Green Beer

I apologize for the lack of information lately but I was recently given a copy of Garret Oliver’s The Brewmaster’s Table and haven’t been able to pull myself from it.

Currently, I am working on an event with Mr. Oliver’s Brooklyn brewery for a new company called CityDusk so I’ve been reading up, getting my information straight and satisfying my unending quest for beer and food knowledge.

Speaking of beer—and organics, but we’ll get into that a bit later—there is an Organic Beer Festival this Saturday, October 25th, at Counter Restaurant in NYC. It’s a smaller fest located in a fine looking little vegetarian restaurant, but most people haven’t had the chance to taste more organic brews then Peak and Wolaver’s. At the last brewfest in NYC I attended Magic Hat was touting a new line of Organic beers which, unlike many other Magic Hat brews, had a taste as distinct as their marketing. Seems like this could be a tasty new movement in beer and it is gaining ground. Check it out if you can.

Drink it like you're Irish

I spent last weekend in Boston, Massachusetts and in honor of my trip I made the obligatory trip to a local brewery. Over debating with myself to head to the Boston Beer Company (a.k.a. Sam Adams) or the Harpoon brewery, I discovered that the latter does free tasting tours every Friday, precisely the day I was looking to indulge.

I’m going to put it right out there: Boston might be a better beer city than New York. This isn’t looking at New York State, but the city of Boston vis-à-vis the city of New York—it’s pretty close. Now I know that there are a lot of differences; Boston is much smaller, there are less people, etc etc etc. However, the Harpoon brewery is 20 minutes on foot from the financial district in Boston. I know that there are a bunch of Heartland Breweries scattered throughout the city, but it’s not like I can buy a six pack of Heartland around the block from my house, and the only way I can walk into the Brooklyn brewery is if I’ve taken the subway into Williamsburg. Also, every single bar I entered while in Boston had at least one Harpoon on tap. The same can’t be said fro Brooklyn, Six Point or Bluepoint beers in New York. Harpoon also coordinates four really, really big beer festivals in the city. At the last St. Patrick’s Day bash, they kicked 300 kegs while partying in the rain. While I now love both cities, the beer drinkers in Boston seem to be fiercely loyal to their local brew. This is definitely a good thing.

There are a few interesting facts about the Harpoon brewery. To start, it owns the first brewing license in the state of Massachusetts, making it the oldest brewery there. Also, their Winter Warmer seasonal is the 2nd oldest annual seasonal beer in the states (I’m still trying to find the first). They use their own proprietor yeast (meaning that you can’t find their yeast anywhere else in the world) and they are one hell of a supporter of the local beer scene. The giant beer fest I attended back in the summer was put on by Beer Advocate and Harpoon brewery. Speaking of which, Harpoon actually sponsored a teeny, tiny beer fest I went to back in Binghamton, NY. Way to go Harpoon.

Basically, I like this beer. If you are ever in the area, take the time to hit up the brewery for their Beer Tasting Tour. Unlike other breweries that schlep you around the beer vats and the bottling line and spit out facts, the people at Harpoon sit you down at their tasting bar, give out a bunch of samples and give you the details on each beer while going through the history of the brewery. It’s interesting, informational, and most importantly, delicious.

Fresh Meat

The New York Times just did an article on the restaurants owned by Mark Firth and Andrew Tarlow in Brooklyn. It wasn’t just any review or blurb about current hot spots; it focused on meat.

The restaurants—Marlow & Sons, Diner and Bonita—have begun ordering whole primal cuts of meat and butchering them on premises. The idea is both to serve local and fresh product, but it also requires chefs to get a little creative with the animal. While it’s easy to sell of strip steaks and short ribs, people are still squeamish about tongue, bones, heart and the like. The ability to masterfully prepare various cuts of offal is impressive in themselves, but to be able to make a profit from it to a cliental who normally wouldn’t eat the stuff is where the real skill is.

Chris Cosentino, chef of Incanto in San Francisco and creator of the very good website offalgood.com is quoted in the article, talking about the importance of head to tail eating. In honor of restaurants close to home putting more focus on the entire animal and culinary locality, I’m linking a clip Mr. Cosentino did for Gourmet Magazine about pig head preparation. This video is just one of the extremely informational videos Chris posts on his website. Even if you aren’t interested in eating a pig’s head (or any offal for that matter), it’s important to know where that filet mignon you are ordering came from. Browse through the blog on offalgood.com for some interesting videos and posts about the meat we eat.

An Apology

Dear Mas,

I’m sorry that I couldn’t make it out to dine with you tonight. You seem like a lovely and delicious little place and I know I must have let you down. I’m sorry that I’m an idiot and crashed my car into a median divider on the parkway last night and now can’t afford/get to the train station (or anywhere else for that matter) to sample your plentiful bounty.

I’m especially sorry since the people I was supposed to go with have connections with the kitchen and we were going to get styled out. You know how much I love meals that start with the directions to “bring a six-pack for the guys in the kitchen” and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me soon.

