Outdoor chef extraordinaire rises bright and early to bring Trail Karma into Southern Arizona’s rugged Santa Catalina Mountains. Utilizing a 2025 Toyota Tundra TRD Pro, Garcia refuels some of the Ìęfinest crews with a steaming gourmet surprise at an impromptu trailhead breakfast. The hearty early-morning surprise kicks off some needed maintenance efforts on the Arizona National Scenic Trail.

Click to learn more about Trail Karma, with , launching on our partner mapping platform now with Toyota’s sponsorship of 20 standout trails across the U.S.—matching donations to these key trail-maintenance organizations up to $100K.

Join the cause, donate and discover classic trails (and open new ones) by supporting the local nonprofits that care for these crucial corridors.

For generations, Toyota has built durable legends destined for greatness. Whether you’re conquering off-road trails, hauling heavy loads,Ìę or seeking the versatility of an SUV, there’s that’s just right for you.

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In of The Road Less Eaten, chef and host Biju Thomas visits Utah’s Heber Valley, an unassuming corner of the western U.S. that has seen an explosion in its food scene over the course of the last ten years. While in the Heber Valley, Thomas spends the majority of his time in Midway, Utah, a town on the Eastern flank of the Wasatch Mountains, about an hour away from Salt Lake City and a stone’s throw from Park City.

Thomas tells viewers that local farming and great ingredients have made the Heber Valley a quiet food mecca with a vibrant culinary scene that can hold its own against other, more well-known food destinations. With farms and ranches dotting the landscape, and local bakeries and restaurants that understand the value of locally sourced ingredients, the Heber Valley is filled with dining destinations for visitors to explore after a day hitting the slopes or adventuring in the outdoors.

 

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Hawk and Sparrow Bakery

Thomas starts his journey through the Heber Valley food scene at , which is an organic, artisan bakery located in baker Andrew Berthrong’s home garage in Midway, Utah, that Thomas says produces some of the best bread in Utah. Hawk and Sparrow is known for its sourdough, which is a staple in Heber Valley restaurants that aim to showcase local ingredients and artisan products. Thomas describes Berthrong, a former academic, as “one of the best bakers in the country.”

Viewers watch as Thomas and Berthrong sample the popular sourdough, which takes a multi-day process to create. As they slather the bread with butter, Thomas remarks on the beauty and simplicity of freshly baked bread that’s made with just a few ingredients because it really has nothing to get in the way of its flavor.

 

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Lola’s Street Kitchen

From Hawk and Sparrow, Thomas ventures onto , a former food truck that now has a brick-and-mortar location in Midway, Utah. Owned and operated by David and Mandy Medina, Lola’s makes all of their own breads, buns, and pitas in addition to using some of the sourdough from Hawk and Sparrow. The Medinas envisioned the restaurant as showcasing the best of American street food, all made from scratch.

One of the highlights of Thomas’ visit to Lola’s includes a rundown of their three most popular items: the fried chicken sandwich on freshly baked potato roll, lamb gyro on handmade pita, and a portobello truffle melt on Hawk and Sparrow’s sourdough. Thomas describes Lola’s as approachable and affordable with beautiful dishes but without any fussiness or stuffiness.

Heber Valley Artisan Cheese

After his ride on the local “Heber Creeper” train, Thomas takes viewers to the fourth-generation family-owned dairy farm and shop. Thomas describes the dairy—and its owner and operator Russ Kohler—as embodying the ethics of the region. At Heber Valley Artisan Cheese, they do it all; they grow the hay that feeds the cows, and they raise the herd that produces the milk that turns into some of the world’s finest cheese.

And Thomas isn’t exaggerating. Heber Valley Artisan Cheese won a gold medal at the World Cheese Awards for its Lemon Sage Cheddar, and its Wasatch Back Jack is a National Champion. A highlight for Thomas comes when he gets to taste both prize winners. As he samples the cheddar, Thomas remarks that the cheese is actually “more buttery than cheesy,” which Kohler explains is a result of the cows’ diet. Because corn doesn’t grow at elevation, the Heber Valley Artisan Cheese herd has an alfalfa-based diet. Alfalfa diets create a richer, creamier texture in the cheese.

