Treats from Amsterdam

The title of this post will no doubt lead to numerous disappointments.

Look past the reputation Amsterdam has earned for drugs, brothels and stag parties from the UK and you'll find there is a food and drink scene that is unique not just to Holland but to the city itself. Rather boringly that is the main reason I keep going back there. A while ago I did a guest post on Beers I've Known with some very amateur beer and cheese pairings. One of the pairings I spoke of was Old Amsterdam and Brewerij ‘t IJ Natte. Sadly I was limited to what was available in the local off license and the supermarket for the beers that day and I settled for a glass or Pauwel Kwak. Last week my parents made a trip to Amsterdam and asked if there was anything I would like brought back, so I put in a request for 3 simple ingredients which they kindly delivered.

Brewerij ‘t IJ Natte - the fantastic sweet dark beer brewed in a converted windmill. May I suggest you check out to this place if you ever find yourself in Amsterdam, it's a keen walk from the town centre or a short tram ride. Last time I went for a couple there I ended up losing an afternoon. As I've mentioned before my Dad is a keen IPA fan and he brought me back one of the Brewerij ‘t IJ ones to try for the first time. I enjoy IPA, but not usually on the level that I enjoyed this one. It had a much smoother characteristic to it than the bitter hop bombs you occasionally encounter in your search for a good one here in England.

Old Amsterdam - The aged cheese that is delicious either as a table cheese or grated over food. Even aged and hard it still has a melt in the mouth quality to it. I adore gouda, I think it is a superbly textured and flavoured cheese that is suited perfectly for continental beer pairings and Old Amsterdam just takes a good thing a little further.

Ossenworst - I've never heard or seen this outside of Amsterdam. It's a speciality sausage particular to the city and as with most of these things if you want the good stuff you have to go back to its home to get it. Essentially it is a seasoned raw beef sausage. The seasonings, saltiness and texture again make it a superb bar snack. I notice now that there is finally a Wikipedia article for it, previously I've wondered whether I dreamt eating it!

To complete my snack I reached into the cupboard and pulled out a few cocktail gherkins and some Dijon mustard. Full sized pickles and Bavarian sweet mustard would have been preferable but you have to work with what is available sometimes.

A delicious snack bringing back some very fond memories indeed. However, I feel another trip will be in order again soon if I am to complete the experience and try out a few more of the delicacies Amsterdam has to offer. Including pickled herring, trappist cheese pie, hemp seed chocolate and some extremely good coffee (an advantage of being a sea port). Also there is no substitute for a beer lover to sitting in a traditional "brown bar" with a trappist beer and a plate of cheese and mustard and nothing much better to be doing for the afternoon.

Sourdough Bread

I don't have any sourdough on the go at the moment which is pretty shameful for a homemade bread fanatic and a foodie. So I've decided to start my own wild yeast sourdough. The beauty of sourdough is that it tastes slightly different wherever you make it as it's flavoured by the wild yeasts from that area. That, and it's like doing a science experiment! Probably the most important thing before you begin something like this is to plan your schedule. For example, if you plan to leave something for 12 hours you don’t want to be tending to it at 1:00pm. I worked my timings around my working week.

I've mixed 25g Plain Flour with a little lukewarm boiled water into a wet dough, covered it with a damp tea towel and left it to gather some yeasts. I've actually left it on the windowsill in our bedroom as this doesn't get direct sun so won't dry out the dough and we have the window open most of the day and night. It also overlooks our back garden and fields behind that so it's the best place I can think of for gathering wild yeasts.

After 3 days I check to see how we'd done. The outside of the dough has hardened into a crusty shell, but inside the mixture is gooey and sticky. The best way to describe it is like a ripe, runny cheese texture. Most importantly it smells like sourdough!

It's time to give it its first refresher. I scoop out the "shell" and transfer the starter to a clean bowl. I mix it up in 1 tbsp milk and 2 tbsp warm water before gradually incorporating about 60g plain flour. After giving my container a thorough clean out I place the very wet dough back in.

I leave it back on the windowsill for 1 day this time, again covered with a damp tea towel, after which it hasn't had time to crust over but has developed a skin which I peel off and discard.

Time for the second refresher and to bulk it out a bit. I add 6tbsp warm water mixed with 2 tbsp milk and stir the starter up into a batter, then I add 200g plain flour. I re-cover it with the damp towel and this time leave it high up in the kitchen, where it’s a bit warmer, for 12 hours.

And there we have a sourdough starter. I must admit it’s not looking quite as active as I'd hoped but I've made a schedule and I'll stick to it now. From here on I'm practicing the process for making bread using my starter. This will be important for me to note because I'm only going to achieve regular breads by getting into a routine of doing this once a week or so.

So, I remove 200g of the starter to a separate bowl, add 100ml warm water and weigh out 200g white bread flour.

I stir the starter into the water, make a well in the centre of the flour and pour in the starter. I flick some of the surrounding flour over the starter and leave in a warm place to sponge.

While that’s doing it's thing I need to replenish the starter I've just removed, so I add another 6 tbsp warm water and 2 tbsp milk, mix it into the starter and feed it with 175g plain flour again. This time I cover it with cling film and place it back in it's high up spot. I don’t want it to dry out, but I want to give the yeast a chance to multiply in the mixture.

I come back to my sponged mixture and mix it up into a wet dough. This I cover with the tea towel and place high up next to the starter for 8 hours. After that I'll decide whether or not it needs a little longer for the yeasts to really get going.

It doesn't look too bad, I think we can work with this. From here on I'm handling this with kid gloves and I'm gonna make sure I get this right. I'm on my 5th day of making this bread and I'd quite like it to work.

I add 100ml of warm water and mix it up into the dough to make a paste, then add 25g of Rye Flour and 1 tsp of sugar.

Then I sieved in 75g White Bread Flour and mixed that in. Finally I sieved another 50g White Bread Flour and 1 1/2 tsp of salt together and mixed it up into a moist dough. I dumped probably about another 50g of White Bread Flour onto the worktop and worked my dough on this until it was all incorporated and gave me a smooth, elastic and handleable dough.

I washed up my bowl and thoroughly dried it before oiling it and putting the dough back in to prove covered with cling film. I checked on it after an hour. Judging by the way it had re-shaped in the bowl I decided it probably needed firming a little so again I floured the work surface and worked a bit more flour in. This time I plumped the dough up into a cushion and left it on a floured baking tray covered with the oiled bowl to second prove for 1 1/2 hours.

After that it was looking good! I pre-heated my oven to 220 degC, dusted flour over the top of the bread, slashed it and put it in for 20-25 minutes. I splashed water around the inside of the oven 3 times in the first 5 minutes of baking. After just over 20 minutes I turned down to 190 degC and baked for a further 10-12 minutes. When it came out... success!

My very own unique sourdough bread. Big shout out to my back garden for supplying the yeast to make it!

The last thing I did at the end of the day was take my tub of starter, that by now had been feasting on it's refresher for about 14 hours and was looking text book happy, and moved it into the fridge. That'll slow it down and it'll be ready for use in my next bread when I want it.

Chilli, Coriander and Lemon Oil

I've had this chilli plant on the windowsill bringing a bit of colour to the living room for a few weeks now. For the chilli geeks it's a Tabasco.

Unfortunately it appears that we're not the only ones that like chilli plants.

I'll figure out what to do with the aphids another day, but for now I'll harvest the chillis rather than risk losing them.

I'll be honest, we don't do a great deal of cooking with fresh chillis. These would be put to better use preserved for later on.

I've also been growing some coriander on another windowsill in the kitchen so whilst I'm at it I may as well use some of this.

I decided last minute to chuck in some lemon rind too. My girlfriend came up with the name "traffic light oil"

I sterilised a bottle and washed and chopped all the ingredients. I crammed them into the bottle and topped up with some half decent olive oil.

I sat the bottle in some boiling water for 5 minutes in a half hearted attempt to pasteurise and more to kick start the infusion. All done and I have a nice homemade bottle of Traffic Light Chilli Oil ready for some bread dipping in about a month or so.

Just need to remember to give it a shake every now and then to move the ingredients around the oil and help the infusion.

Hopfest - a celebration of beer and hops

The following is a diary of the three days my Dad and I spent engaging in Hopfest celebrations organised by the Dark Star brewery. To read up a bit more on their pubs and beers check out their website - darkstarbrewing.co.uk

Friday

My beery weekend began in one of the most unlikely of places, the old nightclub where I misspent much of my late teens and early twenties. The Gloucester as it was known then is located at the entrance to the North Laines and was little more than a purveyor of cheap booze and mostly lousy music. One would never recognise it now that it has undergone this amazing transformation into the North Laine Brewery. The boards off the windows flood the former dance area with light, the soundproofing ripped off the wall to reveal an attractive brick finish and the sticky carpet replaced with a clean wooden floor. Behind the bar is the brewery and a line of gleaming fermenting vessels stand over the staff as they serve pints of quality product to an already quite busy bar for a Friday afternoon. It's bloody sickening I tell you. I moved out of Brighton just over a year ago and in that time 3 new craft beer pubs have sprung up. Three! And one of those has had time to complete a move to bigger premises in that time! My Dad is waiting for me with a pint of Harvest Ale by W.J.King. So new is this place that they haven't got any of their own brew on yet. We finish our pints fairly quickly, uneventful and unremarkable as they were, and move on. This weekend is all about one brewery for me and I'm so particular about their beers that there's only one place to drink them in Brighton.

On the way however whilst walking down Gloucester Street, where my Nan lived as a child, curiosity gets the better of me and we nip into The Brewery Tap. This has always been a trendy something bar in my memory; either coffee, wine and now it would appear beer. A stainless steel wall behind the bar is adorned with a row of about 15 or so taps with an admittedly impressive selection of beers. It's boring in here though, and cold and dead. I could sit here and read the paper and enjoy a great drink, or bring someone out to talk business over an IPA perhaps, but socially this place lacks vibe. I ask for something local. The best they can muster is a wheat beer from Dover or somewhere. It's a lovely drink, I enjoy it, but I'm not hanging round for another. My Dad has an American IPA which he later complains tasted all kinds of wrong. Very particular about his IPAs is my Dad.

We meander our way up through the North Laine area and cross Queens Road to my old stomping ground of Surrey Street and our destination: The Evening Star. The Dark Star Brewery started life in the cellar here and it is indeed this pub, run by Matt and Karen, that is responsible for my love affair with Dark Star beers. I am yet to discover a brewery that brews such a variety of beers so well, yet manages to make each one as individual as they do. We're here because this weekend is Hopfest, a celebration of the hop harvest and the tapping of Dark Star's Green Hop IPA.

My Dad sticks to his guns and has a Hoxted IPA by Brodies which he sips at whilst I devour a pint of Hophead, their incredibly quaffable flagship beer. It's also one of their weakest which is handy. Next I level up to a pint of Original. The Green Hop is waiting in the cellar below, ready to make its debut at 7:00pm. My Dad decides he's going to head off home, not really feeling it today. I know the feeling, sometimes beer gets a bit heavy on the stomach but I'm sticking it out for the night. The Green Hop awaits its debut in the cellar.

Tapping the Green Hop IPA was entirely uneventful. The barman Chris writes it up on the board, the pump clip goes on and the pints begin to flow. It's strong at 6.5 but has a gorgeous aroma and encompasses everything you could love about the flavour of hops in a pint. That said I find it very heavy going and I have to nurse mine somewhat and even take a break afterwards. I hang about awkwardly outside and light a crafty cigarette, my guilty pleasure reserved for drinking nights out in Brighton. The pub has filled up as it always does on a Friday and some familiar faces begin to turn up. I content myself with some people watching for half an hour or so, I'm fairly sure the guy next to me is talking about dungeons and dragons to his mate which provides me with some amusement. Finally my friend Drew arrives and orders a pint of Green Hop and I get back on it with a pint of Camden Ales Hells Lager. My stomach is full of enough ale for one day so I needed something lighter. One more pint of Camden for the road and I head off to grab a taxi to my parents where I shall be staying for the evening.

Saturday

Well, I've had better mornings. However, I've survived the night and it's on with the show, although it would be wise to lessen consumption somewhat today I feel. We have a very slow and phased getting up and walk down to the Steine to catch a bus to Partridge Green. All the busses are delayed and the times are all messed up. This is due to a parade that happened earlier in the day in which recovered addicts celebrated their freedom from drugs by walking along some of the city's major transport routes. Classic Brighton! The stagecoach bus rattles its way up into West Sussex, through Henfield, and eventually to Partridge Green. It stops right outside The Partridge Pub, the most recently acquired Dark Star pub, being so close to the brewery now it has become the official brewery tap. I'm delighted to see an entirely different line up of Dark Star beers to those on at the Star, however I'm not yet ready to jump straight into another rich dark ale yet. My Dad goes for a pint of Winter Meltdown and we wander out the back past the turning hog roast (yep! Hog roast!) to a sunny beer garden. Once he's finished that we head off to the brewery which is no more than a 15 minute walk down the road.

I've visited the brewery a few times before but never made it past the shop to buy a few pints of cheap beer in takeout bottles. Today however the doors at the back of the shop are wide open and we saunter straight into a busy room already in the full swing of Hopfest. To our left huge tuns and fermenting tanks tower over us, to our right bags of malt are stacked on pallets and the whole place is filled with that lovely brewery aroma. A small bar is in operation and a rack of 10 barrels is being manned with a barman dosing out free tasters of about a 3rd of a pint each of some of the various Dark Star beers. I go up for some Festival to carry around as we explore whilst my Dad tries his first taste of Green Hop IPA, despite the advice from the bar man who clearly feels he should be starting at the bottom and working up to the stronger beers. The atmosphere is lively and friendly and everyone is wandering around chatting to each other. Dark Star have this odd relationship with cycling and occasionally organise "Spin up in a brewery" events here, where cyclists are invited to ride out to the brewery to drink beer, watch a couple of bands and attempt to make their way home afterwards. Today the cyclists are again out in force and much of the crowd are sporting the Dark Star cycling merchandise. There’s something about a brewery logo stretched over a toned physique that seems odd to me. Fortunately, we appear to have just missed a display of morris dancing as the morris dancers are still at the brewery and appear to be sober, their job done they can get down to business. It's great to see a brewery opened up like this, usually they are presented as secretive places, entirely out of bounds to anyone without a full outfit of safety gear on or unaccompanied on an exclusive tour of some kind. But this is completely different, completely open, with brewers rubbing shoulders with cyclists, cyclists mingling with CAMRA bellied drinkers and morris dancers strutting loudly and jangly amongst everyone.

At the far end of the room is a table with 5 different hop varieties to sample (as in pick up and smell and rub between your fingers) including some New Zealand and Australian ones that I haven’t come across before. They are definitely some of my favourite hops I've come across, really interesting, liquoricey, sweet smelling and sticky. I must get hold of some when I get round to doing some brewing of my own. Also there’s a handy fact sheet on choosing the right variety of British hops for a beer which I nab a copy of. We don't hang around too long, keen as we are to make it back to the pub and get a taxi booked for later in the evening (travel between country villages is never easy), so we have one last quick nerdy gander at the brewing gear itself before heading out via the shop. I stop to buy 2 bottles of Southern Conspiracy, disappointed that they've run out of Kiwi.

Somehow the morris dancers have beaten us back to the pub and I call out loudly for 2 pints of Partridge so as to be heard over their leg bells. We find ourselves a couple of comfy seats and settle in to our pints that we nurse for a good long time. Partridge is such a great session ale and is delicious down to the last drop in the glass. We're sat in a room called The Hop Barn, a large function room sized area of the pub with hops draped from the ceiling and the names of a few hop varieties painted in gold up on the walls. The blackboard advertises a few of the upcoming pub events (quizzes and such) and boasts of an impressive list of local food suppliers, this is a great pub. We're lucky to have found these seats as Dark Star's very own double decker bus pulls up outside and the pub quickly fills up. Our smugness quickly fades however when the table next to us fills up with morris dancers. It's not long before the inevitable. An accordion appears and so begins a drunken impromptu set of reels and hornpipes. I have no objection to a couple of folk tunes played well, and these are played very well indeed, but I know exactly where this will lead. Sure enough once the accordion player stops for a rest they begin bellowing out the full unabridged version of What Shall we do With the Drunken Sailor at full volume so the whole pub can hear. Finally, the hog roast is ready and everyone goes up for some, we tuck into a bap with some fries and coleslaw washed down with a fresh pint of Partridge. The morris dancers appear to be taking it in shifts so they can eat theirs whilst still pumping out classic drunken hits such as Let Me Go Home which seems to last for about half an hour. Eventually we can take no more and are forced out of the Hop Barn and into the main bar area where a magician is wandering round doing some close up magic. We hang out here until our taxi arrives and we head back to my house for a relatively early night.

Sunday

We make our way back down to Brighton and start the day back off by heading to The Hand in Hand pub in Kemptown. The Hand is the perfect local pub, a true traditional Brightonian’s establishment and the brewery tap for the Kemptown Brewery, the oldest in Brighton which is situated next door. We're here to meet my Nan as my parents do every Sunday, tuck into a pint of Kemptown Brewery's Red Ale and engage in rich foodie discussion with some of the other regulars.

We jump in the car and head to the final destination on our Dark Star tour, The Duke of Wellington in Shoreham. This outpost of Dark Star always seems somehow the most out of reach to me and this is the first time I've visited it. I mean, technically the Partridge is far less accessible but with a great food menu and a car park they rock the country pub angle, and of course with being so close to the brewery it becomes more of an outing than a mere "pop to the pub". The Duke is a charming pub, clearly rescued and transformed into the warm and friendly place it has become. Stained glass windows surround the bar area and the bar itself dominates the centre of the room. The Duke has an excellent selection of ales including a fruit stout and a vanilla and chocolate stout that I am sorely tempted by, also neatly listed are a very good selection of ciders and the best list of lagers I've come across in a long time. I feel immediately at home and recognise a few of the faces from the brewery yesterday. I could do some very serious drinking in this pub. However, I need to be wrapping up my weekend sadly and stay only for the one pint of American Pale Ale. My Dad today has been taking one for the team and drinking bitter shandy so he can drive us, so after we've finished our pints he drives me back home via a favourite farm shop.

My weekend finishes in the comfort of my own living room enjoying a bottle of Southern Conspiracy. It's a 7% collaboration beer between Dark Star and The Bristol Beer Factory, aged in wine barrels and brewed with New Zealand hops, presumably some of the same I sampled at the brewery yesterday. It's utterly delicious.

It was a fantastic weekend and I feel lucky to have been able to take part in so much of it. I feel I’ve done my favourite brewery credit by enjoying their beers in five different surroundings – their brewery, The Evening Star, The Partridge, The Duke of Wellington and finally my own home. Although I'll have to spend a couple of weeks recovering from the amount of beer and stodgy meals I’ve had I'll make certain to use some of what I've learnt about good beer, brewed with good hops and washing down good food when I plan my own brews. Yep, that’s how I'm going justify three days of sheer gluttony - "research".