→ December 5, 2008
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Good Eats Baklava.

Last week’s episode of Good Eats, “Switched on Baklava,” was one of his best in terms of delivering real instruction, including:

* How to blanch almonds
* How to clarify butter
* The difference between cassia and true cinnamon
* Working with phyllo dough
* How to make your own rose water (okay, you really never needed to know this, but it was cool)

It’s a welcome turnaround from the season opener, “Oh My, Meat Pie,” handily the worst episode in the history of the show. I was a little shocked to see AB cut into his baklava with a paring knife since the knife’s tip would likely scratch the surface of the nonstick pan, but then again, I don’t see myself making baklava any time soon, since I can’t stand pistachios. Even if you’re like me and don’t ever plan to make the stuff, it was worth watching for a few good cooking tips, especially the part about clarifying butter.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chicken stock.

A couple of weeks ago, Whole Foods ran a two-week special, selling entire broiler-fryer chickens for 99 cents a pound, which amounted to roughly $4 for an entire bird. Boneless, skinless chicken breasts typically cost at least $4.49 a pound, and since the entire breast of one bird usually runs 1 to 1.5 pounds, it was cheaper to buy the entire bird and butcher it myself than to just buy those boneless, skinless, tasteless breasts anyway.

Of course, when you buy the whole bird, you get the thighs, legs, and wings, all of which have more flavor than the breasts do. You get the giblets, most of which I just put down the disposal, but I suppose you could use them for gravy if you’re so inclined. But the best part of buying and butchering your own chicken is what you get after all of that other stuff is gone: The bones, and bones mean stock.

For each bird, I’d keep the carcass (the bones and bits of meat after all of the “parts” are removed), the wings (not enough meat to worry about and very good for stock-making), and the neck (the one part of the giblets packet that I don’t toss) and stick them in the freezer for the next stock-making day. I also keep parts of various vegetables in a bag in the freezer – the top rings (not stems) and bottom bits of peppers, the white parts of celery stalks, etc. – that are all also stock-worthy. This avoids the expense of buying lots of vegetables just to put them into stock.

(If you’re wondering about that whole butchering-the-chicken part, I’d eventually like to shoot a video I can use here to demonstrate how easy it is. I’ve done it with a timer and I can butcher a chicken into its eight pieces – two each of breasts, thighs, legs, and wings – in about four and a half minutes. That’s under five minutes to get parts that would easily cost you $10 more if you bought them already butchered, plus you get the bones.)

Making stock requires no cooking skill at all other than patience and the ability to not turn your damn stove knobs up to 11. Dump everything in a pot, throw an upside-down steamer basket (preferably a crappy old one – I have one that’s just for making stock now) on top, skim a few times, wait 5-6 hours, cool and store. Nothing in there you can’t do if you have the time.

Anything frozen can go right in the pot without defrosting.

Chicken stock

6 quarts water (the better the water, the better the stock – I buy spring water for this)
1 chicken carcass, including wings and neck
2 ribs celery, cleaned and snapped in half
1-2 carrots, washed well (or just peeled) and cut in half
1 red or green bell pepper, seeded and stemmed, or just various pepper parts
(You can use pieces of hot peppers too. I’ve used jalapeño and poblano pieces before.)
1 medium onion, halved, or half a large onion
2 peeled garlic cloves
A few sprigs of parsley and thyme
2-3 sage leaves
1 bay leaf
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
1 pinch celery seeds
1. Put everything in a stockpot or other large pot capable of holding at least 10-12 quarts. Place a steamer basket upside-down on top of the contents to hold everything under the surface of the water. Bring to a simmer – not a boil, but a gentle simmer – and cook for at least four hours, skimming any scum off the top (every half hour should work). Overcooking it will prevent the liquid from dissolving the collagen in the bones, so take it easy on the heat.
2. When you start to see a thin, clear film on the surface, congratulations – you’ve made stock. That’s gelatin, the thing that distinguishes stock from broth and makes soups taste like soup instead of flavored water. The film will usually appear sometime between the fourth and fifth hours of cooking. I usually let my stock go for another hour or so to make sure I’ve leached all of the collagen out of the bones. Six hours is about the max time you need to do this; if you’re nearing that point and don’t see any gelatin, you probably have your heat on too low.
3. You need to cool your stock quickly. Empty and clean your sink, close up the drain, fill it with ice (two bags should do the trick) and add cold water to fill the sink about halfway. Place a pot or bowl capable of holding at least six quarts in the sink and strain the contents of your stockpot through a fine-meshed strainer into the empty pot. Chill in the ice-water bath until the temperature of the stock drops enough for it to go into the fridge – at least to 60 degrees, and preferably all the way to 40.
4. Chill several hours of overnight. Remove any fat that has congealed at the surface (but don’t discard it – you can cook with it!), portion the remaining stock into containers and refrigerate or freeze. It’ll last in the fridge a few days, but you can keep it for months in the freezer.

