Bad Mother....

Late last year we were playing around with making sourdough, using a starter that a friend gave us. We tried a few different recipes (the Alaskan sourdough pancakes were awesome) but after a while I decided that it was too much like hard work just to get a couple of loaves of bread and my time was better spent making beers & ciders. We put the sourdough 'mother' in the back of the fridge and promptly forgot about it for 6 months or so.

We found it during the move and it was looking pretty bad - it had a rancid, overly-sour smell and separated out into an evil dark fluid sitting on top of an off-white cake of flour. We almost threw it out but because of various dietary fun we're having at the minute decided to see if we could rejuvenate it. A few months on and our mother is healthy & productive again.

Which brings me on to the tune of the week (which to be honest is a reasonable tune with a great video). Graphic language and very violent imagery warning - do not watch this in the same room as anyone with a delicate disposition! Don't be mislead by the picture below, there's a lot more blood than boobs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Rgox84KE7iY

Dinner in a pumpkin

Shortly after we got our kettle Weber we invested in 'The Complete Australian Barbecue Kettle Cookbook', a classic guide to using the barbecue that was first published in the mid-80's and which is still in circulation 25 years and 26 printings later. It's a useful guide but some of the recipes are a little dated, in a wonderful kind of way.

Something that caught my eye early on was 'Dinner in a pumpkin', where you hollow out a pumpkin and use that as both the cooking pot & the bowl. There are breadcrumbs, lentils, onion, chickpeas, beans, tomatoes, brisket, chilli & a few spices stuffed into that 1 dollar pumpkin (got to love the markets...)

After a couple of hours in the kettle it looks like this - unfortunately the outer skin of the pumpkin had split at this point so it started to collapse  

and the transfer to the plate proved less than elegant

despite my best attempts to pretty it up

Despite the serving difficulties it still tasted good. Not great and a little bland to the modern palate, but I have rice & chilli-laden plans for the next one.

There are any number of exciting recipes in the book that I'm keen to explore, particularly because half of them involve pork products. I'm particularly looking forward to the 'banana wrapped in bacon'... 

The doctor will see you now

The last time I cooked a beef brisket it came out with excellent flavour but the meat was dry. I hadn't followed the full recipe that time, so yesterday I gave it another go with a bit more attention to detail and some more barbecue toys.

First off I added a rub to the meat, left it overnight and then injected it several times with a mix of Imperial Stout and salt water

 

You do this because the meat cooks for at least 6 hrs, so it needs some additional help to keep it moist. Poke the needle in and squeeze gently as you pull it out. You can see the meat bulging as you pump it, it's very cool.

One for the beef, one for the chef

I got the smoker good & smoky at around 230F and left the meat on it for a few hours. I went mountain biking and I recommend that option to anyone cooking this (particularly Graham), but it doesn't heavily affect the flavour of the meat

After around 4 hrs (when the meat has reached 150F or so) I tightly wrapped the meat in aluminium foil with a few spoonful's of my injection solution, stoked the fire a bit (temperature was dropping) and left it for another couple of hours. This is called a 'Texas crutch'. Apparently at around 150F there are a lot of juices coming to the surface of the meat which evaporate and keep the meat from further heating up for a couple of hours ('the stall'), and the Texas crutch helps prevent this by capturing the juices instead.

I waited for the meat to hit around 200F and then took it out  and opened it up. Yum.

Blade (which I think is the Australian term for what Americans call brisket) has two distinct pieces of meat on it, the main chunk and a smaller top section called 'the flat'. I took the flat off , re-wrapped the main body of the meat and left it in an esky for half an hour or so (should have been longer but I was hungry). The flat was chopped up and cooked in the juices that came out of the tinfoil; this is known as 'burnt ends'.

Fresh buttery brisket, home made mustard and a home-brewed beverage. And some green stuff for health purposes...

After some time in the Esky the beef came out looking, smelling and tasting fantastic. Much moister than last time and melt-in-the-mouth. You could almost cut through it with a butter knife.   

The only problem is that it only holds this texture whilst it's warm. Once it's been stored in the fridge it's still tasty, but it won't have that smooth butteriness. So I had to eat as much as possible that evening... 

Chipotle

We've got a chilli plant in the back garden which is enjoying the winter weather and producing chillis faster than we can eat them. We've thought about chilli jams & chutneys but for the first batch I thought I'd try making chipotle chilli, which is essentially chilli that's been smoked & dried.

