A beer and food night.

'Ahhh ambasador wiz zis two posts in two days you are spoiling us'

Righo, another evening with Mark from Pencil and Spoon and my friend Nathalie. Nathalie, like most girls doesn't drink beer, leaving all the more for us to work through!

The menu was as follows:

Starter
Spanish omelette with balsamic roast pepper salsa and wild rocket salad.

Main
Herby pork sausage stew with butterbeans, served with roasted garlics and fresh bread.

Desert
Rich, dark chocolate pots with sour cherries.

Cheese
Montgomery's Cheddar, Montenebro Goat, Dorset Blue Vinny.

The food went down really well, some really great pairings were discovered. The sausages were paired very well by Mark with Hopdaemon Leviathan, a 6% ruby coloured beer that fitted well with the earthy herbs and sweetness of the tomatoes.

BrewDog Paradox Longrow with the blue cheese worked beautifully, as did BrewDog's hardcore IPA with the super strong cheddar.

The real winning combo of the night however was the chocolate pud with cherry beer. At Mark's request, here is the recipe for the chocolate pudding.


To make 6-8 portions you will need:

300g of good quality plain chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids)
two egg yolks
A pint of double cream
25g salted butter
75g chopped unsweetened dried cherries

First, melt your chocolate in a bain marie (a bowl suspended over boiling water in a saucepan). When the chocolate has melted, add the cherries and butter and stir until the butter has then melted. Turn off the heat. Add your egg yolks and stir quickly, if you stir too slowly you will end up with chocolate scrambled eggs (that wouldn't be good would it now?). The egg yolks will thicken things up considerably, slowly stir in the cream until the mixture is shiny and unctuous. Put the mixture into espresso cups and chill in the fridge for at least an hour before serving.

Served with a sweeter cherry beer (proper lambic is just a bit too sour) makes for an amazing combination. I'm going to stick my neck out and say it is in the top three I have come across. It will be repeated soon!

The Best of the Best

On Thursday last week Mark from Pencil and Spoon met up and went to The Bull at Horton Kirby for a beer festival featuring some pretty exciting breweries. Among the featured were BrewDog, Dark Star and Ramsgate, three of my favourite brewers.

Garrett and Lynne the landlord and lady had pulled out all the stops with their choices, ‘Best of the Best’ doesn’t cut it. There were at least a dozen out of the thirty five or so beers that I would have had on my dream list for a beer festival. A full list of the beers available can be found here. They made both Mark and I feel very welcome, the barbie was top notch and the weather even held!

Right onto the serious stuff, what beer we drank. Well here goes.

We started with the BrewDog Edge, at a measly 2.7% I didn’t hold out much hope for a full, flavoursome beer. How wrong I was, as ever the boys at BrewDog have managed to shoehorn more flavour into a beer that most brewers can’t manage at double the strength. It is dark, malty, not as sweet as I thought it would be, dry, hoppy and all in all an amazing session beer. Next Mark and I went halves on half pints so as to retain some sort of level-headedness and ability to taste beers and make coherent notes (my notes from the end of the evening are less than coherent!). Amarillo gold was next up, a pale straw wheat beer showcasing a single variety of American hop. It was sweet, simple, citrussy and very refreshing. BrewDog 77 lager next, smooth, very hoppy for a pilsner, almost US style probably the best lager I have had this year.

Mark opened a cheeky surprise for us all to try round our table next, a sample bottle of the as yet unlabelled 8% Atlantic IPA. As a fan of almost all BrewDog have done it pains me to say it but, it was a disappointment. Over oxidised, sour, with the once bright hops mellowed to an earthiness that clashed with the whisky barrel aging. All in all, a bit disappointing. Sticking with BrewDog, a half of Dogma next, sweet, dark, with a rich mouthfeel, a boozy punch and a bitter hop kick left my tongue punished, but aching for more.

As Mark mentions in his review, all of the Thornbridge beers we tried over the course of the evening were disappointing, shadows of their normally bright and zingy selves. I feel it would be unfair to slate their beer as it might have been a problem outside of the brewery’s control. In the past however I have had amazing pints of both the Kipling and Jaipur that were on.

After a quick beer sponge burger came a very special brew indeed, Marble Brewery Pint. A heavily hopped, dry session bitter that was dangerously drinkable and probably my personal favourite of the festival. From there a brief flirt with Marble’s Ginger which was er, gingery but ace. Moving quickly on, Pitfield IPA which tasted ethanoly, harsh and a bit like paint stripper. Not nice. A half of BrewDog Trashy Blonde redeemed a couple of duff beers being fruity and another example of BrewDog hitting the nail on the head.

