Irish Dark Beers & Stout Stew

On a recent visit to Ireland, suitcase space was limited for picking up some beer to bring home from the burgeoning microbrewery scene there, and shopping time was scarce. So having to make a snap decision while in Probus Beers near Trinity College, I decided to just pick up a couple of Irish dark beers, that I could bring back and have in a kind of “compare and contrast “ session over one evening with other similar beers I could source in England.

To go with the beers I wanted to try cooking some beef-in-stout stew. I haven't made this before (using sausage for stew is the preferred recipe going back generations in our family for some reason, probably war years austerity!), but I do love a good plate of warming stew; it's something you can find in many cafes, bars and coffee shops in Northern Ireland, but not often in England (although apparently @newinnharborne do a winter stew on their current menu). So I dug out a likely recipe, bought in some good quality beef from Harborne Village Butchers, and found an afternoon with plenty of time to get the stew slow cooking in the oven and the beers lined up to drink.

The first up was Knockmealdown porter from @8degreesbrewing, a micro that started in 2011 – I hadn't had much by this brewery before so was interested to try their dark beer. At first I realised I'd left it a little too long in the fridge and needed to let it warm up for a bit once poured, but once that had happened more aroma was released – and I was surprised to find a slightly sour note in this – reminded me a bit of Orval, mixed in with some coffee-ish scents. The lactiness was evident also in the taste, and I'm not sure was meant to be there (later batches of this beer have been described as having a sweetish finish); it wasn't unpleasant, but left me feeling unsure of how this beer should “actually” taste.

 

Next I poured the Guinness Export – this had more tartness & bitterness than I was expecting, as I thought it may be more smooth and roasty. I had used this in the stew as it was the right size bottle for the recipe, readily available in England, and I didn't want to use one of the beers I'd brought back from Dublin in the cooking, otherwise I wouldn't get the chance to properly taste them! I was expecting to like this beer a little more than I did but it was pleasant enough without being particularly exciting.

While drinking this, I served up the stew that was finally ready after several hours cooking – thankfully the beef was by now really tender and tasty and the liquid absorbed. The meat flavours had a slightly more bitter note than I'd expected, so I may choose to use a very slightly sweeter stout when I make this dish again. I wished I had some Irish wheaten bread to go with it, but hadn't had time to hunt some down in the shops of Birmingham so crusty bread and some ground black pepper would have to do. After some research, I had settled on this recipe and was pleased with the results.

Once we'd had the stew, we moved on to the O'Hara's Irish Stout (brewed by Carlow) – again procured from Probus – and this delivered much more of what I was expecting and hoping for. Sweet roasts on the nose, like a rich filter coffee with a touch of cream and sugar. That lovely coffee bean note was carried over into the flavour, with a silky mouthfeel, but wasn't overpowering – making this more of a 'pintable' stout for enjoyable everyday drinking than something you'd sip with reverence – but I liked it very much for that aspect and would hope to encounter this on draught somewhere next time I'm in Dublin.

 

I then wanted to try the Irish Stout that Carlow Brewing Co produce for Marks and Spencer. Initially I thought this may be the same beer as the O'Hara's Irish Stout, but Carlow informed me they are actually different beers, and this was obvious once I'd poured it. It was much lighter in the mouth and on flavour than the previous beer, with a slight effervescence. The pronounced roastiness wasn't there, but the hint of smooth sweetness made this easy drinking, although not that memorable. Not a bad beer, but not a particularly distinctive one either.

Last of the night was the bottle-conditioned Porterhouse Celebration Stout – this is a beer they produced as a one-off originally, to celebrate their 10^th Anniversary, but I now believe is produced every year as they realised it was quite popular. Although there was no year of production on this bottle, and it's 'best before' date was November 2012, I suspect it was fairly recently made and would have benefited perhaps from keeping for a while. But it can be difficult to take the gamble of ageing on a beer you don't know that well, so better to drink it and then you can judge if you'd be better storing it, the next time you get hold of a bottle. While this didn't have the full-on richness I'd experienced the first time I'd tasted this beer a few years ago, it certainly had a velvety texture on the palate, bitter roasts and sweet, woody liquorice notes. A worthy nightcap, though I couldn't help wondering what other delights this beer would have yielded up, given a bit of time resting in the beer cupboard first.

