Hickory Smoked Seitan Steaks in a Porter-Bourbon Demi-glace

By bwyker

One day, I hope to come up with a way to extract the gluten left in spent grain and turn it into “steak.” A lot of breweries give their spent grain to farmers to feed cattle. Why not skip the middle man? For now, however, I use store bought vital wheat gluten and a kick-ass recipe Kevin developed using bits and pieces of other recipes floating around the interwebs. Last night, I made some seitan and served it in a slightly modified version of Tim Shafer’s Stout-and-Whiskey Laced Demi-glace that was featured in the July 2007 issue of Beer Advocate magazine. I made some roasted potatoes & garlic and sauted collard greens for sides and paired with Stone Smoked Porter.

I only made minor modifications to the sauce recipe, using Jim Beam bourbon instead of scotch and my uncarbonated smoked porter instead of Irish stout. Also, I switched out the Kosher salt with smoked salt and used Earth Balance instead of butter. Here is the recipe with these modifications:

1/2 TSP. olive oil
1 white onion, diced large
10 organic whole peppercorns
2 oz Jim Beam bourbon
4 oz smoked porter
2 cups brown stock (I used Organic Better than Bouillon Vegetable Base)
1/4 TSP. smoked salt
1 TSP herbs (I used dried rosemary, parsley and thyme)
1 TBSP. Earth Balance

In a sauce pan, heat the oil and add onions and peppercorns. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat until the onions have become tender and golden in color. Remove the pan from the stove and add bourbon. Carefully return the pan to the flame – the ALCOHOL WILL IGNITE! (since I use electric, I had to light mine with a match) Stir in the beer and cook 4-5 minutes until half of the liquid has evaporated. Add the stock and continue to simmer for 15 minutes. There should be about 1o oz remaining. Finish by straining out the onion and peppercorn, then season with herbs (note: I also strained out the herbs after infusing the sauce for about 15 minutes). Whisk in Earth Balance and set aside.

The steaks:

Dry ingredients:

1 cup vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
2 TBSP. corn meal
1 TSP. onion powder
1/2 TSP. adobo

Wet ingredients:

1/4 cup rehydrated porcini mushrooms (I usually use shiitake mushroom stems, but didn’t have any on hand)
3/4 cup water
2 TBSP.  Wan Ja Shan oyster mushroom sauce
1 TBSP.  olive oil
1 TBSP. tahini
1/2 TSP. Dijon mustard
1/2 TSP. truffle oil (optional)
1/4 TSP. smoked salt (optional)

Mix together the dry ingredients. Blend the mushrooms into the liquid ingredients (I use a hand blender), then mix the liquid ingredients into the dry. Form a ball, then pull off pieces and flatten into rounds.

Normally, the seitan is baked for about 10 minutes in an oven at 350 degrees, flipped and basted, then returned to the oven for another 15 minutes or so. I wanted to give the steaks a smokey flavor, so I decided to cook the seitan in my smoker for the first 10 minutes, setting the grill to low heat.  I used about 1/2 cup of the demi-glace as the basting sauce and returned the steaks to the grill in a baking dish on low heat for another 15 minutes or so, until most of the liquid was gone and the steaks were firm.

For the sides, I sliced about about 6 medium sized organic red potatoes and about 6-8 cloves of garlic, placed them in an oiled baking dish with 1/2 cup of light stock, black pepper and a pinch of smoked salt. Baked at 350 for about an hour. I sauted the greens in olive oil with a little pepper.

Everything came out great. The bourbon and porter gave the sauce a sweet toasty flavor, wihtout the boozy character you might expect. The texture of the steaks was perfect. I feared they would come out too doughy, which has happened in past efforts to grill seitan. The mushrooms give the seitan an earthy flavor, which removes the grainy gluten taste you get in most seitan recipes. It has a smooth smokey flavor, but it’s not an overpowering bacon-like taste. My wife Jaime, who does not care for bourbon or smoked beer, found the sauce to be really tasty. In fact, she even had some smoked porter with the meal, as it  complimented the sweet smokey flavors of the food nicely. The only complaint we both had was it was a touch too salty. I probably could have left out some of the smoked salt and adobo and maybe reduced the amount of Better than Bouillion I used to make the broth. Overall, a great steak and potatoes meal.

