It’s not a copy of any particular sour beer that I’ve had, which means I only screw it up if I don’t like it.  I’m using the cherry nut-brown I made last summer as a base and Wyeast’s seasonal Roeselare blend of beasties as my grand priests of funk.

I remarked at the time that the cherry nut-brown would work well as a sour beer. It being cherry season and one of the plastic buckets I use for primary fermentation starting to wear out, I decided that now was definitely the time to give it a try.

As I started my boil, some friends who share my love of food and drink dropped by. We talked about our favourite subject and pretty soon were thoroughly salivating. They quickly ran home to pick up a few goodies and the party started.

With the wort boiling in the background we laid out our entirely impromptu and home-made spread:

• porter
• rye/multi-grain bread
• duck-breast prosciutto
• goat labneh
• 3 chutneys

I’ve remarked on porter’s affinity with duck-breast prosciutto before and rye bread slips in nicely between those two.

The unique mix of musty goat-milk flavours and yoghurt sourness from the labneh balanced well with the other treats and gave a kind of funky milk-stout effect to the porter.

The revelation was chutney with duck-breast prosciutto. The powerfully sweet and spicy chutneys worked really well with the concentrated game flavours of the duck. Porter is not the ideal complement to chutney, but the chutney, duck and porter combination wasn’t bad.

Great company, great food, great drink: an excellent way to make a 3 hour boil evaporate into the warm summer evening.

Chutney is now on the menu and with a significant peach and plum crop on the way expect to see some ideas here soon.

The beer is now safely in the fermenter while my post-brew mess remains. Before I start cleaning up, I have a bunch question for anyone who has used any of Wyeasts bacteria and yeast blends to ferment a fruit beer.

If I remember correctly, Cantillion beers spend their entire lives in one fermenter. Isn’t this a recipe for the yeast autolysis? or does the bacteria inhibit autolysis in some way?

Fruit normally gets added to 6-month old beer. I presume this is because they can only make these beers in the colder months and only get fruit in the hotter months. Does the timing of fruit additions affect the final beer?

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Sour Company

Dungeness Crab

Dungeness crab season goes from April to July. You can catch crab any time of the year, but if, like me, you only go after crab when they are spawning in shallow waters, then crab season is April to July.

Waiting for the crabs to move to shallow waters means crabbing involves wading in shallow waters looking to scoop up any legal-sized crab. It’s a lot more enjoyable when compared to periodically checking traps dropped in deep water.

Crab season may last up to 4 months, but, most of the time, you’re not going to find more than a couple of legal-size crabs.

This past weekend was not most of the time. After 2 days of catching my limit, throwing back tons of otherwise legal crab, I found myself with a lot of crab that needed to be eaten soon. Time to make something special.

Dungeness Crab Linguine

Just saying it makes my mouth water, mmm Dungeness crab linguine. I don’t measure when I cook so all quantities are rough estimates

Ingredients

• 2 Dungeness Crabs
• 1 tsp Fennel Seed
• 1 tsp Salt
• 1/2 tsp Paprika
• 1 pinch Ground Chili Pepper (or anything else that adds a tiny bit of heat)
• 1 small bunch of Chive (or shalott or onion)
• 1 tsp Fresh Thyme
• 3 cloves Garlic (or more if you’re like me)
• Olive Oil
• 375 mg Linguine

Instructions

1. Crush or grind fennel seed.
2. Pre-heat olive oil and add fennel seed.
3. After about a minute, add crab meat, salt, paprika, chili pepper and enough oil to lightly coat all of the ingredients.
4. Just before the pasta is ready, add thyme, chive and garlic. Cook until you start to smell the garlic (30 sec to 1 min) and remove from heat.
5. Serve over pasta.

Beer Pairing Recommendations

Dungeness crab goes well with herbs and citrus fruit so British and American IPA are both on the menu.

Wheat beers go with pretty much any food, but anise that sometimes gets added to Belgian Wit beers will get you bonus points with the licorice-flavoured fennel seed.

Strong Belgian Amber beers will also do a nice job balancing all the strong flavours in the recipe. The extra sweetness in a strong beer is a nice counterpoint to a recipe that otherwise lacks sugar.

