A Link or Two

Hey folks,

While I'm working on the next installment of Beer 101 (or 10000001, if I had it myyyyyyy wayyy...) here's a couple interesting food things I found today.  These aren't cooking blogs, but I've been thinking about the diversity of dietary choices lately.  Check the articles here and here.

ALSO I have been totally obsessed with lentils.  This week, I've made three different red lentil dishes already.  Tonight, I took a break from the lentils in the interest of frying up some pierogies from the deli across the street, and also of not-getting-sick-of-lentils.

They're so versatile!  They really appeal to the non-recipe-ist in me.  You can add ANYTHING to them and the dish will be wonderful, as long as you balance the spices in a way that makes sense (NEVER combine cinnamon and oregano.  Or do, and get back to me on how that works out for you).  Always add yogurt, it makes for a delightful texture.  Blah, blah, blah; I love the legumes in the winter.

I can never quite decide the spelling that I should use for yogourt...yogurt...or yoghurt.  I also can't say it too much or it becomes totally alien to me.  The solution is to just eat it already, dammit. 

Earlier, I roasted some red peppers and shoved them all into a jar with oil, salt and pepper, to help with breakneck cooking that I have to do during the week.  They're tasty, and will probably keep for a little while in the fridge! 

Why do I have to do speedy cooking?  Well, I've just started taking the Level 3 Wine Spirit Education & Trust (WSET) course at Brock.  I've totally taken up swing dancing on Monday nights, too.  Quite fun stuff!  So not only am I broke, but the first two days of the week, I have to come home, eat something and then immediately fly out the door--not my favourite way of treating dinner. 

Short update.  More to come next week!

Thanks for reading,

Melissa

The Flavourful First Adventures of the Novice Home Brewer

Hey readers,

Last week, I met up with a friend of mine for coffee while killing some time downtown. He invited me over to his place that night to help brew up some beer.  Of course, I happily accepted the invitation!

I've been obsessing about brewing beer for a while, pretty much since I started working full-time in the wine industry. As soon as you see wine all day, every day, and it's all over you and it's all you can smell, sometimes you just want a beer at the end of the day. Seriously. I think I'm actually becoming wine.

So I went over, drank some brews and just kind of watched everything he did, throwing questions at him the entire time. I missed some of the prep work since I was a bit late getting there, but I'm going to collect some of the introductory concepts of brewing here.

Some Terms Worth Knowing

Malt: Usually barley that's been soaked in water, allowed to start germination, is then stopped by kiln-drying the grains. The malting process helps develop the enzymes that become active during the mash.

Mashing/mash tun: The process of mixing the malted grain with hot water and maintaining a stable temperature for enzymatic (amylase) activity to occur. The mash tun is more of an industrial consideration—it allows for consistent mixing and insulation. The “home” mash tun is a big clean pot, clean spoon, a reliable heat source, and you. Mashing takes about 60-90 minutes—this is why it's good to have people around.

Wort: The resulting liquid from the enzymatic conversion of starches in the grain to fermentable sugars.

Sparging: In order to get more of the wort separated from the grain, brewers rinse the grain after the initial straining, and then strain it again. Too much sparging results in a weaker beer, so this is something that the brewer has to determine (the quantity/quality balance).

My First Taste of the Homebrew

The first thing I was told was basically “keep it clean”. Beer has a significantly higher pH than wine and is therefore less forgiving to spoilage microorganisms. If you don't remember what's been sanitized and what hasn't, sanitize it again. Having a well-organized space, even if it's not a lot of space, makes sanitation a lot easier.

You can make beer if you have a pail, a strainer, a racking stick, and a big pot. Get applicable equipment if you feel comfortable (or if you're looking to invest in this for a while), but as is the case with home winemaking, start-up cost can be quite a lot. Check out the existing equipment you already have in your place before dropping mad coin on fancy stuff.

The basic idea of beer brewing is to heat the malted grain of choice in order to convert starches to fermentable sugars, extracting them to the wort. Hops are included for preservation (I'm interested in experimenting with honey in my home brews too). Use a mix of different malts! There are lots.

Watch temperatures closely while you're “mashing” the malt. Too low a temperature, and not enough enzymatic activity will occur in order to make available sugars for the yeast to ferment. Too high a temperature results in denatured enzymes and therefore also less available fermentable sugars. I was given a range of 140 - 160 F (approximately 60 - 75 C).  The mash also has to stay around the same temperature for about an hour, so you can find a way to insulate it for that period of time, and overshoot 150 F--a little bit--in order to not fall below 140 F. Since this post is meant to be introductory, I'm just including what I picked up in my first session, plus things from a little extra reading of interest.  If you want to check them out, hit up the Beer Advocate, or even the Wiki entry for a decent historical background. 

Anything can really be done with beer (add flavouring by way of fruit, spices, honey, oak...) and if it's made well it can definitely age! During our session, we cracked open a honey brown ale that one of the guys had made a couple years prior, and it was fantastic.

