Gravlax

Started a little salmon curing today; I'm not expecting the world from it, but if it comes out better than my last batch (which wasn't even edible), I'll be pleased.  The recipe is adapted more or less from this one - I'm not a believer in Paleo nonsense, but I wanted a recipe without a lot of excess cure after how dry and salty it turned out before.

• ~566g salmon (two fillets, skin on)
• 2 tablespoons corn sugar (I normally only use it for carbonating beer, but I needed something finely granulated for this)
• 1 tablespoon smoked sea salt (I don't think smoking salt actually does anything, but I had a little I bought to try it, might as well use it up)
• 1/2 -> 3/4 teaspoon finely ground juniper berries, plus ~3/4 tablespoon whole ones
• Lots of whole fresh dill

I mixed the salt, sugar, and juniper, and spread it over both pieces of fish, favouring the thickest parts, then sandwiched the whole berries and dill between them and wrapped them in a few layers of plastic wrap.  Layed in a long dish and weighed down with a cutting board and a couple of plastic bottles full of water, it just fits onto the bottom shelf in my fridge.  Since the fillets aren't that thick, I imagine this will cure quite quickly, only a couple of days and then ready to try.

Speaking of curing, that elk worked out amazingly.  I wanted to do some more, but I got to the farmer's market too late and all I could get was bison.  I'll try something similar with that, but since it's not quite as lean it won't be the same.  I also got some whitefish, though, which I'm doing to try lightly curing and tea smoking later.

But for now, I've got some cider to carbonate and a high-voltage power supply to figure out.

Oh, and stand-up on Monday!

Curing Elk

I bought a couple of elk roasts at the farmer's market today (inside round, for people who know more about this), sort of spur of the moment, and then it occurred to me later than even one roast is going to be quite a lot of meat for a guy like me to eat right away, especially when I have all that bacon as well.  So I thought I'd cure one.

A little looking around for recommendations lead me to this Canadian bacon recipe, which I've modified by replacing the garlic powder and onion powder both with some hot Hungarian paprika - it should have a lovely colour at a minimum.  I'm probably also going to omit the smoking, and just bring it up to temp in the oven in about a week when it's done curing.

Cured Elk Round:

• 690g Elk inside round
• 1 1/2 Tbl spoons Morton's TenderQuick
• 1 1/2 tspoons brown sugar
• 1 Tbl spoon paprika

I'm thinking it'll make a good sandwich next time I make some bread?  We'll see.

Oh, yeah, stand-up last week...  Wasn't.  I temporarily lost the notes for my set and didn't feel prepared, so I showed the old pilot for Don't Cook This at Home instead.  That went over really well, though.  I've got to do a second episode soon...

Wa-San Dark Saison

I brewed up an experimental saison a little while back - experimental both because I've never actually done a proper saison before (and with the notoriously finicky Wyeast 3724 Belgain Saison yeast, at that), and because I decided to add some Thai red rice (Alter Eco's Thai Ruby Red) and kaffir lime leaves.  This was my first batch with temperature control, too, since saison yeast likes it hot (30+ Celsius, which is pretty hot for yeast) - I had the whole fermenter in a water bath with an aquarium heater.  It was a learning experience.

Today, I bottled it, and despite all the ways the beer could have gone wrong, it seems to have gone more or less entirely right!  After a few weeks at high temps it settled dead-on at my calculated final gravity (1.010), so it should be around 5.1% ABV - a little high for a saison, but lower than my stuff usually comes out.  Bottling went really smoothly, apart from once again overestimating my volume; it'll be a bit over-carbed, but it's a Belgian so it should be fine and I used good bottles.  But most of all, it tastes great!  I could be happier - it could have more Belgian character, if I'd gotten the temperature up after the first day instead of the third - but I think the nuttiness of the rice comes through and the lime leaves don't overwhelm everything else, and there's nothing I'd call an off flavour, so hooray!  Not bad for my first try with a challenging style.

Recipe for ~8L (small batch brewing!) as follows:

• 1 Kg pale ale malt
• 454g Thai red rice
• 125g "Special B" (Really just a variant of Munich in this case)
• 125g dark crystal malt (120L)

Mash at around 148F for 60 minutes.

• 8g Amarillo hops boiled for 45 minutes
• ~8 Kaffir lime leaves boiled for 5 minutes

Ferment with Belgian saison yeast, starting around 70F and ramping up to 90F over the next few days.

In other news, the blood orange bacon is great!  I need to work more on my smoking technique, and maybe not leave the skin on next time, because the orange flavour and the smokiness are both a bit uneven, but it's really good.  I smoked it over oolong again, mixed with barley and a citrusy chai.  Bits of it are really intensely citrusy, and bits are really smokey, but mostly it's very nice.  I'm definitely going to keep working on using zest in my cure.