Since I can no longer afford you—or any other restaurant—due to auto body expenses, I will be spreading the word that I am willing to prepare, cook and do the dishes at anyone’s house if they are willing to let me partake in the meal. My only requirement is that I must be able to ride my bike there.

Mas, I hope to see you very soon.

Tearfully,

Justin

Fine Dining and Led Zeppelin

A close friend went out of her way to get me a reservation to Babbo, Mario Batali’s restaurant in the West Village that many consider one of the best places to eat in Manhattan. Do a quick Google search and you will be bombarded with glowing reviews for the restaurant from legitimate publications (i.e. The New York Times, New York Magazine, Gourmet Magazine) and one not so legitimate (i.e. Tastychomp). In addition to this, you will see interviews with Bill Buford, the author Heat—the book which chronicles the life of Babbo’s kitchen--and photos of just about everything on the menu. For this reason, I refrained from taking any photographs and will hold my tongue from rambling off lofty adjectives to try and describe the food that Babbo produces. Instead, I will be terse and get straight to the point:

Babbo is quite possibly the best place I have ever eaten. (Emphasize that “.”)

I was expecting a lot from the restaurant ever since I was told we had one of the coveted months-in-advance-reservations, but every single one of my expectations were surpassed.

The restaurant is fancy without feeling stuffy. Halfway through my first glass of wine I realized the Led Zeppelin’s first album was playing in it’s entirety over the speaker system. Throughout the night I heard The Black Keys, Dinosaur Jr. and a few other albums you would never expect to hear in a 3-star restaurant.

The menu is compact and blows you away with unfamiliar ingredients hand-in-hand with Italian staples. Do you like lamb’s brains and sweet breads? Both are old-school Italian staples and well represented here. However, if the thought of these gross you out (although this would definitely be the place to try them) there are goat cheese raviolis, calamari and other delights to placate the minds of the timid but inspire the tongues of the faithful. I plan on going back as soon as I can to try as much as I possible can.

The wait staff is knowledgeable, helpful and will make you feel like a million bucks. Our waiter was fantastic and he could have sold me his wife and child if he wanted to. He knew everything about every dish and could answer any obscure question I mustered up. The sommelier provided us with a delicious Amaro tasting after the meal and I won’t even get into the amount of knowledge I picked from his brain.

All in all, Babbo knows how to take care of you. Whether you are coming in for a bite at the bar—which I saw many people doing. A shame they didn’t have anyone snagging reservations for them—or decide to sit and eat for three hours—this was my situation—the experience is spectacular. I have tried several of Batali’s other restaurants—Lupa, Otto and The Spotted Pig—but none have come close to transporting me to the euphoria that Babbo did. Mario Batali, I love you more than ever.


Following is a brief run-down of the meal:

-A bottle of a delicious Aglianico
-Bruschetta with garbanzos and olives
-Marinated Fresh Sardines with Caramelized Fennel and Lobster Oil
-Neci con Funghi Misti (a mushroom crepe with porcinis and oysters)
-Goat Cheese Tortelloni with Dried Orange and Wild Fennel Pollen
-Pumpkin“Lune” with Sage and Amaretti
-Spicy Two Minute Calamari Sicilian Lifeguard Style (Lifeguard style apparently is olives, capers, couscous, and a most delicious and slightly spicy tomato broth)
-Roasted Beet “Farrotto” (a type of cous cous/ risotto with beets)
-Ricotta and maple cheesecake (the absolute best dessert I’ve ever had. It was as soft as an angel’s wing and tasted what heaven must taste like)
-Amaro tasting (4 delicious glasses of various bitter after dinner drinks. Accompanied by a boatload of knowledge about each drink).

Eat here immediately.

Food for aliens

It seems that the French are everywhere lately in the culinary world. Currently, there are several very famous French chefs and numerous others hoping to give French Gastronomy UNESCO humanity heritage status. In case you are unfamiliar with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), they are—to put it simply—an organization intent on preserving things that need preserving. This refers to both physical objects such as monuments, buildings and other structures, and not-so-physical-things such as cultural events, festivals, dances, and songs. A tour guide in Spain once told me that the idea behind UNESCO is that in case aliens come down to visit the earth, we have a running list of things we need to show them. I guess the French want to feed our intergalactic visitors some beouf bourignon.

This past weekend I attended an interesting discussion held by FIAF (French Institute: Alliance Francaise). The topic was—of course—food. The discussion consisted of a French chef, a French artist and the American chef-with-French-roots Wylie Dufresne of the restaurant WD-50. The guests were there to discuss the future of food with a heavy emphasis on molecular gastronomy.

Molecular gastronomy is not a new idea by any stretch, but recently it has been getting a lot of attention. Mister Dufresne is by no means the first to dabble in molecular gastronomy and has nowhere near the fame status as Spain’s Ferran Adrian, but since his restaurant won a Michelin star he has been on the forefront of the scene in the States.

