Tom and I spent last Sunday welcoming the Solstice with our friends Brett and Mary, a few of their Wisconsin neighbors, and a handful of others who made the trek from Minneapolis/St. Paul. It was a beautiful day…
We contributed this salad of cauliflower, mint, carrots, &c. with market produce inspired by a Black Sheep Pizza market salad. Many thanks to Brett and Mary for hosting. I’m only sorry I don’t have more pictures of the rest of the food!
Midtown Farmers Market continues to provide. Carrots were a welcome new addition this week, bringing fresh color and sweet, early season flavor to the table. I’m looking forward to how this crop will inspire Tom’s cooking in the coming days.
A beer’s name doesn’t necessarily tell you what you should pair it with: a porter might not complement a porterhouse, and just because it’s a Kwak doesn’t mean you should eat it with duck. But happily, sometimes names make things easy; take India Pale Ales, which in the first word of their name make as good as a suggestion as you could hope for. Drink me with Indian food!
The affinity of Indian food as we know it in the West and India Pale Ales is no mistake — the beer and the cuisine grew up together. IPAs, distinctive above all for their extreme hoppiness, were first popularized among Britons working in India in the days of the British East India Company and the Raj, at least partially because the extra hops helped the beer survive shipment halfway across the world.
Indian food as most of us know it — the kind you get in Indian restaurants everywhere from London to your local strip mall — is also a product of the British presence in India, as Britons and their local cooks adapted Indian culinary traditions to suit the British palate — particularly the British taste for meat. You can bet that as these Brits and Indians worked to develop this new cuisine, they made sure it paired well with the beer that was most widely available — that is, India Pale Ale.
Popular though they may have been in India in the 18th century, I think it’s safe to say that IPAs are even bigger today — it seems like craft breweries are leaping over each other to bring out the next big IPA, and to see how many more hops they can cram in. The selection of IPAs in a decent liquor store can be pretty overwhelming. Looking for something a little bit different, I picked up a six pack of Summit’s latest addition to their Unchained series: an India Style Rye Ale — an IPA with rye thrown into the mix (an IRA if you will).
Summit’s IRA pours with very little head and is quite dark in color, reminding me of a brown ale. As the beer hits the tongue, the brown ale description continues to be apt: the first flavor note is a very strong roasted, caramel flavor. After that initial impression, the beer takes a turn into more traditional IPA territory; that is to say the hops hit and hit hard. I thought I detected a slight grassiness in the flavor from the rye, though that might well be the power of suggestion (a power that should not be underestimated in beer rating and pairing!). Although the beer poured with very little head, it had great carbonation, with little spritzy bubbles that danced across the tongue. Overall, this is an enjoyable, well balanced beer, provided you like hops. And if you’re drinking India Ales, that seems a safe assumption.
With India Style Ale in hand, all that was needed was some India Style Food. As a centerpiece for our meal, we turned to that mainstay of the Indian buffet: chicken tikka. Starting with a recipe from Bon Appétit (a practice I don’t normally recommend) I marinated a cut up whole chicken in yogurt, cilantro, salt, garam masala, and garlic. After an hour in this yogurt bath, I roasted the chicken pieces for about 40 minutes at 500ºF, until the meat was cooked through and the skin was starting to blacken. Following through on Bon Appétit’s full menu, Martha roasted carrots with oil, salt and cumin seeds, and I made raita and white rice. All these elements combine to make a fulfilling Indian food experience: moist and roasted-tasting meats and vegetables accented by warm and citrusy spices that fill the mouth, all cooled and brightened by the yogurt and cucumber in the raita. Comforting and enlivening at the same time, it’s the kind of food that could help you feel at home in a place a few thousand miles away from home.
Food like that, or a cold beer. Better yet – the two of them together. I had a hard time trying to explain intellectually why the India Style Rye Ale and the Chicken Tikka worked so well together; each seemed to tame and complete the other. Maybe it was the acid in the yogurt cutting through the hops’ bitterness, or maybe the fact that the big flavors of the beer were a match for the big spice flavors in the chicken. Perhaps the beer’s roasted malts found their soulmate in blackened chicken skin. None of these elements really suffice in explaining what made this combination so satisfying. Ultimately, their affinity may owe to their shared history; a few gulps and bites might be enough to express the perfection of 200 years of codevelopment, but they are probably not enough to understand it. I’d better do this again.
Fellow Twin Citizens are probably familiar with Surly’s CynicAle, a saison/farmhouse style ale available year-round from Surly. Cynic will always occupy a special place in my heart: it was the first Surly beer I ever tried, one adventurous afternoon at Common Roots when I was taken in by its name’s affinity for my natural disposition. Cynic is the most approachable of Surly’s regular offerings, not having the bitter roastiness of Bender or Furious’s hop bludgeoning. This is also one of Martha’s favorite beers, and she is far more discerning than I.
For those of you not so lucky as to live within Surly’s distribution range, Cynic is a very full-flavored ale; as the beer hits the tongue it fills one’s mouth with bananas and cloves and maybe a hint of vanilla. As the initial banana blast dies down, a solid malty backbone makes itself known and and other spices appear, most notably cinnamon, which burns slightly. As the beer finishes, it snaps with some hop dryness, but this is by no means a hoppy beer. Compared to other saisons, Cynic is — like many of Surly’s beers — much bigger; the banana and spice flavors are prominent on the tongue and easy to identify, and the malt and hops are distinct and recognizable.
In the past when I have done pairings on this blog I generally planned them pretty carefully: starting from Garrett Oliver’s masterful Brewmaster’s Table I would pick a beer I could find locally and plan to make whatever food Oliver suggested to go with it. Tonight’s pairing, however, was pure serendipity. On a recent trip to The Four Firkins, Martha insisted that we pick up a four-pack of Cynic. I was already planning on making Moroccan Chicken, a culturally inauthentic but nevertheless tasty recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. As I got to thinking about the richly spiced chicken in fragrant broth and the four cans of spicy, fragrant Cynic sitting in my fridge something clicked and a pairing was born.
