Monthly Archives: April 2010
Gourmet Underground Detroit's content archives are organized by date and catalog the aggregated content of our Features pages as well as our blog.
Crab Leg
I’m swigging crab legs. And it doesn’t involve some sort of new aerosol fish product that you might find on the shelf between Chee-Z-Whip and Krab Stix.
It’s one of the newer tea selections available at Goldfish Tea in Royal Oak. As the absolute pinnacle of what the Detroit area has to offer in terms of tea, Goldfish specializes in Chinese teas. While their extensive menu is generally static, they occasionally have something new and/or truly special that comes through their shop by virtue, I suspect, of their direct importing arrangement.
So today, I’m sitting in Goldfish with my laptop, drinking a tea called “Crab Leg.” The name fits: The leaves are narrow and long, punctuated every several millimeters or so with a joint- or knuckle-like bulbous ridge. There’s a faint mushroom quality to the aroma of the moistened leaves, which gives the impression of a puer-style tea. But its golden, medium-brown color hints at more of a robust oolong treatment, as it is indeed labeled at the tea shop. And its flavor, equal parts medicinal, buttery, and earthy, leaves me fairly dumbfounded.
After a bit of research, it appears that several online retailers qualify Crab Leg (or”char yong”) as puer but offer little detail in support of that. Puer can be tricky to classify, of course, in that its green/raw form is so very different from its richer, earthier post-fermentation “big brother.” If I were to reach into my bag of over-used diagramming tools and pull out a simple Venn diagram, I’d say that Crab Leg tea falls in the middle of an overlap between raw puer, fermented puer, and an oolong.
It’s fascinating stuff — almost as fascinating as the salon job interviews some hair stylists from the next shop over are conducted a few tables over. Give it a try. The tea. Not the salon gig. Unless you’ve been to beauty school and love the word “like.”
The Simple Joy of Fermenting Food at Home
It all started with booze. Picture the Neolithic hunter-gatherer coming home from a couple of weeks in the bush to find the honey he had collected before he left a simmering mess. Ravenous from his adventure, he would take a small taste, realize that this strange, not exactly rotten brew wasn’t going to kill him — and the next thing you know the edges of his world have softened and after seeing God he carves mad poetic figures into the walls of his cave. Thus begins our love affair with fermentation.
The wonders of fermentation are mystical. It’s a complex chemical process that occurs, often of its own accord, with little display over a sometimes lengthy period of time. This can be intimidating for the person interested in fermenting at home but with no experience.
Is it working? What is that white stuff? If I eat this am I going to need a stomach pump?
Relax.
Whether in a cave, tent, cabin, yurt or château in Southern France, humans have been fermenting at home for millennia. And they generally had a lot more to worry about than bad food. There are just a few things that you have to pay close attention to.
Cleanliness: Make sure your fermentation vessel and anything else that might touch your pre-fermented food is clean. It’s that simple. Bad bugs and mold can’t take hold if they’re not there.
Inhibit the growth of mold and undesirable bacteria with natural preservatives: This is mainly done by using salt or acid.
For example, acid is a key mold inhibitor in kombucha. That’s why you always want to keep about 15% of your last batch. The acid in the already fermented kombucha is plenty to save your new batch from getting fuzzy on top. Acid allows grape and apple juice to be naturally fermented into wine and cider through yeasts that reside on the fruit and in the fermentation area.
Vegetable ferments require a certain percentage of salt. I like around 5-6% brine (3/4 cup salt per gallon of water). This is easy when making pickles, but cabbage, or other vegetables that release a lot of water when salted, are a bit more difficult. I usually use a tablespoon of salt for about 3-4 cups of cabbage and then top with the measured brine.
Trust your taste: If it tastes or smells bad, don’t eat or drink it. Kombucha and lactic fermented vegetables may be an acquired taste but you should be able to tell right off whether your ferment is too funky to eat.
This is very basic information provided simply to help reduce any fears that you might have about home fermentation. Though they are all related, every type of food ferment has it own rules. The best thing to do is find a trusted source for recipes and more detailed information. If you’re nervous, start with something simple, like sourdough or yogurt.
