Archive for the ‘Epicurean’ Category

« Older Entries

Chocolate Espresso Stout

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

Today I’ve moved our fourth batch of chocolate stout into its secondary fermentation. The first batch was more of a porter. The second was solid, especially after about 10months of bottle conditioning. The third batch was excellent from the beginning, to the point we didn’t manage to hold onto any long enough to see how it aged. Each time I tweeked the recipe a bit. This fourth batch has the addition of a half pound of Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend espresso beans (minimally ground at a #13) that was roasted just this week and added to the carboy before racking the brew for secondary in order to cold extract the coffee flavors.

As it currently stands the recipe comprises:

  • 1c. Ghirardelli Natural Unsweetened Cocoa powder
  • grains:
    • 0.5lbs rolled oats
    • 1lb chocolate
    • 1.5lbs roast barley
    • 0.5lbs 80L crystal
  • 7lbs amber malt extract
  • hops:
    • 2oz fuggles (60minutes)
    • 1oz goldings (20minutes)
  • White Labs liquid London Ale Yeast or better Dry English Yeast…or even better is to swing by HUB during their Friday afternoon dock sale for a bottle of their amazing fruity yeast (supposed to be the same as used in Young’s ales)

The house has an amazing aroma of fruity yeast and dark espresso.

Tags:
Posted in Epicurean | No Comments »

First berry pi of the year

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I just pulled our first berry pie of the year out of the oven. Made with the last of our strawberries and the first of red raspberries, black cap raspberries and marionberries (no blueberries yet). Yum.

Pi

Pi

Tags: ,
Posted in Epicurean, Home and Garden, Photoblog | No Comments »

Our latest beer moved into secondary

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

I moved our latest homebrew (an English Bitter for Mike & Joy’s baby shower) into its secondary fermentation this evening. It smelled and tasted good…

(NOTE: that’s a short 2 second video clip..double click and it should play)

Posted in Epicurean, Home and Garden | No Comments »

Spring Beers

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

2009 spring beers fermenting

2009 spring beers fermenting



We’ve got 20gallons of beer fermenting at the moment. There’s a Czech style lager cooling in the crawlspace in its long secondary fermentation, which will end any week now. And in the image, from left to right, is our Scotch Ale, this years (the 3rd) attempt at finding the perfect Chocolate Stout for our tastes, and what will hopefully be a simple light easy drinking sunny weather beer in the form of a classic English Bitter.

Tags:
Posted in Epicurean, Photoblog | No Comments »

Coffee drinking while scootering

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

corazzocoffee.jpg
I’ve been thinking for some time of rigging myself something to nestle a coffee holding vessel somewhere on my scooter. Corazzo seems to make good products (though I bought a larger fancier Italian lap blanket instead of theirs) and this seems like an obviously handy one to have.
But patent pending, self-levelling, auto-gimbal? Either they’re trying to patent basic physics (inertia, gravity) or that is supposed to be internet humor…

Tags:
Posted in Culture, Epicurean, Journal Entries | No Comments »

Krups 4050 mods

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

krups4050_mods.jpg
Make magazine’s had a lot of interesting articles on coffee related topics. We haven’t undertaken anything radical here, but have come up with a few simple things which have greatly improved the coffee experience with our middle to low end Krups 4050. It performs well IMHO for the price, especially with the following:

  • Buy small quantities of Peet’s Coffee: Maybe someday we’ll try roasting/grinding our own, but this seems like a good compromise given the effort.
  • Chisel off the plastic latch from the water/splash tray: We actually had to return the machine after nearly a year because we could not remove the tray to empty it. The plastic had slowly warped from heating over time and the little wedge of plastic on its bottom (which ostensibly keeps the tray from sliding out and making a mess) was simply too tight to disengage. The new machine had a tray of different type plastic, but it didn’t seem worth the hassle, so first thing I did was trim off most of the nub of plastic. It no longer gives a positive click when slid into the machine, but wont get stuck again.
  • Coffee ground guide: This idea came from Dave Hansen and isn’t machine specific. Find a yoghurt cup with a bottom diameter size near that of the inner diameter of your portafilter. Cut out the bottom and enough of the sides of the yoghurt cup to fit into the portafilter (see picture above…Yoplait cup just visible on bottom right). This makes it really easy to quickly dump in grounds without making a mess, break up any hunks and get just the right amount (ie: slightly more than the height of the portafilter since the grounds will be tamped down quite a bit).
  • Swap the Krups pressurized portafilters (double bottomed with only a single outlet hole in the true bottom versus the many holes in the false bottom): We are using pretty fresh coffee always and have gotten a nice crema with the standard Krups portafilters. This is supposedly a fake crema though and eventually we’ve started having a lot of trouble with the portafilters clogging, regardless of the size ground we use. Searching online we found a number of portafilters which would potentially fit our machine. Krups’ own older non-pressurized ones were the first we tried and they work like a charm. The crema is not any more or less in volume, but it’s notably different in consistency and taste. I’m not convinced it is notably better or worse, just different. And it doesn’t clog which is key. The coffee is also coming out as a nice puck after pulling a shot now, where before the output was fairly random between over dry puck, good consistency puck and pure soup. (Pictured above the original pressurized portafilter is on the left and the new to us “older” Krups non-pressurized portafilter is on the right.)