 

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Midway Mercantile

Chef John Platt then gives Thomas a tour and tasting at his upscale Midway, Utah, eatery . A former teacher and principal, Platt moved to Midway nearly two decades ago, drawn by the Heber Valley’s beauty.

While at Midway Mercantile, Thomas gets to sample their panko-crusted Alaskan Halibut, which is Midway Mercantile’s most popular dish. The fish is panko crusted in yellow curry, served with coconut rice and spinach, and topped with apple chutney. Thomas loves the dish—particularly the apple chutney. Thomas also gets to taste Sandra’s Classic Salad, a salad named after Platt’s wife and composed of greens, herbs, lemon vinaigrette, truffle oil, and grilled Juustoleipa cheese. Juustoleipa is a Finnish bread cheese that really has its flavors come out when grilled.

 

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Ritual Chocolate

Thomas finishes his exploration of the Heber Valley at , where Anna Seear has perfected small-batch, bean-to-bar chocolate from ethically sourced heirloom cacao. Thomas notes that he and Seear actually both started their careers in the Boulder, Colorado, food scene.

After walking through the artisanal process Seear uses to create Ritual’s finely crafted chocolate, Thomas enjoys tasting Ritual’s unique, single-origin drinking chocolates, which are made from half hot water and half chocolate. After drinking both the Madagascar and the Ecuador, Thomas notes the cinnamon-y flavor and richness of the Ecuador, while the Madagascar has a brighter flavor.

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It’s not that I don’t like food. I do. I carry frozen cheesecakes on winter expeditions. They’re caloric and they don’t freeze hard, so you can bite off chunks without chipping your teeth. I once ate the same dead catfish boiled over a fire for three days. Was it good? Absolutely not. I like cardamom, snap peas, and Asian pears. I eat frozen bean burritos. I hate raw tomatoes, a trait I attribute to growing up near a ketchup factory in California. Tomatoes festered on every street corner and stuck to the soles of my flip-flops. They rolled off trucks en route to the factory, then rotted in the sun.

My husband, on the other hand, was raised by an epicurean grandfather, driving hours one-way for frog legs, bouillabasse, a pastry shaped like a bird’s nest. We have twin babies now. He wants them to appreciate good food, so he’s learning to cook. In pursuit of this goal, he discovered the , a remote bed and breakfast in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where superstar chef Lane Regan (formerly Iliana) cooks foraged ingredients for a handful of guests in exclusive weekends that sell out years in advance. This year, my husband’s been helping out at the Inn, building a woodshed and tending colonies of bees. He’s developed a new language, dropping words like “garum” and fermenting wild plums on the top shelf of our closet. In exchange for his work, Lane offered us a slot on a last-minute November weekend—and my husband, excited to share a place he loves, gave the slot to me.

The Inn lies about a mile from two-lane Highway 13 as the crow flies, and 25 miles by unmarked dirt road. Guests caravan. It’s a log cabin with a central parlor that’s half kitchen, adorned with Pendleton blankets, paintings of foxes, and Chef’s three Michelin stars. Tonight’s dinner is not the star of the weekend—that would be Saturday’s 15-course tasting menu—but as guests gather around the three small tables, it’s clearly no less anticipated. I scoot in at the corner table with two couples, dodging a silky lump that reveals itself to be a Shih Tzu named Clemmie. George, a nine-year-old Newfoundland, sprawls like a bear rug by the hearth.

Host Rebecca, a breezy redhead with pigtails and an expression of warm concern, brings dishes of savoy cabbage with pine flower miso and milkweed flower vinegar that have my tablemates gasping. It’s meaty, complex, and—to my inexperienced palate—ineffable. I feel like a phony for eating it without the knowledge to name the tastes. Like wild mushrooms, I think, tentative even in my mind—and when a neighbor mentions the same, I feel a sprig of confidence. By the bread course, a thick warm sourdough with tangy goat milk butter and honey, I find myself relaxing. The trout in herb gribiche is fleshy and tastes like lake in the best way, and dessert—a profiterole with spruce ice cream and chaga cookie top that cracks into patches like the spots on an amanita—offers an almost musical experience of bliss.

