Turkey and Beer Hoedown

Thanksgiving is a time for family and friends, but when you don't have the money or time to travel back to family, sometimes you just have to have a "Friendsgiving". Clarissa and I spent the day with some good friends, and I will brag a little bit by saying we cooked up a spectacular meal together. Clarissa and I covered the turkey, gravy, and dressing, and our friends helped with side dishes and dessert.

The latest Beeradvocate Magazine had an recipe by Sean Paxton on beer-brined turkey with Moroccan spices. I took this as a jumping-off point for my own cooking, but I left out the Moroccan spices, concentrating on traditional Thanksgiving savory herbs. I also changed out the beer. Instead of throwing down $12 on 3 bottles of Ninkasi Believer Double Red Ale (which I would rather drink than soak a turkey in), I used some good but not exceptional homebrew. I used my Alt, which is less robust than the Ninkasi, so I used a little more of it. What I did use was Paxton's basic brine proportions, which are the most important part.

Here's what I came up with:

3/4 gallon water

1 cup pickling salt (cuz we were out of kosher)

3/4 cup sugar

bay leaves

black pepper corns

1 chopped onion

3 stalks chopped celery

6 smashed garlic cloves

- Simmer all that stuff together for 10 minutes, then cool it to refrigerator temp.

- Add 3/4 gallon beer, in this case Alt.

- Remove the innards from a 17-pound turkey, rinse, and dunk it in the brine, keeping it at fridge temp for 2 full days.

** You could probably scale the brine down and use less, if you soak the turkey in a plastic bag.

- Day of: Remove turkey, drain and pat dry inside and out. Bring to room temp over a couple hours, then roast in a 350 degree oven to 160 degrees internal temp. Roast it on a rack, or some sticks of celery if you don't have one, to keep it off the juices. This took a little under 3 hours.

- Remove from oven, rest under tin foil, while making the dressing and gravy (vague recipe provided below by Clarissa's mom is their family recipe). Carve, dowse in gravy, and eat the moistest, best-seasoned turkey you've ever eaten.

Recipes provided by Ann Hitchon:

Mama Lowe's Cornbread Dressing
1 cup celery
1 cup onion Slighty boiled ( I have also added more than this never less)
2 or 3 eggs
1/2 Turkey drippings (save the other half for gravy)
sage or poultry seasoning
salt and Watkins pepper to taste
milk to moisten
dry bread crumbs (left over bread of almost any kind--toasted)
pan of cornbread
Mix together and place in a greased pan
Bake at 400 till done (golden brown and firm to the touch in the middle)
Mother ALWAYS used a large cast iron skillet, but I have never been that brave.

Giblet Gravy

cook all giblets in enough water to cover DO NOT DRAIN
2 or 3 boiled eggs sliced
thickening/ flour or starch
drippings from turkey
salt and Watkins pepper to taste
milk
Cook the giblets and leave them in the water. When cool enough to touch, slice all giblets and clean all you can off the neck too.
Return them to the water and add sliced eggs
Return to a boil and add drippings and then starch and/or flour

All this together with some from-scratch creamed corn, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green beens, and a zucchini dish made for an awesome feast.

As for the turkey, here is my opinion on the brining process: It produced by far, the best turkey I have ever had a part in. It was juicy, perfectly done, and perfectly seasoned. Even the leftovers stayed moist for days. No one was actually able to taste any beer flavors in the turkey. Since I have never done any other brines, I can't say if I think the beer contributed anything that a regular brine wouldn't have, but it was damn good. I guess this is one of my issues with cooking with beer. A lot of times I am skeptical about the actual flavor contribution of the beer. Certainly it can add flavor in certain applications, but would this turkey have been just as good with a regular-old brine?

Well, in any case, it was a great opportunity to pair a food with the beer it was made from, since I also brought a growler of the Alt to drink. However, the best beers to drink with dinner were the saison and the rye-amarillo pale ale I made recently, which reminds me I need to put up some tastings on the blog soon about those beers.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, and if you had a chance to cook with beer, or found a great beer and food pairing, please feel free to share in the comments!

Happy Easter! (Yesterday)

Just a few photos a really excellent meal that Clarissa and I cooked for Easter dinner. She was the chef for most of the meal, roasting the organic chicken and baking a rhubarb crisp. We are very stoked to have the PSU farmers market open again, and all the produce for this meal was bought there. I put together a classic au gratin potato dish, and a broccoli raab dish with brooks prunes, red pepper flakes, cumin, garlic, and a touch of vinegar and sugar. This might sound like an odd combo but it was really, really tasty.

