“Whatever highly honorable motives they may have—to save money or to enjoy themselves, for example—the greatest motivation for homebrewers is the opportunity to experiment and to produce beer in all the glorious varieties in which it manifests itself.”

-Michael Jackson (this MJ, not the other) in the preface to The Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian (Amazon.ca and WPL)

Making beer from scratch in your own home is extremely satisfying but it can seem a bit difficult if you’ve never tried.  And if you do know a little bit about the process that most people use it can seem downright intimidating.

That’s because many homebrewers brew five gallon batches (or larger) and use all sorts of specialized equipment.  This includes pots and kettles that are 8 gallons or larger (the average “large” stockpot is around 2-3 gallons) and converted coolers with false bottoms or manifolds for straining grains.  In addition to this are all the buckets, jugs, tubes, pumps, measuring devices, and other unique items that serve very specific purposes in the brewing process.

However, it is possible to brew your own beer—truly from scratch—with limited supplies and equipment.  You just have to be willing to go a little bit smaller and then you can work with more common household items, like the pots and strainers your kitchen most likely already has.

This is where Emma Christensen has had a huge impact on my perspective towards homebrewing.  In her first book, True Brews (Amazon.ca and WPL), she taught how to make a wide variety of fermented beverages at home—kombucha, root beer, cider, mead, wine, beer, and more—and in most cases with very little specialized equipment.

I truly hadn’t considered making one gallon batches up beer until I read that book.  Although much of my brewing is still 5 gallon batches, the beauty of small batch brewing is that all aspects of the process are made more manageable by scaling down.  And just what are those aspects?  Here is an overview of brewing a small (1-2 gallons) batch of beer:

1. Heat 1 gallon of “hot liquor” to 160^◦F (“hot liquor” is just what the hot water is called)
2. Dough in (mix the hot liquor with the recipe’s crushed malts)
3. Mash for 1 hour at 148-153^◦F (basically just maintain the mixture of malts and water at this temperature for 60 minutes to create “wort” which is the sweet malty liquid that will ferment into beer).
4. Lauter and Sparge (lautering is the process of straining the wort from the grains and sparging is rinsing the grains with additional hot water).
5. Boil (the boil is when hops are added and the wort is sterilized, clarified, and concentrated through evaporation. 60 minutes is the typical length for this step).
6. Chill and pitch yeast (before the yeast can be added to the wort it must be brought down to room temperature. For a 1 gallon batch of beer this is usually done by setting the kettle in an ice bath in the sink and stirring with a sanitized spoon.  Then the wort is transferred to a sanitized bucket or jug and yeast is added).
7. Ferment (the yeast convert the wort into beer over the course of 2-3 weeks).
8. Bottle (the finished beer is mixed with a small amount of extra sugar and then put in bottles where the additional fermentation creates carbonation. Then you drink the beer!).

Looking at that list of steps I can’t say that brewing beer is “simple.”  However, if you break it down and just approach the process one step at a time there shouldn’t be a part that is overly difficult.   And once again, this is where Emma Christensen comes in!

After tackling small batch brewing in True Brews with enough detail to get people started she revisited it in full form in a second book, Brew Better Beer (Amazon.ca).  About a year and a half ago I had the opportunity to do recipe testing for a few recipes that would appear in the book (I got compensated for the ingredients and received a copy of the book once it was published).  I brewed up a 5 gallon batch of her “Riding Lawnmower Pale Ale” and one gallon batches of the “Pecan Pie Brown Ale” and “Affogato Milk Stout.”  Of those three the milk stout was my favorite and I plan to brew up a large batch of it later this summer to enjoy in the fall as the weather turns cooler.

With the arrival of Emma’s new book I decided to try out the “Smoky Chipotle Porter” recipe.  I’ve been intrigued by spicy beers for a while and had been waiting for a good opportunity to try brewing one.  Emma’s step by step instructions are clear and easy to follow. If you have a copy of her book the intro chapters go into great detail about all the steps, but if you don’t have the book I highly recommend her beer school on The Kitch’n.

