Tag Archives: Beef

Beef Jerky and Chilli Mead Tasting.

July 31, 2015 Munchkin

It was so hot today!! What a change from the rains…now we are starting to worry about our water situation because we still do not have a well-pump. Gnome says we are on Red Alert which means that we have to use water judicially and some frog spawn will be have sacrificed as we use up our collection of buckets.

Anyway, I am onto the Beef Jerky and Chilli Mead (having guzzled down all the Resurrection Metheglin, which I found most profoundly enlightening). If you will recall, we decided to make a mead out of beef jerky (ended up being black pepper beef jerky) because there is a traditional ale recipe made with rooster (cock). If you don’t remember that, perhaps you might remember Gnome’s cock jokes which everyone politely ignored! Let us don our evening wear to do the tasting:

I have shortened the name of this mead to “BJ” for Beef Jerky (I have to spell it out because Gnome thought it was something else). Munchkins have a clean mind!!

Beef.Jerky.Pepper.Metheglin — Beef Jerky and Chilli Mead.

Colour is light amber with some cloudiness. No head but ample small bubbles can be seen.

Smells very mildly of home-made beef soup with a background of spiciness.

The beef jerky lends a very well-rounded taste like a good soup that has had time to cook and absorb flavours. There is a mild hot after taste from the chilli and black pepper (if you ask me…I would like more chilli with the next batch).

Excellent. Totally love the heat and soupiness of this mead. Definitely a favourite!!

By the way, Gnome does not drink because he has “Yang in his liver” which gets him all heaty . Every time he even has one drink, he gets pimples and piles (poor Gnome). I have to balance the “fire” with really simple cooling foods like rice, tofu and cucumbers (which he dislikes). So he said that he would rather give up drinking than eat boring food like that!

Thank-you Gnome For Your Fermentation Magic!

Belize, Fermentation, Food

Home-made Miso Tasting.

July 18, 2015 Munchkin

Hello there every-one!! Hope you are having a good day. Today, I have two miso tastings from the time when we “were mad about the beans” and made buckets and buckets of home-made miso.

The Shiro Miso: has a higher proportion of white rice to bean (we used blackbeans instead of soya beans since we live in Belize). We have actually been eating through our supply for the last month or so and I was afraid that I would munch my way through it all without doing some proper feed-back.

Shiro Miso Tasting:

Gnome says: overall, it is a light fermentation product; will continue to build complexity with aging. Less salty, sweet and mild tasting.

Munchkin says: I have used the shiro miso in soups, marinating of meat and to flavour pot roasts. All flavour packets have been replaced with a dollop of shiro miso (in fact, we have ramen noodles with this miso). It is so mild tasting, you need a whole tablespoon in a bowl of miso soup.

Hatcho Miso with Beef Jerky: Miso made from bean (blackbean) koji alone. We also added beef jerky and black pepper to make it into “Meat Lover’s” Miso.

Meat Lover's Hatcho Miso. — Meat Lover’s Hatcho Miso.

Meat Lover’s Miso Tasting:

Gnome says: Obviously needs more time to develop but at this stage, still very, very tasty. Has strong mushroom overtones with meat undertones. Can do with more black pepper. Will certainly reach an exquisite taste and will peak in ten years or so. A true masterpiece that has to be waited for.

Munchkin says: Beefy!! Let’s start eating it!! Yum. So rich and creamy. This miso has such intensity of taste, you only need one teaspoon to make a bowl of miso soup.

There is nothing like home-made miso…you can’t buy it for love nor money!!

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Belize, Farming, Food

Baked Wax Apples Stuffed with Chilli Beef.

June 16, 2015 Munchkin 2 Comments

We have so many wax apples on our farm this year…we have even been giving them away to our piggies.

We have been eating a lot of them raw. Because they have the crispy texture of an apple, I thought that they would do well baked. And, then I thought of chilli beef and hey presto, I came up with this recipe: Wax Apples Stuffed with Chilli Beef.

To stuff the wax apples, you just need to cut a wedge into the bottom. Like so:

Stuffed wax apples:

I slow-baked the stuffed wax apples with onions so that the onions could form a nice gravy.

We ate it with a side of green vegetables:

We really enjoyed this dish and this is also a great way of cooking other fruits in the Syzygium family, notably the Malay (Molly) Apple.

Enjoy your evening!! It has been raining all day.

Belize, Food

Mamey Sapote Beef Burgers.

June 5, 2015 Munchkin

It is mamey sapote season in Belize.

A ripe mamey sapote is soft to the touch when you press hard with thumb and fore-finger. Cut around the shell lengthwise (like an avocado) to obtain the two halves of the fruit with a central large seed. Remove the seed and spoon out the pulp to eat. The flesh should come off easily in a ripe fruit. You can eat this fruit out of hand or you can transform it into a savoury burger meal:

This is a unique and tasty way of eating this tropical fruit. Mamey sapote has a reddish-brown, smooth and creamy flesh with a sweet flavour reminiscent of caramelised brown sugar. This marries very well with beef giving a caramel velvetiness to the ubiquitous burger.