First posted at Total Kombucha
Spruce Campbell Ale: A Spruce Beer Recipe & Notes
Spruce Campbell Ale is a unique bottling flavored with spruce tips harvested from our own backyard tree and named after ‘B’ Horror movie icon Bruce Campbell of Evil Dead fame. Tart and refreshing with a touch of malt sweetness, it is reminiscent of a Flanders Red Ale.
Fresh Spruce tips are picked in early May and used right away or frozen until brewing time in late summer. You might imagine a beer brewed with spruce tips would taste like pine resin but in fact the tips add a citrus-like flavor and acidity akin to lemon. The tips also contain tannins which help structure the beer. There are no hops used.
The malt bill is based on a Bell’s Best Brown clone. I don’t recall why I chose this particular malt base but it couldn’t have worked out any better. The resulting balance is rather wine-like which may account for its popularity among people who aren’t serious beer drinkers.
Famous among a half dozen of my close friends, the word about Spruce Campbell’s delicious intensity is spreading like wildfire across internet communities. Actually, only one person asked me for the recipe but I wanted to post the pretty pictures again.
Recipe for six gallons of Spruce Campbell:
5 lbs. pale malt
2 lbs. Maris Otter
1 lb. Victory
1 lb. caramel 60°L
14 oz. special roast
2 oz. chocolate
Single infusion mash. Add 0.75 oz. of spruce tips at 60, 45, 20 and 10 minutes boil for a total of three ounces. (Spruce tips can be adjusted down to as low as 1.5 ounces for a less sour beer)
Best enjoyed during an Evil Dead Trilogy marathon.
A Dry Martini
I haven’t always been a fan of martinis. In fact, until recently, I pretty much thought they were terrible.
Then I had good vermouth.
At first, it was just sweet vermouth in the form of Carpano Antica Formula. That helped open up an entire world of classic cocktails. But my real education began with the entire line of Dolin vermouths, which aren’t as of yet available here in the Detroit area.
Dolin Dry is absolutely delicious on its own as an apertif. But it shines in a dry martini, that formerly dreaded drink that I’ve come to appreciate if not love. With light citrus flavors and hints of herbs de provence, it’s drier, more spicy, and more nuanced than any other dry vermouth I’ve ever tasted, and it illustrates why a classic dry martini isn’t made with a splash of vermouth and a bucket of gin as has become the fashion today.
If I had to settle for Martini & Rossi in my gin, I suppose that I’d only want a sprinkle of vermouth in my martini as well.
Fortunately, there’s Dolin.
So in my dry martinis, I’ve been working with 2 1/4 oz gin to 3/4 oz vermouth or even a half-and-half mix. Why not showcase the flavors of all the ingredients if they’re worth showcasing?
The Red Wings just won the fourth game of their first round playoff series as I was polishing off the last sip of my martini. I think I’ll have something else that features Dolin Dry to celebrate.
Wine versus Beer: The Truth Revealed
Following a general trend away from the industrialization of food, the past few decades have seen the craft beer movement sweep across the nation and introduce an entire generation to a world of beer flavor that their parents likely never knew existed. In the wake of all this improved drinking, a class of chest-pounding pundits making bold proclamations about the superiority of beer over wine, particularly when pairing with food, is rising. Meanwhile, smarmy wine collectors with large amounts of disposable cash snigger behind their thin-lipped sneers at these upstart knuckle-draggers. Can one drink really be better than the other?
Let’s take the corporate brands, the drinks that are produced in mass quantities with an eye toward minimal cost and homogenized “flavor”, out of the equation. They tolerably serve their purpose at wedding receptions and art gallery openings but have no place in this debate.
Wine lovers will argue that a good wine speaks of place. After the sun and soil have done their work, after the grapes have been hand-harvested, crushed and fermented with indigenous yeast, after the wine has been aged and bottled, after all of this, the year that the grapes grew is placed on the label and you have the essence of a geographic area. A time capsule that tastes good.
Beer enthusiasts will argue that beer also speaks of time and place. Though malted barley is a commodity that stores well and can easily be shipped anywhere, a good brewer can use it to reproduce a classic style of beer, rich with history, for local consumption. And it will be less expensive and easier to share at convivial gatherings. Some brewers will even craft a product, much like wine in fact, subject to the unpredictability of airborne yeasts and bacteria.