Dijon (& IPA) Lentil Sauce over Grilled Polenta and Rapini

By bwyker

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.

Smoked Porter

By bwyker

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.

Wit Minus Minus (Gluten-Free ‘Wit’bier)

By kevin

One of my good friends was semi-recently diagnosed with Celiac Disease, a rather craptacular condition that essentially makes consuming gluten a big no-no. Most of the world’s beer is brewed with barley and/or wheat, which both contribute gluten proteins. Bummer. Said friend loves beer, so I figured I needed to take a stab at brewing a completely gluten-free beer, using Briess White Sorghum Syrup a gluten-free, 100% concentrated wort made from the unmalted grain of the white sorghum plant.

Original guidance on this recipe came from Russ Chibes’ White Riot sorghum based wit. First off, I had a little bit of trouble finding sorghum extract. Most online homebrew suppliers seemingly used to carry it. I even recently have heard commercials from Fermentap on The Brewing Network podcasts advertising that they carry it… but that seems to no longer be the case. Northern Brewer stopped carrying it; Beer, Beer, & More Beer seems to be completely out as well. Locally, Keystone Homebrew had a small amount left, but their two locations are quite a haul for me from South Philly these days, now that I no longer work in the suburbs. Midwest still had some though. Score!

One of Russ’ comments to me on beeradvocate.com when I asked him about the beer was that it needed some more orange peel character. Recently during a fun-filled week in Philadelphia Jury Duty, I spent a lot of time reading Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. I am typically a “stick-to-the-bjcp-guidelines-and-use-proven-recipes (coughcough Brewing Classic Styles coughcough) but this book is pretty inspiring in a challenging, refreshing way. It includes lots of pointers on using non-traditional ingredients, and how to go about getting the most flavor out of spices and other additions for homebrewers. One of the sections that caught my eye was on orange peel – a typical addition to most of the world’s witbier recipes. Mosher points out that in his brewing, he has found the dried Curacao orange peel that most homebrew shops sell imparts “too much pithy bitterness and not enough orange aroma.” One of his substitutions? Seville Orange Marmalade. Usually marmalade would be a no-no in beer, since the pectin would lead to a haze, but luckily, that is quite acceptable in this style of beer! The other day at Wegman’s I stumbled upon a Seville Orange Marmalade, actually made by Trappist Monks in Massachusetts, which I clearly had to have.

Anyway.. On to the recipe:

Wit-- (Sorry, I’m a computer geek, and this is a wheat-less wit)

Fermentables:

  • 6# Briess Liquid White Sorghum Extract
  • 8 oz Maltodextrin powder (to add body)
  • 2 oz Corn Sugar (just to boost the alcohol a tad)

Other Ingredients:

  • .7 oz (6% AA) Organic New Zealand Hallertau (60M)
  • 1 oz Fresh Mineola Orange Zest
  • 1 T Buckwheat flour (to add more haze)
  • 1 T Seville Orange Marmalade
  • .4 oz Lightly Crushed Coriander Seed (Fresh, not stale!)
  • .15 oz Dry Chamomile Flowers (both JZ and Mosher mention this as pretty key in this style

After chilling this down to the low 60s, I pitched a packet of Fermentis Safbrew T-58 dry yeast. Normally for a belgian specialty ale, I’d use a nice starter of some White Labs or Wyeast yeast.. But they are usually grown on barley, whereas most dry yeast are grown up on gluten-free sources of food like beet sugar and the like.

I started with 5.5 gallons. I racked from my kettle to a 6 gallon better bottle and had about 4.75 gallons. My starting gravity was 1.050; assuming I get solid attenuation like I always seem to from Fermentis dry yeast, I am looking at a final gravity in the low teens and an ABV in the upper 4s. We’ll see. Beth commented that the aromas permeating from this wort were the most pleasant of any batch to date. I think using good quality coriander, vibrant chamomile, and fresh orange zest is really the way to go with this style.

I had good activity by the next morning – though there was no krausen. I’ll let it go for about 10 days or so and bottle, and hopefully we’ll be tasting in a couple of weeks.