Check out the recipe for Mamey Sapote Beef Burgers in Belize Wild Recipes!

Belize, Farming, Fermentation, Food

Full of Beans!

April 11, 2015 Munchkin

Gnome was full of beans this morning and brimming with energy right from the get go. He was out of the house by 5.30am with the brush-mower clearing the back of the farm. I started cleaning buckets and basins, started a big pot of beans on the stove and washed sheets for koji making. It was bean mania and the various bean preparations continued to exude beaniness into every square inch of the house.

When we finally met up again, Gnome had grated coconuts and I proceeded to squeeze the cream out of them. I then laid out the coconut meal in the sun for the making of flour.

After this, it was back to the beans. The night before we had decided upon making a “meatier” hatcho miso and so today we made Beef Jerky Hatcho Miso or as Gnome has coined it “Meat Lover’s Hatcho Miso.” This involved putting 20 cups of fresh black bean koji and 2 lbs (1kg) of beef jerky through a meat grinder.

There was a few cups of black bean koji left over so we decided to make a small batch of Taosi which is a Filipino fermented black bean preparation, made by soaking the koji in brine.

Next we took the freshly cooked beans from this morning and added more Aspergillus spores to start a continuous batch of black bean koji. Our goal is to fill a 55 gallon drum with hatcho miso…more about that in a later post!

We then had a brief intermission for food and refreshments. For those interested, we still think that it is important to sit down and eat two proper meals a day, despite all the frenzy and excitement. We had Chinese roast pork, pumpkins and shiitake mushrooms cooked in mead and sweet potato cakes.

Anyway, the next task was making Shinshu miso with the mountain of bungle beans from the freezer. This was Gnome’s idea since I had been giving him such a hard time about the bungle. Yes, we used up all the beans so problem has been solved. We made 2 and 1/2 gallons of this…ready in one year!

Phew, it has been a bean marathon. We were done by 2pm.

Munchkin and Gnome: Mad About the Beans!

Amusing, Belize, Fermentation

Beef Jerky and Chilli Mead.

April 7, 2015 Munchkin

Brewing has come to an end…boo-hoo! After completion of the Resurrection Metheglin there was one last brew bucket to be used and alas, this is what has happened, the final fermentation: Black Pepper Beef Jerky and Chilli Metheglin.

All Buckets have been used. — My collection of trigeminal buckets.

The idea for this unusual mead had its inception from reading an old article on Cock Ale. Apparently, an old, parboiled cock (a rooster, you sick folk ;-P) that has been flayed, stamped in a stone mortar and put in a sack with other aromatic goodies can be steeped into ale to add just a little bit more body! Well, with a leap of tangential thinking, derailment and frank thought disorder, I took Cock Ale and got…ta-da…Beef Jerky Mead with Chilli!

Black Pepper Seasoned Beef Jerky Ready to be Simmered.

Extrapolating (or intrapolating or just plain guesstimating) from the original recipe of one cock for 10 gallons of ale…and making some assumptions as to the size of your average Belizean cock; and, also, considering the difference in flavour between fowl and beef…we settled on 250g of beef jerky for five gallons of mead.

This is the amount of chilli pepper we used:

…a nice, wild hybrid of jalapeno (sorry, no tilde) and bird pepper that turns purple before red.

I aimed for a slightly higher strength of alcohol than usual (6-7% alcohol) in order to better hold the expected heaviness from the beef and chilli; which in this case, was achieved with four and a half “quarts” of Belizean Rainforest Honey…

Belize Honey "Quarts." — Belize Honey “Quarts.”

The beef jerky was simmered with half the chilli for about an hour without the honey, making a nice and spicy beef broth. After which, the honey was added and brought to the boil for a second before cooling and pouring into the brew bucket. The yeast used was my standard “evolving” lager yeast.

Let’s see how it turns out!

Belize, Food

Peanut Brittle Beef Cakes.

November 25, 2014 Munchkin

This recipe is great because it incoporates peanut candy bars bought in Belize. I have seen these everywhere in the country and they can be bought at any local super-market. They are so versatile because you can break the bars up into smaller pieces and put them in your home-cooked meals.

As well as being a good source of protein, it also adds crunch and texture to food. Moreover, the sugar in the bar caramelises once it is cooked adding more taste to the whole meal.

This is another recipe for the frustrated local ex-pat who tells me over and over again that there is nothing to cook in Belize! For the overseas reader, probably any peanut brittle/candy bar can be used in this recipe.

This is yummy mixed in with minced beef and formed into little cakes;

See my Peanut Brittle Beef Cakes Served with Lentils.

Casa Mascia Apothecary