For months I’ve been meaning to make the Dijon Mustard Lentil Sauce from the first Milennium Cookbook. The trouble was, I could never really make it fit into a meal. Serving a protein up in sauce form is a little strange and pouring it over tofu or seitan felt like too much protein. Since spring has returned, I’ve been cooking on the grill and a spring/summer favorite of mine is grilled polenta. The lentil sauce recipe suggests a hoppy beer and I have a homebrewed IPA on tap at the moment (the IPA didn’t turn out well enough to get into the complex recipe,  but it is plenty hoppy.) With all the other ingredients on hand and some rapini (aka broccoli rabe) for a side, I cooked it up last night.

First, I cut up a roll of organic polenta into about 1/2 inch rounds and soaked them in a marinade for an hour or two.

Polenta Marinade:

1/4 cup olive oil
4 tablespoons champagne vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground sage
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme

Next, I cooked the lentils in the pressure cooker for about 10 – 15 minutes and then started on the sauce. Here is the recipe directly from the book:

DIJON MUSTARD-LENTIL SAUCE
Makes 3 cups

With this sauce, I prefer using a red ale with a strong bitter hop flavor; stouts and heavy Belgian beers also work well. Any good beer of your choice will do except maybe fruit beer.

2 tablespoons corn starch
1 large yellow onion, cut into 1/3-inch dice
1 tablespoon olive oil (optional)
1/4 cup sherry or white wine
1/2 bunch fresh thyme leaves, or 2 teaspoons dried
One 12-ounce bottle of beer or non-alcoholic beer
1 cup apple juice
2/3 cup Dijon mustard
3 cups vegetable stock
1 cup cooked French lentils
1/4 bunch fresh tarragon, leaves only
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 teaspoons salt

Dissolve the corn starch in 1/4 cup cold water and set aside. In a saucepan over medium heat, cook the onion, oil, and sherry until the onions are lightly caramelized, about 15 minutes. Add the thyme leaves stir into the onions. Add the beer, apple juice, mustard and stock. Simmer until reduced by one third, about 20 minutes. Add the lentils, tarragon, pepper, and salt, and whisk in the cornstarch until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Simmer 5 minutes, remove from heat, and use or set aside. Will keep up to one week in the refrigerator.

I did not use quite as much mustard – maybe 1/2  cup. There was plenty of mustard flavor with that. The rapini was sauted with a few cloves of sliced garlic in a tablespoon or two of olive oil and sprinkled with a little salt and pepper.

I paired with a Berliner weisse I had been aging since September. With the weather in the 60’s, it felt like a nice day to tap it.  The recipe for the Berliner was very simple; however, I still managed to f it up. I used the recipe from  Brewing Classic Styles, which calls for 2.75 lbs of wheat LIQUID malt extract (LME) and 2.75 lbs light LME. I was so accustomed to using DRIED malt extract (DME) that I used the same amounts of DME. Yes, a very stupid oversight, but the results were still great. I boiled for 15 minutes, adding .5 oz organic NZ Hallertau (8% AA) at 15 minutes. Primary fermentation at 68F with safale US-05, then transferred to a keg and pitched Wyeast Berliner weisse blend (3191).

The sauce is excellent. It’s rich and earthy with a pronounced Dijon flavor. There is definitely a slight citrusy sweetness that may have come from the beer, but it was subtle and buried under layers of other flavors. Maybe a Belgian or a hearty stout may have come through more. The bitterness of the rapini and the sourness of the Berliner complemented the sweetness of the sauce nicely. If I were to make this again – and I most likely will – I may switch out the polenta with grilled portabella mushrooms to give it a little more substance.

After my first brew kettle/MLT sprung a leak, it was time to retire my 5 gallon ghetto setup. I decided to upgrade to a 10 gallon megapot from Austin Homebrew. I added the Blichmann BrewMometer and stainless steel 3-piece ball valve. While the new kettle is awesome, dealing with Austin Homebrew was not the best experience. It took more than a month to arrive, thanks to an incredibly stupid system in which the thermometer and ball valve are shipped directly from Blichmann. Despite it being listed as “in stock” on the Austin Homebrew site, the thermometer was, in fact, not in stock. When it finally was, Blichmann shipped, then recalled the order due to an “invoicing error.” Anyway, the full order finally arrived last week and I got to work on the smoked porter I had planned out ages ago.

The recipe is primarily based on the Stone Smoked Porter clone from the Dec 08 issue of BYO. I had to make a few modifications to correct for a slightly shitty efficiency and to use up some crystal malt I had. Also, I scaled down to fit the batch into my 5 gallon primary fermenter (corny keg). Here is the recipe I used:

Grains:

10 lbs 2-row pale malt
1.5 lbs chocolate malt
5 oz crystal 60L
4 oz crystal 90L
.25 lbs peated malt.

Added to make up gravity points:
.75 lbs light LME
.25 lbs brown sugar

Hops:

1.5 oz Perle (7.6% AA, 90 min)
.5 oz Mt. Hood (Kevin’s Fresh Hop rejects, 5.8% AA, 15 min)

Yeast: 1 pack Safale 04

Other: 2 tsp Irish moss (15 min)

Mashed at 154, with 4 gallons of water. After a 60 minute mash, batch sparged with 3 gallons of 170 degree water. Collected 5.5 gallons of smokey wort.

Since the new pot is gigantic and cannot fit on my stove, this was all done on the back patio with the help of the turkey fryer. Few things are as disgusting as the act of deep frying an entire turkey’s dead body; however, the burner is significantly cheaper than anything from homebrew shops and a million times more efficient than my electric range. Most importantly, it allows me to bring the brewing outside – great for spring days like this brew day. Big thanks to Kevin for this. He needed a kettle a while back and picked up the fryer kit on sale at Boscovs (as he put it “nothing more humiliating than being vegan and walking around a store with a turkey fryer.”) Split the cost – he got a $20 7 gallon pot, I got the burner, which the new kettle barely fits on.

Keeping the mash at 154 was much easier with the thermometer. It dropped down to about 150 midway through, so I added a few cups of boiling water to get it back to 154.

My target pre-boil gravity was 1.053. I ended up with a corrected reading of 1.049. To compensate, I added some LME I had in the fridge and a little brown sugar. After a 90 minute boil, I ended up with about 4 gallons of 1.066 wort. I probably could have gotten another half gallon out of the sludge at the bottom of the kettle, but, mostly out of laziness, I decided to leave it behind. I needed headspace in my keg anyway. After it chilled to 68, I transferred directly to a corny keg. I’ve been using corny kegs as secondary fermenters for a little while now, but this is only the second time I’ve used kegs for primary fermentation. I got the idea from an article in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of BYO. It’s pretty simple and has many benefits (less space, don’t break easy, no light and a built in handle to name a few). Just pull out the little tube under the gas-in post and put a barbed gas quick disconnect on the post. Run a hose from the disconnect as you would a blow-off tube.

This should ferment at 68 for about 3 weeks. Once the primary fermentation is over, I’ll transfer to another keg (through a tube connected to each liquid-out disconnect) using CO2. I may add about .25 oz of bourbon soaked oak chips I’ve had around for some time. That’s yet to be determined.