And they would both be right.
Other people will promote a Laissez-faire philosophy and tell you simply to drink what you like. But let’s face it, we have human brains and are not to be trusted. We trick ourselves all the time. If you base a taste preference on little experience the only thing that you accomplish is a narrowing of your options. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to try absolutely everything available. Do a little research and start with the benchmarks. Or try what your region has to offer. Learn.
That jaw-dropping food and drink pairing that you covet is more than likely going to come as a surprise rather than a planned event. The variability and nuance in quality fare is sometimes revelatory in both good and bad ways. Just as we should celebrate the individuality of people, we should also celebrate the individuality of our experiences.
So don’t take anyone’s word for it. Explore. At mealtime, or when you have a nice cheese spread, go with your gut feeling when deciding what to drink. Use the customary guidelines if you want, or do the opposite, just to see what happens. Draw from experience or use your intuition. A regular drinker will be aided by a metaphysical power that connects the universe through molecules of ethanol. It usually doesn’t kick in until after the first glass is drained, admittedly, but one eventually learns to harness this force to support their pleasures.
At any rate, the end result of all this scrutiny is clear: Cider is the best drink to pair with dinner. Seriously, you must try it with roast pork. It’s like nothing else.
Wednesday
Wednesdays aren’t for serious drinking. That’s what they tell me, anyhow.
Wednesdays are for watching forensic dramas. They’re for anxiously anticipating Friday. They’re for wanting to beat the crap out of an office mate. They’re for nervous breakdowns, early bedtimes, and doing laundry.
Wonderful, wonderful Wednesdays. Replete with routine.
Enter: a special bottle of wine. Most people pull out a special bottle of wine for a special occasion. But the power of a special bottle can elevate any occasion. That may appear trite and too full of wine snob whimsy for most, but to those who have had a revelatory moment or two with a glass of wine know what I’m talking about. A friend recently quoted the wine blog, Saignée, “Anyone who knows the initial experience of finding a wine that sticks with them knows the feeling of looking down into the glass in amazement that something could taste so good. The pleasure of the moment is impossible to describe to someone who has never experienced it.”
Looking down into the glass can be quite an event. It can be such an event, in fact, that it can make you throw aside your Wednesday laundry plans and clutch your wine stem for hours.
I’d be exagg
erating if I said tonight’s choice was such a rare, ethereal bottle as to qualify as one of my absolute most memorable wine moments. But it has nonetheless lent a bit of excitement to an otherwise indistinguishable Wednesday evening.
We opened a 1999 Chateauneuf-du-Pape from Chateau du Mourre du Tendre for no other reason than I happened to see it lying in a local wine shop and my wife likes Chateauneuf. How could I lose with an unfiltered wine from Peter Weygandt, a generally reputable importer?
Ripe with raspberries and piquant with peppercorn, the aroma gave me the false impression that this was at its peak. It didn’t take more than a sip to see that there was a ton of size and structure to this wine and that it’s got years ahead of it. If anything, I’d worry that the fruit may fade long before the massive tannins. Besides the bracing acid and fruit skin astringency, there’s a lot of earthy, fungal flavor riding underneath the sharper notes. My first thought when I first opened it was that the nose, palate, and red brick color seemed closer to the last Cote-Rotie and the last Cornas I consumed (two weeks and two months ago, respectively) than anything else.
I’m having fun sipping through this bottle. A lot of fun. And now I get to write about it. Who says Wednesdays are only for bad television and household chores? It may take some excess funds, some giving friends, or some good fortune, but repeatedly casting my nose into a glass of wine that’s elegant far beyond its massive size is about as good an evening as I can fathom.
Wonderful, wonderful Wednesdays indeed.
Kombucha Tasting Note: GT’s Multi-Green
The fact that GT’s Multi-Green kombucha looks extraordinarily like a vernal pond doesn’t have a thing to do with its flavor, sort of.
It starts with a contrasting sweet and tart fruit flavor, something like unripe apple or green mango without the rawness. Eventually, a wave of freshly mown grass and cut herbs washes through. With the herb you’re expecting a bitter aftertaste but it’s quite the opposite, finishing slightly tart, maybe even a bit soft, even more drinkable than you would expect given the wholesome ingredients.