And speaking of Brewing Better Beer, the publishers are going to send a copy of the book to one reader of this blog (in the US or Canada).  To enter just go to the form at the end of this post.  But if you don’t win a copy be sure to ask your local library to order one—that’s what I do every time I don’t win a book!

My plan is to follow up this post in a few weeks with a more in depth look at the equipment that I find essential for small batch homebrewing.  I’ll also include a review of how the Smoky Chipotle Porter turned out!  (And just send me an email if you’d like some ingredients to brew your own small batch of this beer for $12!)

What follows is an excerpt from Brew Better Beer, courtesy of Ten Speed Press. 

Credit: Reprinted with permission from Brew Better Beer, by Emma Christensen, copyright 2015. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

Photography copyright © 2015 by Katie Newburn

Smoky Chipotle Porter

I admit it: the idea of a spicy beer is a little . . . strange. Even to me. But this smooth and smoky porter with its slight prickle of heat is worth a leap of faith. Chipotles are the smoked and dried version of jalapeños—a process that transforms the crunchy green peppers into wrinkled, deep-red husks while simultaneously tempering their quick burst of heat into something slow and smoldering. Just the thing for a moody beer like this one.

Brew Notes If you’d like the smoky flavor of chipotles without the heat, crack open the dried peppers and shake out the seeds before adding them to the beer.

Make It Yours Make a Mexican hot chocolate version! Add cinnamon sticks, cacao beans, and a split vanilla bean or two to the secondary. (Read more about adding spices on page 166.)

Beers to Try Pipeline Porter (Kona Brewing Company), Stone Smoked Porter (Stone Brewing Company), Alaskan Smoked Porter (Alaskan Brewing Company

Follow the master method for brewing 1-gallon or 5-gallon all-grain batches as described on pages 54–59 (5-gallon measurements in parentheses).

• Remove liquid yeast from the refrigerator and, if necessary, activate according to package instructions. Place on the counter to warm.
• Heat 1 gallon (or 4 gallons) of water to 160°F, then stir in the grains. Maintain a mash temperature of 148°F to 153°F for 60 minutes. Raise the temperature of the mash to 170°F, then sparge using 1 gallon (or 2½ gallons) of 170°F water to make 1½ (or 5½) gallons wort.
• Bring to a boil over high heat. Add the Magnum hops and boil vigorously for 40 minutes. Add the Mt. Hood hops for flavoring and the Irish moss and continue boiling for another 15 minutes. Add the chipotle peppers and continue boiling for another 5 minutes. Add the Mt. Hood hops for aroma and remove from the heat. (Total boil time: 60 minutes.)
• Cool to at least 75°F and transfer to a sanitized primary fermentation bucket. Add the yeast and aerate the wort.
• Let ferment for at least 1 week or up to 4 weeks at 70°F; then transfer to a sanitized jug or carboy for secondary fermentation. Continue to ferment for another 2 weeks or up to 2 months at 70°F.
• Taste the beer a few days before you plan to bottle. If you’d like a stronger, hotter flavor, chop 1 chipotle pepper (or 5 peppers) and steep in just enough vodka to cover for 15 minutes, then drain and add the peppers to the beer. Taste daily and bottle when the beer tastes good to you.
• Dissolve the sugar in ¼ (or 1) cup of boiling water and let cool. Mix with the beer, bottle, and store for 2 weeks or up to a year. Refrigerate before drinking.

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I spent almost three years of my life living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.  While living there my absolute favorite food was pupusas.  They’re not hard to love, considering they are pretty much like the corn tortilla version of pizza (which I am rather obsessed with).

It’s a simple idea, you take a ball of masa dough, make a hole in the center and stick in a lump of cheese, or meat, or veggies, or a mixture of those, pat it flat, fry it up with a decent amount of grease, and serve it with a variety of spicy cabbage slaws and krauts.

I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but the main type of kraut used on top of pupusas is called curtido, which is pretty much just a broad term for pickle.

I have played around with various non-fermented versions of curtido over the years but it wasn’t until I won a copy of Fermented Vegetables by Kirsten and Christopher Shockey (available also in Canada) that it finally hit me what was missing from my version—mine wasn’t fermented!

