Eathummus: 2010

This is a wonderful article about my cousin's husband Chris and his beer expedition!

One cold brew

Bethlehem brewer and friends to trek by motorcycle to the Canadian Arctic to brew a historic beer
July 02, 2010
By Daniel Patrick Sheehan, OF THE MORNING CALL

Later this month, Chris Bowen of Bethlehem and a couple of his friends will lead a motorcycle expedition north — far, far north — to the Canadian Arctic, where they plan to set up a portable brewery and make 100 gallons of a hoppy, potent beer that is exceeded in richness only by its own fanciful history.

We'll get back to Bowen in a moment, but first, the beer. It's called Allsop's Arctic Ale. The first people ever to drink it were British sailors dispatched to the Arctic by Queen Victoria in 1852 to discover the fate of an earlier expedition to that frozen realm.

They brought thousands of bottles of the beer, which had been specially crafted by Allsop's Brewery with loads of hops and a bracing alcohol content — 12 percent, compared with 5 percent in your Budweiser — to ward off scurvy and withstand freezing.

Alas, the rescuers fared little better than the explorers they were sent to rescue. Led by Sir Edward Belcher, they were forced to abandon four of their five ships in the ice and return to England, where Belcher was court-martialed — though acquitted — for his failure.

That might have been the end of it, but one of the ships, the HMS Resolute, broke free from the ice and drifted thousands of miles into the path of an American whaling vessel, which towed it back to Massachusetts. It was restored at a Brooklyn shipyard and returned to the British as a gift, and served the Royal Navy a dozen more . (Beams from the ship, incidentally, were turned into two desks: one for Buckingham Palace, the other for the Oval Office).

Now, back to Bowen. In 2007, the 43-year-old financial planner read about an eBay auction in which one of two bottles of Allsop's Arctic Ale known to exist sold for $500,000.

It turned out to be a false bid, but Bowen — a craft beer brewer who has been honored with national awards and built his own private brew pub in a cottage near Stabler Arena — was hooked by the Allsop's story. He set about investigating its history and, over the course of 2 1/2 years, discovered a couple of things. One was the second Allsop's bottle, which he now possesses.

The other was the recipe for the beer.

"This was the Tang of its day," Bowen said, likening Allsop's to the powdered orangeade touted as the astronaut's choice in the heyday of the space program.

Being the sort of man he is — a curious tinkerer with an adventurous streak — he decided the Allsop's story needed to be told in dramatic fashion. He's been riding a motorcycle for years, so a plan evolved: ride to the Arctic, brew the beer and turn the epic journey into a documentary film.

"How am I going to tell the story? I'll tell it from the back of a motorcycle," he said as he stood astride the burly BMW bike that will carry him from here to there.

You don't do this sort of thing alone. Bowen asked friends, John Chay and Dick Gethin, to ride along, and enlisted the services of some Russian filmmakers whose work he had seen and admired at a Bethlehem film festival. Also on board are a Chester County photographer, Dan Savage, and Lance McKay, a motorcyclist and adventurer from Maryland.

Follow their adventure on their blog Arctic Alchemy.

Many years ago an Israeli friend, whose parents were born in Morocco, taught me how to make the classic Moroccan-Jewish dish: Matbucha (Maat-boo-hah). It's my pleasure to share with you my favorite Sephardic Jewish dish! Here is how Wikipedia describes it:

Matbucha (Hebrew: מטבוחה‎) is a cooked dish of tomatoes and roasted bell peppers seasoned with garlic and chili pepper. The name of the dish originates from Arabic and means "cooked salad". It is also known as Turkish Salad. It is served as an appetizer, often as part of a meze. In Israel it is sometimes referred to as "Turkish salad." Matbucha is popular across the Maghreb. It was brought to Israel by new immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya.

1-First of all, you need the following items:
-large metal pot
-24 fully ripe tomatoes
-8 long green hot peppers
-1/2 of a head of garlic
-250 grams of soy oil
-20 grams of salt

Press on photos to enlarge

Cut a large "x" in the bottom of all of the tomatoes. Take the core out of each tomato as well.

Boil the tomatoes in water for about 15 or so minutes and then remove the skin from each one.

Take the hot peppers and roast them on a gas flame. Be sure not to burn them too much. There should be a thin layer of burnt black skin around the entire pepper. Over-burning is not desired.

Scrape off the black layer on the peppers with a sharp knife. Run them under the faucet to remove the excess burnt black skin. They should look like the bottom photo below.

Using a rubber funnel is the easiest way to remove the skin from the garlic. You can adjust the amount of garlic you use, depending on your taste.

Pour about 250 grams of soy oil into the pot containing the skinned tomatoes, roasted hot peppers, crushed garlic, and 20 grams of salt.

The initial cooking should look like this.

Use the "smasher" below to stir and smash the matbucha salad. The initial cool should last about an hour on the highest flame. Be sure to stir regularly, especially as the excess water evaporates. Otherwise, the mixture will burn in the bottom of the pot. The smasher is sitting on an electric hot plate. You will need this in the next step.