The mustard was a bit less of a success.  It turns out I underestimated the amount of liquid required, and had to add more beer.  The only bottle I had at the time I was willing to sacrifice was a Big Rock Barghest barleywine (drank a bit as well, review = shrug), so the De Ranke XX didn't come through like I hoped.  I'll have to try again.  It's still nice grainy mustard, though.

My cheese is coming along swimmingly, but I haven't tried any yet.  The rind looks lovely, just pure white.  It's in the stage where it gets really soft, almost like brie, which I was told to expect - apparently it will firm up and turn into a nice hard cheese if I give it another few weeks.  I'll have to eat at least some in the state it's in now, though, just so I can compare.

I choose to believe all this success is a good sign for my stand-up set on Monday.

Blood Orange Bacon

Started curing some blood-orange bacon today.  Recipe as follows:

1. Pork Belly - ~1.24kg
2. TenderQuick - 31g
3. Brown Sugar - 86.8g
4. Malt Syrup - 71.8g
5. Ground Cinnamon - 9g
6. Blood Orange Zest - 14.6g (4 oranges)

This is modified from the bacon recipe I learned at Charcuterie 101 from Shovel and Fork - the biggest change, or at least the one that worries me, is subbing TenderQuick for the basic cure we used that day; I've done my homework and the ratios should be about the same, though.  Anyway, I'll let it cure for a week, and then tea-smoke it (over oolong - worked great for my first batch).

I've also got some beer mustard going, using De Ranke XX Bitter: about 250g of mustard seeds, 3:2 black to yellow, with ~1 1/4 cups of beer and a bit less than 1/2 a cup of malt vinegar.  I think that's a bit too much liquid, actually, but I'll be adding a few more things after the seeds have soaked for a bit and it should work out.

And I pulled my cheese out of the "cave" (read: box in my fridge) and wrapped it.  Mold looks pretty good, smells good, I think these are going to work!

Spent Grain Meatballs

I think I've found a recipe for the Homebrewers' Guild potluck this year.

Ingredients:

• ~600g lean ground pork
• 2-3 teaspoons of dry tarragon
• 1 1/2 cups spent grains
• salt & pepper to taste

Grains left from making a dark beer, like my own Sarcastic Doorman, are preferred.  (Recipe for the latest batch of Sarcastic Doorman this weekend sometime, maybe.)

1. Run half of your grains through the food processor for a while.  They don't have to be smooth, just mushed-up a bit.
2. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands.
3. Roll into 4 - 6cm diameter balls.
4. Arrange balls evenly in a low baking dish which can be covered with foil.  Cover with foil.
5. Bake in a 190C oven for 15 minutes.
6. Remove foil, turn balls over carefully with tongs.
7. Bake 15 minutes longer, un-covered.

They're pretty great!  Somebody who prepares meat more often than me might improve on the cooking times, maybe, but I'm comfortable with them as is.

Oh, yeah...  And I did stand-up on Monday for the first time.  That was also pretty successful, so I'll probably be doing both these things more often.

Cynic Ale

Smashton & Parris started a beer series over the summer, themed around famous philosophers.  The first entry, the awkwardly-named "The Horror of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster)" (no one has ever actually called it that, but it's on the label) was a dark buckwheat pseudo-witbier with American yeast and LOTS of citrus.  It was pretty successful, but too much work to do the same way again.  Maybe there'll be a Bride of Wit-Kenstein ('s Monster) someday, without quite so much mandarin orange zest in it.

There are plans in the works for a couple of other entries, but the first follow-up is a very small batch of "Riogenes the Cynic", an ESB of sorts brewed with flaked rye, oats, and Nugget hops.  It just went into bottles today, and unlike the last one, I think I actually will brew more of this one, because the pre-carbonation sample was pretty good and it doesn't involve grating all my fingers off.  It could be maltier, but it's easy enough to adjust that.

Anyway, I ran out of tape, but here's the one bottle that got labeled:

Not bad, eh?

Ancient Sarcastic Doorman

Well, maybe not ancient.

The Sarcastic Brown (that one glass looked amber, but it's been pretty brown in all other lighting) has turned out to be a bit of a blessing, in that the Home Brewers' Guild meeting has a brown ale theme this month and I wouldn't have had one otherwise.

But, I have just discovered in the back of the brewing closet a few liters of the "failed" batch before this one, which has in fact been greatly mellowed and smoothed out by the extended secondary, so I'm going to bottle it sometime this week and see what people think.  I don't think I'll make it exactly the way I did that time again anyway, but certainly it looks like some of the mistakes of that batch were less severe than they at first appeared.

And it is definitely, definitely a porter.