An enjoyable evening trying a few new beers with a theme and learning to cook a new dish – my overall vote for the evening would go to the Carlow O'Hara's stout, and I do hope to find bottled and draught versions of this side by side next time I'm across the sea, for more of a comparison and dark beer session!

Adventures in Sunday Roast

I have a difficult relationship with the concept of a Sunday Roast – which still seems to be a strong tradition in England; certainly lots of pubs offer it as an enticement to spend a lazy afternoon with them, and from scanning Twitter it seems a lot of people still do it at home as well.

When I was growing up, it seemed to me to symbolise the tedium of childhood Sundays, where nothing was open, everything moved at a slower pace, and the television schedule was terribly dry and religion-oriented. Although I always ate it up and asked for seconds, the roast was kind of the antithesis of food I would actively seek out, preferring more exotic flavours from round the world, preferably with a bit of spice and garlic.

In addition, something which has coloured my view of it ever since, when I was about 11 I was called to the kitchen and told I needed to learn how to make a roast dinner, so I could “make it for my husband” - I took afront to this, thinking firstly, I may not want a husband, and secondly, if I did, why wouldn't they be making the roast? So since then it had been a point of principle not to learn how to make a roast – a small act of anti-genderisation politics against a meal that wasn't my favourite anyway!

But I have been treated to many lovely meals made by @dave_car that just happened to involve a roast element – pheasant, partridge, quail, grouse – so in an effort to return the favour, and feeling inspired by a chicken and garlic dish I'd had recently at @DraftHouseUK, I decided I'd finally give it a go and adventure into the world of the "Roast Dinner".

I knew that the key thing (apart from me not messing it up of course) would be to start with good ingredients - so I visited Harborne Village Butchers, a newish shop run by two lovely guys who have worked as butchers in Harborne for many years. All their stock is free range and I've been impressed with the quality of every single thing I've bought here since they opened. So I nervously confessed I needed to learn how to roast a chicken, and asked what they had suitable for two people, with leftovers. They fixed me up with a free-range bird, ready for the oven, and a jar of goose fat for the potatoes, and I promised to report back how it all went in return.

 
Next was a trip to @lokiwine in Birmingham's Great Central Arcade, to ask Phil's advice for a decent white to go with chicken, with the caveat 'anything but Chardonnay'. Phil was able to help out with a few suggestions, including a Viognier and a Spanish white, which I mulled over while checking out a few fine samples from his Enomatic sampling machines. Eventually we settled on a Jean Orliac Loup y Es-Tu? Blanc which I think includes Viognier and Marsanne in the mix, so should be zippy and fresh but with a slight honeyed note to balance it out.

 
Preparations started on the Saturday night - as I only have a small oven with one shelf, about three batches of roasting would be needed to assemble a complete meal. I decided to roast some little Chantenay carrots with orange juice and local Rea valley honey (from Stirchley), and these worked out really easy to do - top & tail 1kg of carrots, give them a scrub but don't peel, mix olive oil & the juice of one orange in a hot metal baking dish, chuck the carrots around and then drizzle over about a teaspoon or so of honey and give it all a good mix. Then roast for 20-30 minutes at Gas 6, taking them out and turning over every 10 minutes until they're a bit browned looking and yielding, but still with some texture left. I found these also made a good accompaniment to a range of other dishes like winter-spiced lamb or pork in wine.

With part 1 done, I slept a little easier, and woke up on the Sunday morning ready to tackle the next bit - potatoes. This involved using King Edwards (Delia's suggestion; other good varieties are apparently Maris Piper and Desirée), cutting into equal-sized chunks, par-boiling for 6 minutes and then shaking a bit in a colander to rough up the edges. Meanwhile, I got my baking tray good and hot at Gas 7, and spooned in half the jar of goose fat (around 100g), which quickly liquefied. I tossed the potatoes in this to cover, and then roasted for around an hour, checking and turning them every 20 minutes. They came out nicely golden, so I put them to one side and my oven was now free for the main event.

 

... and after!

... before ...