I racked my first PCTBB beer to a keg while Clarissa was cooking the chicken, and took a little flavor sample which seems promising. I decided to dry hop it in the keg. Other than that, I didn't have a beer all day! We made a nice apertif cocktail with Bulleit bourbon, homemade ginger syrup, soda, and mint (I love a good bourbon cocktail). The rose was great with the main course.

Oh man, we slacked on our opportunity to make an Easter day "Cadburry Egg Nog" from This Is Why You're Fat, which we might have to do as a belated easter cocktail soon. It looks like a sugar-induced belly-ache in a glass!

Happy Easter!

I gotta say it was a good day: Hoppy Pilsner and Carbonnade Flammande

I did some brewing on Thursday, and some cooking too, and it occurred to me while enjoying some well-earned vittles after the brew session that hey, today was a good day. Just like that classic rap song from 1993, except I guess instead of playing dominoes and not having to use my AK, I just brewed a nice pilsner, and instead of getting the Fatburger at 2 in the morning, I made a fancy beef stew from Belgium. But sentimentally, it was very much the same.

I'm pretty psyched to have finally gotten lager season rolling. I usually get to do at least a couple of lagers each winter, but I got a late start this year since I had a few other yeast strains already in action. I'm planning on doing at least another batch of the smoked helles (pretty much a Schlenkerla Helles clone) and a Baltic Porter with Paul Key.

When I design a recipe, whether it's "to style" or free-style, I like to think a lot about how I want to final beer to taste, smell, and look like. I like to keep a couple of commercial examples in mind if there is anything close to what I am looking to target. For example, if you are talking about German Pilsner, you have anything from Bitburger or Radeberger pils (very light, clean, and somewhat hoppy but pretty much a lawnmower beer), to something pretty radically hoppy and aromatic like Victory Prima Pils. More often than not, there's a huge range within the style to work with. Less so for German beers for sure, but still there's a range. This is why I think it's funny that some brewers make a point to say it's below them to brew to style. It's as if they think you can't make a creative expression if you stick pretty much within a recognized style. If you think about that for more than a second, you realize that's just not true. It's like saying that a cubist or a surrealist isn't really a painter. Not that beer is fine art, or that it has to be taken so seriously, but I guess art works as a good analogy. Maybe a food analogy would work even better: Do all cheeseburgers taste the same? Of course not!

Anyway (end of rant), I wanted my beer to be more on the hoppy, full-flavored end of the spectrum, like Victory, Jever and even Sly Fox Pils. I wanted to really push the hop flavor and bitterness, and have some residual body to counter the bitterness. I had a lot of noble hops still in the mylar package from 2008, and they were smelling great. I didn't adjust the alpha acids down for time on any of the hops still in the mylar.

One issue I had with this recipe is an extremely long time to go from the boil pot through the heat exchanger. I think there was a little too much hop matter and I just had to wait 40 minutes to knock out into the carboy, but when I did, the wort was at a great pitching temperature: 50 degrees. That's the lowest I've ever pitched a lager yeast, which should make for a really clean fermentation.

The Recipe:

7 gallons pre-boil, 5.5 gallons post boil, all grain

O.G. 1.055 F.G. 1.012 ABV 5.7% IBU's 45

9 lb. Weyermann Pils malt

.5 lb. carafoam

13 gr. Hallertau (1 plug) FWH

14 gr. Perle pellets 6.5% 60 min

8 gr. Magnum whole 12% 60 min

56 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 20 min

28 gr. Czech Saaz pellets 3% 0 min

28 gr. Hallertau pellets 4% 0 min

Mash: 4 gallons + 5 gr. gypsum, 2 gr. calcium chloride

152 for 60 minutes

Sparge with 5 gallons at 166

Collect 7 gallons at 1.043 = 84% efficiency

Boil 90 minutes

wyeast nutrient & whirlfloc at 15 minutes

Whirlpool, rest 10 miuntes. Chill to 50 degrees, took 40 minutes to run through heat exchanger! Ground water was run though a copper pre-chiller in an ice water bath.

Collected 5.1 gallons at 1.055, pitched Wyeast 2124 Bohemian lager yeast at 50 degrees.

Fermented at 52 degrees for 12 days.

Pulled into the house on 1/26/10 for a D-rest for 4 days

Pulled back out in the garage to chill to 50 and racked to a keg on 2/2/10

OK, now here are some cooking pics of the Carbonnade Flammande, and this is the recipe that I based it loosely off of. The carrots are not traditional, I just felt like adding some vegetables. I used my flanders red homebrew as the stew base, which is still a little lacking in acidity. After I pulled a sample for cooking, I added some more bugs to the keg to help sour it up, and a couple of bottle of the Belgian Dark Strong to give it a little more maltiness and sugars for the bugs to eat.