You may want to use a bit of damp cheesecloth to strain the last of the stock and remove any dirt or off bits that have settled at the bottom of the pot while it chilled.

You may also notice the absence of one ingredient: Salt. Don’t salt your stock – add salt when you cook with it. If it’s salted, and you reduce it as part of any recipe, you’ll end up with an overly salty finished product. You can add many different herbs, spices, and vegetables, but avoid any members of the cabbage family (including broccoli), which will give the stock a strong and not-desirable flavor. I’ve used mustard seed, cloves, tarragon, and leeks, among other items. Think “aromatics” and you’ve got the idea.

I’ll post some recipes using chicken stock over the next few weeks, but it’s great for basic soups, for moistening stuffing at Thanksgiving, and for reducing and using to thicken some sauces. Any decent cookbook should have soup recipes that start with chicken or some other stock as their bases.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Dana Point eats.

I did breakfast both days at Harbor House, a diner right on PCH in Dana Point, going back on day two because day one’s meal was so good. That first meal was scrambled eggs with chorizo, home fries, and toast. The eggs/chorizo were probably the best I’ve ever had – not overwhelmingly spicy (seriously, I can only take so much heat at 8:30 a.m.), obviously made to order rather than as part of a huge batch – and the home fries were just a pinch of salt away from perfection, with no grease, plenty of crispy browned bits, and soft interiors. The second meal was pancakes, bacon, and eggs; the pancakes were solid-average, good but unremarkable in flavor and – like most pancakes – a little heavy, and while the bacon came in thick slices that could have been fried a little longer to get some crisp to them.

I had one lunch at R.J.’s in Dana Point Harbor, although they’re also open for breakfast and seem to have a local following. The turkey sandwich with feta is pretty much just that, turkey roasted in-house with lettuce, tomato, red onion, and a sprinkling of feta cheese, plus mayo if you’re so inclined (I wasn’t). The turkey was excellent, nothing like the cheap previously-sliced stuff you get in too many restaurants, and the bread (a French roll) was obviously fresh. The sandwich comes with soup or salad; you might want to try the soup, as the salad was drowned twice over in dressing. Getting into the place was kind of tricky; the best way seems to be to go westbound on Dana Point Harbor Drive and pull into the lot just past the intersection with Golden Lantern.

My other lunch was too much of a good thing, a Mexican place called Olemandi right across from the beach. The food was amazing, but the portion sizes were absolutely over the top. Their carnitas are among the best I’ve ever had, moist but with some browned ends, deeply flavored but neither too acidic nor too spicy, allowing the flavor of the meat to still take center stage. The dish comes with a small amount of very good Spanish rice, a large serving of refried beans, plus tortillas, guacamole, sour cream, and so on. All of that plus easily 3/4 pound to one pound of carnitas makes a great value for $16, but it’s also ridiculous to send that much food back when, like me, you have no place to which you can take leftovers. Oh, and the meal comes with tortilla soup, which was very rustic (just a delicious broth and tortilla strips with a little diced tomato) but sort of added to the gluttony. I can’t really complain about having too much food, but sending that quantity of food to the disposal/trash does bother me a lot.

I had one very, very bad meal on the trip, sushi at Gen Kai in Dana Point. The fish was bland, boring, slightly tough, and way too cold. I wouldn’t say it was bad in the sense of going bad, since I wouldn’t have eaten it, but it was unacceptably low quality fish. Even the green tea was a mess (way too hot – green tea should be brewed at around 160 degrees). I did make it up to myself by stopping in Seal Beach en route to the airport and having my last meal of the trip at Koi, amazing as usual and relatively quiet for a place that usually offers a wait for a seat at the sushi bar.

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→ December 5, 2008
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“Grilled” Baby Bok Choy.