On this particular day, I had a home-brewed ESB. The ESB was less hoppy than typical American ESBs, but was more caramelised than British ESBs. It was quite nice, if not sublime. The caramelisation wasn’t ideal, but the malt sweetness and hop aroma and bitterness blended nicely.

Photo Credit: Will Scullin

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Dungeness Crab Linguine Recipe

How much beer and beer-related ingredients can one put into a chicken? I might now have the record, but I’ve got a few ideas on how to beat it.

For starters, try marinating the chicken in beer. I used stout for the gravy, but for some reason crappy lager seems like a good marinade. You don’t use vintage wine when cooking so you probably don’t need to use quality beer.

My beer cheesecake had a lot of really intense flavours. If you want a really intense gravy, start reducing the beer 20-30 min. before the chicken is ready.

Personally, I’d prefer the intense beer reduction sauce with pork or maybe game, but if you’re trying to break a record.

Use your favourite roast chicken recipe and try the recipes below for stuffing and gravy.

Barley-Fennel Stuffing

The fennel and barley in the stuffing were decent matches. The moisture in the fennel helped soften the barley while the spent barley from brewing soaked up moisture from the chicken.

The combination worked well with the chicken and gravy, but I wouldn’t hesitate to try more typical seasonings with a barley base.

The barley was still little dry and, if you’re not trying to break a record, try using a 50-50 barley-rice mix as the base of your stuffing in place of bread crumbs. With the gravy, though, it didn’t seem so dry.

As with anything I cook, quantities are approximate.

Remember this recipe when you have guests with wheat allergies.

Ingredients

• 1 cup of barley (after brewing)
• 1 stalk fennel
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp salt

Chop the fennel and mix with barley and salt. Peel and add the whole garlic cloves to the stuffing. Then stuff the beast.

Stout Gravy

I can’t say it’s the first time that I’ve used beer in gravy, but it’s definitely the best beer-gravy I’ve made to date.

Hoppy beers seem to bitter even more when cooked. The stout I used this time was bitter, but not hoppy, and worked just fine.

Ingredients

• pan drippings from chicken
• 300 ml of stout
• 1.5 tsp salt
• 2 clove garlic

Mix drippings with stout and salt and boil at high for about five minutes. Once it comes to a boil, whisk corn starch with warm water and add it to the gravy. Crush and add garlic about 30 seconds before removing from heat and serving.

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Brewmaster’s Chicken

But even with all of this money going around to support struggling sectors, I don’t see anything to support Bock beer.

The Case for Bock Beer

Bocks are deserving of stimulus spending, more so than many other areas of our economy.

Bock beer is a very smooth and accessible style that is very rarely brewed in North America. But it’s also got a rich, full, malty taste and unique yeast flavours that beer connoisseurs can appreciate. It is an under appreciated style with potential for mass appeal.

Auto Industry and Bock Beer

Compare that with say the auto industry. Automakers struggle against competition with a product that better meets the needs of ordinary people at a lower cost.

Bock beer, on the other hand, is superior to mass-market beers, can delightfully meet the needs of ordinary people, and can be produced at a similar cost.

They are clearly more deserving of a bailout than the auto industry.

Financial Industry and Bock Beer

Compare bocks with the financial industry.

The excesses of the financial industry leave ordinary people with a hangover. Similarly, excesses of bock leave ordinary people with a hangover.

Both industries are obsessed with constant growth that increase the risk of hangover.

The financial industry saturates the mortgage market and has to dole out increasingly risky loans to sustain growth. Similarly, basic bocks, already quite healthy at 6% or more, morph in to dopple-bocks, and then in to eisbocks steadily increasing the risks of hangover.

Clearly, bocks are equally deserving of a bailout.

Lobbying for Bock Beer

In order to further the cause of bock beer in our countries, I’m starting the bock beer lobby.

My goal is to secure a $35 billion in funding to further the cause of bocks in North America.

In order to achieve this goal I plan to educate legislators in both countries about the value of bocks. Once legislators understand the value of bocks compared with the financial and auto industries, I’m confident that legislators will quickly approve the bailout.

But for the bailout to be truly successful, we need coordinated global stimulus.