The recipe is very simple, just cabbage, carrots, onion, garlic, and chile pepper flakes, and oregano and cumin.  You can take the curtido in different directions by tweaking the ratios, making it hotter or milder, more herbs or less, more of one vegetable or less, and so on.  I was running out of carrots the day I made mine so I think I’ll use more next time, partly because it will add more color to the final product.

The recipe is adapted from Fermented Vegetables, and if your library doesn’t have this book I highly recommend getting yourself a copy (or asking them to get it!).  I’m so happy to have won a copy because I love the book and have read through pretty much the whole thing!  Now I see before me a summer full of fermenting….

It will be a week or two before it’s fully fermented, but making it now will help connect you to the spirit of Cinco de Mayo, which is ¡perfecto!  Once it is ready make your favorite tacos, burritos, or even try making pupusas, and then be sure to put tons of curtido on top.

Where We Began is not Really Where We Began

The classic (North) American meal: a delicious, mouth-watering plate with a big piece of meat, preferably cooked on the grill, a potato or hunk of bread or ear of corn, and some small side of vegetables, like carrots or something else that most people like.

Photo from Men’s Health.

And what does that meal look like when it’s growing?  Most likely it looks like an endless monoculture of grains being grown to fatten a cow stuffed into a huge feedlot with thousands of its kind.  The small amount of vegetables in this meal are also grown in a huge monoculture, and are harvested by machine or underpaid laborers.  Is this meal and its production rooted in tradition?

Maybe the tradition of the last 50 or 60 years, but not a tradition based on what the Earth truly produces and has historically produced.

Photo from Awesome Stories

It is an achievement of human ingenuity, this ability to reduce nature down to the simplest parts in order to lower cost, increase efficiency, and level the playing field so that all of us in North America can eat the way we’ve been told is best.

Photo from MFA Blog

In the last 10 or so years this has been called into question.  As a response the second plate we were served had a strong resemblance to the first, but the way it was grown was completely different.

Photo from LeftCoast GrassFed

The monocultures—single crops grown as far as the eye can see—were removed from the picture in favor of pastures for the animals to graze.  The vegetables grown for the meal were heirlooms, bred for their flavor, not just shelf-appeal.  They were grown by farmers we could name, on farms that didn’t stretch as far as the eye could see.

And this Second Plate was a good change.  It was accompanied by other positive changes.

One Plate, Two Plates, Three Plates, New Plates…

All over Canada and the US farmers’ markets have been on a resurgence.  Influential books like The 100-Mile Diet, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle have popularized seasonal eating and questioning food sources.  Blogs like, um, this one, have focused on what eating local food all year long looks like.

And yet for Farm-to-Table Chef Dan Barber this change was not enough.

Which is why he put together a third plate of food.  His idea for this meal was to invert the old by featuring a large portion of vegetable—originally imagined as a carrot steak—with a sauce made from second, lesser-used cuts of meat.  And this idea became the starting place for Barber’s new book The Third Plate: Filed Notes on the Future of Food. 

I actually finished the book over a month ago but have felt like I needed time to reflect on it and internalize it.

And ultimately I think I’ve felt a bit intimidated.  This book is an achievement.  It is the memoir of a chef who is never content to just sit back and cook.  It chronicles his journey from “farm-to-table” all the way to an imagined truly sustainable future of food.  And it is clearly a work of passion.  For this reason I think I have been a bit afraid to tackle this review.

But I was so excited about the book when I started reading it that I asked the publishers for a giveaway copy and they obliged me.  Thus I find myself needing to finally sit down and write about this book.

Let me start by saying if you care about the future of food you should read this book.  Furthermore, you should read this book if you care about the current state of our planet and its future.

But in spite of me recommending that you read this book I’m not left completely satisfied by the book.  My main criticism is that Barber is somewhat withholding when it comes to his actual cooking.  He describes many foods he makes but never elaborates about how home cooks can actually make them.

Even with the power of the internet it’s hard to find very many of his recipes, at least with casual searching.  I found a few but it was unclear if they were actually his or just from his restaurant, Blue Hill.