Here're the chillis in the smoker for the first time - I either opened up or sliced most of them, but after I took this shot I added a couple of whole ones

After four hours or so of smoking they were still a little moist, so the next time I smoked something I added the chillis back on when I was done and let the smoker burn itself out. So there's probably 8 hours or so of drying time all up. They look great 

 Are they dry enough?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acRhMHKYst8

Yup, I think so...

Govt Health Warning - smoking is addictive

Fancy a chicken wing?

 

Smokeapolooza

I had a smoking extravaganza this weekend. When you smoke food it needs a fair bit of preparation so for a few days before the fridge was full of interesting looking containers 

If it doesn't work out I can always try to be the next Damien Hirst

After a few days of bring & curing a rub is applied for a few hours - I also found some lamb shanks going cheap so thought I'd chuck them on as well. I use this site as an inspiration and source of recipes for rubs & marinades

On the kettle ready to go

After a couple of hours I added a couple of chicken breasts - I'm experimenting with trying to make a 'chicken bacon'

and after a couple more hours it was dark but all was good to go!

The 'chicken bacon' is very tasty, but the lamb shanks were a little tough - I think I need to start using temperature probes to keep things a bit more accurate, but it's still fun to chuck it on and see what happens...

Cooking in the gardens

We packed our passports and headed north of the river on Sunday to check out the Redcliffe food festival. Australia is big on its food festivals and they vary from small intimate gatherings to large corporate events. The atmosphere tends to vary inversely to the size - at the Southbank festival we've even been scolded by a stallholder for daring to taste a wine at a wine tasting and not immediately buying a bottle.*

The Redcliffe festival was a little different as it was held in the botanical gardens, with a twisty turn maze of pathways threading through beautiful woodland

Along with the food, wine, gardening talks and general knick-knack stalls were some historical recreation societies including a gypsy group 

and a medieval recreation society, one of whom gave a great talk on making mead

Hanging over everything and constantly chattering to themselves were the fruit bats that have made their home in the gardens 

I thought that bats slept during the day but these guys were early risers

 After a few hours we sought refuge from the crowds and went to the beach - it was beautiful Qld winter weather and I didn't see a single cloud in the sky all day. This is an aerial shot from the drone, although I'm not game enough to fly it over water quite yet.

 When I get the hang of flying it then I can try for some bat close-ups...

*The two of us shared very small tastings of a mediocre Shiraz and an overly sweet & fake tasting 'ginger zinger' wine put out by '2nd 2 None' wines. After politely refusing the suggestion to buy something at $17 / bottle that was outclassed by Dan Murphy cleanskins we were snappily asked 'why are you tasting them if you're not going to buy one?', which is kind of missing the point I think. We spent a few dollars more on a lovely Pinot Noir from a very friendly neighbouring stall instead. '2nd 2 None' are regulars on the foodie circuit - if you see their stall, just keep walking.

Briskett

There are two classic American barbecue dishes - pulled pork and beef brisket. There are plenty of guides on line for both - I favour this place which is a great mix of recipe, theory, history and philosophy - but sometimes it's hard to figure out which cuts of meat over here match the American cuts. It's funny, you'd think that cutting up animals would be a generic thing but different cultures divide the same animals up in different ways. Apparently it used to be a regional thing even within the same country, but with the development of the mass market the cuts that were sold became dictated by the larger merchant organisations. Nowadays there's a movement to discover old traditional cuts and even to invent new ones, to the point where some of the new cuts of meat are being patented by artisan butchers & restaurants. But for those of us trying to replicate recipes from what we can see on line, it can often be a case of looking at an American butchers cut guide and trying to correlate that to an Australian guide. So for example from what I can see Australian blade matches American brisket, whereas Australian brisket seems to match parts of American fore-shank & short plate.*

With that in mind I found a 'blade roast' selling for $6 / kg and thought that would be a good cut to experiment on. Here's the original joint

and with a rub applied (as per the Amazing Ribs link above)

Add to a kettle Weber set to smoke with indirect heat for a long time...

Six hours later the joint looks like this - you can see from the thermometer behind that it's been cooked at around 250F 

Leave it to rest for an hour or so in an Esky

take out onto a chopping board - it's apparently supposed to look like a meteorite

and then carve

There's good and bad with this. The rub is beautiful and the smoke 'bark ring' looks and tastes great, but the meat is a bit dry and granular 

The recipe suggested that I apply a 'Texas crutch' after a couple of hours, which entails wrapping the joint in a couple of layers of tinfoil with a few spoonfuls of beef broth next to the skin. That's apparently done to prevent the joint drying out during the end of the cooking process and I think that next time I'll give that a go. 