The prep...the meat is browned. Use a well marbled meat, unless you like dry stew meat.

Most of the online recipes do not specifically call for Flanders red ale, but it's best to use a sour malty ale. If you can't find that, you can probably fake it with a Belgian Dubbel and a dash of vinegar and sugar.

The end product was excellent. I think it's traditionally served with noodles or pommes frites. I used some leftover garlicky mashed potatoes.

Here's another cooking project that Clarissa and I have been getting into: the no-knead bread technique that is very popular and turns out a great loaf.

Our first loaf, above was made with all bread flour and baked at 500 degrees. It was OK but it was not entirely done when we took it out of the oven. The crust was getting very dark but the inside was a bit moist. So it steamed out the crust and made it a bit chewy, but it was still pretty good.

Here's the second loaf, where we used 1/3 whole wheat flour and 2/3 bread flour. It tasted every bit as awesome as it looks here. We turned our oven temp down to 450 so it had plenty of time to finish cooking before the crust got too dark.

Hop Taco Constructed: Another brutally labor intensive project!

I've been working on a better way to strain my wort, so that I can use the Shirron plate chiller that Alex (from Upright) loaned me to try out. I needed to make sure I'm not letting any hop particulate into the plate chiller that could stop the flow and be a real pain in the ass to clean out later.

Why change from am immersion chiller, that works just great, to a plate chiller? Well, my last batches of beer brewed with Cali ale yeast showed a little of the "ring around the bottle neck" that indicates non-beer yeast contamination. This contamination, if that's indeed what it is, isn't tastable by myself or anyone else that I've let taste the beers, but it still bothers me. It could be from the fact that I'm chilling my wort about 15 feet from the neighbor's compost heap! Or not, but it was pretty stinky the last time I brewed. I also changed out all my beer hoses in case there was any infection there.

So, once I have the plate chiller hooked up, I'll rule out the problem of wild funk floating in from the decomposing food so close to my beloved beer. I did some web research, which mainly consisted of going to the KOTMF website to check out how they made a cheap DIY version of the Hop Stopper.

I scored some cheap materials totaling less than $5, with about a 6 inch SS strainer from a thrift store, and some copper wire (medium and thin copper scored out of some electrical wiring from a metal shop. I'm hoping that this size will be fine for 5 or 10 gallon batches. The screen is not "fine". It's just regular old SS screen with maybe 1/8 inch holes.

I started by cutting out the screen from the strainer, and then bent the ragged edges in so I would have a good edge to sew shut. Then I just started at one edge with the fine copper wire and sewed it up. I couldn't figure out how the hell the KOTMF managed to get a hose clamp to attach the screen to the tube, so I just sewed around that as well as I could too.

Before I sewed the tube in, I worked in a little piece of medium gauge coper wire to keep the tube suspended in the middle of the screen. Then I just sewed the Taco shut all the way, and things looked good! We'll see how things go on brewday. The first brew will be with about 2 oz. whole hops, then I'll try pellets if that works out well.

It took me at least 2 hours to construct this thing, so be prepared if you try to make this to spend some time. It will be worth it if it works well!

I don't know if anybody cares about this stuff, but here are some pictures of me and Clarissa's "Christmas" meals. We celebrated on Sunday, since she's going home for a while to see her family. We started off the morning with some "eggs in the hole", made with some really fantastic rosemary bread that we pick up at the PSU farmer's market. We are totally addicted to this bread and we usually finish the loaf within a day of buying it. The beer is Trader Joe's Doppelbock, which is another great contract-brewed lager from Gordon Biersch. Seriously, try it if you haven't yet.

Dinner was the main attraction of course. I bought a leg of lamb at the farmer's market also, which we marinated for 1 day in some cheap wine (Smoking Loon, don't buy it!), and lots of garlic, shallots, rosemary, and thai basil. We hit it with some coarse salt and pepper and roasted that sucker for about an hour at 375, til it hit an internal temp of 120 degrees (a nice medium once it's rested for 20 minutes). The lamb turned out amazingly, and the sides complimented it well.

We served the lamb with a celery root puree, sauteed hedgehog mushrooms, and kale sauteed with raisins and whole cumin seed. The wine is from a small winery in Oregon that we actually bought in New York. It's really tasty, so if you ever see Montebruno, give it a try. We met the winemaker, who used to brew for Deschutes and helped them expand to their current (I think 50 bbl) system.

Dessert was a very rich and tasty, but ugly, chocolate mousse. No picture, sorry! I'm not a great pastry chef.

So, I'll be brewing a lightly spiced saison on Christmas eve, and hopefully a parti-gyle brew of an imperial stout/stout on Christmas day. Cheers, people, enjoy your holidays and brew strong!!!