Still, I enjoyed the book and found it quite impressive.  Divided into four sections—Soil, Land, Sea, Seed—there is a natural flow that follows Barber’s own journey from serving local food at his famous Blue Hill Restaurant to working to understand and incorporate food that is best for the earth.

As the book progresses, following Barber over several years of journeying to farms and around the world, his emphasis shifts from his original simple interpretation of a third plate to a much more holistic approach.  He begins to see how the role of a chef is not to demand the best produce and meat from farmers and fisherman, but to learn what is best for them to grow and harvest and then determine how to use that food.

For me this is a great challenge.  I’ve often been critical of this model of eating because I know it’s not in line with the way consumers want to eat or shop for food.  It’s certainly true for me and my family—we make a meal plan based on what we think we can find locally, then shop at the market for the food.  Joining a CSA has inverted our meal planning by forcing us to wait and see what our farmer has grown for us.  Then we go home and try to come up with a plan for how to use all the food.

This is where the role of innovative chefs like Dan Barber are so important.  By taking the idea of a CSA—supporting a local farm by committing to buying their produce for a whole season, regardless of how the season goes and what is produced—and focusing on how to create new dishes and meals from that food, a new cuisine is being created.  It’s not just about local food, but about sustainable food.

And this brings me back to my main criticism, which is that I’d like to see some recipes.  Luckily I found a few (see them pinned here), but I can only hope that someday Barber blesses us  with a whole book of his Third Plates.  In the meantime I’ve started a pinterest board called “Third Plates.”  Email me if you would like to be added to the board as a contributor.

So Who Defines the Future of Food?

Ultimately it is not just Barber’s role—or the role of any famous farm-to-table chefs—to define the new menu of the future, but ours.  We the consumers who support local food producers need to engage in conversation more with them to find out what they can produce best with their land.  Then we decide what to do with that food.

Within our communities we can share our ideas and recipes.  Within our larger regions we can join online conversations and blog about what to do with our local foods.  We can let our locality answer the question of what to eat.

Should we be eating meat?  Maybe that depends on whether the local geography and ecology are best suited for producing meat.  Should we be eating wheat?  Same answer.  This is probably too simplistic, because it’s hard to ask people (myself included) to change their diet and limit it to what the land can best support.

But if we don’t do this our descendants in the future will be forced to do so.  Someday the land will no longer support the diet of the First and Second Plates.  And then the Third Plate will be forced upon us.  And if that’s the case there may not be time to develop a new delicious culinary tradition.

Thanks to Penguin Press one reader in Canada can enjoy a copy of The Third Plate.  And if you don’t win find it at your library or your local book store!  Penguin Press also generously provided me with a review copy, thank you, Penguin!

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As much as I enjoyed my job teaching I was eager for a chance to be home with my boys and have more time to develop some of my favorite hobbies, like cooking and gardening.  I even added all sorts of new hobbies, the one that has absorbed most of my passion being homebrewing beer.

I have had a hard time pinning down just what I want this blog to be but have always focused on my main objective which is eating local food and making meal plans.  If you browse through the site you’ll find meal plans for all times of the year, always emphasizing locally grown foods.  That means that if you live in the Region of Waterloo, or Southern Ontario, or really most parts of North America you can follow along and hope to find most of the local foods that I’m using at roughly the same time of year.

Since moving the site from localkitchener.wordpress.com over here to localkitchener.ca I’ve been thinking a bit more about what I want to focus on. I will continue posting our meal plans anytime we make one, which should be almost every week, and will share locavore tips and skills as seems relevant.

In honor of the new site and the new year I’m giving away a homemade book that you can use for whatever you want!  Maybe it would be a good place to put meal plans.  Or keep track of kitchen experiments (which is what I use mine for).  Or just as a journal.  Or give it to a friend as a gift.  Or do something else, once it’s yours you decide what to do with it!