The assembly was brought together to discuss whether or no molecular gastronomy is here to stay, or it is just a fashionable fad that chefs use to get attention and gain publicity. One big argument against molecular gastronomy is pretty simple: why mess with something that tastes good? Dufrense and David Zuddas (the French chef) both agree that food is an ever-expanding art and as long as you don’t lose sight of food’s main purpose (to taste delicious) then what is wrong with a little experimentation. If a bagel with lox and cream cheese tastes good, then why not make bagel ice cream, roll it in poppy seeds, dry cream cheese to a peanut brittle consistency and serve it with salmon sashimi? These are exactly the kinds of question Dufrense asks and exactly the kind of food he creates.

There is a lot to be said about our correlation between visual references and taste references. If we close our eyes an eat a bagel and cream cheese, but then open them to see we were actually eating ice cream, will our outlook on food change? These playful recipes are what Dufrense, Zuddas and scores of other chefs are trying to introduce to their customers. Food can be playful, intelligent and delicious at the same time. Just because popcorn shrimp tastes good, does that mean we can’t make popcorn soup and garnish it with fried shrimp?


This little gem is a spoonful of Parmesan cheese, an orb of risotto with tomato and basil. The risotto was made traditionally, calcium was added and then blops of it were tossed into a pool of some sort of seaweed liquid which reacts with calcium and molds the risotto into light little globs. Pretty neat, eh?

The World's First Beverage- 2nd Annual Manhattan Cask Ale Fest

“The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled with beer.”
-Egyptian proverb, C 2200 BCE

I found this quote in a book by a fellow named Tom Standage. The book is called The History of the World in Six Glasses and it traces the development of six beverages through different epochs of human history. The reason I bring it up is because the book thoroughly explores the origins—and supposed origins—of beer. Origins that, Standage says, are “closely intertwined with the origins of civilization itself."

While this statement may seem a bit outlandish, it makes sense when you break it down. All alcohol was discovered by accident; grapes left too long turned into wine, honey left too long (when mixed with some water) turned to mead, and grains left too long would turn to beer. However, until the invention of pottery around 6000 BCE, it was impossible to store wine and mead since grapes were only available in season (no refrigeration yet!) and wild honey was available in limited qualities. Beer, however, is made from grains, which in are readily available and easily stored. Also, beverages made with prepared water (i.e. boiled) were safer to drink than straight water. These reasons may be the reason that the first written recipe—written in cuneiform—is for beer.

You may be wondering why I am spewing information about the birth of beer. Well, primarily, it is easy to justify the importance of the drink to those who find it distasteful or “gross.” More importantly, however, it is to divulge a bit of information about cask ales. I was fortunate enough to attend the 2nd Annual Manhattan Cask Ale festival this weekend at the Chelsea Brewery in Manhattan and feel that is my duty as a devout beer lover to share with you the deliciousness that is cask ale.

Since we’ve already established that beer goes hand and hand with the birth of civilization (and if you dispute this fact, please do get in touch. I would be more than happy to discuss this with you), let us examine how beer was traditionally served before the advent of Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide.

The vast majority of bars and restaurants today serve draught beer from a keg. This keg is pressurized and has an opening in the top where a line can be attached. Without going into detail—and if you care for a more specific description, you can go here—the artificial pressure of the keg is sometimes coupled with nitrogen or CO2 tanks to force the beer from the keg to the tap and accounts for a portion of the carbonation in a beer. In bottled beer, C02 is forced into the bottle before capping to create the necessary “fizz” when you crack the bottle open (it is also added to prevent air from staying in the bottle, which would oxidize the beer and skunk it.)

Cask Ale, however, is beer served the way it used to be served. A cask is similar in shape to a keg, but there is no forced carbonation and the opening is towards the side of the cask, not in the middle. There are two ways to serve cask ale: a beer engine (basically a hand pump, similar to an old water pump) and gravity style (literally angling the cask on its side so gravity can do its work). Both of these styles irritate the remaining yeast in the cask and allow for a little bit of natural head (the fizz on the top of your glass) to form.

Cask Ale is by far my favorite way to enjoy beer. Some people say it is flat and warm, but since the beer is served at a warmer temperature (in order not to kill the yeast) it allows for a richer flavor. Also, while there is less carbonation, the full taste of the beer perfectly accentuates the natural carbonation. A well made beer will have enough carbonation to please the taste buds without leaving you yearning for canned CO2.

The festival at the Chelsea Brewery was serving up 47 different varieties of Cask Ale, the most ever put together in one spot in Manhattan! I went to the Cask Festival at the Brazen Head bar in Brooklyn a year ago, and while their stash of 20 plus casks was substantial, the collection at the Chelsea Pier was almost overwhelming. Patrons were allowed to choose from 8 oz or 16 oz serving sizes and after purchasing your beer, you could wander around the brewery or take a seat at the outside pier and watch the sunset over the river (and New Jersey, what fun!). Over all, it’s a great experience and a fantastic way to become acquainted with cask ale. If you ever see cask ale offered at your favorite neighborhood bar, definitely try it. You’ll be happy you did.


PS: I called up the Brazen Head in Brooklyn and they said that the next Cask Festival would be held sometime in October. Get your taste buds ready and call your drinking buddies!

Cheers!