Moroccan chicken — an adaptation of traditional Moroccan tagines for American kitchens — is made by cutting a whole chicken into eight pieces (a task I achieved effortlessly with my new boning knife — my latest kitchen obsession) and browning them in olive oil. Next, onions are sautéed with a few pieces of lemon peel, then garlic, paprika, cumin, cayenne, coriander and cinnamon go in the pot. Broth and honey are added to deglaze and form a braising liquid, then the chicken thighs and legs are added in, followed by large discs of carrot and the chicken breasts. The whole thing simmers away for 15 minutes, at which point the chicken is removed and olives are added. After five minutes of boiling to thicken the sauce, the chicken returns to the pot accompanied by cilantro, lemon juice, and a paste of lemon zest and garlic. The result is a dish of strong spice and garlic, with notes of citrus and sweetness from carrots and honey balanced by bitter olives. Served over cous cous it is very satisfying, warming fare that takes little time to prepare. Doesn’t get much better than that.
Doesn’t get much better, that is, unless you happen to have a can of Cynic on hand. At this point I had built the pairing up so much in my mind that there wasn’t much chance I wouldn’t say it worked, but honestly — honestly! — this was a great combination. At the most basic level, any food that is spicy (spicy-hot) is great with beer as the beer’s carbonation helps lift the burn from your tongue, readying your palate for more food. But the specific spice flavors in Cynic — especially the cinnamon — were matched by those in the stew in such a way that they blended together beautifully, a seamless union of drink and food. The citrus in the dish, which is subtle and muted, was nicely picked up by the citrusy hops present at the end of a drink of Cynic; as the hops hit, they provided an invitation to explore the citrus in the stew more fully. So too the hops’ bitterness countered the sweetness of honey and carrots in the stew.
When pairing food and beer, selecting similar flavor profiles can be risky since the flavors in one might overpower or distort the same flavors in the other. But in the case of Surly Cynic and Moroccan Chicken, the flavors were in near perfect proportion to each other; each bite of this stew made me want another drink of Cynic, each drink of Cynic another bite of stew.
Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a small crowd, I have complete control over the meal. This satisfies the control-freak in me, and also allows a bit of flexibility about how I cook the bird.
The bird in question arrived from Clancey’s Meats & Fish last Monday. I was wide-grinningly excited when our turkey — which had never seen the inside of a freezer — showed up under Martha’s arm; I immediately set about dismembering it. Originally, my plan was to cook the bird whole, in search of that classic Norman Rockwell moment. But after reading Kenji Lopez Alt’s enlightening “Turkey Stuffed Turkey” article I could not resist taking my turkey apart. It just makes so much sense: the legs and the breasts are two different kinds of meat that demand different treatments — they are done at different temperatures — and, best of all, if you cut the legs and breasts off, you have the whole carcass to make turkey stock in advance, to be held at the ready for all your stuffing/dressing and gravy needs.
After dismantling the turkey, I salted the legs and thighs and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, they were ready to confit in a crockpot with plenty of olive oil, bay leaves, thyme, orange zest, peppercorns and juniper berries. Before removing the breasts, I carefully took the majority of the turkey’s skin off in one piece — I think Hannibal Lecter would have been proud. The breasts and skin were reserved for Thanksgiving day. Meanwhile, I roasted the rest of the carcass and boiled it down into stock. The copious amount of bones made available by cutting the turkey apart meant that I got a thick, gelatinous stock.
For reference, a ten pound free range turkey produces about 2 ½# of white meat. I felt like a mad scientist rolling the two breasts together and wrapping them in their own skin per Lopez Alt’s instructions. The technique worked out really well; the meat cooked very evenly and the skin even managed to adhere to the meat, no Activa required. Go figure.
My quest to use all parts of the turkey resulted in the surprise best dish of the evening, a turkey liver pâté. After soaking the turkey’s liver in milk for two hours to leech out some supposed metallic flavors, I sauteed it in butter along with some shallots. This I ground to a paste in my food processor along with thyme, turkey meat left over from the stock, salt, lots of black pepper, some juniper berries and a bit of heavy cream. After baking this mixture in a water-bath in a 300°F oven for an hour I cooled it and refrigerated it overnight. The result was amazing. I have been dabbling in terrines, pâtés and other potted meats for well over a year now. The results, while always pretty good — how can you go wrong with potted meat? — were always missing something, or featuring too much. Either I have learned enough or the stars were just aligning right for this Thanksgiving: the pâté was creamy, rich, slightly gamy and very peppery. Great with mustard, pickled green beans and olives. Not how I’ve usually started off Thanksgiving, but possibly a new tradition!
One can hardly have Thanksgiving appetizers without Thanksgiving cocktails. Martha found the recipe we used on Apartment Therapy: 1½ oz rye whiskey (Wild Turkey, of course), ½ oz triple sec (substituted for clear curaçao), 2 oz apple cider, 1 tsp simple syrup and a couple of cranberries for garnish. Changing every “oz” to “cup” we successfully octupled the recipe with enough for everyone to enjoy two.
As for the rest of the meal, it was more or less what you would expect. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans with lemon, roasted parnsips, carrots and brussels sprouts, roasted turkey breast and turkey leg confit and plenty of gravy to cover it all.
In some ways Thanksgiving is a stupid meal: nobody can make all these dishes perfectly at the same time. We’d be better off focusing on just a couple and having a really great meal. But it’s Thanksgiving, it happens only once a year, and frankly, nobody expects it to be perfect. That’s why there’s gravy.