Nearing the end of the night and testing the limits of our alcoholic abilities, we rolled out the big guns. Pitfield’s Imperial stout weighing in at 9.3% and BrewDog’s Devine Rebel at 12.5%. I by this point wasn’t making very good notes, my brain was a little befuddled! Here is a transcript of the notes I made about each:

Devine Rebel – Oranges, molasses, treacle, spice, massive mouthfeel, boozy, Christmas cake.

Pitfield Imperial – Burnt toast, coffee, dark chocolate, raisins, soil.

Soil!? Really!? I’m sure it made sense at the time.

By this point Mark and I staggered back cross country to the station with the aid of Mark’s cunningly packed torch. I bet he was a boy scout and knows how to tie knots too.

Day two:

Having tried almost all the beer that was available day two was a much more relaxed affair. Phil from here and my brother David came along as well as Mark’s friend Matt.

I hit the ground running with a pint of Pint, this got me into the groove for a half of Dobber straight after. I stopped being so precious about making notes and had a Gadd’s No3, Thoroughly modern Mild and a Dr Sunshine’s Special Friendly, all of which were great. At this point I stopped taking notes, more beer flowed, the sun set and the charcoal smoke from the barbecue spiralled lazily up into the evening sky. Another drunken walk back to the station and a visit to the chip shop on the way home another day at the festival ended.

A great couple of days, with some fantastic beer.

Super special rare beer

A rare insight into my wine cellar reveals a super rare treat waiting to be opened!

This arrived a couple of days ago and i'm absolutely gagging to get it opened and try it. Roll on the beer tasting I will be blogging about in a couple of weeks! I'm putting together a beer and food menu as we speak!

Membrillo

The quince is an odd fruit. My fruit grower's handbook tells me that they are related to both the apple and pear family and originate in the middle East. It also says there is evidence that quince trees were cultivated long before either apples or pears.

I have a quince tree in my garden, however the fruit that come from it are pretty inedible and too few in numbers to do anything interesting with. The Spanish and Portugese however, make membrillo. A super sweet, fragant, floral smelling jelly that tastes fantastic with cheese. As we all know I love cheese.

Membrillo works really well with hard strong cheese, it is traditionally eaten with manchego in Spain, but is equally good with a strong cheddar. Ashmore, Godminster or Winterdale Shaw are the three I think it pairs best with, but it also goes well with soft tangy goat's cheese too.

So this is a quick recipe for you I have corrupted and bastardised form something I saw done by someone on the tv a few years back (I would credit them but I can't remember who it was).

Garlic and goats cheese toasts with crispy fried Parma ham and membrillo.

To serve two you will need:

A stale baguette, olive oil, a clove of garlic, 150g of french goat's cheese, 4 slices of Parma ham, 100g of membrillo, fresh thyme.

To make it:

Take the stale baguette and slice off four pieces of about 1.5cm thick. Brush them with olive oil and place them under a hot grill. Once toasted on both sides rub the clove of garlic roughly over both surfaces and leave them to one side.

Take your membrillo and slice it thinly into four equal sized pieces. Wrap them tightly in a sice of Parma ham and place them in a hot frying pan with a little oil until the parma ham starts to become brown and crispy. Towards the end of the cooking add a couple fo sprigs of thyme to the pan.

Crumble a fair amount of goat's cheese on the toasts and place them back under the grill for about 3-4 minutes so the cheese starts to bubble and brown. Lay the parma ham and membrillo on top, drizzle a little olive oil over and serve immediately with a fresh leaf salad.

As a little note, when considering what to drink with this, try Whitstable Brewery's Raspberry Wheat beer. The acid tang cuts through the goats cheese beautifully and the sweet fruitiness in the membrillo plays beautifully with the residual fruit from the raspberries in the beer. A fantastic combination.

Bank Holiday Barbecue Bonanza!

I'm sitting here typing this on Bank Holiday Monday. As with most Bank Holidays the weather today is awful, off and on rain all morning so far. With the weather forecast taken into account we decided to have a barbecue yesterday rather than today. Ahhh bank holiday barbecues, conjours images of sausages that are black on the outside, raw in the middle. Dad burning his eyebrows off after spraying too much lighter fluid on the coals to get them going. Some limp iceberg lettuce and a couple of insipid, watery, crunchy unripe tomatoes as a token salad that everyone leaves.