Once I have successfully lobbied Washington and Ottawa, I plan to leverage those contacts to achieve global action.

Grassroots Action

In order to start my grassroots campaign, I brewed a bock of my own the other day.

I decoction mashed it using almost 100% Munich malt. Unfortunately, I had difficulty hitting my rest temperatures coming up short each time. I wanted to rest at °149 (°65) and °160 (°71) but instead hit °147 (°64), then °149 (°65), then °154 (°68), then ° 158 (°70). But I never imagined that the road to success wouldn’t be without obstacles.

If any of you see bock listed in the register of gifts from lobbyists, you will know where they came from.

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Time for a Bock Beer Bailout

Labneh Cheesecake with Beer Glaze

Tasting the Labneh Cheesecake

The first thing you notice is strong expresso notes from the chocolate porter glaze. The espresso blends into raisin, chocolate, vanilla, and other flavours all balanced across the palate no one taking prominence except when you look for them. Then the flavours all fade into the pleasantly bitter aftertaste of high quality espresso. I can still taste a hint of espresso bitterness now, half an hour after eating.

The very healthy cheesecake only retains the slightest tinge of yoghurt tartness from the Labneh. It serves as an excellent platform for the chocolate porter glaze unifying all the strong flavours from the glaze. The fat helps cleanse the palate letting you appreciate new flavours as they develop. Sour is about the only flavour not in the glaze so the light yoghurt tartness is very refreshing against all the heavier flavours competing on the tongue.

Even though the spent barley was from a stout, I could only detect a slight flavour of the base malt. It worked fine as a crust, but it was a little moist and crumbly. It feels fibrous in the mouth, but not unpleasantly so.

It was very good. And there were a number of firsts for me and original experiments:

1. My first cheesecake (I’m a good cook, but don’t normally do desserts).
2. My first cheesecake crust.
3. The first Labneh cheesecake that I know of.
4. The first spent barley crust that I know of.
5. The first dessert beer glaze that I know of.

It may not have been perfect, but all things considered this first try deserves an A+.

Recipes

The Crust

This recipe is slightly modified from what I made today. I didn’t use flour originally, but I think the addition of flour will help soak up the liquid and make it easier to spread the crust up the side of the pan. If you or any guests have gluten allergies, then leave out the flour and maybe dry out the barley in the oven before mixing it.

• 1.5 cups spent barley
• 1 small egg
• 0.5 cups suger
• 0.5 cups flour
• 3 tbsp melted butter/margarine

Mix all the ingredients together. Spread thinly in a greased cake pan. Cook for about 20 mins. Remove from oven before adding cheese.

The Cheese Filling

You can make Labneh with light or full fat yoghurt. Either way Labneh is alot healthier than cream cheese normally used in cheesecake.

• 2 litres Yoghurt
• 3 eggs
• 0.5 cups sugar
• 0.5 tsp vanilla
• 0.5 tsp salt

Start the Labneh at least a day before making the cheesecake. 2 days is even better. Sling the yoghurt in a clean hankerchief or put it in a coffee strainer-lined colander and let the whey drain from the yoghurt. Make sure you Google whey so that you know not to waste it. The curds that remain after the whey has drained off is Labneh.

When you are ready to make the cheesecake, mix all the ingredients together. They should soften up a little and expand as some air gets in to the mixture. Mix more or less depending on how light or heavy a cheesecake you want to make. Put the filling in the crust and bake at 350 for about 40 minutes or until lightly browned.

Chocolate Porter Glaze

I used Phillips Brewing Longboat Double Chocolate Porter, but I’d be willing to try this with any porter, or sweet stout. I also wanted to use agar as a thickener, but couldn’t find any nearby so I fell back on corn starch. This glaze would also work really well over pork.

• 500 ml Chocolate Porter
• 0.25 cups sugar
• 2 tsp corn starch

Cook beer and sugar in a sauce pan over medium heat until the liquid has reduced to about 1/3 the original volume. Dissolve the corn starch in water and add to the sauce pan. Cook for another 3-5 minutes, cool, and pour over cheesecake.

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Barley Crust Chocolate Porter Labneh Cheesecake

Tasting Labneh

Labneh tastes like cream cheese with a little yoghurt sourness. I expected it to be very sour, but a lot of the sourness drains off with the whey.

