Salsa Over The Years

As I perhaps have made it known, I have been creating mine own salsas for quite some time -- definitely longer than I have been creating mine own brews and cheeses.  So I'm going to post my last recipe, as a comparison to the first recipe I posted (and the nickelback salsa I saw I posted, cos it's salsa for people who don't like salsa, like nickelback produces music for people who don't enjoy music).  I should probably note that most of my salsas make use of the peppers I grow in my garden, and it is definitely way too early for them to have come in yet.

2 poblano peppers
6 green bell peppers
10 small vine ripened tomatoes
1 onion
8 cloves garlic
1 can tomato paste
lime juice
basil, thyme, rosemary
chili powder (mild), cayenne pepper powder, cumin, salt, pepper
olive oil

Cut peppers into panels.  Roast/broil at 500 F with tomatoes.  Burning is fine within reason, the primary goal is to remove the skins, the secondary goal is to enhance the flavor.  If you don't cook it long enough, neither happens, if you do it too long, there is nothing to separate and the flavor is burnt.

Dice onions and garlic.  Put them aside in their own bowl.

Get an ice bowl ready to put all of the peppers and tomatoes in.  When they cool, pull the skins off, dice the peppers, and cut the tomatoes into as small pieces as possible (they should start to disintegrate though).  Put all of this in its own bowl (advise cutting the tomatoes inside the dish to retain all of the juices).

Coat the bottom of a pot with olive oil and begin to heat it up.  Add the spices and mix in, it should noticeably change the color to an orange/red.

When the oil is heated up enough, add the onions and peppers.  It should sizzle a little bit, and the oil may splash up.  Cook until soft.  This is the base from which the salsa is created.  Keep stirring to avoid burning.

Add the tomato and pepper mixture.  Add the herbs.  Mix thoroughly.  Add the lime juice.  Mix thoroughly.  Add the tomato paste. Mix thoroughly.

Keep stirring every few minutes until it starts bubbling.  Lower the heat and let it simmer for about half an hour.

Pour it out and let it cool.


-- end result, it was kinda mild by my standards, but still had some good flavor depth to it (much better than the nickelback salsa).  The process is similar to what I've done the past few batches though.

So what has changed of my process?  Well ingredients will always shift to what I have.  Once I attempted to make a salsa using sweet potatoes and butternut squash because there weren't any good tomatoes in season (it was November).  Cayenne pepper powder and that lime flavored Mexican chili powder have remained staples of the spicing.  I have stopped growing thai basil because it is annoying to maintain (and almost gave up on regular basil for this year).  My peppers aren't in yet, and neither are any sort of local tomato.

I no longer use a food processor or blender.  Firstly, I like the texture of hand cut everything better (and yes, it takes so much longer, but it is so worth it).  If you cook it well enough, the odd large piece isn't a huge factor.  Secondly our blender burnt out, so I wouldn't be able to use it anyway.

I let it simmer for shorter, keep it unlidded, and get it hotter faster.  I have various reasons for all of these, but basically I found letting it sit that long on the stove just made it far far more likely to burn and didn't really add any measurable flavor depth.  There isn't any isomerization going on there.

Balance wise, I lean towards the pepper side nowadays, whereas early incarnations where more tomato based.  In fact some early ones were compared to spicy tomato sauces (my love of basil doesn't help here).

I think I've become better at broiling the vegetables now too.  Cutting them into panels gives a more complete and even burn, and I have a better idea of how long it all takes.  Also, broiling Cayenne peppers is a bad idea, they are just too small.  You'd have to do them completely separate or put them on the fringe or something.  Sometimes I add them to the onion/garlic mix to get some more heat on the base.

-- Knuttel

A Night of Beersearch

Sadly, I realize, I have not paid much attention to this blog in recent months.  There have been a lot of brew-happenings on my end, and I might update them later.  But this is a pressing matter.

When one chooses to make beer, every aspect of beer from grain to glass must be examined and studied thoroughly.  I have been to many a beerfest and had a few nights indulging in many varieties of beer, but all of the notes made were mental.  Last night I put together for myself a collection of 10 beers, drank them all, and made detailed observations about them along the way, using the ASTMO model (appearance, smell, taste, mouthfeel, and overall impression).  Each beer was poured into a Chimay goblet, which was super appropriate for the first beer, and still a fine choice for the others.  I resisted from using numbers because numbers lie, and you also usually have to grade it against a style as well as "overall greatness", my quest for great beers runs independent of styles.

Saving a Beer

I recently made a beer for an upcoming competition -- Philly Beer Scene's Best Homebrew Shop competition.

The first round requires one to make a session beer, defined by them as 4.5% abv or lower (it's important they say this as everyone seems to have a different definition).  Stylistically there really isn't that much there aside from light lagers and British beers (the entire island developing different session styles because of the way beer was taxed).  Not willing to reinvent Bud Light and hating beers with that "English" character, I decided to try my hand at a Scottish ale.  In order to try and minimize the English-ness of the beer, I used an American yeast instead of a British one (and fermented it cool at that, to minimize the flavor impact there too) and substituted the English hops (Scotland, unable to grow its own hops, relies mostly upon England) with an Austrian hop related to the English varieties.

It still had that "Englishness" pervading through it.  It was laughing at me with each sample I took.  I knew I had to save this beer, but how?

Taking inspiration from the Norman invasion of 1066, I decided to assault this brew with some French hops.  I didn't have enough time to dry hop, and that's kind of an English technique anyway.  So instead I made a hop tea, more traditional to German brewing.

I did the tea on thursday and bottled on friday.  The character has been mitigated, it seems, and the crisis may be averted.  I will only know this once the beer is done bottle conditioning, but I have confidence.

Here are some pictures from the event.

1 oz. of hops carefully weighed out

Hops stapled shut into a coffee filter to act as a tea bag.  I didn't account for water absorption, and it eventually burst, but almost all of the hop material stayed out of the tea itself.

Wort, made from DME, for the tea to take place in.

Once the wort got up to 170 degrees fahrenheit, I pulled it off the heat, put the hops in, and let it steep for about 10 minutes.  You need to use wort for this (but only a very weak one) in order to change the chemical structure of the water, most importantly the pH.  If I did this in just water, it would probably taste of grass.  Also, it is important I never let this get to a boil, otherwise the alpha acids in the hops will start to isomerize, making the tea bitter instead of "hoppy".  I was considering doing this at the actual bottling phase, but the idea of using DME to bottle makes me a little uneasy -- this is the absolute end of the road for the yeast so I just want to give it some easy sugar to make for a quicker and more complete refermentation.  I know the use of "speise" is traditional in Germany, but I'll probably keep that experiment in my pocket for another day -- and save some of the pre-boil wort to use for it to keep it more consistent.

-- Knuttel