Slow food from the kitchen of the

2008 Bruces Rsang

2009-04-24T22:43:00.001-07:00

TBD

Nit Wit

2009-04-18T20:40:00.000-07:00

This is a Belgian style witbier in the style of Hoegaarden. The mermaid under my arm is meant to represent SGK, as she wanted me to make this beer (in her favorite style) and then demanded to be on the label :-)
Thanks to Eric at Brewmaster for help in tweaking the recipe. It is the first time my extraction was right on target!
SGK also wants everyone to know that she helped bottle this beer.
For those unfamiliar with the terminology; gruit refers to spices used in beer before the advent of hops. A practice outlawed in Germany due to Reinheitsgebot, but the Frenc enforced a hops ban in Belgium of old so the practice gained it's adherents.

1lb White wheat malt
2lbs Belgian pilsen
½lb Weyermann lt. Munich malt
4¾bs Flaked wheat
¼b Rolled oats
3lbs Belgian pale
1lb Rice hulls

Mash at 150°f for 90 minutes
Sparge with 160°f east bay mud (water)

½oz 4.5AA Kent goldings pellets @ 60 minutes (The Kent goldings were very old so this represents a double dose)
½oz 4.5AA Kent goldings pellets @ 15 minutes
⅓oz Bitter orange (again it was old, so this represents a double dose) @ 15 minutes
1oz lightly crushed coriander (again, it was old ingredients) @ 15 minutes
¼oz 2.7AA Saaz @ 5 minutes
1oz 2.7AA Saaz @ end of boil

Racked 2 weeks later for 48 hours then bottled with 3oz corn sugar.

2007 Wilderotter Zin

2009-04-14T14:06:00.001-07:00

TBD

2008 Teague Pearapple

2009-04-01T16:21:00.001-07:00

TBD

2008 Big Boss Pink

2009-03-30T17:06:00.001-07:00

2008 White Sangiovese

Vineyard: Bruce's Vineyard Madera AVA
Composition: 100% Sangiovese
Yeast: L2056 Rhône
Nutrients: dAP
Harvest: 31-Aug-2008
Brix: 25
Acid at harvest: .83 @ 3.09pH
Gently crushed by the feet of babes (Michelangelo age 5 and Isabella age 2)
Aged Sur-Lie
Bottled: Apr-2009
Alcohol: ±13¾ ABV
Production: 7 Bottles

A rosé is most often industrial waste. It is what is left over when a winemaker is attempting to increase the colour or tannins in his red wine through a practice called "saignée". Saignée is the bleeding of must off of the skins prior to maceration. This vintage is no exception. The grapes in this wine began as ⅓ of the grapes that Laurette, Stacy, and I picked on a hot August morning down the road from the Pacific Ethanol plant. Laurette took ⅓ and I split my ⅔ in half as an experiment to see if saignée would improve the red, so I pulled ⅓ of the juice out of ½ my must and fermented it as a white on the fine lees.
After bleeding off the must, the TA dropped to .65 so in attempt to lower the pH tartaric acid was added.

The short skin contact time, and the poor sulfite control leaves the resulting rosé an almost apricot colour. SaraGrace likes it as well as any commercially available pink wine.