Labneh is used in all sorts of middle-eastern cuisine, but I wanted the labneh flavours featured against the beer. So I decided to serve the labneh with garlic and salt mixed in, sprinkled with cumin, oregano and marjoram, and served with tomatoes, Moroccan black olives, and freshly grilled flat bread.

Pairing Beer and Labneh

My choice of beers is Unibroue’s Maudite, a strong, red Belgian ale.

The match is excellent. The full-body and phenols balances the sourness of the labneh. The malt flavours blossom with the body, phenols, and sourness in balance only to be subplanted by the herb flavours from the labneh. Truly an excellent match.

The strong, full-bodied beer also holds its own against the Moroccan spiced olives. Maybe not perfect, but the beer withstands some very assertive flavours and almost complements them. A perfect match with the olives will probably not work with the labneh, so this is an excellent compromise.

Final Pairing Recommendations

I haven’t tried labneh with any other beers, but I expect it and olives to work well with tripels. A Belgian amber strong ale would also be a good match. I imagine the fruity-malt flavours of Duvel would work particularly well against the cream cheese and yoghurt flavours of Labneh and with the spicy Moroccan olives.

The labneh paired with any of these beers would make an excellent appetizer or snack for particularly honoured company.

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Labneh and Beer

The beer was a present from my sister who lives in Abu Dhabi and writes an urban planning blog, but spent the holidays in France with my mom who brought the beer back. So thanks to both of you.

The biere de garde that I tried was Jenlain Ambree and it leaves me wanting more. I’m working from memory because I had this beer last night with some beer-connoiseur friends, but I’d generally describe this style as American ESB hopping and malt balance in an amber beer with fairly high carbonation.

Other resources suggest that there should be some farm-house flavours in bieres de garde, but I didn’t notice any.

Wyeast recommends pretty much every lager yeast for biere de garde style, but they also have a seasonal so I might have to start asking around and the local homebrew shop.

I was with company last night and didn’t think to harvest the yeast. Oh well, maybe I’ll learn from my mistakes.

According to various sources online, the blonde and brune versions of this style that are quite different from the ambree. The brune in particular supposedly uses fewer hops so I’d definitely like to get my hands on some other examples of this style. In the meantime, I think I’ll try making my own version of the ambree.

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My First Biere de Garde

add 100+ IBUs of hops and blast away all the maltiness.

I fully agree with this sentiment. India Dark Ales, as I know them, are all about putting roast and hop bitterness at war with each other.

Weaker stouts  can share the stage with hop bitterness, but the really strong India Dark Ales put those flavours in conflict. And I just don’t like the resulting beer.

If this is a style of beer, I hope it dies quickly.

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Disgust for India Dark Ales

The classic combination is prosciutto and melon. I don’t know of any beers with melon flavours, but a nice fruity wheat beer should probably do the trick. I chose my own Almost Heaven Belgian Wheat Beer.

Another combination is prosciutto with plain bread or crackers to cleanse the palate without interfering with the flavours of the prosciutto. The obvious pairing would be a good, bready pale ale, but I decided to try something a little different: the classic Czech pilsner Budvar which is a little more bitter than pale ale, but not nearly as bitter as the original Pilsner Urquell, and has all the bread-malt flavours of English pale ale.

In addition to the the pairings derived at from common food combinations, I tried R&B’s Hopgoblin IPA, and two Belgian-style tripels Unibroue’s Maudite and Brooklyn Brewery’s Local 1 reasoning that the duck breast prosciutto could stand up very well to these strongly flavoured beers.

Finally, after reading Garrett Oliver’s prosciutto recommendations from (drumroll for Amazon affiliate link please) The Brewmaster’s Table, I got some roastier or more caramelly beers to try with the duck breast prosciutto. My choices were Guinness, Fat Cat Brewing’s Pompous Pompadour Porter, and Aventinus’s Weizen-Eisbock (my first ever eisbock).

Tasting the Beer and Prosciutto

Just about any beer with duck breast prosciutto works acceptably well. The duck is quite fatty, but beer really cuts through the fat and salt quickly asserting its own characteristics. Having said that, there were some winners and losers.