The catch: because I believe whole-heartedly in local living I’m not sending this book anywhere.  What???  Yeah, sorry, the contest is open to all but if you don’t live in Kitchener/Waterloo then you will need to be willing to come visit our awesome cities and meet me at a local cafe or restaurant sometime to claim your prize!  Ultimately I’m more interested in local community than in giving away free items to people across the continent.  I think I will continue local giveaways like this in the future as I make new items like homebrew (coming soon), soap (which I plan to do next month once I catch a demo at the KPL!), bread, and anything else that seems like it would make a nice gift….

If you live in this area and want to boost your chances of winning the book you can enter more ways than one!  And check out the photos of how the book was made if you want to make your own.  The video I followed is also included below and is an excellent resource.


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One of our favourite wedding gifts was the classic cookbook 

Cream of Asparagus Soup

From Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker. Joy of Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2006.  Page 144.

Ingredients:

• 4 Tbs. butter
• 1 ½ cups minced celery (we didn’t have this and the results were fine!)
• 1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 – 1 ½ lbs. asparagus, chopped
• ¼ cup flour
• 4 cups broth (vegetable, or chicken)
• ½ – 1 cup cream, half-and-half, or milk
• Salt and pepper
• Grated cheese for serving

Melt the butter in a soup pot over medium heat.  Add the celery and onion and cook, stirring, until softened.  Stir in the asparagus, cover and cook 5 minutes.  Stir in the flour and turn the heat to high.  Slowly stir in the broth and bring to a boil.  Reduce the heat and simmer, partially covered for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Use a food processor or immersion blender to puree the soup until smooth*.  Return the pureed soup to the pot over medium heat and stir in the cream or milk.  Add salt and pepper to your liking and serve, garnished with the grated cheese.

Bagels (Really, really good bagels, that is!)

From Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff, Marion Rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker. Joy of Cooking. New York: Scribner, 2006.  Page 619.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup plus 2 Tbs. warm water
• 2 ¼ tsp. active dry yeast
• 2 ½ tsp. sugar or honey

• 1 Tbs. melted vegetable shortening or butter
• 1 ½ tsp. sugar, honey, or maple syrup
• 1 ¾ tsp. salt
• 4 – 4 ½ cups bread flour (or all purpose)
• Additions: dried cranberries, raisins, cinnamon, minced garlic, shredded cheese, etc.

• 4 liters or quarts water
• 1 Tbs. malt syrup, sugar, honey, or maple syrup
• ½ tsp. salt

Combine the warm water, yeast, and sugar in a large bowl and let stand until yeast dissolves (5 minutes).  Mix in the shortening, sugar, salt and 1 cup of flour.  Gradually add more flour and begin kneading when you can no longer stir.  Knead for about 10 minutes by hand, adding enough flour to make a smooth and elastic dough that has a “satiny” feel.  Cover and let rest for 15-20 minutes.

Punch down the dough and divide it into 8 pieces (or more for smaller bagels).  Roll each piece into a rope about 10 inches long with tapered ends.  Get a bowl of water and dip each end of the rope in the water to help it stick together, stretching the dough over itself end-to-end and pinching it together (here’s a great slideshow about the process).  Let the rings of dough (soon to be called “bagels”) rise, covered with a cloth or plastic wrap, on a floured counter for about 15-20 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 425 F.  Bring the water to a boil in a large pot with the syrup and salt.  Place the bagels into the boiling water, adding as many as will fit without being on top of one another.  When the bagels surface flip them and cook for about 45 seconds longer.  Remove them with a slotted spoon or spatula and place them on a baking sheet lined with cornmeal or semolina flour (or just flour if you don’t have those).

Top with your favorite toppings like shredded cheese (my favorite), sesame seeds, garlic, poppy seeds, etc. (You can also work these ingredients into the dough earlier in the process which is what we like to do with the cinnamon and raisins as well as the garlic).  Bake for 20-25 minutes, until golden and crisp.  Eat them as soon as you are able (or let them cool to really seal in the flavors and then slice and lightly toast).

Oh yeah, and they’re really good sliced in half, lightly toasted and topped with soft goat cheese (chevre)!

*When using a food processor I use a slotted spoon to transfer most of the vegetables to the blender without the broth because otherwise my food processor will leak all over the place.  Thus if we had an immersion blender it would be much less messy… birthday ideas anyone?