Again, just the recipe here.

2 heads baby bok choy, rinsed and roughly chopped (leaves and upper stems)
1 clove garlic, slivered
1 small dried chili pepper
1-2 tsp toasted sesame oil
2 tsp honey
Salt & freshly ground black pepper to taste
Toasted sesame seeds

1. Toss the bok choy in a bowl with all remaining ingredients except the sesame seeds.
2. Place the bok choy mixture in the center of a large sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Fold up the edges of the foil to enclose the bok choy in a packet, crimping all edges to seal it and then poking two or three small holes in the top of the packet to allow steam to escape.
3. Place the packet on the grill just barely off of the heat (somewhere between direct and indirect heat). Grill for 8-10 minutes until the bok choy stems are tender, although you’re going to have to guess at when that is.
4. Open one small end of the packet and drain off any excess liquid. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and serve.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Chocolate-Bourbon Pecan Pie.

I’m a big fan of recipe triangulation. I see a recipe I want to try, but something doesn’t sit right – a method, an ingredient, whatever, there’s something there that I don’t believe will work, and I don’t believe in wasting time or food on poorly constructed recipes. So I find other recipes for the same dish and try to combine them, identifying similarities and isolating the differences, then either picking and choosing methods from all recipes, or just splitting the difference when we’re talking about something like a discrepancy in oven temperature. This recipe for a rather heavenly pie is the result of just such a triangulation. It’s largely adapted from Bourbon and Chocolate Pecan Pie Recipe, with an assist (the heated-filling trick) from the plain pecan pie recipe in Baking Illustrated.

(Next time out, I’m going to see how much chocolate I can stuff into the filling, but I’ve had two requests from readers for this recipe who saw my update on Twitter.)

Chocolate-Bourbon-Pecan Pie

One pie dough for a 9″ pan

1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
3 large eggs
¾ cup dark brown sugar
¼ cup white sugar
¾ cup dark corn syrup
½ tsp vanilla extract
3 Tbsp bourbon
¼ tsp salt
1½ cups coarsely chopped pecans

1. Blind-bake the dough at 375 degrees for 25 minutes, covered in foil and weighted down with pie weights or dry beans or whatever you have that won’t melt at 375. Remove the foil and weights and bake 6-7 minutes more until the crust just starts to brown.
2. Set a skillet with about ½” of water over a burner and bring to a simmer. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a heatproof bowl set over the simmering water. Stir to combine and set aside to cool. Do not overheat or the butter will break.
3. While the pie is baking, take a large heatproof bowl and whisk the three eggs together until frothy (meaning you can see some air bubbles and the mixture’s volume is increasing). Add both sugars and whisk until completely combined.
4. Add all remaining ingredients except the pecans and set over the simmering water (you didn’t pour it out, right?), whisking constantly, until the mixture reaches 130 degrees on an instant-read thermometer.
5. As soon as the pie crust reaches that light golden brown stage, dump the pecans into the filling, then pour the whole thing into the crust. Drop the oven temperature to 300 degrees and bake until the top is cracked and the center is just barely set – it should wiggle when you shake the pie dish, but should not slosh. Start checking it around 25 minutes; mine was done at 30, although my oven holds its temp well because I have a pizza stone and some unglazed quarry tiles on the oven floor.
6. Set on a cooling rack and allow to cool completely before cutting, 2½-3 hours.

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→ December 5, 2008
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Beans: to soak or not.

(Repost)

Man, I hate when there’s no clear answer to a cooking question.

The question is whether or not it makes sense to soak dried beans before cooking. You have three options: Soak overnight in cold water (they’re actually fully soaked after about four hours, but can stay in the water for up to eight hours); soak quickly in one hour by starting with boiling water; or don’t soak and increase your cooking time and cooking liquid.
Here are the arguments I’ve found for and against soaking:

  • Soaking frees up minerals and vitamins in the beans. Beans contain a chemical called phytic acid, which “can form complexes with some minerals and make them insoluble and thereby indigestible,” a process known as chelation. Some phytic acid is destroyed in cooking, but more is removed (an extra 15.4% up front, according to the American Chemical Society) if you soak overnight before cooking.
  • Soaking cleans the beans. Got that from Miss Vickie’s, the best site around for pressure-cooking tips. She says there’s a lot of nasty stuff on the outside of dried beans. I think that a really good rinse should take care of that nasty stuff, and besides, letting the beans sit in water that has absorbed undesirable compounds sounds like a bad idea. But what do I know.
  • Soaking reduces cooking times. It does – by maybe a half an hour. Doesn’t bother me. Might affect people who have office jobs, although I’m guessing you’re still not making two-hour beans on a Tuesday night.
  • Soaking cuts down on “ze tummy music.” I’m pretty sure this is bullshit, but then again, everything gives me ze tummy music, so how the hell would I notice?
  • Soaking means softer beans. I know this is bullshit, because I’ve tried it both ways, and soaking did not help the texture of the cooked beans one iota. You know what helped? Cooking them longer.

Arguments against soaking beans:

  • Soaking leaches out flavor. Well, you have my attention there. Alton Brown has suggested soaking and then using some of the soaking liquid in cooking, although in this season’s red beans and rice episode (a good recipe, BTW), he dispensed with soaking entirely. I have made beans both ways, but I’m usually putting so much other stuff in the pot that I would never notice a 10% flavor loss through soaking. My beans tend to taste like other things, such as bacon.
  • Soaking removes the phytic acid. Yeah, how about that: Phytic acid is an antioxidant. I found a few studies discussing phytic acid’s antioxidant properties, although none seem to argue strongly in its favor. It has been mentioned as a potential anticancer compound, and it definitely plays a role in preventing bean spoilage.
  • Soaking leaches out nutrients. So perhaps we’re even – soaking takes out nutrients but gets the phosphate out of the phytic acid so that the remaining nutrients are more accessible; not soaking leaves the phytic acid but the beans start with a higher nutrient content. I have no idea how that nets out.
  • Soaking is not traditional. I know it’s just a forum post, but this caught my eye: You’re probably all bored to death with my saying this, but I have lived in Mexico for nearly 26 years. I do not know a single Mexican cook who soaks beans. Naturally, YMMV. Rick Bayless, who knows a thing or two about Mexican cuisine, also advises against soaking. Not a nutritional argument, of course.

Usually I can at least offer an opinion based on a preponderance of evidence, perhaps mixed with personal experience or observation, but on this one, I just don’t know. You might have a tradeoff between tradition and nutrition, or between convenience and flavor.

I can only tell you what I do, or what I don’t do: I’ve stopped soaking beans. I never found a cooking benefit, and I was unaware of a nutritional question until shortly before I started writing this post. I did find something interesting in, of all places, Wikipedia – and, oddly enough, it comes from a bona fide academic source:

Probiotic lactobacilli, and other species of the endogenous digestive microflora as well, are an important source of the enzyme phytase which catalyses the release of phosphate from phytate and hydrolyses the complexes formed by phytate and metal ions or other cations, rendering them more soluble ultimately improving and facilitating their intestinal absorption.

That indicates to me that popping a couple of L. acidophilus pills before chowing down on some (unsoaked-before-cooking) beans might help you get the best of both worlds. But beyond that, I’m as confused as ever.

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→ October 16, 2008
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Browned and Braised Asian Carrots.

This is a pretty simple side dish, although it doesn’t scale well because of the sautéing required. You can use other liquids in place of the ginger beer, including chicken broth; you can also add about 1/3-1/2 tsp of butter at the end to turn the glaze into more of a sauce.

½ pound young, slender carrots, peeled and sliced into 3″ sticks
1 Tbsp butter
¼ tsp Chinese five spice powder
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp brown sugar
¼ cup ginger beer
chopped fresh parsley (optional)

1. Heat the butter in a sauté pan (with a lid) until the bubbling stops.
2. Add the carrots and let them brown on one side, approximately 3 minutes. Do not stir.
3. If you’re using a gas stove, turn down the flame. With the lid in one hand, add the salt, spice powder, brown sugar, and ginger beer, and clamp the lid down. Wait a few seconds for the initial violence to stop, then remove the lid, stir once, and put the lid down again. Raise the heat to medium-low and braise the carrots until barely tender, two to five minutes.
4. Remove the lid and allow any remaining liquid to cook away, taking care not to let the carrots burn in a dry pan. Serve with chopped fresh parsley if desired.

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→ October 5, 2008
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Chicken Paillards with Sun-Dried Tomato Cream Sauce

A simple main course that comes together in 20-30 minutes. To make it a little more luxuriant, start by chopping 3-4 slices of bacon and rendering it in the skillet, using the fat to cook the chicken and adding the bacon pieces to the final dish.

1 pound chicken breast, sliced into paillards (scallopine) and/or tenderloins
Flour to coat
2 Tbsp vodka
¼ cup chicken broth
¾ cup heavy cream
2 Tbsp fresh strained lemon juice
3 Tbsp chopped oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes
2 tsp chopped fresh parsley

1. Preheat the oven to 200°.
2. Heat about 2 Tbsp of olive or vegetable oil in a large skillet.
3. Pat the chicken paillards dry. Season with salt and pepper and dredge in the flour, shaking off any excess. Working in batches, pan-fry them for roughly two minutes per side until browned on the outside and just barely cooked through. Hold them in the oven while you prepare the sauce.
4. Drain any remaining fat from the pan and turn off the heat. Deglaze the pan with the vodka, scraping quickly to dissolve any fond, and then add the chicken broth (before the pan goes dry) and boil until reduced by about half.
5. Add the lemon juice, tomatoes, and cream and heat through. Return the chicken to the pan, spooning the sauce over the meat. Top with parsley, season with salt and pepper, and serve with pasta or rice.

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→ September 30, 2008
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Milwaukee eats (+ TV, radio).

TV today: ESPNEWS, 4:10-4:30 EDT as part of the Insider segment with Jerry Crasnick.
Radio: Northsound 1380 AM, Everett, Washington, with the Fish, 5:30 pm PDT. Also, ESPN 540 Milwaukee, Wednesday, 11:15 am CDT (streaming available online).

I have to say that I underestimated Milwaukee, figuring I was headed into a culinary wasteland filled with fat people who eat brats and drink pale beer all the time. It was actually one of the best eating towns I’ve been to all year, especially in the very funky area between Brady Street and North Street west of Prospect, which is definitely where I’d live if I moved there and could stand winters cold enough to turn your testicles necrotic.

First meal might have been the best – lunch at Cempazuchi on Brady Street. It’s sort of an upscale twist on Mexican food, with a heavy dose of authentic Mexican dishes mixed in. I started with the sopa de lima, a clear soup with chicken, lime juice, and tortilla strips, and then ordered the pork “torta,” Cempazuchi’s term for an unusual sandwich on pan frances with avocado, jalapeño, and onions. Both were phenomenal. The soup had just the right balance of acid, salt, and a touch of heat, and had obviously been assembled seconds before it reached the table. The sandwich was filled with pulled pork, apparently smoked properly since it wasn’t dry and didn’t require a sauce, and came on soft bread that had been sliced and grilled. The sandwich also came with a half-hearted garden salad with sliced radishes and an indeterminate white dressing. The meal starts with two salsas, one that was “peanut-based” that had an odd texture (shocking), and another with roasted tomatoes and garlic that was too thin but had a great smoky flavor.

Saturday’s breakfast was at Beans & Barley, a combination café and natural foods store just off North Street. There was no pork on the menu, so my EMPT included chicken sausage, which was cooked to death and mostly inedible. Everything else was excellent, particularly the breakfast potatoes, new red potatoes sliced and roasted with rosemary. The café serves Rishi teas (rhymes with “chichi”), but their only black tea is Earl Grey. It comes in a big ceramic pot with a strainer inside filled with loose tea, but it was already dark and bitter the moment it reached the table, meaning that it had been brewing too long. The properly-made scrambled eggs and the amazing potatoes still make it worth a trip.

I hit up a reader suggestion for Saturday dinner, Pizza Man, across the street from Beans & Barley. That’s where I had my lone beer of the trip, an ale from New Glarus with a fruity taste and medium body; I prefer darker beers, so this probably wasn’t the best choice, but it was their only local beer on tap. For dinner, the pizzas looked like they had the proper crust but were overtopped, so I went with one of the recommended specials, wild boar ravioli in a marsala sauce. The ravioli were excellent; I’ve never had boar before, but the flavor of the ravioli was very much like bacon. The sauce, on the other hand, was bitter with a pretty clear note of alcohol, meaning that it wasn’t cooked enough. The dish came with this amazing light garlic bread, not greasy at all and perfect for absorbing sauce, if you wanted the sauce absorbed. Pizza Man also has a huge wine list, and the décor – Old World Dungeon – reminded me of a place my wife and I visited in Siena almost ten years ago, an upscale “medieval” place called Il Gallo Nero.

