Or, what I've been up to since 2015:
Intro
I am still making beer (added 3 lbs of pureed mango to a hazy IPA today) but I have also grown up in other ways in the kitchen and I really want to write about them. Things like salami, cheese and other fermentables.
When I started writing this blog in 2012, I was making beer a few times a month, or more. It slowed down considerably over the years culminating in 2019 when I think I only made one beer. In 2020 I have found some steam to go forward with more batches, namely to have an abundance of my favorite style. Right now it's fruit-infused hazy IPAs. I made a hazy IPA from More Beer but this time I used the same recipe and added mango. This is an attempt to hone in on some all-grain brewing skills I was lacking over the years. This will help with getting specific targets of mouthfeel, alcohol percentages and overall efficiency improvements in my homebrew process.
Beers
As I mentioned, hazy IPAs are my new favorite, but I am also thinking of making a breakfast stout. If I were to make something big like that again (it was a chocolate stout I made in 2019) then I would also want a more "session-able" beer alongside it. In another point, as service to my fans, I want to get two going at the same time so I can prove I can do it with my kegerator. It seems some people commented on older posts asking to see pictures of it.
In truth, it is a little difficult to get the two kegs in there: I have one keg that is shorter and wider than my other two. This shorter keg is able to sit on the back step in my Sanyo kegerator - but it must be held in place by another full 5 gallon keg! I apparently never took a picture of it. But a project plan is to clean up that short keg and to get two beers going at once.
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| brew table |
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| mango |
Meats
This is something new I picked up about a year ago, but it took a few large appliance purchases to get here: I started fermenting meats. I bought a used full fridge from Next Door for $150 and it was made in 2013 I think. This is key because you need a fridge that has good electricity standards and won't use tons of electricity (since you most likely already have a fridge at home, having a second fridge can be a big hit to your power bill). From Amazon, I bought a temperature regulator, a humidity regulator, a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I built a make-shift heating unit out of a lasagna tin and an old light bulb fixture.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I feel the salami is the most exciting part of it, but it started with buying a KitchenAid stand-mixer, the stainless-steel meat grinder attachments, and quite shockingly, some natural hog casings from Amazon (I now source my hog casings from thesausagemaker.com as the quality and price cannot be beat for getting stuff sent to your home). With that, I picked up some pork shoulder from Safeway and got to making sausages and smoking them. Once you get the method of slinging sausages, you can read up on all the other stuff you need to properly ferment the meat.
I've also been making 3 lbs slabs of bacon but I am not quite good at it. I can do all the stuff to make it (bacon is stupid-easy to make, you just need a regular fridge and a method to smoke it) and the bacon tastes really good, but it isn't the same consistency as store-bought bacon - so I need to figure out what I'm missing there. I tend to find the flavors are concentrated in certain spots on the slab and not all slices of bacon are created equal. Pork belly slabs are one of the more expensive cuts of meat I've ventured to buy so I haven't really pinned this one down.
I spent 4 months hang drying a pork shoulder in the fermentation chamber while salami came in and out. The cured pork shoulder is called a coppa or a gabagul and it mostly seems to just take patience. I tried using a collagen casing and it seems to work really well as the coppa came out delicious. Sometimes I fry it up and put it on a breakfast sandwich, but it's good to eat as-is, thinly sliced. I was gifted a meat slicer and it's very fun to use it to cut the coppa.
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| salami hanging |
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| getting better |
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| duck sausage |
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| Italian pork sausage |
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| first bacon smoke |
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| fridge cured lonza (pork loin) |
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| coppa initial cure |
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| coppa after 4 months |
Cheese
Making mozzarella cheese is somewhat easy, the hardest part is just getting the swing of all the timed steps. After making mozz a few times, I sort of let that hobby go because the next steps were all about cultures, presses and ageing. After getting the fermentation chamber up for the salami, I was able to pick up cheese making again and I successfully pressed and aged a gallon of organic milk into white cheddar cheese. It was mostly a trial run (I just watched one YouTube video and the guy made it seem quite easy) but I was pleasantly shocked when I cut into the cheese to find it was not a black-mold pile of nasty. It was a sharp, hard, funky cheddar cheese that was pressed too hard.
I decided to over-engineer a cheese press so that I could be sure I was pressing the cheese at the right weight. I followed an instructible which claimed an "easy cheese press" could be made but I found it lacking in a lot of details. I ended up with a functional press, it is calibrated for 25 and 50 lbs of pressure. I also bought a culture so that I can make Parmesan cheese (apparently it's all about the culture you use which is the main contributor to the flavor besides the milk).
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| old cheese press |
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| very sharp cheddar |
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| cheese press 2.0 |
Hot Sauce
I love the show Hot Ones on YouTube and I think that's the reason I got into spicy sauces. Sometime later, Bon Appetite YouTube channel started putting Brad Leone on the spot more and one of his first videos was fermented hot sauce, sort of like siricha. After copying this recipe, what came out was a bright, floral tasting sauce with a bit of a funky kick. I started collecting hot sauces and now I have too many but they're good to keep me motivated. I've done some tasting with these but some of them are too hot if you use too much sauce.
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| scorpion peppers |
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| dried and ground |
Epilogue
I intend to continue writing blog posts as more of an instructional story. Sometimes I criticize the videos and blogs I've read to get me where I am, when I really should just produce those experiences myself and fill the gap that I feel is missing.
Thanks for reading!
Bonus pasta and pickles:
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| pickles |
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| pasta |
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