Corned Beef

2009-03-09T22:10:00.001-07:00

St. Patrick's day is coming up, and we all know that in America that means corned beef. The tradition of corned beef on St. Pat's day is strictly an Irish-American thing. In Ireland it's unheard of.
At the root of it; corned beef is simply a pickled beef brisket. I decided that this year I was going to do my own corned beef. So I pulled out Rytek Kutas's "Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing", and looked up corned beef.
Once again, Rytek disappoints. His recipe is not easily adjusted for batch size; I prefer the way that Len Poli does his recipes - with metric weights so you can easily adjust them if you have more or less meat. This will shock some of you that know me and know that I never use a recipe when I cook; I simply adjust all to taste on my current whim (cooking is an art form after all); but in the case of preserving meat, the ratio of preservatives is damn important - too much you get poisoned; too little and you get sick because the meat rotted in the wrong way.
The other shortcoming that Rytek has is his ingredient list is weak.- it mentions something called "Pickling Spice" without defining it, and calls for dextrose. Dextrose, as any home brewer could tell you, is commonly available as corn sugar. It's flavorless, and easily digestible by bacterials, yeasts, molds, and fungi. Flavorless describes Rytek's recipes in general; and why in god's creation would I want to provide spoilage biota with an easy meal?
Now, I'm pretty hard on old Rytek; but his book does provide a foundation to all this, so is a pretty valuable resource nonetheless. (I did eventually find out what "Pickling Spice" is - McCormick spices sells little 1.5oz bottles of it as "McCormick Pickling Spice". It's cinnamon, allspice, mustard, coriander, bay leaves, ginger, cloves, chili, pepper, mace, cardamom, and sulfite.)
So, giving up on Krytek; I decided to check up on what Alton Brown of The Food Network show "Good Eats" would do to pickle his brisket.
I am a fan of Alton Brown. I love his scientific approach to cooking; he loves to explain why you do something when cooking. This makes us all better cooks. Alton's recipe though had 2 major problems for me.
His recipe calls for saltpetre, and a 10 day cure.
Saltpeter, in addition to being a great food preservative and lawn fertilizer amongst other things, is a primary ingredient in gunpowder. In this post 9-11 world, the jackboot thugs at homeland security make it a pain in the ass to buy undiluted nitrates of any sort, so in order to preserve your meat, you need to instead buy sodium nitrite diluted by run of the mill salt and dyed pink (universally called prague powder #1). This necessitates figuring out how much prague #1 you need to equal the amount of saltpeter called for in the recipe; then figuring out how much salt is present in the prague powder, and adjusting the salt in the recipe to compensate; and living without the potassium that is normally in saltpetre. Yuck. I wish the fuckwads at homeland security would have better things to do than persecute me for wanting to make sausages!
Now, I can do math, and figure adjust Alton's pre 9-11 recipe; but what I couldn't do was maintain a 10 day cure as the prague#1 I ordered did not arrive until today, 8 days before the anniversary of the eviction of snakes from Eire.
Len Poli's recipe calls for injecting the pickle into the meat and only curing for 5 days. Bingo! I could do this.
I bought my free-range organic brisket from Baron's and since it was a whopping 8.3lbs I decided to pickle it now, do ½ for St. Pats, and make pastrami by cold smoking the other ½. Since I only had 8 days till St Pats, I decided to do a hybrid Len Poli-Alton Brown recipe. I couldn't stick to Alton's and simply inject the meat, as Alton calls for whole spices, which don't fit in the marinade injector, so I made enough of Len's pickle to inject, and did the rest as Alton's to marinade, and threw in some of my own. Here's what I ended up with:

Injection
6⅓ cups	Water
65g	Kosher salt
38.3g	Brown sugar
25.4g	Prague#1
5.2g	Pepper, finely ground
1.6g	Garlic powder
0.7g	New Mexico chili powder

Marinade
2Qts	Hot water
1 cup	Kosher salt
½cup	Brown sugar
2Tbs	Prague#1
1	Cinnamon stick, broken
5.5g	Yellow mustard seeds
3.3g	Black peppercorns
1.2g	Juniper berries (whole)
3	Bay leaves (crumbled)
1.7g	Ginger, chopped
stir, then add:
32oz	Water, really cold
1tsp	Coriander seed
1tsp	Capers
3 cloves	Garlic, chopped
1g	Red Pepper flakes
1	Star Anise
4	Cardamom seeds
1.1g	Bitter orange

Any leftover injection I added to the marinade, and placed the whole kit and caboodle in an old enamel roasting pan, covered with saran wrap (all air bubbles removed) and placed the whole shebang in the fridge until the eve before St Pats, when I plan on hacking it in half and putting the big half in a crock pot for the big dinner.

Update: 18-Mar-09
Sliced the flat off the briskit and returned it to the brine for later smoking (can you say Pastrami! YUM!). Doesn't look like the brine fully penetrated the briskit. Next time remember to cut the fat off, and give it an extra week in the pickle.
Cooked up the point for St. Patricks day with cabbage, potatoes and carrots. It was unsliceable; the meat just fell apart. I think this is a good thing :-)
Colour was good, but the flavour was missing something. Perhaps it did not pick up enough during the shortened brining process. Will add more spices next time, and as mentioned above; lengthen the brining time.

