Monthly Archives: September 2011
Gourmet Underground Detroit's content archives are organized by date and catalog the aggregated content of our Features pages as well as our blog.
Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial
Every now and again, a dreary weekday comes along and begs for some wine to improve it. Great wine – or even just expensive wine – can often create the feeling that it requires times of occasion for opening. But on those days that are less than stellar, that wine can be an occasion in and of itself.
Tonight, it’s a Rioja, Castillo Ygay Gran Reserva Especial from the 2001 vintage, a year that was regarded favorably in the wine press. I’d never even heard of the wine let alone tasted it, but I bought a bottle on recommendation from Elie in Royal Oak.
Blood red with barely a hint of browning from age, it’s youthful despite its 10 years of life. And that shows on the nose: While it displays some rustic, meaty qualities, it’s initially a bit closed. Eventually, it opens up to show some tart raspberry jam aromas. Similarly, it starts out quite tannic, though not so much so as to be unenjoyable. Quite the opposite. There are hints of a minty Bordeaux quality and rough, oaky flavors along with plenty of fruit. Over time, layers build: licorice, plums, berries, spices.
All the somewhat superfluous wine media jargon and descriptors aside, this is delicious, dry, meat-friendly, powerful, age-worthy wine. “Masculine” in its youthful astringency and “feminine” in its somewhat mainstream elegance.
It stands in marked, stark contrast to a lot of the rustic wine I drink on a regular basis, but I find it captivating.
Ygay is only made in the “best” years in Rioja — 1978, 1998, 2001, etc — using 93% Tempranillo and 7% Mazuelo from the producer’s prime vineyard sites. It ferments in stainless undergoing daily remontage (circulating the wine from bottom to top of the vat) and pigeage (punching the “cap” of grape skins down into the wine) to ensure lots of skin contact, and undergoes at least 10 months of aging in new oak.
The 2001 spent a few additional years in older barrels and then spent another 3 years in the bottle before being released to the market. (The 1978 spent 18 years in the barrel before moving to the bottle!) These guys clearly are in no rush to get their product to market.
As I’m writing this tasting note, I’m finishing the last of the bottle, and there’s a strong acidity at the finish. It’s remarkable how much this has changed after 100 minutes or so and how many different aspects there are to this wine.
I often talk about how much I dislike oak, but while that flavor is present, it’s done so very thoughtfully here — and it’s where I find myself really puzzled by this wine. The barrel is present, but it’s not as though it’s overpowering, despite all the time in American oak, widely used in Spain and known for contributing powerful vanilla flavors. There’s barely a whiff of vanilla here. With age, that oak has already settled out or been buried behind all this tannin, and there’s at minimum another decade of improvement in this bottle.
This quite successfully walks a thin line between a fruity, oaked, international style of wine and a traditional Rioja with a pure red color and big, burly tannins. There’s no hint of purple hues in the glass or vanilla extract aromas in the nose, but they’ve managed to get intense extraction and fairly high alcohol (14%-ish). It sees new oak, but by the time it hits the market, most of that flavor is gone. It’s kind of a paradox, but it’s a fun paradox to unravel and enjoy on a rainy Monday night.
If you’re in the mood for a bit of a splurge but a lot of age-worthy bang for your buck, consider picking this up. It’s a delicious bottle.
Bitter Melon
Every Saturday for a couple summers in a row now, I’ve gotten herbs, baby bok choy, beans, and other greens from Vang Family Farm at Eastern Market. And every Saturday, I stare quizzically at the bumpy “Bitter Melon” bundled into packs of three with a rubber band and stacked neatly at the end of the table.
No longer.
Drawn in by its strange appearance — it looks like a brain mated with a cucumber — I bought my first bitter melons last Saturday. Not knowing where to begin, I took to the internet, where I discovered this particular gem:
Stir fry seemed like an easy, ideal preparation for my first foray into bitter melon, so a few days later, I surveyed the fridge and decided on a bitter melon stir fry with egg, shrimp, onion, garlic, and ginger. Aiming for something a bit more “Thai” tasting, I threw together a “sauce” of tamarind paste, fish sauce, soy, rice vinegar, siracha, and sugar.
Everything I read indicated that scooping out the spongy interior and the seeds was a “must,” but opinions were divided on the notion of parboiling or steaming the melons for a couple of minutes to remove some bitterness before frying. I figured I’d start out with the unadulterated melon, so we fried them without any prior heat treatment.
Accurately named, bitter melon is remarkably bitter. It’s not at all sharp like a grapefruit or charred like some coffee. Rather, it has a sort of dull, earthy, chalky bitterness that reminded me of a beer flavored excessively with Chinook hops. Larger pieces (and/or pieces with some of the white interior still clinging to the fruit) seemed to retain more bitterness throughout the process, which made sense.
We served it over rice and with some fresh cilantro on top, both of which were fine compliments. Next time, I might consider using pork to get some extra fat to help buffet the bitterness back a bit. That seems to be a common recipe combination for bitter melon online, and it certainly would hold back that chalky flavor more than shrimp and siracha.
Regardless, the bitterness after stir frying isn’t overwhelming by any stretch. I can understand why people sweat it with salt and cook it before completing the stir fry, but even without those measures, the bitter flavors are simply intense, not offensive.
While there appear to be no studies to corroborate the claims, many Asian countries ostensibly consider this fruit to be quite healthy. Regardless, while I’m in no rush to add bitter melon to my list of staple ingredients, I’ll be trying to use it more in the future. It’s truly unique and unquestionably interesting.
