A Noble Hop

I was at a conference last week in Regensburg, Bavaria. Time for wine to take a back seat and beer to stand up and be counted.

The easyjet plane smelt like a leaky Zippo lighter, which reminded me of recent news stories that claim cabin fumes may well be toxic. I was more worried about the germs emanating from the clearly ill, coughing person next to me. A cat with a fur ball. The cabin was like a combined doctor's waiting room and creche, very unrelaxing.

I know a little German, but he sadly did not travel with me, the luxury of English speakers not so prevalent in Southern Germany. After much flamboyant sign language I left Munich airport by bus and travelled on the autobahn, where it seems all sense of moderation is forgotten. The floor is the natural resting place for accelerators making it feel more like the Hockenheim circuit. Cars in the fast lane were almost travelling in their own dimension, producing a tunnel of air buffeting other lesser vehicles.
Whizzing by were endless fields divided up with matrices of tall posts, looking like a rather large pin cushion. I was puzzled as I had never seen this type of agricultural mechanics. It turn out that this is for hop growing. Bavaria is the biggest producer of hops globally, and we were passing Hallertau, a 'noble hop' region, which is a term with similar meaning to the French 'appellations' for wine, a designation for specific growing areas. The region affects the aroma, bitterness and quality of the hop, much like grapes. Hallertau Mittelfruh is said to be the original German lager hop.

Regensburg was stunning. The medieval town centre is full of large palaces set amoungst cobbled streets. The impressive stone bridge over the Danube was built by Roman workers fueled by Bavarian sausages, purchased 'it is said' from a 900 year old hut by the bridge still serving sausages today . I popped in to be confronted by a fierce looking lady next to a grill covered with countless chipolata type sausages. I was served two in a roll covered in fermented cabbage (sauerkraut) and locally produced Handlmaier's sweet mustard. They were delicious.

My evenings consisted of yet more sausages punctuated by biergartens, the 'Reinheitsgebot' (German beer purity laws) seemed to leave me without a hangover.

Blowin' in the Wind

I opened my bread bin this morning to discover a mouldy interior. I half expected 'Fungus the Bogeyman' to crawl out. My neglected homemade loaf had attracted fungal friends, and was languishing in a newly acquired fur coat.

I walked the baby Husky to the bread board. In my poorly stocked house a decision had to be made whether to operate and remove the fur with my inadequate knife collection, or just starve. The latter prevailed.

Fungus in certain forms can be dangerous as demonstrated by Bob Dylan who famously caught histoplasmosis from fungal spores 'Blowin' in the Wind', derived from bat guano. Domestic outbreaks are generally non-toxic, and in fact there are old remedies in Serbia and Greece where mouldy bread was used to treat wounds thanks to the fungal production of penicillin. I can assure you that I was not about to rub that Husky into a recent paper cut.

Fungus loves damp dark places, a wine cellar being the perfect breeding ground. It does not require light and derives all it nutrients from the host, much like the bat whose bowel movements almost dispatched Dylan.

Fungus can be very damaging to wine when it infects a cork. Cork engineering is a challenge, if too moist it attracts mould growth which in turn can aid the production of a nasty chemical called TCA, tainting the wine if allowed to progress all the way through the cork.
I have come across many mouldy corks, but thankfully in most cases the rot had not prevailed, leaving the wine untouched. A TCA induced 'corked' wine can either be flat tasting if mildly effected, or can smell in worse cases like a wet Labrador (keeping to the dog theme).

Most of South East England is suffering from the 'Euro-Whiff' at the moment, a rotten smell arriving on unusual easterly winds from continental Europe. Agriculture in the form of flatulent cows is being blamed. I can see plenty of wine connoisseurs obliviously drinking corked wine, their senses already overloaded.

Olympic Mushrooms

I like my puddings and made a dish recently after discovering some rhubarb at the local deli. Rhubarb and custard, a classic combination that has even evolved into cartoons and sweets, catapulting me back to my childhood.

I heated the rhubarb, added muscovado sugar, raisins and the embers of a forgotten sweet Austrian wine which I found at the back of the fridge. The wine was a sophisticated blend of Chardonnay and Welschriesling grapes.. and now rhubarb. It was thankfully still drinkable due to the prolonged shelf life of a sweet wine after opening.

While this was softening I separated three egg yokes and made a custard. What remained was a bowl of nervous egg whites, waiting to get more familiar with my sink.

Egg white has its uses as a fining agent in mainly red wine, removing solids and proteins, clearing out the chaff. On this occasion I turned the tables and messed with the egg white's own proteins, attempting meringues. I whipped them up, disrupting their delicate protein chains, changing the structure. This 'denaturation' causes air to be trapped resulting in a nice thick foam, into which I folded some sugar. Using Delia Smith as a guide (although her mystique and kudos has been slightly diminished in my eye after too much attention around her extra-culinary activities) I cooked them in a 'cooling' oven.

An hour or so later I removed the meringues. They were undercooked, more like a Tunnock's Tea Cake than the armadillo I desired. Impatient for the crunchy sugar rush I decided to turn them upside down under a low grill heat to finish them off quickly.
I was distracted for a few minutes and returned to the kitchen to find it full of smoke. My meringues resembled a collection of Olympic torches, burning vigorously soon to be extinguished. Rather embarrassed I crawled under the smoke to the garden where I threw the flaming husks for the creatures of the night to feast on. After sorting out the smoke alarm I went to bed.

The next morning was crisp and dewy. Walking across the lawn I saw my discarded meringues. Incredibly they looked exactly like a collection of Portabella mushrooms with their black burnt underside and off-white tops. They were untouched in the night, not even tempting for a passing 'Dong with a Luminous Nose'.

Asymmetric Abnormality of the Gait

I developed a mild limp at the end of last week. My right foot is actively encouraging me not to walk, there are clearly some mysterious mechanical problems.

Limps do not go unnoticed by friends, and the word 'gout' is being wildly banded about with sympathetic smirks. In fact the general public are staring at me with suspicion as I hobble around the place. A limp is a very public disorder.

There is some confusion over the causes of gout. Red wine grape seeds contain procyanidins which help by reducing our uric acid levels, the cause of gout. On the other hand alcohol does not help. We are in fact very familiar with ridding our bodies of uric acid as we actively expel it into porcelain receptacles. A high purine diet (which the body converts to uric acid) is what to avoid if you are susceptible to gout. Sweet fizzy drinks are particularly bad.

Port used to contain litharge to sweeten it up, this caused lead poisoning, and the side effect of gout to irritate you even more in your madness. The only way to accidentally get lead into wine or port these days is to leave it too long in a lead crystal decanter. The lead will eventually start to seep into the liquid.

My symptoms according the the hallowed 'Dr Google' do not implicate gout, but I may well self-combust. There again that was more help than my doctor could offer, who told me to carry on as normal while popping a few pain killers. I must say I immediately felt much better after escaping from the waiting room full of the cast of 'Dawn of the Dead'. My foot seemed a small matter in the grand scheme of ailments.

I limped to a wedding in Brighton last weekend, and spent the night at a nearby Bed and Breakfast. The room was like an eighties time capsule, very chintzy, and as damp as the underside of Palace Pier. Everywhere you turned was a little typed message with peculiar etiquette or pointless warnings like 'please be aware that the towel rail is hot'. If it was actually hot then maybe some of the damp would have been dispelled.

Sort of refreshed, my musty clothes and I went to Littlehampton to meet friends for lunch the next day at a cool new place called the 'East Beach Cafe'. I parked the car and found myself wandering through a 'mature', large crazy golf course to find the cafe. There was what only could be described as a giant discarded half chewed toffee a little further on. The ultimate challenge for the crazy golf enthusiast, 'Happy Gilmour' springs to mind. On closer inspection the other side of the toffee was glass fronted, containing the cafe I sought. Very interesting design. Inside, I felt like the filling in a Baked Alaska, a white and cavernous arena set on the beach with fabulous sea views.

I chose Moules Mariniere, a very fine use of white wine and cream. More plentiful purines.