Familiarizing with Style

Literally hundreds of different styles of beer exist all over the world. As usual, my recommendation is to taste everything available! Something I do is a kind of “beer roulette”: I go into the liquor store, and pick 6-10 singles of various styles, from as many different places as I can. I always include one or two that I know and love. I also found this page, The German Beer Institute website, and even if it's a slightly overwhelming list, it's a fun site to browse for styles.

The basic qualitative aspects of style are these: bitterness, sweetness, alcohol content, colour, weight (viscosity), and the inclusion flavouring agents like fruit, spices or honey. This is still incredibly general, but it's a start.

Next, categorically beer breaks down from generally “ale” into things like lagers, pale ales, wheat beers, dark lagers, porters...and so on.

Ale colouration is influenced by drying method: pale ales from kiln-dried, darker ales from fire roasted malt. Red, brown, and dark ales usually have flavour profiles featuring smoke, caramel, toffee, coffee, and chocolate. In this respect, it's just like the differing toasting levels on wine barrels lending different flavours: how the malt is toasted yields a variety of flavours and colours.

Opacity (“cloudiness” frequently found in yeasty wheat beers) is related to fining and clarification. “Lager” usually refers to cold fermentation and storage, which results in a crisp, clear, steely and refreshing style of beer.

Stouts and porters are related in their history: “stout” came first as generically a strong, dark style of beer made from heavily roasted malt. The “porter” as we know it is also a dark and heavy beer; usually the differentiation is specific to a brewing company and the “stout” is the heavier/stronger/more bitter beer. It's said that porters (carriers) liked this kind of brew, and the name “Porter” for the beer style came from the association. 

As beer continues to grow in popularity, we'll see even more differentiation in the styles, and that's why it's good to get out and try these things: much of the stylistic considerations just evolved from a proprietary recipe or regional method. For now, this is just a primer.

 

For now, I have a mountain of books, guides and websites to look at on the topic. I'm glad I'm surrounded by patient teachers, too.  I'm going to get brewing, and these entries will become more detailed as I learn about it. I'll be sure to keep sharing.

Cheers!

Melissa

Feeding Your Soul, Tuning Your Senses

Hey everyone,

First, I've got another link to put up here, because it's an interesting read that matches up with some concepts that I'll be working with.  There's some nicely written articles on the pleasures of comfort and soul food here.  I'm not vegan, but in the interest of exploring how people experience food, dietary choices can't be outside my sphere.  I like the experimentation and creativity that emerges from trying out these regimes, even if it's only for a little while.  True gourmands say, "Can we do this?  How can we do it?"  They become the masters of food chemistry and enjoy a depth of understanding of how cooking works; using emulsions, infusions, leavening, drying and preservation.

Regarding the article: how we connect to comfort food is something I've talked a little bit about before. Tasting is linked to memory in several ways, so first I'll show you the pathway of descriptive taste development that I've come to envision.  My aim is to match this up with concepts associated with the development of both the olfactory bulb and memory/pattern recognition in the brain.

The Model of Descriptive Taste Development

1.  "I can taste it, but I don't recognize it."

2.  "I can taste it, and I can recognize it, but I don't know how."

3.  "I can taste it, I definitely recognize it in the ways a, b, and c, but I don't know what that means."

4.  "I taste and recognize it in these ways a, b, and c; it means 'this'."

An example, using alcohol content in wine.

1.  "I'm experiencing a slight burning feeling in my nose and throat."

2.  "I learned that alcohol content gives that impression of heat in wines."

3.  "This is a higher alcohol wine, indicated by the burning sensation and 'legs' on the sides of the glass."

4.  "This wine is 'hot'.  The alcohol is out of balance towards the high side, it causes the sensations in nose and throat of heat; this indicates that the grape must's initial sugar content was high."

This is how I can see descriptive taste development progressing.  The second and third points often work together.  The transition between the four points can be shortened by guided tasting experiences.  As I'm just introducing this here, I will expand on how we develop sensitivity to qualities as I continue to learn about the olfactory system.

Barbara Leslie, author of Canadian Wine for Dummies and one of my professors at NC, taught the first tasting class I've ever taken.  I was overwhelmed at first, with people saying that they smelled oranges, apples, cat's pee, and socks, when I could pretty much just identify that what I had in my glass was, in fact, wine.  I was definitely not alone, and the piece of advice she gave to first-time tasters was this: "Go home, and smell everything.  Smell the fruit that you have in your lunch.  Smell your spice cupboard.  Most importantly, pay attention to what you're smelling and assign that memory to your nose."

The movement from perception to recognition certainly takes focused effort.  After a while, the recognition of apples and oranges still exists, but the new aromatic elements that you're looking to define will take up the space in your attention.  For example, a taster learns how to recognize oak in wines as having woody, smoky, caramel or vanilla aromas (this is only a short list of the associated characteristics; I could carry on about eugenol, vanillin and octo-lactones, but that's a bit more specificity than needed).  Then, as the taster familiarizes with the concept of oak, they can start to differentiate between American, French and Hungarian oak.  As they continue to taste, they further differentiate American oak into sub-categories such as Appalachian oak, Missouri oak, Minnesota oak, and so on.  How complex does the spectrum need to be?  This depends on the interest level of the taster, of course.  To most consumers, they may not care that much if the oak tree that grew in Missouri went on to be coopered into a barrel, in which the winery then chose to vinify the Chardonnay that they are enjoying... My point here is more that we can practice specifying tastes to increase the familiarity of elements, which can lead to a fulfilling and multi-leveled taste experience.