Turkey Mozzarella Sausage

2009-02-16T09:45:00.000-08:00

This sausage came from SGK's desire to have a more kid friendly sausage. She took this to mean no red pepper; I took it to mean cheese.

5lbs	ground free range turkey. The ground turkey was cheaper than the whole. I chose turkey as it is lean and with the addition of the cheese I didn't want it the sausage to be too fatty
5lbs	ground pork. I had this leftover in my freezer from the last time I made sausage.
2lbs	Precious brand low moisture mozzarella
1 entire bulb as big as my 5 year old's fist	garlic
21	pearl onions. Red, white, and yellow
14.5g	Fennel seed. The fennel (or Anise seed in a pinch) is what makes an Italian sausage Italian.
10g	Caraway seed (supplements the fennel)
10g	Black pepper, coarse ground)
8.5g	Peppercorns, multi-coloured (for texture)
30g	Corn sugar. In a fermented sausage the sugar would serve as food for the bio that you add; in a fresh sausage like this one it's to help bind the meat so it stays relatively firm.
6g	Coriander, ground
2.5g	Coriander seed, whole (for texture)
100g	Kosher salt. Kosher salt is not iodized. You don't want to cook with iodine!
¼ cup	2004 Cline ancient vine zinfandel
2 cups	Water
4¼ oz	Trader Joes brand sun dried tomatoes in olive oil (The sun dried tomatoes were SGK's idea)
8½ oz	Christopher Ranch brand Sun dried tomato pesto (The only kind of sun dried tomatoes they had at nob hill)
6g	Colmans yellow mustard powder
2g	Brown mustard seed
Several feet	32-35mm Hog casing

Grind the garlic, onions, tomatoes, and cheese with a coarse plate. Mix thoroughly and stuff.

I had a heck of a time with my little 5lb stuffer. I was using the medium sized spout, and I guess the cheese was clogging up the works. I switched to the large spout, which worked well, but it plumped the sausage thicker than I would have liked. I'm toying with the idea of getting a sausage stuffer attachment for my Kitchenaid mixer, which might help the problem as it has a continuous feed rather than a plunger like the 5lb stuffer.

The other problem I'm having is that the on a good number of the sausages, the links come undone, and when you cook them all the cheese comes out. I need to work on my linking technique.

Coriander Sausage

2009-02-14T15:57:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since my friend Scott (different friend from the Kimchee Scott) and I last made sausage from the Mule Deer that I brought back from Colorado, so I figured it was time again. The Venison sausage came out on the dry side (despite liberal additions of Pork Fat) so this time I decided to follow a known recipe more closely. I chose one of Rytek Kutas's from his book "Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing" Now, I'm not really a fan of Rytek's; mainly because he recommends to not-culture fermented sausages and IMHO that is a recipe for disease. I simply chose his recipes to check the ratios in my ingredients. I started with about 20% more meat than his recipe calls for, so I bumped up his ingredients by about 20%. Since he uses household measure, this was hard to figure out until I decided to use the Blade scale that I bought for wine making to weigh most of his measures and then increase by ±20%. I would then fry some up and taste it so I could make any adjustments before stuffing. What I found was that following Rytek's recipe produced an incredibly boring sausage; so I pulled an Emiril and bumped it up a notch. Here's what I ended up with:

12.37lbs	pork shoulder but roast bone in.
1 entire bulb as big as my 5 year old's fist	garlic
17g	Fennel seed. The fennel (or Anise seed in a pinch) is what makes an Italian sausage Italian.
20g	Caraway seed (supplements the fennel)
8.1g	Black pepper, coarse ground)
1 Tbl	Peppercorns, multi-coloured (for texture)
25g	Red pepper flakes, crushed
2 Tbl	Corn sugar. In a fermented sausage the sugar would serve as food for the bio that you add; in a fresh sausage like this one it's to help bind the meat so it stays relatively firm.
6.3g	Coriander, ground
2.3g	Coriander seed, whole (for texture)
5 "throws" (a throw is the precision measurement where the wife pours some in her hand then dumps it in)	Kosher salt. Kosher salt is not iodized. You don't want to cook with iodine!
30gWhite onion
106g	Red onion
Splash	2004 Esprit de Beaucastel
2.5 cups	Water
Several feet	32-35mm Hog casing

I used the Meat grinder attachment on my wife's KitchenAid Mixer to grind the meat, onions and garlic. I used the large grinding plate as I wanted texture to my sausage.