Meet Cool People, Drink Beer, Help Tashmoo Biergarten
Tashmoo Biergarten is a pop-up, European-style biergarten that will be serving fresh, local beer in Detroit’s West Village for five Sundays this autumn beginning on September 25th. The hours will run from 12pm – 9pm. Alongside the beer will be a small amount of food and non-alcoholic beverages from Great Lakes Coffee.
They’re looking for volunteers to help with several aspects of the project.
Bottling beer:
Have you ever been curious as to how tasty beer gets into a bottle? Here’s your chance to find out. Work a seven hour shift at MilkingIt in Royal Oak bottling beer for Tashmoo and not only will you gain a unique experience, FREE BEER will be provided as you work. Enough said, right?
Build the biergarten:
Tashmoo is also looking for folks to cut and drill lumber, assemble tables and benches, and assemble a pallet fence. Imagine bringing your friends to a session at the biergarten and setting your suds upon a table that you constructed with your own fortitude. You’ll be like the hero in a James Cameron film.
If interested in helping out, contact Tashmoo Volunteer Manager Matt
Clayson at
Tashmoo BierGarten
Quintessence
Chicago’s personality is so lovable. Part of why I find that to be the case is that it’s always felt to me like it has more in common with Michigan than with more cosmopolitan locales. Obviously, it’s bigger than any cities here, and it offers the type of diversity, transit, and culture of a place like New York. But at its core, it’s a big, sprawling Midwestern city with ample neighborhoods full of pleasant, Midwestern people.
I always understood that on an intellectual level. But my most recent trip there felt so completely different from any other I’ve made.
For my thoroughly awesome job, I was sent to Chicago to interview two of its finest chefs – Rick Bayless and Stephanie Izard – for a couple of upcoming magazine articles. I tried to prepare the best I could, of course. But no amount of pre-work could have readied me for how genuine and personable they are. I suppose I should have expected it – I’m sure there’s a bumper sticker somewhere that reads “Chefs are people too” – but for whatever reason, their celebrity had sort of created this mental distance between me and the notion that they had, you know, actual personalities. Duh.
These chefs could open restaurants anywhere, I’m sure, but they fit in Chicago.
We’d arranged to have some photographs taken of both chefs, so I was also meeting our photographer for the first time, a Chicago-based food and lifestyle specialist named Huge Galdones. All I knew previously was that I liked his portfolio and my colleague had chosen him for the project after comparing him to others.
It turns out he’s one of the friendliest guys pretty much ever, and we grabbed some dinner after our work was done. Interestingly enough, it turns out we also had a mutual friend via food and wine circles.
Along those lines, when dining at Girl & the Goat the night before, I ran into a former Detroit area resident who had moved to Chicago two years ago, who in turn introduced me to a couple of the bartenders at Goat, both of whom were knowledgeable, interesting, nice people. While aggressively consuming their alcoholic wares, I also got to know a woman at the bar who had friends in southeast Michigan and who, upon learning why I was there, shared all of her dishes with me so I could try more of the menu.
After returning from my dinner at Girl & the Goat on Monday night, I wrote on Facebook, “So it turns out that all the hype for Girl and the Goat in Chicago is not only justified, it may very well be under hyped. Four hours of eating and drinking. Maybe the best desserts I’ve ever had. It’s perhaps needless to say, but I’m a fan. Big time.”
In retrospect, each of the two desserts I had are the best desserts I’ve ever had. No equivocation on that. One and two, or maybe one and one-a. I mean, who the hell puts lemon-infused eggplant with doughnuts? Or gooseberry compote, foie “fluff,” and chocolate? Chef Stephanie Izard. That’s who. She’s a damn genius.
It’s pretty impossible to really say what my absolute best meal is of all time – after all, how can I compare her lamb heart skewers to Japanese marinated raw beef tongue, or how can I compare my first ever bite of pulled pork to fluffy agnolotti filled with seasonal root veggies? – but it’s safe to say this ranks right up there.
So after two days, all the people I’d met – from bartenders to world famous chefs – were universally kind, thoughtful people. And the whole Small World thing was in full effect. I might as well have been hanging out at Astro in Detroit for how at home I suddenly felt.
After Huge and I had eaten dinner, I closed out my trip by hiking out to Bar DeVille on Chef Izard’s recommendation. I’d already been to the great cocktail bars that are decorated by interior designers. I wanted something a bit simpler, and she came through with the perfect suggestion. I drank (a Vieux Carre, a Weller 12 year, two beers, and two unnamed cocktails) while He-Man DVDs played on the TV and Nirvana and Raekwon blared over the speakers. A local liquor rep sat down next to me and unloaded a day’s worth of bad luck and a few jokes as though we were Norm and Cliff in some sort of weird hipster reboot of Cheers.
The whole night was like a big blanket wrapped around my soul. A bourbon soaked blanket. But a blanket nonetheless.
Having a better time on that trip would have been pretty much impossible. Unsurprisingly, it heightened my appreciation for Chicago. But after some reflection, I realized that (aside from the exquisite, incomparable food experience at Girl & the Goat) all the things that I really loved about my trip are exactly the things I love about Detroit and about Michigan – the people I’ve met, the small town feel where everyone somehow knows everyone else, and sharing good drinks and good food with good people, whether they become friends for a night or a lifetime.