This didn't involve much prep really - sticking my hand up it to check there were no giblets and shoving some lemon halves, bay and rosemary in there; then rubbing the skin all over with a mixture of olive oil, sea salt and finely chopped rosemary. Lastly, surrounding it with a mixture of stock, white wine and garlic cloves that had been simmered a little, and covering the dish tightly in foil so no steam escapes. Then into the oven it went, and the nervous waiting commenced. Towards the end the foil was removed and it developed a nice golden colour - finally looking like I imagined it should! 
I used this recipe and was pretty impressed it all went to plan.

The finished article

 
So finally I plated up with the potatoes, carrots, and some green beans, and the sauce containing about 15 cloves of garlic each, and served it with the wine - and then stared at it for five minutes exclaiming "it worked!". The chicken was beautifully moist and tasty, and most importatly too the sauce was full of flavour, with the garlic cloves soft and squishy to be added to each mouthful. The potatoes had stayed crunchy on the outside and fluffy on the inside, with the vegetables hopefully adding some balance health-wise. It's fair to say I felt rather pleased with myself in my 'new venture'!

 

 

Credit to @dave_car for this one

The following week, I was back at Harborne Village Butchers, this time asking for "whatever bit of beef would be suitable for roasting for two people, with plenty left over" - I also wrote down their instructions on cooking the beef just right - i.e. flavoursome but pink in the middle. But on this occasion although I made the veg and potatoes, I did need @dave_car to step in - he laid the beef on a bed of shallots, rosemary and sage to roast, and made a great gravy with the meat juices and some Reserve port - and to top it off, some mini Yorkshire puddings. The beef came out perfectly tender and enticingly medium-rare, with lots left over for future meals. So another roast success, albeit not all my own work this time, but still, I can chalk it up as another area now explored in my cooking map of 'unknown places'!

Resolution 1 - Make More Soup

This was obviously going to be an easy resolution if I wanted it to be – I mean, how hard is making soup, and if you love it, won’t you be motivated to keep making it? Maybe – but sometimes you can get into little procrastinatory and demotivating cycles where it’s the tiny things that you allow to put you off – the blender is on too high a shelf for me to reach without getting a ladder; the fridge is too full to stock up on soup ingredients; I don’t know when I’ll have time to eat it up; I can’t be arsed with all that chopping. So this resolution was just a gentle reminder to myself to get to it, and so far anyway this has been successful.

Soups made so far:

• Spiced squid, scallop and chorizo – mostly following a recipe in a new fish book, I was fully planning to make this with fresh squid and let it simmer away for ages to tenderise, but Waitrose fish counter had none in stock; so a compromise of some fresh scallops was used instead, with some pre-cooked squid meze from the deli counter added. It worked out grand, with lovely warming flavours, but I’d make sure of the fresh squid supply first if making again.
• Brie and Courgette – a stalwart recipe from the New Covent Garden Soup Company Book of Soups – that I’ve made time and again and it’s never let me down. Saved some in the freezer so that's my weekend lunch sorted.
• Chestnut mushroom with garlic & parsley – for some reason I’ve never made a mushroom soup before – I think possibly because I once ate the most perfect, textured mushroom soup in a Paul Rankin café in N Ireland, and I know I’ll never be able to replicate it.
• Celery - nice and simple, had some leftover celery to use up, so just put in a pan with one potato, onion and some stock, and that was it!
• Irish broth – a strong contender for my favourite food in the world – but I rarely make it as you just can’t get celery leaf – a major ingredient – in any quantity in England. So I was reduced to hunting through the celery stick bundles in supermarkets, furtively pulling off any leafy bits, stuffing them into a single pack, and buying it. I reckoned I wasn’t depriving anyone of it – most people probably put the leafy part in the bin – and the end justified the means. If anyone knows of a source of celery leaf, PLEASE let me know, so I no longer appear on security cameras ‘messing with the celery’. I was also going to use a turkey drumstick I picked up at a Farmers’ Market for stock & meat, but it didn’t smell quite right, so I just used some good chicken stock cubes and added shredded chicken later.

Soup making next:

• Don’t know! But I know I need to get on with it and keep up the momentum, so I’ll have a think over the next few days and see what inspiration hits me. Something hearty for lunchtimes perhaps, with the onset of this colder snap. Or maybe I'll be inspired after I come back from Belgium to make a beer and cheese soup, yum ...