(botulism free) Chile beer: a recipe

Most of the cool farm wives and frugal huisvrouwen these days freeze rather than can, but I've always been fascinated with jars of preserves.

It's complicated. It's about going down into the dank, slightly scary basement at my grandparent's house in earliest memory to pick out a quart jar of beans or peas, and how much I would give to be standing there now. It's about the home ec barn at the Minnesota State Fair, where the colors and patterns of backlit preserves rival those of the quilt display. It's about a kitchen 10 miles out of Athens, OH, where A. and I put up apples and tomatoes, lining up the jars on shelves by a window that framed frosty laundry and a defunct pump in the yard.

And it's about botulism toxin, the stuff that stills the palsied and spastic and makes so many New Yorkers look smooth and impassive, that grows in oxygen-deprived spaces and that is lethal in in doses above one microgram. And that is potentially lurking in tens of millions of cans of chili sauces, hash, beans, and other meat- and chili-containing products made by Castleberry Food Co. for major store brands like Meijers, Krogers, Piggly Wiggly, Food Club over the past two years. (For a complete recall list, click here.)

All the more reason to cook up your own tasty chile products at home. Here's my recipe for chile beer, adapted from Shawn Davis and Fred Colby's 'Hot Chihuahua' Jalapeno and Santa Fe Chile Blonde Ale (Zymurgy Sept/Oct 2005) and originally inspired by Sigda's Green Chili Beer. I just cooked it up yesterday so I can't speak for the results yet, and honestly, several critical recipe alterations were the unintended consequences of mistakes. It is bubbling furiously right now, though, and you know how much I love that.

for 5 gallons/19 liters:

• 7.5 lbs. (give or take) Cooper's Light malt extract
• .5 lb 80L crystal malt
• .5 lb clear candi sugar
• 1 oz N. Brewer pellet hops, added at the start of the boil
• 1.5 oz. Cascade flower hops, added with 15 minutes left on the boil
• [This would also have been a great time to throw in an oz. of ground coriander seed to give the beer a little citrusy something something, but I forgot. On the other hand, it's deep summer and our apartment is never in the temperature range (70-75 degrees, tops) recommended to prevent 'fruity esters' from cropping up in my beer, so I guess I can just leave it to the little yeasties.]
• Irish moss added in the last couple of minutes to clarify
  
• [Usually I use Whirlfloc tabs, but dried seaweed seemed much more sporting.]

After the wort was cool, I pitched Windsor yeast. This was a mistake; I was supposed to use Doric Ale yeast, which apparently I must have thrown in my Irish red batch a couple of weeks ago, also by mistake. I haven't found a really detailed description of the flavors imparted by either one, but I have no complaints about the work ethic of the Windsor strain in this batch.

Primary:

• Dry hop with 3 oz. of dried Guajillo chiles and 3 oz. of dried New Mexico chiles.

Secondary:

• Dry hop with .5 oz flower hops; I'll probably use Saaz.
  

Kegging/bottling day:

• I plan to chop up 3 fresh serrano chiles--I like them better than Jalapenos and anyhow that's what's in Sigda's--boil them in 2 c. water, strain out the chiles and throw the cooled water in the keg along with the priming sugar.

Farm Bill time

Within the last several years that I've been living back in the U.S. as an ex-expat, I've discovered the simple pleasure of calling my representatives in Washington, and more recently, in New York. There is so much about the current governance of our country that does violence to my beliefs that if nothing else, calling up my elected officials and telling them that I'm cranked up or pissed off about something makes me feel slightly less powerless. It's amazingly easy to make an impact; when in D.C. for a few days last summer, I stopped by my House Representative's office, and the intern behind the desk claimed to recognize my name. The other day, when I called up my State Senator to register my disgust that a) the Democratic majority had failed to pass a congestion pricing measure in time to receive much-needed federal funds for public transportation and b) said SS had attributed the problem to Mayor Bloomberg's failure to adopt an "ingratiating" posture, I was pleased to hear from the haggard-sounding woman who took my call that the phone had been ringing off the hook.

If you'd like to try it out yourself, let me just remind you that every five years Farm Bill time rolls around, and that this is the week. The politics of food production are intimately involved in all kinds of commonly held concerns, including environmental protection, health, energy independence, trade deficits, labor rights, immigration, and social justice. Phone calls and letters have already helped remove a measure from an earlier draft of the current bill that was intended to preempt state laws or regulations beyond those mandated at the federal level. Here are some of the current provisions you could weigh in on with your Representative, particularly if s/he is on the House Agriculture Committee:

• an amendment by Representative Goodlatte (R-VA) would gut COOL (country of origin labeling) mandates, making these voluntary and restricting them to the 20 most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables, capping potential fines at $1,000, and defining imported animals as domestic unless they did not pass Go and went straight to the slaughterhouse
• in happier news, other amendments support:
  
• organic conversion assistance (Rep. Gillibrand, D-NY)
• "fair share" of USDA-ARS funding for organic research (Rep. Kagen, D-WI)
• mandatory funding for organic research (Rep. Cardoza, D-CA
• you could also express your views, among other issues, on:
  
• increased funding for the Food Stamp and Nutrition program
• mandatory funding for the Community Food Project Grant Program, the Organic Research and Extension program, the Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program and the Healthy Enterprise Development Program that would help small and mid-sized farmers distribute their products to local markets
• changes to the Conservation Security Program to make it easier for organic producers to participate and receive on-going financial assistance rewarding the implementation of conservation practices on their farms
• crop insurance equity, leveling the playing field for organic farmers who currently must pay a 5% surcharge on their crop insurance rates but are typically reimbursed for their losses according to conventional prices that don't take the greater value of their products into account

For more information or to sign and send a pre-fab letter instead, click here. To get contact information for your elected officials in Washington, click here.

Newsflash: Contrary to market wisdom, Americans do care about more than just price

Call me crazy, but I think we've got something like a groundswell going here. Check out the results of this Consumer Reports poll, released on Wednesday following a phone survey in June. A few of the highlights:

• 92% of consumers agree that imported foods should be labeled by their country of origin; a 2002 Farm Bill provision mandated country-of-origin-labeling (COOL) but implementation was delayed until 2008; now there's hope Congress may move the enforcement date up to September 2007
• 86% of consumers expect the 'natural' label to mean that processed foods contain no artificial ingredients (so no more sneaking in the high fructose corn syrup, please; ditto for partially hydrogenated corn oil)
• 83% of consumers expect 'natural' meat to come from animals that were raised in a natural environment. Currently, the USDA standard for natural meat only pertains to how the cut of meat was processed and not how the animal was raised or what it ate
• Only 46% of consumers approved of using the 'pasteurized' label in place of 'irradiated.' This is bad news for producers depending on irradiation to cover for the poor sanitation endemic to feedlot operations, because just 29% of consumers would buy 'irradiated' meat
  

Fun ag/local econ. facts from July Harper's Index

• Amount that a Colorado state prisoner is paid to work a day as a field hand at a local farm: $0.60
• Amount the prisons are paid by farmers for each inmate's daily work: $77.20
• Amount the USDA's Rural Development program has given in aid to distressed rural areas since 2001: $8,600,000,000
• Amount the program has given to metropolitan areas, retirement communities, and resorts: $39,100,000,000
• Percentage of every dollar spent at a locally owned Chicago store that is retained or recirculated in the city: 68
• Percentage of every dollar spent at a chain store in Chicago that is: 43
• Portion of the worldwide revenue from food retailing accounted for by ten corporations: 1/4