Food Recipe: Jägerschnitzel

Bonus post!  I wrote a guest post for the Rantings of a an Amateur Chef blog about my original Jägerschnitzel recipe.  Jägerschnitzel is a traditional German dish consisting of schnitzel (breaded and fried flattened pork) and Jäger (hunter) sauce, a delicious brown gravy with bacon and onions.  Check it out here!

Jägerschnitzel!

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First Attempts at Fermenting Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut is yet another fermented goodie you can make at home.  And the chances are very good you have everything right at home.

Molecular Gastronomy for Brewing

I recently finished up a free molecular gastronomy course (basically, the science of delicious things) offered by the University of Hong Kong through the website coursea.org.  The focus was on food, but some of the things were applicable to beer as well.  Here, I would like to share some useful things you might want to consider for your next brewing or tasting session.

Simple Home Cheese Making and its Science

My first cheese making experience was completely accidental.  As a child, I was in the kitchen and happened to have both milk and vinegar within reach; naturally, they got mixed together.  I noticed a near instantaneous curdling, though it wasn’t until some years later I really grasped what I had done- I had made cheese.  Relatively recently, even after knowing some of the basics of cheese making, I again fell victim to accidental cheesery: I mixed some milk into a tomato based dish as it simmered and was surprised by the resulting simple cheese in my dish (it turned out to be quite good- I do it on purpose now).  There are many simple fresh cheeses that anyone can make at home.  They make for a great compliment to snacks and meals, and are a fun weekend science project to do with kids (or in my case, my inner child).

DIY Belgian Candy Syrup 2: Experiments

[Miniseries part one, two]

In part one, I went in to some of the science behind making syrup from sugar.  Here, I’ll go into some of the experiments I tried before coming up with something I felt worthy of risking five gallons of brew over.

DIY Belgian Candy Syrup 1: Sugar Science

[Miniseries part one, two]

A while back I wanted to make a belgian trippel; traditionally this style is brewed with up to 20% simple sugars to lower the final gravity.  Naturally, I looked first at belgian candy (candi?) sugars,  but found that they were basically just crystallized table sugar, with the darker varieties having some mystery darkening agent, some leftover of the refining process which presumably somehow added to the flavor of the final product.  As far as I can tell, the only products that lend any real flavor are the golden-brown to molasses-colored candy syrups.  In fact, the flavors normally associated with the common varieties of candy sugars are actually from the yeast, as revealed on a Brew Strong episode (part one and two) when the guys visited White Labs and did some side by side tastings of identical worts fermented with different yeasts.  And yes, I realize that using such a syrup will not actually result in a trippel (its far too dark), but I was already on my way down the rabbit hole.