It seems like smoking meat is a bit like brewing beer. It takes time both in preparation and execution, it gives us large quantities of something I both enjoy very much and need to cut back on and when I've finished one, I immediately want to try another one with what I've learnt...  

*There's a family element to this too. My grandfather used to be a butcher before the war, but ended up flying in Catalina flying boats over the North Sea as a radar operator trying to pick up German U-boats. After the war was over he started working as an electrical engineer for Rolls-Royce Aero-Engines in Derby. It would probably surprise him to find out that almost 60 years on his grandson would be living on the other side of the world and trying to figure out what he knew about cuts of meat all those years ago. I need to ring him and ask him about it!      

Learning to grind

I think I first saw grind tricks on a skateboard when I was a kid - they looked awesome, but I was far to unco-ordinated to stay upright a skateboard, let alone try a grind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=7lbnYEIea5c

Snowboarding gave me a second opportunity and snow is a lot softer to fall onto than concrete. I even managed a couple of simple rail slides, but soon found out that both rails and the things they're mounted on are much harder than snow....I soon left this kind of craziness to younger bendy people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_a9qtRDfj8

You can grind on bikes as well - on a mountain bikes (if you have no regard for your chainstays)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwnlQ7UxQNs

 

On a fixie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM0gA2cZ7kw

 

and of course on a BMX

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utdm6PNo8CA

 

In my view the most impressive grinding of all is on inline skates

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf67bDwN6-M

 

This weekend I had another go at learning to grind

In less than 10 minutes I'm managed to convert whole wheat 'berries' from this

to this

to this

Unfortunately our bedmaker's settings for 'wholemeal' flour are based around using shop-bought wholemeal flour, which is essentially wheat that's been milled down to white flour and then had some ground-up husk mixed back in with it. So the loaf turned out a little denser than planned...  

I can probably use it to mount a grind rail into so I can start practicing again... 



Tomato beer

 This weekend I decided I'd pick up a long standing challenge - make a tomato & basil beer. I'd carried out a few internet searches and there aren't many recipes out there for beer brewed primarily from tomatoes so I was on my own with this one. Although surprisingly tomato juiced mixed with beer seems to be a reasonably common drink in the US (it's known as 'red beer') - crazy people.

There were a couple of different ways of going about it. I could have just added some extras to tomato juice and fermented that out, similar to how I made my cider. That seemed a bit too easy and I wanted to use vine-grown tomatoes and include the vines in an attempt to give a more resinous texture. I could have followed the technique commonly used by 'hedgerow wine' makers where the ingredients are chopped, mixed with water & yeast and left for an initial ferment for a week or two. Then the solids are separated out and the liquid added to a demijohn. But this normally requires various additional powders to prevent the food from spoiling. So I decided I'd follow the 'traditional' brewing approach and make a 'mash' of tomato.

So here's the base ingredients -

1.8kg Vine tomatoes
1 bunch basil (I only used the leaves plus one stalk) - this may have been too much
1 fennel heart (approx. 200g)
4 bay leaves
2 chillis - I maybe should have removed the seeds, but it's hard to gauge the heat
2 teaspoons ground fennel seeds
3 star anise

Chop everything up (including tomato vines) and cook at medium heat (stirring regularly) to break down the tomatoes. This is early on in the cooking process

and this is 'the mash' after a couple of hours. I'd also added around 1/2 pint of water to keep everything liquid

Press the mix through a steel sieve to get a rich tomato sauce - at this point you can still bail and pretend you're just cooking Italian

Dissolve 1kg of light malt extract into boiling water in another saucepan, then mix the two together and bring to a gentle boil. I'm not sure if this was wise as I lost the vibrancy of the tomato colouring, I think next time I might just use raw sugar instead. I also debated adding in some hops at this point to give a hop aroma, but after tasting I decided against it.

Cool the wort in the usual way and once it's no hotter than body temperature decant into two clean demijohns, then top up with filtered water to halfway. You need to cool the wort to stop the glass demijohns from shattering.  

Add yeast and leave. My two got pretty feisty over-night, and you can see from the foam ('kreuzen') that's being generated why you don't fill the demijohns to the top - if you do it' just gets messy.

Once the kreuzen has died down then I'll top up the demijohns, and then all I can do is wait. I reckon two to three weeks of fermentation should be all it needs followed by a couple of weeks of bottle maturation. Then we need to make some pizza and give it a try!