Posted in Epicurean, Photoblog | No Comments »

Broiled salmon, ratatouille and couscous

Saturday, January 10th, 2009

Over the holiday I Tivo’d Ratatouille for something good visually to check out the new TV. Since then though I’ve been wondering what exactly is ratatouille.
Tonight I decided to make it. I served it with a simple broiled salmon fillet (with olive oil, garlic, onion, black pepper and parsley) and couscous (arguably a French connection given their north african connections; made with our home canned chicken stock, black pepper, onion, garlic and parsley). The couscous sucked up a bit of juice from each of the salmon and the ratatouille and really just connected the whole thing into a scrumptuous meal.
The following is a combination of my thoughts plus the Smitten Kitchen’s take on the movie Ratatouille and a random glance through the top hits on google for “ratatouille recipe”.
Ratatouille:

  • 1c diced/stewed tomatoes
  • 1 red onion, diced
  • 5 cloves garlic, minced
  • olive oil
  • ground black pepper
  • ground thyme
  • parsley flakes
  • white wine
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 each red, green, yellow bell peppers, guts/seeds removed
  • 1 eggplant
  • 1 green zucchini
  • 8oz cherry tomatoes, chopped
  • grated mizithra (or parm or hunks of feta, goat or what floats your boat) cheese

Start oven heating to 375F.
Pour stewed tomatoes in bottom of 9-10″ Pyrex baking dish. Lay bay leaves in dish.
Saute onion in olive oil with black pepper, thyme and parsley. Add garlic at end once onions are cooked, stir briefly, layer on top of tomatoes in baking dish.
De-glaze saute pan with a bit of white wine. Pour reduced wine into baking dish.
Thinly slice peppers, zucchini and egg plant. Stand these around throughout inside of the baking dish, alternating eggplant, zucchini and peppers.
Layer any remaining vegetables on top of the baking dish decoratively.
Add additional black pepper, thyme and parsley, and then sprinkle chopped cherry tomatoes on top. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil.
Cut parchment paper to fit inside top of dish.
Bake at 375F for about 45 minutes, until the vegetables are cooked. Vegetables should be cooked and releasing juices and the sauce be bubbling, but the veggies shouldn’t be dissolving into mush.
Sprinkle top with cheese and serve.

Posted in Epicurean, Journal Entries | No Comments »

Tomatoes starting to come out our ears

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

tomatoes.jpg
Our tomato plants have really kicked into major production (finally…the season’s always really late in my garden). Last weekend I canned 6 quarts of spaghetti sauce. Tonight I did 8 more of stewed tomatoes. I also decided it was time to get a good ceramic knife for cutting all the tomatoes. Sometime back we’d been at a cooking class and tried a ceramic knife. They work really well and are definitely a useful tool to have when chopping lots of tomatoes. I hope they’re sturdy and it lasts a while. Definitely looks fragile.
I guess if I’d have stewed the tomatoes a bit longer they wouldn’t have separated? I usually put them in soups and other soupy things and didn’t want them to be cooked down too much.
As we fall asleep the jars are popping shut.

Posted in Epicurean | No Comments »

Scotch Ale Recipe

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I’ve been meaning to blog more about my beer making and haven’t done a good job. This week Adam Litke was in town for the Linux Plumber’s Conference and I brought some homebrews into lunch one day for him to try. He’s got a pumpkin ale I’m really curious to try and he (as have many) really liked the Scotch Ale we made.
It’s a fairly hard to find brew but quite tasty. We’ve found it at Pelican (hour away) as well as Max’s (only 5 minutes away), but there isn’t really anything available to just grab at the grocery store and have on hand at home for a meal that matches. So we decided to try our own. And it was winner.
We’ll have to make a second batch soon and make sure it wasn’t a fluke. But I intend to go with the same recipe I did the first time:

I did a primary and secondary fermentation at the yeast’s suggested temperatute. Our favorite supplier and experts at Main Brew suggested we’d want to let it age a while and we did. Also because of that I carefully syphoned the beer from the secondary back into one of my plastic fermenters and let it settle a bit before bottling to leave as much yeast sediment behind as possible…didn’t want it to sit in the bottles conditioning and come out with a really yeasty flavor.
We tried a bottle after two months and decided to let it condition a bit longer. We ended up letting it wait almost 5 months after bottling. And at that point it was quite exceptional. At this point it’s been another 4 months or so and I think it’s slowly getting past its prime, so it’s about time to finish off the last couple bottles and make another batch!

Posted in Epicurean | No Comments »

Bigfoot 2008 is out!

Wednesday, February 13th, 2008

I noticed the new batch of Bigfoot at the store today. So I bought some and had my last bottle of ‘07 with dinner.
There’s fancy new label 25th anniversary label. And Sierra Nevada’s (finally) moving to pry tops instead of twist. Assuming the new bottles work with my capper I’ll be able to recycle the bottles with my homebrews.

Posted in Epicurean | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries