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Newsletter for February 2006 Your source for what’s cooking at OBW
25 South Indian Alley Winchester VA, 22601 540-662-1455 |
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Here I am again, sending another newsletter out late. In this case, it’s a good thing. Business has been booming to the point where I have little time to write. But, better late than never, and in this case, I think you will enjoy these articles despite their tardiness.
This month, we announce an expansion of our tapas offerings, talk about all the upcoming special dinners that we have scheduled, explore some winemaking options, learn about pine nuts, and have fun and games with roasted garlic.
I hope that you enjoy this edition of our newsletter. If you have any topics you’d like to see addressed in the future, drop me a note.
Ed Matthews, Chef/Owner
A change in our tapas schedule: we had been serving tapas every weeknight between 5 and 6pm, but the restricted hours made it difficult for some of our customers to attend. From the first of February, we have switched to an all tapas menu every Wednesday night and ceased to offer tapas on other nights.
Each Wednesday night, we offer at least a dozen tapas: 4 vegetarian, 4 seafood, and 4 meat. Each dish is small, about one-third to one-half the size of one of our regular appetizers, and is designed so that you can taste 5 or 6 different dishes without becoming totally stuffed. These dishes lend themselves to after work socializing. Grab some people from your office and come by for a light meal and a good time.
Note: Tapas was discontinued except by special request in January 2008.
Wednesday February 22, Oregon Wine Dinner We will be featuring several wines from Oregon, which has long been known for the quality of its Pinot Noirs. We will taste a sparkler from Domaine Meriwether, a Pinot Gris, a Pinot Noir from A to Z, and a Syrah from Cristom. Raw materials: wild mushrooms, fiddleheads, sea beans, huckleberries, Coho salmon, Dungeness crab, and Moulard duck. We are almost at our limit of 24 guests: you need to book immediately (by phone: you must reserve by credit card) if you are interested. We start receiving guests at 6:30pm and dinner is served promptly at 7:00pm.
Tuesday February 28, Mardi Gras Every year on Fat Tuesday, I do a special menu of whatever Cajun and Creole dishes strike me at the moment. This year is no different. Come by at any time that evening or better yet, call ahead for reservations. This menu is à la carte, not prix fixe. Free dessert if you wear your Mardi Gras beads!
Wednesday March 8, Veritas Wine Dinner This dinner features food paired with the wines of Veritas Winery from Afton, just west of Charlottesville. We are pleased that Andrew Hodson will be with us to talk about his wines, which are some of the very best in Virginia. Frankly, his Cabernet Franc is one of the best that I have ever tasted. (Did you catch the pun?) We’ll be tasting his Sauvignon Blanc, 100% stainless Chardonnay, Cabernet Franc, and his wild Traminette dessert wine called Kenmar.
Wednesday, March 22, Spring Beer Dinner Finally, we have been able to get our hands on some Dogfish Head ales from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Rehoboth, DE . For most beer lovers, I need say no more. For the rest of you, Dogfish is one of the very best brewers in the country. Book now for this rare treat.
With all apologies to the Bard, this is a great question apropos of Chardonnay. Once Chardonnay is pressed, a wine maker has a couple of key choices to make. The first is whether to subject the wine to malolactic fermentation, a secondary fermentation (generally after the main alcoholic fermentation) that softens the sharp, green apple malic acid into the silkier, buttery lactic acid. This is an interesting choice, for the sharper malic acid makes for a better food wine (acid cleans the palate) while the more buttery lactic acid makes for a pleasant sipping wine. In addition, the process converts one of the two acid radicals in malic acid to just one in lactic acid, thus reducing the total acidity of the wine.
The second choice is whether to age the wine in oak. Oak lends characteristic wood flavors (phenols) of caramel and vanilla to a wine, giving it an interesting flavor and bouquet. A wine that sees no oak, often called 100% stainless steel, will offer the pure fruit of the Chardonnay grape. A wine that sees a lot of oak will be dominated by the aggressive flavors coming from barrel contact.
A winemaker, once he decides to age in oak, has to choose barrels carefully. Each species of white oak from each location in the world has a slightly different flavor profile. Also, the newer a barrel is, the more oak flavor will be imparted to the wine. New barrels flavor wines very aggressively, while older barrels, say veterans of five vintages, are almost benign. When a winemaker buys a barrel, he may specify the amount of toast or char on a barrel. As the cooper is assembling the barrel, the inside is charred by the heating process necessary to bend the staves. Because the layer of heated oak serves as a buffer between the wine and the tannins in the wood, a little char, or light toast, is much more aggressive than a heavy toast. Finally, the duration that the wine and the barrel are together has everything to do with flavor. The longer the contact, the more the barrel flavors the wine.
There are no right and wrong answers. In fact, many winemakers make hybrid wines. They will put part of their Chardonnay through malolactic fermentation and leave the rest alone. And they will leave some wine in steel and some in barrel. And of course, economics dictate that the winery can only buy a few barrels at a time, so the barrels range across the whole spectrum from new to old, the new ones replacing the very old ones, a few at a time.
It is these factors and the thousands of other variables that make wine making an art and not a science. And they are what make it so fun to taste different wines made with different approaches.
If you look back through the hundreds of menus that I have put together, you might notice that I use a lot of pine nuts (there’s a recipe below). And for good reason, I love the crunchy little seeds with the nutty, earthy, piney flavor. As you might suspect, pine nuts are the seeds of various pine trees, coming from inside the cones. While all pine trees have seeds, only about twenty species have seeds that are big enough to be worth harvesting.
You might have noticed that pine nuts are not cheap. This owes primarily to the high cost of harvesting and processing the seeds. The new cone crop is harvested manually in late fall or early winter. Each cone contains tens of seeds and often the cones have to be heated to release their seeds. The seeds are covered in a hard shell which varies in thickness by species. The shells are cracked in a roller mill to free the seeds that we know as pine nuts, which is a botanical misnomer. In truth, pine nuts are seeds, but for culinary purposes, we treat them as nuts.
Pine nuts are an ancient food source. In Europe, for example, the Stone Pine, Pinus pinea, which is now grown in plantations, has been cultivated for seeds for at least 6,000 years. Similarly, in America, there is evidence that our Piñon (Pinus edulis) seeds have been harvested and eaten for that long as well.
Commercially, the vast bulk of pine nuts are either Chinese (from the Korean Pine, Pinus koraiensis) or Mediterranean (from the Stone Pine). Virtually non-existent in the market 25 years ago, the Chinese have in recent years become the world’s leading exporter of pine nuts. The Chinese nuts are more triangular than the slender Mediterranean nuts. The Chinese nuts are much less expensive (because there are a lot more of them on the market) with a mild, but more pronounced piney flavor, which I prefer. I find the Mediterranean nuts a little nuttier. Both are very good.
Because of their high fat content, pine nuts are fairly perishable, so try to buy them from a place with high turnover (around here, that means Costco). Then store them in the refrigerator.
For all of you who couldn’t make our early February Spanish wine dinner, you can perhaps live vicariously through this menu. We paired ten tapas with five wines. Everyone seemed to have a great time.
Gambas al Ajillo (Shrimp Roasted with Olive Oil, Garlic, Chorizo, and Piquillo Peppers)Boquerones and Olives (White Spanish Anchovies wrapped around Spanish Queen Olives)Patricia Fino Sherry, NVab Piquillo Pepper Stuffed with Salt Cod and Potatoes Piquillo Pepper Stuffed with Goat Cheese Mousse Pasil Verdejo, Rueda 2004ab Tortilla Española (Baked Omelet of Potatoes, Onions, Fresh Thyme, Pimentón, and Manchego Cheese)Paella Cake with Pimentón Sauce Palacio de Feffiñanes Albariño, Rias Baixas 2004ab Migas Extrameñas (Bread Cubes Fried with Chorizo, Onions, Poblano Chiles, and Red Peppers) Grilled Shrimp and Chorizo Skewers Tres Ojos Garnacha, Calatayud 2004ab Pinchitos: Grilled Pork Tenderloin Kabob Albóndigas with Almogrote Sauce (Pork Meatballs in Roasted Red Pepper and Manchego Sauce) Convento Oreja, Ribera Del Duero 2003ab Blood Orange, Manchego, and Cabrales-Stuffed Date
Recipe: Shrimp with Roasted Garlic, Pesto, Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Pine Nuts
Here’s a recipe from a couple of weeks ago. It originated in a starving moment after lunch service one day when I started rummaging my reach-in (the refrigerator behind my range where I store all the ingredients I need for service) for something to eat. I had at hand roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, pine nuts, and pasta. Two minutes later I was eating lunch and was happy enough with the result to put this variation on the dinner menu.
1 bulb of roasted garlic 12 sun-dried tomato halves, sliced into strips ¼ c pesto 2 T pine nuts, toasted 4 T extra virgin olive oil, divided ½ lb shrimp, peeled and deveined 1 t fresh garlic, minced pinch of crushed red pepper flakes 2 T dry white wine salt and pepper to taste
Squeeze the roasted garlic from the husks and roughly chop it. Mix with the sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, pine nuts, and 2 T of the olive oil. Reserve. Meanwhile, preheat a sauté pan over medium-high heat and when hot, film with the remaining olive oil. Add the shrimp and cook on one side about two minutes, then flip. Add the fresh garlic and red pepper flakes and cook another two minutes. Add the white wine and the reserved roasted garlic mix. Stir well and cook until the shrimp are just cooked through, maybe another minute. (These timings are for 16-20 count shrimp.) Season to taste. For a variation, throw in a couple handfuls of cooked pasta. Serves two.
Feel free to send email if there is some technique or ingredient that you need help with.
If I recall correctly, roasted garlic was the darling of foodies back in the 1980s and that begat all manner of useless garlic roasting apparatus. Nothing could be simpler than roasting garlic and it certainly requires no equipment other than a sharp knife, a sheet of aluminum foil, and an oven.
Preheat your oven to 400F. Tear off a sheet of aluminum foil big enough to make a packet around your garlic when spread out in a single layer. With a sharp knife, slice off the tops of the bulbs to expose the tip of each clove. Place the topless garlic bulbs on the aluminum foil. Drizzle each with extra virgin olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. (This step is not really necessary, but it is how I have always done it). Seal the packet around the garlic and place it in the oven until the garlic is soft, about 30 minutes.
Remove from the oven and cool. To remove the garlic from the husks, squeeze the base of the bulb and all the garlic will squirt out.
As for the tops that you cut off, you can roast them too, but at the restaurant, we pick out the largest bits and throw them in the pile to chop for fresh garlic.
When roasting garlic, you might as well roast a bunch. It keeps well in the refrigerator.
While I love to see all of you in the restaurant, I hope that you’re eating well at home when you’re not eating with us. Did you catch the key phrase to eating well in my recipe for the shrimp above? It was, “I had at hand roasted garlic, sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, pine nuts, and pasta,” the key being “at hand.” If you don’t keep good things in your refrigerator and pantry, when you’re tired, the temptation to eat junk grows exponentially. And if you don’t have a good stock of ingredients, how can you play in the kitchen when inspiration strikes? Running to the grocery store will kill many an inspired moment.
All my best and come see us when you can,
Ed
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Copyright © 2006 Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC sensational seasonal cuisine and the W logo are trademarks of Shenandoah Food and Beverage Holdings, LLC. |
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