I used a mortar and pestle to lightly crack the whole seed spices (peppercorns, coriander, carraway, and fennel). I prefer using a molcajete to a traditional ceramic mortar as the volcanic stone in the molcajete gives a texture to grind against.

Mix all ingredients thoroughly, then take a tablespoon full of what you got and fry it up to taste if it's going to be OK. If not, then adjust the spices to taste

Stuff and link.

Enjoy!
MRA

Update 15-Feb-09 Fried some up for breakfast. Next time I'll go lighter on the corriander.
Update 16-Feb-09 It needs more heat. More pepper flakes or perhaps chili powder next go

Kim Chi

2008-12-03T14:58:00.000-08:00

Kim Chi

My friend Scott and I have been toying with the idea of making Kimchi for a while now; and in a drunken Thanksgiving moment, we decided to give it a try.

On the surface, Kimchi should be an easy slow food to make; it's nothing but spicy cabbage based fermented vegetable dish. The hard part is the culturing. Whilst it is possible to make Kimchee without a culture; if I rot my food on purpose, I want to stack the deck that it will rot in the proper manner. It turns out that Lactobacillus Kimchi KoreEnsis is not available commercially in North America (at least that I could find - Please if anyone knows where to find it let me know!), so that left us with a couple of choices:

Sympathetic Magic:
Feed the new batch of Kimchi with a sample of a previous successful batch. The thought here being that there will be enough live flora in the other batch to successfully inoculate this one.
Substitution:
Lactobacillus Kimchi KoreEnsis is a homofermentative lactic acid bacteria. I could simply add some Lactobacillus Acidophilus instead and hope that it could survive the high-saline environment.

We decided on the "Sympathetic Magic" route, and Scott picked up some Kimchee at a Korean grocer in Oakland; but alas; he forgot to bring it home! So we ended up using some of my dietary supplement Acidophilus pills instead. We also hoped that despite the preservative added to it; that the Kimchi sauce we bought would have some live bioflora in it.

We started by loosely following the directions from The Pyongyang Metro.

Chinese Cabbage
The "Chinese Cabbage" at my local Nob Hill was really adult Bok Choy. There was an "Oriental Cabbage" that looked more similar to the ones that the girls on the metro were using; but more yellow and with less central stalk; likely not the same variety at all, but I picked up 2 heads and Scott picked up 2 additional heads. I also picked up 2 heads of Bok Choy and Scott picked up some young Bok Choy, and I threw in a head of Radiccio for colour.
Spring Onions
Not sure what these really are, so I chose green onions instead.
Sea Salt
Scott picked up some "Korean Sea Salt" at the afore mentioned green grocer; but we decided to use my already opened Kosher salt as the real objective here is a non-iodized salt.
Korean Chili Powder
I substituted Mexican Chili Powder and we cut up a handful of red jalapeños as well
Crushed Garlic
Ours was finely chopped
KimChi Sauce
Ours was a different brand; and included amongst it's ingredients: "Squid Juice" and other fish-based weirdness.
Crushed Ginger
Ours was grated
Onion
I picked out a red one.
Additional Ingredients
we also threw in a quartered and thinly slices daikon radish, and since the whole idea sprang from Scott's recollection of a turnip kimchi, we sliced and quartered some of these as well.

We did not bother to measure the ingredients carefully, and likely added too much chili powder. If it's too spicy post-ferment, we'll make some more with only cabbage to mix in and dilute the spice.
We didn't let the cabbage brine for the full 6 hours that the Metro girls recommend, as we began making it at 17:30. Scott did most of the mixing as I sliced the end of my finger off on the Mandoline Slicer early on in the evening, and we didn't want to get much human blood in the mix.
I left it in the kitchen overnight to allow a warm environment for the culture to incubate in, then brought it down into the wine cellar where it will remain, fermenting away for a few more days.

It already tastes great!

Updates

03-Dec-08:Moved Kimchi to garage
05-Dec-08:Moved Kimchi to refrigerator

Grape Cider

2007-09-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

My neighbor Niaz Yosofzay is a great guy. He has a farm up in the sierra foothills and always shares it's bounty with us. When he learned that I was a zymurgist, he volunteered some of his grapes. Given the location of his farm up near the Fair Play AVA, my mouth started to water with visions of old vine Mataro, Zin, or Petite Sirah. Alas, Niaz was volunteering a grape grown over his arbor in his backyard in Alameda.
Despite Niaz's assurances that this was a wine grape that he brought back from Afghanistan (he's a Pashtun), I suspect it is Concord (big leaves, slip skins, and the dead giveaway: it smells like Welches)
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth; Niaz and I picked the vine bare and Michelangelo and I cleaned our feet and stomped them flat.
As the wine progressed, I became quite proud of it. It is likely technically the best wine I have made to date. It had great clarity, good balance, a real fruity aroma, and very true to the characteristics of the varietal. Unfortunately, the varietal is Concord. Due to low alcohol, and high PH (and as Concord wine is not really what I was after), I decided at the end to krausen it as I would a beer (the positive pressure in the bottle will help forestall spoilage) and serve it cold. In other words, rather than making a "vineyard designate (Niaz's Arbor) San Francisco Bay AVA sparkling Labrusca"; I'll make a cider out of it.

04-Sep-07 - Niaz and I picked the grapes; Michelangelo and I stomped them. We ended up with ±5 US Gallons of must. 17 brix @ 68℉ = 1.067 specific gravity, TA = .6% pH = 4.9. It tastes like Welches Grape Juice. I am worried about the starting gravity. I want to bring it up by another 35G/L (to a specific gravity up to 1.1). My calculations give 412.5g needed so I chaptalized it with 15oz of corn sugar to bring it up. I pitched it with the Lalvin 71B that I had left over from the Mosto Italiano kit. The resulting must soon took on the aroma of bread.
05-Sep-07 - Not much fermentation going on. Smells awesome. Punched down.
06-Sep-07 - Lots of thick cap. on a twice daily punched down routine.
09-Sep-07 - Pressed. Yielded about 2.5 US gallons. Very light in colour.
18-Sep-07 - Racked. Hydrometer reads .996 @68℉ = .997
30-Sep-07 - Racked and finned with 42ml of 10% egg whites. Does not really taste too bad at this point; still predominately Welches.
17-Oct-07 - Smells like jelly. Fantastic colour. Still tastes like Welches.
04-Nov-07 - Started cold stabilization. Normally with the low acid I would not do this; but since I'm planning on serving it chilled I don't want any tartaric crystals dropping out in someone's glass. Put oak in the ½ gallon bottle as a test
13-Jan-08 - Fridge in mid 30's (℉) Clarity is unparalleled. still smells of jelly and tastes of Welches. Colour is awesome. The unoaked sample was very simple in flavour; the oaked is slightly better so I added about ⅓ of the American oak left over from the Mosto Italiano kit
19-Jan-08 - Doug Jefferys came over for a barrel tasting. He said: "Big fruity nose. Yep, Concord when tasting :-) Carbonate and drink!"
Sometime between Jan and Apr - Moved to cellar as I'm worried it is warming up in the garage
13-Apr-08 - looks like malolactic has occurred as the corks have pushed out and sprayed residue all over cellar
20-Apr-08 - The small bottle is way,way cloudy
17-Sep-08 - added 7oz of corn sugar and crown capped in 187ml bottles. I had intended on using plastic champagne corks; but the bottles I got do not accept the corks I have. I chose the small bottle as this is not the kind of wine you would want more than a ¼ glass of in a sitting. Cellared all bottles.
27-Feb-09 - Chilled a bottle and tasted. SGK liked it. She thought it was a cider not a sparkling wine. (reaction I was hoping for). Not as much carbonation as I want. I'll move it to the Garage in spring so the warmer temperature should activate the yeast to continue carbonation.