Ingredients like Klamath blue green algae. Klamath Blue Green Algae is a wild, fresh water algae growing in natural abundance in Upper Klamath Lake, east of the Cascade Mountains in Southern Oregon. The mineral-rich volcanic soil that’s deposited into the alkaline waters is the perfect growth medium to produce the nutrient dense algae containing glyco-proteins, vitamins, minerals, simple carbohydrates, lipids and biologically active enzymes.
Other algae found in Multi-green are Spirulina, a food source of the Aztecs and people of 9th Century Kanem Empire near Lake Chad, and the simple green Chlorella.
Studies suggest that all of these extra ingredients have the ability to reduce high blood pressure, lower serum cholesterol levels, accelerate wound healing, enhance immune functions and help aid dioxin detoxification. Add all this to the goodness already present in kombucha and you might as well be drinking from the fountain of youth.* Never mind the color. Hell, we know people that won’t eat guacamole because of the way it looks.
*No clinical studies have proven that drinking GT’s Multi-green will turn you immortal, though you are guaranteed to get strange looks in the cafeteria. Not recommended for zombies.
Detroit Zen Center Teuk Seon Green Tea
When the students and monks of The Detroit Zen Center in Hamtramck aren’t meditating, they’re drinking and selling organic Teuk Seon green tea. Hand harvested from the Korean mountainside “Bright Eyes” is a high grade tea with a pleasing aroma of marsh grass and honey. A sip is mildly sweet and earthy with just a hint of tannin on the finish. I feel more self-aware merely inhaling the aromas. It’s a quality tea.
It’ll last up to three or four steepings and proceeds go to support the non-profit Zen Center. They offer a total of four grades of various quality and price and even throw this fun how-to pamphlet in the bag.
Adventures in Drinking
Campbelltown. It was a Scotch-producing region entirely unknown to me, a relative novice in the realm of single malts.
But last Friday, I picked up a Glen Scotia 12-year as an introduction to the area. I had no idea what to expect, so perhaps I was surprised when I got a lot of interesting herbal qualities out of the dram. I’ve read some reviews that express disappointment at the lack of harmony in the drink, and I can understand what they mean, but with a proper dose of water, it’s a fairly smooth, long, iodine and herb laden sip of scotch. It’s perhaps not worth the price on a comparative basis — I’d rather drink Talisker 10 for 10 or 15 dollars less — but I’m hardly disappointed at the purchase.
While I was picking up the scotch, I noticed a case of sparkling rose that was sold with a promise of supporting breast cancer research. Sadly, the beverage seemed entirely untrustworthy. It’s origins were dubious enough, but the shockingly phallic wax job topping each bottle was just hilarious.
Fast forward a few nights. I decided, since my wife’s evening was to be occupied with work, to swing by Birmingham’s Forest Grill to sample from the bar menu. Bartender and cocktail lover Dawn fixed me an excellent caipirinha, after which I snagged a burger and glass of Rioja.
But the evening really got started when she introduced me to Parker’s Golden Anniversary Bourbon. It’s a pricey bottle of booze — the suggested retail was $150, and it’s still selling online for upwards of $100 — but it’s worth it. The nose has quite a bit of vanilla and maple in it, but not in the sickly sweet unbalanced way one might expect from such a description. Conversely, the palate was an explosion of diverse flavors, leading with berries and vanilla, eventually featuring mint and herbal qualities, and finishing with a long spiciness. A black pepper heat that just barely burns the throat and absolutely tickles the soul.
Not quite ready to leave, I ordered a glass of Aberlour 12 as well. Roasted nuts, herbs, and tea on the nose. Sweet almonds and oaky, toasty notes drive the palate. This is a nice drink and better than the only other Speyside scotch I’ve ever tasted, but having had so much exposure to smokier, peatier scotches, I find that the sweeter qualities of less “intense” drams are a little hard to take. That said, I’d absolutely drink this again, and I suspect this is the type of scotch that will continue to teach me something about the intersection of complexity and drinkability in the coming years.