Next time you taste a wine, try this. Give it a good couple sniffs, and decide on the dominant fruit flavour that stands out the most; say it's cherries if you're tasting a red.  Then, see if you can be more specific.  Is the fruit sour, candied, dried, rotten, juicy?  That's all you have to do to start familiarizing with aromas.

The next "level" is to find out how these characteristics relate to fruit condition before fermentation, which could lead to clues about climate conditions, or vintage variation...

This is why I feel that unraveling the mysteries of wine is incredibly fun.

Cheers, and happy perception and recognition.

Melissa

How to Recover from Illness

Purchase bottle.  Open (in whatever way is appropriate).  Pour into glass.  Observe, sniff and swirl.  Jot a few notes!  Bring a friend!

Oh, don't forget to keep trying new ones.

I have some cool stuff to share with you:

I'd first like to introduce you to Allison Vidug.  She's a fellow graduate of NC, and without the experiences we shared together then, my wine life would certainly have been a lot slower to develop!  The NYE dinner she's posted about looks totally exquisite.  Check out her stuff! 

Also, while browsing around today I found an interesting article about incorporating sustainability into the first-world lifestyle.  I thought it was a good read for a lot of reasons: I still live like I'm kinda broke, so the world of re-use can sometimes reveal little treasures (like, making soup stock out of scraps, shells, bones, etc is the most fulfilling second-use of food that I can imagine, as well as being a wonderful way to fragrance the apartment).  I've watched my parents slowly build a vegetable patch in the backyard (my dad very happily takes an old fruit basket out to pluck out herbs and little golden and red tomatoes from the vine).  To me, once the pleasure of caring for your food becomes apparent, all that "hard work" doesn't seem to be that difficult.  After a while, cooking for a couple hours instead of a scant 30 minutes, taking the time to can or prepare for freezing the bounty of harvest, or even making soup from scratch when you're not feeling well can feel perfectly in place with your daily activities.

More on this last point: I ducked and I dodged, but finally I was conquered by a brutal cold that had been going around work (only a couple days before New Year's Eve, too)!  I took a few days of sleep and tea (I avoid over-the-counter drugs unless I absolutely need them--it's one part stubbornness, one part doubt that they work at all, and one part the bloody cost of the things).  As I was puttering around at home, not doing much of anything, I decided that I wanted to make jambalaya.  I had the appropriate veggies, spices, rice and some shrimp, so I set to work combining things for the dish, throwing peels and scraps of onions, celery, carrots and peppers in my stock pot.  I wanted to roast some tomatoes for the jambalaya to really bring out their flavour, so I had taken some of those to add as well... Before long I had three different things going, including stock using the shells from the shrimp in a little saucepan which turned out to be very tasty!

From the first minute that I'd set to dicing onions and peeling carrots, I was feeling like myself again.  Hanging out in front of my stove, cooking aromas floating up to my face, it was both a comforting and satisfying activity to do.  My apartment smelled quite "home-y" which further added to the impression of comfort--as if the very aroma were another blanket around my shoulders and warm mug of tea with honey, cupped in hands.

I think it'd be interesting to suggest using the sheer act of cooking as therapy.  This does not necessarily mean "using food as a remedy for depression," obviously any therapy has to be suited to the individual.  All I know is that when I'm not feeling altogether like myself, I consciously make the effort to get into the kitchen and just cook it out of my system.  It'd be nice if this worked for someone else too.

Here's what I did for the jambalaya:

Cook 1 cup (dry) of white or basmati rice in 2 cups of water--I know I'm a rogue with my measurements, but I've messed up enough rice for this to have become a necessity over the years.

Peel a half a medium white or gold onion and dice it; two medium carrots, peel and slice into coins; clean three pieces of celery, trimming ends, and slice.  Saute in a good amount of butter (like, a couple tablespoons) over medium heat in a deep skillet.  Mince two medium cloves of garlic and add to the pan.  This will smell really, really good!

 Clean and dice a half of each a yellow pepper and red pepper, add to pan once the previous veggies have softened and onions are translucent.

Add peeled cleaned shrimp (about 15-20) and cook until they are pink.  Dice roasted plum tomatoes and add to pan.  Add a healthy amount of each: coarsely ground black pepper, coarse sea salt, hot hungarian paprika, cayenne pepper, ground coriander, ground cumin and a pinch of each ground white pepper, and cinnamon (for everything except the last two, I'd estimate about a quarter teaspoon--but this is to taste). Add a splash of rose or white wine and let the alcohol steam off.  Stir in the rice and let it absorb any liquid that may be left.

Enjoy!  It may not be totally traditional, but most one-pot meals are pretty forgiving of alterations.  When I'm sick, I take advantage of my stunted palate and eat some of the spicy things that I'd love to love, but can't usually handle.

Thanks for reading!  Cheers.

Melissa