The Winning Combinations

I’m quite gratified that my first choice was correct. The Almost Heaven Belgian Witbier was excellent. The fruit flavours and aroma really offset the saltiness of the duck prosciutto while the farmhouse flavours of the Witbier complemented the hints of game or duck from the prosciutto.

Probably the best combinations, though, were Porter and the Eisbock. In both cases the dark malt and caramel flavours complemented the cured duck, but I think it was the sweetness of the two beers that was the key to making the combinations work. Rather than cutting through the salty flavours of the duck, the sweetness balanced them giving the rich malts a chance to shine. The nutty caramelly flavours of the Eisbock in particular paired really well with the prosciutto. I imagine that a supremely expensive acorn-fed Jamon Iberico http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamón_ibérico must taste similar.

Finally, the Budvar was good. It didn’t complement the prosciutto the same way the other beers did. But it clearly cut through the salty cured meat flavours refreshing your palate without conflict.

The Losing Combinations

The astringent rubbing alcohol-like phenol flavours and spices of the full-bodied Belgian tripels, Maudite and Local 1, played dangerous game competing with the salt from the prosciutto. The Local 1 hit a bit of a sweet-spot and actually came out a little fruit-like which was quite pleasant, but mostly these two beers seemed in conflict with the prosciutto flavours.

The IPA also didn’t fare so well. It wasn’t horrible. It cut through the flavours of the prosciutto, but, like the Belgian tripels, the hop bitterness seemed in conflict with the stronger prosciutto flavours.

Final Pairing Recommendations

When pairing duck prosciutto with beer try one of the following recommendations:

• A sweet, dark, malty beer to balance the saltiness while bringing out the malt flavours. Try sweet stout, porter, nut-brown ale, any kind of bock, British mild.
• A fruity beer to complement the salty-cured meat flavours while refreshing the palate. Try any kind of European wheat beer, except possibly Berliner Weisse.
• A light-coloured bread-like beer to refresh your palate while letting the duck prosciutto shine. Try a good pale ale, blonde, or one of the less bitter pilsners.

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Pairing Duck Prosciutto and Beer

Duck Breast Prosciutto

Making Duck Breast Prosciutto

After checking a number of different recipes online and also consulting at the local salumeria, I made a few adjustments to the Mad Fermentationist’s recipe:

• salted for 28 hours
• washed salt off with wine
• coated with white pepper, garlic powder, fresh thyme and rosemary
• aired for 13 days at °37 F (°3 C).

I followed the Mad Fermentationst’s recipe in every other way.

Tasting the Duck Prosciutto

The meat is quite firm and jerky-like at the narrowest edges, but the texture of most of the meat is very close to prosciutto.

The big difference between duck and regular prosciutto is that the fat in pork is marbled throughout the meat whereas duck fat all sits on top of the meat. There’s also a lot more moisture in duck fat than pork fat. Normally prosciutto is sliced thinly, but this is even more important with duck breast prosciutto because a large mass of moist duck fat in your mouth isn’t very pleasant. But the fat on thinly sliced pieces almosts melts in your mouth and blends in with the meat.

My duck prosciutto tastes like cured pork with a slight overtones of game. The white pepper comes through quite nicely and it is noticably salty. The thyme and rosemary are really evident in the aroma, particularly when opening the package, but they blend well with the other flavours in your mouth.

Modifying the Recipe

I’m pleased with how this recipe turned out, but there are a few things I’d like to try.

I think it would be better if it weren’t quite so dry. Next time I make this I’ll reduce airing time to 10 or 11 days. From what I can gather after reading a number of different recipes online, the airing time seems to depend on the temperature and humidity. I’ve seen instructions ranging from “hang in a dry area” to “hang in a moist area” and “hang in your refridgerator” to “hang at room temperature (in a warm region no less!).” I decided to play it conservatively and keep everything (salting time, airing time and temperature) on the safe side.

Another thing I’d like to try is to marinade the duck breast in wine or beer and herbs before salting. It seems a little silly adding liquid before drying, but it also might be the best way get milder herb flavours in to the prosciutto.

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Duck Breast Prosciutto Recipe