chef's knife." I'm not kidding. Once we were certain of what it was, we realized we only owned one of them, and it was a kind of crappy one I had bought right out of college. It looked like we had a good use for the Bed, Bath and Beyond gift card I had received for my shower. Thanks Aunt Lorna! Once a decent knife had been acquired (and Will volunteered to use the crappier one in class) we were ready for our new lives as trained chefs. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't envisioning the chopping on Iron Chef and thinking, "That's totally going to be me." I also may or may not have been thinking about the scene in Kill Bill where Uma Thurman cuts a baseball in half in mid-air with a samurai sword. I'm pretty sure I could learn to do that in a two hour class in Brooklyn.

Last Wednesday, knives wrapped in paper towels and secured in my bag, we were off to Brooklyn. Luckily it was not one of the days they were searching bags on the subway so I was able to make it there without being wrestled to the ground by one of New York's finest. The store was cute; in addition to an impressive range of gourmet cooking tools, they buy and refurbish copper and cast iron pans and resell them. As a well seasoned cast iron pan is supposed to be the holy grail of cooking equipment, I looked on these with quiet envy. And by quiet I mean I poked Will repeatedly as I pointed them out.

Our teacher was a chef named Brendan McDermott, who was already extremely cute and his attractiveness was only increased by his deftness with sharp objects. What can I say, I like a man with steel. He started by teaching us how to reset the "teeth" of a knife with a honing steel. Apparently you have to go from an X to a triangle. Who knew. As he chatted about knife safety and tecnique, I listened attentively. Then my stomach started feeling a little funny. Then very funny. Then I broke into a sweat. Once my vision started to swim I became fairly convinced I was going to faint. I sat on the floor, which grabbed me a fair amount of attention. I've had a few fainting spells over the year, and there is just one thing about them I know for certain. Get on the floor, or fall on the floor, it's you choice, but you will end up on the floor. It's not always an easy call, because the first instinct is denial. "I'm fine, this will pass, I'm just having a dizzy spell, blurry vision is better, I like it this way." When you wake up on the floor, however, your ego's not the only thing that's bruised. And so I sat on the floor, and made my excuses from there. Will grabbed me water and helped me to the bathroom. He was very heroic, supporting me and promising not to pose me in funny positions if I lost consciousness. After slumping against the wall, breathing deeply, and splashing water on my face my constitution returned to normal.

I know what you're thinking. "And then Will hailed a cab and took you home?" Um, not exactly. See, I've had these spells before. And there's one thing that remains true about them, they never last more than fifteen minutes. Then I'm fine, like nothing ever happened. Had Will tried to drag me home, it would have been five minutes into the ride that my body would have righted itself and I would have been super pissed that we had lost out on all of the info and the $50 we paid to take the class. I splashed water on my face and headed back to class. Chef Brendan seemed surprised to see me, but with a wary look he let me pick up my knife.

The class was excellent; I got caught up chopping celery, as well as planing, julienning, and brunoising carrots. I awkwardly hacked out chunks of carrot, desperately trying to master the down and forward motion without cutting my thumb. I had a tendency to start hazardously high. Will was freakishly good at this, earning praise from the chef for his perfect tiny carrot pieces. I'm pretty sure he cheated. Cheater.

We then moved onto the fearful onion. With eight people chopping at the same time, statistically the chances were high that tears were imminent. Onions are cut by creating a grid that doesn't go through all the way, and then cutting downward to get perfect little squares. One girl lost her eyes almost immediately, but I've never been very sensitive to onions. Another girl nicked her finger, not seriously but enough to warrant a band-aid. She persevered for a few more minutes, and then in a warbaly voice she said "You're not going to believe this, but now I'm dizzy." She sank into a chair and sipped water of her own. I felt so relieved to not be the only one swooning that I put on my best Florence Nightengale and grabbed her a wet paper towel, assuring her that putting it on the back of her neck would help. Hey, I've been there. The chef shook his head at us, "Fainting, blood, you guys are a mess, we've never had this many casualties!" Well, at least we stood out.

The class concluded with a series of demos. Nimbly wielding his knife Chef Brendan took apart a pepper, a tomato, and a whole chicken with ease and speed. The chicken was pretty cool, and he explained how much more cost effective it is to butcher the chicken yourself then to pay for individual pieces. Culinary school makes for impressive skill. I tried to pay close attention, but I may have to look up an online video when I go to do these. Because I didn't have the hands-on practice, I'm sure I didn't retain as much as with the other veggies.

The store offers students 10% off purchases on the day of their class, so I bought a little salt dish that I am rather enamored with. I've heard of some other fantastic classes Brooklyn kitchen offers, including the butchering one I was initially researching. You don't get hands on experience in that one, but you watch an entire pig get butchered, and you get to take home four pounds of meat. I have a fantasy about hosting a "Pork Overload" party the next day, since there's no way Will and I can eat that much meat. Well maybe Will could...but he would probably spend the next week in the doctor's office while a skilled medical team scrapes the plaque out of his coronary arteries. I figure a class like this would be the best way to really learn about the cuts of meat you are getting from an animal, and give you a better understanding of what you are cooking. I've asked for the class for Christmas. I think Will's still wrapping his brain around the idea that his fiance wants to see a pig cut up for a present.

The only problem I had with the class is that it's actually held in the tiny store, with limited work space and people shopping around you. I've read that in November, Brooklyn Kitchen will be opening Brooklyn Kitchen Labs, a new facility with a butcher shop in the front and full teaching kitchens. As long as the prices don't skyrocket, they can count me as a loyal student. And I will do my best to stay on my feet.