Taieri George

Spiced beers generally fit alongside those other joke beers like chili beer or a perfectly-skunked Corona. In the official judging guidelines, they’re relegated to the category of “Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer” to languish amongst the beers that simply don’t work elsewhere. At best, they get passed off as a Belgian specialty ale, a beer with too many characters to characterise.

Most of the people who brew them are certifiably mad; the type of brewer who thinks that the one missing flavor from their porter is pumpkin. I like the hint of coriander and orange peel in a Hoegaarden but don’t really want a beer that boasts that its primary appeal is that it tastes unlike beer but more like garden.

Thus I approached Taieri George with caution. It comes from the brilliant brewers at Emerson’s as a spiced ale, brewed seasonally and released on March 6, the birthday of brewer Richard Emerson’s father, George. It’s also named after a train. A train in New Zealand.

Emerson’s says: “The beer pours a reddish brown hue and offers a delightful aroma of freshly baked hot cross buns with a hint of chocolate…the luscious malt and spice flavours are balanced with just enough hop dryness”

I say: It is much like liquified hot cross bun, pouring with a foamy, dirty brown head at the suggested 8 degrees C. I imagine this is how the Easter Bunny tastes if you put him through the Pacojet. The added cinnamon and the spiciness of the nutmeg aren’t at all cloying and balance with the malt, and the high alcohol content remains slyly hidden. This is a fantastic beer for Winter. This batch, bottle-conditioned since March, would probably hold up to more aging, developing into something even more complex for next season.

ABV: 6.8%

Price: A$10.99 per pint bottle

Leftover shots

Sorting back through my shots from Vietnam looking for something in particular, I’ve realised that there is so much content that I left behind. I was too busy enjoying myself to post them while I was on the road nor did I take any sort of notes that I could spin out into a meaningful post.

Kid who rents out mats to slide down the White Sand Dunes in Mui Ne, Vietnam. He looks that angry because I’ve just told him that under no circumstances will I be hiring a mat.

Bringing oranges across the bridge to market in Hue

Moving coconuts to market by cyclo, Hue

Serving pho in the back streets of Hội An

Usufruct in Fitzroy

Usufruct, the right to derive benefit from the property of others, is generally best (and in most societies, only) displayed by the example of picking fruit from trees that overhang the boundary of a private property into public space.

A Google User named kirsten has begun compiling a map of all of the overhanging fruit in the suburb of Fitzroy.

It’s collaborative, so the map could easily become a guide to all the free fruit in the whole city.

Does Gordon Ramsay write his own extrafood column in the Herald Sun?

Gordon Ramsay’s Humble Pie was a 2006 bestseller but it was the award-winning feature writer Rachel Cooke who quietly wore out the “f” key on her laptop. Then again, she can afford a new computer, having pocketed a rumoured £100,000 share of Ramsay’s rumoured £750,000 advance.

From “Literary Haunts”, The Times, November 12, 2007. Surely Ramsay has much more lucrative things to do with his time than pen a few hundred words a week for extrafood in Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper. So who is the food writer at Gordon Ramsay Holding’s PR agency, Sauce Communications? Any idea, Ed?

Beer Flaw Tasting

“T” is for Taint

If there is one thing that evaluating beer in Cambodia has primed my tastebuds for, it is tasting bad beer. I never particularly dwelt upon the reasons behind their badness because I was too busy trying to find synonyms for “watery”. I had never approached badness in a systematic way.

So the opportunity to pinpoint the reasons behind the badness could not be passed up. Tastes and the ability to discuss them with objectivity can be learned.

The key problem with beer is that it is a complex, living animal for at least some period of its existence. The yeast within it breeds and mutates; it acts differently when hot or cold, or in the presence of more or less oxygen. When dead, the yeast cells settle in clumps. Certain micronutrients inhibit the growth of some strains but promote the growth of others. It sometimes competes with other foreign organisms for the sugars used in brewing. The water used matters.

At every step of the brewing process, something can infect the beer: bacillus, clostridium, coliforms, acetobacter, gluconobacter. Other wild yeasts that float upon the breeze can drop in and take charge (in lambic beers, this is actually the goal rather than a problem).