Milwaukee being the center of the frozen custard world, I had to make sure to hit a few spots while I was on the ground. (Frozen custard is a style of ice cream that relies on egg yolks for texture, as opposed to “Philadelphia” ice cream, which contains no eggs and uses more butterfat.) Of the three places I tried, Gilles, Leon’s, and Oscar’s, Gilles wins the overall prize for the best combination of flavor and texture. All three places had very smooth custards, and Leon’s probably was the smoothest of all but both the chocolate and vanilla were timid, particularly the chocolate. At Gilles, I went with the flavor of the day, “turtle,” which had caramel and pecans mixed in and maybe a tiny bit of fudge. The vanilla flavor still came through in the custard, and the texture was just a shade below Leon’s. Oscar’s “mud pie” – allegedly mocha custard with hot fudge and Oreo knockoff cookies – had the worst texture, just slightly icy, and the knockoff cookies weren’t very good, but the custard did have a strong chocolate flavor.

I also approve of the Milwaukee Public Market, which is a fairly small building that houses maybe a dozen merchants, from a produce stand to a real fishmonger to a spice house to a few stands selling prepared foods. If I lived in Milwaukee, I’d be there all the time. The coffee-shop in the Market, the Cedarburg Coffee Roaster, roasts at least some of its coffees right there at the stand, which was a positive sign for their espresso. A double espresso macchiato (they don’t sell singles) runs $2.75, and while the beans were obviously fresh, the espresso was underextracted, resulting in a powerfully sour shot; the most likely explanation is that the barista used more grounds than necessary for the pull. It was a waste of what I think was pretty good coffee.

I also went to The Soup & Stock Market and ordered a bowl of their chicken and dumpling soup, which included real hand-made dumplings (obviously pinched out of dough by an actual hand) and was based on their own homemade stock (available frozen for purchase if you don’t want to make your own stock at home). The soup was very good, if just a little underflavored, filled with dumplings and chicken and vegetables; the stock was a bit on the light side, but it had the great mouth-feel you only get from soup made with stock. The soup also came with a hunk of a pretty amazing dense white bread. I also bought a bottle of Haley and Annabelle’s Vanilla Root Beer, brewed by two girls aged 10 and 5, with proceeds going to their college education fund. It was at least solid-average, better than any national brand, with a dark color, deep root beer flavor, but probably a little more sugar than I’d like. It’s behind, say, Thomas Kemper’s (my gold standard), but I admit I was sucked in by the story and the cause.

The one dud meal was breakfast at Miss Katie’s Diner, an old-school greasy-spoon near Marquette’s campus. Absolutely everything was drenched in butter, and I don’t mean that in a good way. The hash browns were soggy from frying in so much grease, the toast was buttered so heavily that I could see through it, and the eggs ended up sitting in the grease that was on the plate. There were definitely better options out there for Sunday breakfast.

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→ September 25, 2008
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Milwaukee beer recs.

From today’s chatters:

(1675) Adam (Roselle, IL)
Keith, some good breweries to check out in Milwaukee: Lakefront and Sprecher. Other good local beers are Point, Capitol, and New Glarus.

(1674) Kyle (Chicago)
Ack! Take my advice and thank me later, Wisconsin is the 2nd fastest up-and-comer on the US craft beer scene (after Michigan). Here’s what you need to look for; New Glarus, Sprecher (German style stuff), Central Waters, Furthermore, Capital (more German) and Tyranena. If you want the best of those, the Black Bavarian from Sprecher and anything wheat or fruit-based from New Glarus are all world class.

(1533) Shawn (WI)
See if you can get your hands on some Capital Brewery or Lakefront Brewery Beer.

(2552) DTK, Troy, NY
In Milwaukee, try Sprecker. Little homestyle brewery. They have awesome rootbeer and ginger ale, too.

(2163) Jon UK
From a Chicago beer writer Milwaukee beers:- I’d pick Lakefront, although Roger Protz would opt for Sprecher instead. Plenty of other Wisconsin micros to pick there, too.

(1709) Evan (Philly)
Keith, try Lakefront Brewery in Milwaukee. Good craft beer.

Someone asked what “Old Mildred” is … it’s Old Milwaukee, a bad beer made by Pabst.

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