People, it doesn't have to be this way!


We are lucky enough to have one of these amazing barbecues at home, which was quite possibly the best investment ever. Although barbecue purists get all sniffy about gas cooking not tasting the same as charcoal, the results, in my opinion are much better. The fact that it is gas means that you are up to temperature in a few minutes and don't have to faff about lighting the charcoal 30-40 minutes before you start cooking. Gas also means the heat is very much more controlable, meaning that you can cook things a lot more precisely. As ours also has a hinged lid, it can be used to cook whole joints of beef, legs of lamb, pizza or even turned into a hot smoker.

Weber do a bit of kit called a chicken roaster for the barbecue as well. This is an adaptation of the old concept of beer can chicken. The chicken stands on a spike which has a reservoir in the centre for liquid to be poured into, we used white wine for this one. There is a plug that is placed in the chicken's neck cavity to stop all the wine that is evaporating from escaping and a drip tray to catch fat and the juices running out of the chicken. We also added a layer of parsley butter between the flesh and skin on the breast of this bird.





We had also par-boiled some new potatoes and mixed them with some fresh rosemary and whole cloves of garlic. These were placed in the drip tray of the chicken roaster to get all beautifully crispy and coated in the chicken juices. The garlic when roasted becomes sweet and sticky and beautiful to eat.


We also made a couple of easy salads, a green salad with rocket, peas, broad beans and fine beans and a coleslaw style salad with white cabbage, apple, rasins and pine nuts.


To make this feast for four you will need:


For the Chicken and Potatoes:
One meduim chicken
A 500g bag of new potatoes
A large bulb of garlic
About 5 tender stems of rosemary
Lots of chopped parsley
About 40g of butter

For the salads:
A white cabbage
Two apples
A handful of pine nuts
A handful of raisins
About 3 tbsp of mayo
A bag of rocket leaves
Half a mug of frozen peas (fresh are better)
Half a mug of frozen broad beans (fresh are better)
A handful of fine beans

Instructions

Mix your butter and parsley together and create a pocket between the skin and the flesh of the breast of your chicken with your fingers. Stuff the butter under the skin and spread it out evenly, making sure you don't break the skin. Preheat the barbecue to a meduim heat and place the chicken in on the stand filled with a glass of white wine. If you dont have a stand, use a small baking tray and an empty beer can half filled with wine.


While the chicken is cooking, par boil the potatoes for about 10-15 minutes so they still retain a bit of resistance when poked with a knife. Wrap them in tin foil with the rosemary and individual garlic cloves while steaming hot season generously with sea salt. This allows the potatoes to take on more of the flavours of garlic and rosemary. During this time use some of the boiling water left over from the potatoes to steam the beans and peas, once tender run them under the cold tap to stop them from over cooking. Shred half the cabbage finely and cube the apple into 1cm cubes, add the raisins, pine nuts and mayo. Mix well.

Once the chicken has been in the barbecue for about an hour, open the lid and place the potatoes in the drip tray round the bottom. Replace the lid and have a beer, your work is nearly done.

Once the chicken is cooked take it off the spike to rest for a few minutes before you carve it. Leave the potatoes in the tray in the barbecue fo that time for extra crispiness.

Take everything out of the barbecue, carve the chicken and serve!







Please, please, please note: Our chicken took about an hour and forty minutes, yours might take more or less time depending on its size and the heat of your barbie. I would strongly suggest investing in a meat thermometer so that you don't poison everyone and your chicken is cooked perfectly. They are only about a fiver in a decent cook's shop.

So here we are as ever, the great reveal!



The chicken was beautifully tender, falling off the bone when it was cooked, the potatoes were fantastic, all that concentrated, sticky chicken flavour works so well with the garlic and rosemary. I urge you to give this a go, lets make badly cooked barbecue food a thing of the past!

Steak Science

Steak cooked well is a beautiful thing, many of my mates say steak and chips is their favorite meal. My problem with steak is that unless I have cooked it, it generally is not done how I like it. If you are interested, show it the pan for about a minute on each side and i'm happy!

I'm going to list a few things here that are, in my opinion really important if you want to want to cook steak well. These are my opinions, from what I have learned and they are by no means a definitive guide!

Buying the steak:

1. Buy the best possible steak you can afford. Avoid supermarket meat, it is almost always disappointing. Instead, go to your local butchers and ask what they have available, this takes time but is well worth the extra effort.