It still amazes me that any two beers ever taste the same.

This weekend a friend and brewer, Ben from pint.com.au, bought The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit, a selection of 8 artificial flavors that are identical to the most common flaws in beer and invited a crew over to drink some deliberately and systematically tainted beer. Metal taint, spoilage by acetic acid bacteria, bacterial growth in the mash or fermentation, spoilage by wild yeasts, insufficient wort boiling, poor yeast health, use of old hops were all to be tasted. Often many of these things happen at once to beer but the ability to separate each of these problems out by taste alone is the cheapest way to improve the brewing process.

Some taints were much worse than others.

While most of my friends found the “infection by acetic acid bacteria” as a mild flaw, I thought it to be like drinking a cup of vinegar. The apple flavors of badly boiled wort weren’t right for a beer but nor were they hugely offensive to me. Nobody enjoyed the “bacterial growth in the mash” which I likened to having freshly regurgitated a whole fruitcake; others found it reminiscent of baby vomit. As someone who tastes things for a living, I’m still not sure if it is reassuring that I’ll now be able to identify that the goaty, damp basement smell in some beer is caused by coliform infection during fermentation or that the metallic flavor that I have come to associate with Angkor Lager is the fault of poor quality equipment at the brewing plant.

The full set of beer flaw tasting notes (PDF) is now at Pint.

One-plus-One Dumplings: Uyghur-licious

Chinese food in Australia is for the most part, awful, but it is an awfulness within which you can revel. Steak and black bean sauce, paint-liftingly acidic lemon chicken, your-meat-of-choice stir-fried with cashew nut and cornstarch. Fried rice with peas in it and those little prawns (jumbo krill?) from a can that only exist to populate this specific dish. I still have a lot of love for it, mostly because it represents a resolutely Australian cuisine.

It does bear a passing resemblance to Cantonese food, if you squint hard enough and have a terrible aversion to vegetable matter, offal and real seafood. I’ve been meaning to do some research to uncover Australia’s first Chinese restaurant as a way to find out whom or where gave birth to this food, and why it was Cantonese and not the Uighur food from Western China that captured the Australian palate.

If Central New South Wales had have invented a Chinese cuisine of their own (and been originally populated by nomadic Central Asians subjected to 2500 years of bloody invasion), it would probably look much like Uighur food.

The far Western province of China is built upon sheep and wheat; which the food reflects, as does its location between Tibet, Mongolia, Russia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan- and India-controlled Kashmir. It thus has a byzantine political history whose richness is only surpassed by its daedal religious intricacy. As a consequence, people eat potatoes; piles of cumin; chili in crazed abundance, both whole dried and as flakes. Fresh wheat noodles are pulled or are presented flattened and hand-cut.

lamb is omnipresent: in the cumin-coated kebabs (above), atop and beneath hot noodles ands soups, providing filling for the dumplings and pastries. Apart from the spices, it couldn’t conform more to the cliche of the Anglo-Australian palate.

Green salads even arrive uncooked and unpreserved which is about as far from the rest of Chinese cuisine as you can possibly veer. Why isn’t this food in every Australian country town?

Apart from the obvious reason that there is no critical mass of Uighur people spread about the countryside, there is probably a Western Chinese restaurant nearby that you wouldn’t otherwise notice unless you could read Chinese characters. One-plus-One Dumplings in Footscray is a case in point. Their name is little more than a ruse to hide their true cuisine; their dumplings only notable for being forgettable; the interior indistinguishable from any other Chinese restaurant under the disinfectant glare of fluorescent lighting and mirror-halled walls.

But the lamb and noodles will transport you straight back to Ürümqi.

While one should eat Uighur food apropos of nothing, this particular occasion to hit up some Western Chinese in the Western suburbs was that Maytel from Gut Feelings was in Melbourne, as were ex-Cambodian expats Andrew and Anth. We are all still bound to upholding the myth that every English language blogger in Cambodia knows each other. And there isn’t a decent Cambodian joint for miles.

Address: One-Plus-One Dumplings, 84 Hopkins St, Footscray

Addendum (27 May 2008): Added Tibet to list of neighbouring nations. I missed it.