2. When it comes to choosing a cut, people often opt for fillet as it is the most expensive and therefore the 'best', sadly this isn't true. I would much rather have a sirloin or a ribeye over fillet any day, this is all to do with fat content. Fat is where the flavour is, because fillet is so lean very little fat is present it can end up tasting a little bland.

3. Ask you butcher how long the meat has been 'hung' for. Hanging is the process of maturing beef in a carefully controlled way that allows a slight breakdown of the muscle fibres within the meat. Normally this is done for a period of ninteen to twenty eight days. At ninteen days the meat will still be pink or red but after longer periods will darken in colour becoming grey or brown. I like my beef to be hung for at least twenty one days.

4. Make sure when you get the steaks cut they are all of an equal size, uneven sizes mean uneven cooking times which makes life a lot harder when trying to organise everything later.

Preparing and cooking the steak:

1. Firstly don't think about grilling your steak. Frying is the only way to do it.

2. That out of the way, consider your pan carefully. The best possible pan for cooking steaks in is a cast iron ridged griddlepan. I am fortunate enough to have been bought a Le Creuset one a few years ago, but any heavy based ridged frying pan will do. Having a heavy base ensures that the pan doesn't loose too much heat when you add whatever you are cooking.

3. Always oil the meat not the pan you will be cooking in. You can use any oil really, I tend to use a little rapeseed oil beacuse it deals with high temperatures well and has a fairly neutral flavour.

4. Get the pan as hot as humanly possible. A dry frying pan should be just starting to smoke before you add the steaks.

5. Don't move the steaks around too much once they are in the pan, you should try to turn them only once. Never place a spatula or spoon on the steak and press down on the meat it when it is cooking.

Peter's Patented Poke Test:

Giving instructions for how long to cook steak for is tricky. So much rests on how hot the pan is, how thick the steak is and what cut it is. Rather than give timings try this method, follow the hand gestures below with the predominant hand you use (i'm right handed) and touch the index finger of the opposite hand into the fleshy part at the bottom of your gesturing hand. Touch the steak then touch your hand, this will tell you how cooked the steak is.

Blue


Rare


Medium


Well Done (heaven forbid you ever cook steak like this)


Before serving

1. Let it rest. Take the steak out of the pan and let it rest for alt least 4 to 7 minutes. When the meat is cooked all the muscle fibres contract making it tough an chewy. Give it a little time and the fibres will relax and the meat becomes much more tender.

The picture of the steaks I cooked last night are at the top of the page and in a great Blue Peter style, here is the final product.


Sirloin steak served with fried mushrooms, Lyonaisse potatoes, aspargus, grilled tomato and peas.

Pub Review: The Butcher's Arms, Herne

In the search for somewhere new and interesting to have a pint, I found a pub in Herne named The Butchers Arms. It won CAMRA's Kent pub of the year last year so at least I knew the beer would be well kept. Claiming to be Britain's smallest freehold pub, the Butcher's Arms is just that. Tiny. It has no bar and seating for 6 people.

The disused butchers shop, now decorated with a myriad of old beer towels, hop bines and butcher's equipment has an instant warm and welcoming atmosphere. I went on a Saturday night and it was packed, by which I mean there were about fifteen people in there. The beauty of a pub this small, it measures fifteen foot by eleven, is that there is no such thing as a private conversation. Instantly you are involved with what is going on between the people around you. Within half an hour you feel like you have been a regular there for years, chatting to everybody about just about anything. The only no go areas when it comes to conversation are lager and a large local brewery with the initials S.N.

Speaking of lager, don't expect any. In fact dont expect anything other than fresh cask ale. No soft drinks, no spirits no alcopops. This is a beer drinker's pub which suits me down to the ground. As I mentioned previously there is no bar, ask Martin the landlord and owner and he will dissapear off down to the cellar where the beer is racked and he will bring you a jug of beer and an empty pint glass. No lines, no handpumps, a tap at the bottom of the barrel and a spile on top. There are always at least four beers on at all times, with a few remaining fairly constant, Hophead and Harveys being two for the almost constant presences. Every week Martyn updates the beers they have available on the website, this week being: Dark Star's Over the Moon and Hophead, Adanams Broadside, Thornbridge Jaipur and Harveys Best.

I had a pint of Harveys best when I went a couple of weeks ago which was lovely, fresh, well kept and as beer should be. Sadly I was driving so I didn't get to try anything else, i'll be back soon though that is for sure.

You can visit their website here for updates on their beers or find out how to get there. There is also a short video here about the pub winning the Kent pub of the year.