Bánh Mì Xiu Mai

Bánh mì xiu mai is the ultimate culinary mashup: a strange interpretation of Cantonese food in a French baguette via Saigon. The banh mi is your average baguette filled with a slap of pate, pickled carrot and stalks of coriander. The xiu mai part is utterly bewildering.

Picking the xiu mai from the sauce

The Vietnamese version of the Cantonese siew mai bears only the most basic resemblance to its Chinese compadre. It is both made from ground pork and is the size of a golf ball but lacks the thin wonton skin of the Cantonese dumpling. Instead of being gently steamed, the Vietnamese version is boiled in a tomato sauce.

The further that you delve into the origins and history of the recipe, the stranger it becomes. Andrea Nguyen from Vietworldkitchen hints that it might be a Vietnamese version of an Italian meatball sub and to illustrate the point, uses a modified Cambodian recipe for them. I’ve certainly seen them around Cambodia: there was a vendor in the Russian Market in Phnom Penh who sold them from an aluminum soup bain marie, in the same thin and oily tomato sauce. Graham from Noodlepie spots them about Saigon.

As far as I can find, there is no canonical Vietnamese recipe or even one that closely accords with the others. This recipe in Vietnamese, for example, calls for devilled ham along with ketchup. Another specifies Hunt’s brand tomato sauce and breadcrumbs. This lack of consistency and extensive use of more typically “Western” ingredients suggests that the xiu mai (for banh mi purposes) is a fairly recent addition to the Vietnamese culinary pantheon, even if the Cantonese siew mai have been cooked around Vietnam for millenia. Xiu mai just happened to be the most convenient word already in common usage.

This leaves the more difficult question of whether the banh mi xiu mai originated in Vietnam, and if so, how long has it been there?

If you happen to be in Footscray, Banh Mi Ba Le does an excellent banh mi xiu mai for A$3, with the bread amply soaking up the oily sauce and squishy pork ball. It comes a close second to the nearby banh mi thit nuong.

Address: 2/28A Leeds St, Footscray VIC 3011, Australia

Guerilla Gardening: How to compost a whole cow

The guerilla garden continues apace with one rude surprise. The bamboo has been chopped down and left aside to mulch as much material as possible before I call in the council to remove the woodier stalks.

The rude shock is that beneath the thin ground cover of rotting bamboo leaf and years of accumulated trash, the bluestone and tarmac alleyway is intact. There is no soil beneath, apart from a few spots where the road surface is collapsing. So I scraped up as much of the ground cover as possible, built a raised bed and put in a compost bin to mulch kitchen scraps (and bamboo); added a good thirty kilos of cow manure and have planted the first crop of winter greens.

Nothing fancy, just broccoli (above), onions, leeks, spinach. I don’t expect it to be the best of crops and my plan is to plant some climbing beans after the leeks come up at the back to take advantage of the fence.

As for how to compost whole cows, I’ve been researching feedlots in Australia for another unrelated project. According to the South Australian EPA’s Guidelines for Establishment and Operation of Cattle Feedlots in South Australia, 2nd Edition, 12.5.1 Composting

Adult cattle should be composted using the following method:-

1.In the manure stockpile area, or approved composting site, place a layer of dry organic matter 30 – 45 centimetres deep on the ground over an area slightly larger than the carcase. Straw, sawdust or hay are all suitable.

2.Place the dead animal on the bed and cover with another layer of the dry organic material to a depth of 30 centimetres.

3. Cover the whole lot with 60 centimetres depth of semi-dry organic material such as feedlot pen manure, stockpiled manure, or silage. This layer needs to be at least 60 centimetres deep to contain odours and exclude scavengers.

4. Allow the pile to “work” for 20 days undisturbed. Internal temperatures should reach between 65 – 75oC.

5. After 20 days, or when the internal temperature falls below 60oC, turn the pile and expose the carcase. Cover the carcase again with 30 centimetres of dry organic material and 60 centimetres of semi-dry material.

6. Allow the pile to “work” for another 20 days undisturbed. Internal temperatures should reach 70oC and then slowly decrease. After the 40 days only large bones and some hair will remain.

The composted carcase can then be incorporated with manure or solid wastes for spreading on land.

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