By the time guests sigh and lean back, the woods outside the windows are black. The nearest neighbors are more than a howl’s reach away. Rebecca did a 12-day silent retreat “in order to be able to work here—because one struggles with one’s mind,” she remarks of the Inn’s isolation, gliding to the table with postprandial tea. A guest inquires if she has any decaf coffee. “No the fuck we do not,” she says.

I sleep outside by choice, full-bellied in two sleeping bags, and wake to daylight in a shell of ice.

By first breakfast—banana-walnut bread with salt and butter—the guests are familiar with each other. They’re midwestern, foodies, adventurous—two retired couples, a pair of restaurant owners, and a data scientist and millennial geriatrician from Madison, Wisconsin. Chef Lane bustles in the kitchen, answering questions and offering guidance on the wood-fired sauna. They’re slim and soft-spoken, with a teal moth tattooed on their neck, wings filling the open collar of their tucked-in wool flannel. In a minute they stir, scoop, plate, taste, give hiking suggestions, and brush Shih Tzu Clemmie’s eyebrows up with their hand, securing them with plastic barrettes. Second breakfast is tacos on green tortillas, tinged with weeds picked that week.

The day is food and leisure; some folks wander to the Sturgeon River, descending a trailless slope, while others knit, hike, or read. I sit briefly in the loft, overhearing snippets of conversation. “One time I got stung by a hornet on my butt cheek and [redacted] sucked all the venom out of me,” someone remarks. “That was the most romantic thing he’s ever done.” Later, thoughtful: “My tapeworm’s the only one who understands me.”

When guests stay too long in the sauna, Lane worries. “Do you think they passed out?” they murmur. “Maybe they’re cooking.”

Lane says that guests at Milkweed fall on a spectrum: on one extreme, foodies who rarely step outdoors, and at the other, outdoorsfolk who—like myself—“have never even had a tasting menu.” It’s Milkweed that brings them together.

As an adventurer, I’m often in the position of enticing people outside, and it can be a hard sell. Not because the highs aren’t great, but because folks fear the lows: bugs, cold, bears, isolation, toilet paper made of leaves. And yet here’s Milkweed, pulling magic: calling new people into the Northwoods, not in spite of discomfort, but for pursuit of pleasure alone.

Lunch starts with a salad of fennel and carrot two ways (shaved raw, and blanched and marinated in lemon), moose garum and egg white aminos with marinated white beans and garnished with chamomile. The flavor is multisensory, euphoric; I feel it in my arms. Something’s sweet on my tongue, and tart on the sides of my mouth, and there’s a tinge of smoke, too, which surprises me.

“We fed the moose firewood,” says cooking resident Jade. She’s joking, but she might as well not be, because I swear it’s all there: the soil, the rain, the antlers, the trees. And when it hits me, I almost laugh from the revelation: foraged food isn’t just about bringing people into wildness. It’s about bringing wildness into our very mouths.

We can—we do—have nature inside us, even in the most conservative sense of the word: wilderness as nonhuman, nature as beyond control. What’s a tapeworm if not a reminder that our bodies are ecosystems, too? But this place, this cooking, this food—it turns fear into pleasure. Savoring a wild lion’s mane mushroom is no less an engagement with wildness than spotting one in the woods, and it is—in a tactile way—more accessible to most.

I’m not proud to realize that my lack of engagement with good food was, in minuscule part, because I thought myself above it. Because, while I savor comfort, I’ve always prided myself on enduring its lack, and I have in me some Puritan sense that suffering for a goal gives you greater pride. I have struggled in my life to let myself be purely content, and maybe food represents that: it turns a need into a gift. I’ve spent decades chasing wilderness, when it could always be right here: on my plate, in my mouth, in the animal body that I am.

The post How Milkweed Inn Challenged My Idea of Food appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

I used to have a recurring dream in which I’m sitting on my mat awaiting instructions from a panel of my yoga teachers. I’m at an Iyengar yoga assessment, for which I’m completely unprepared. And I am terrified. After what seems like an eternity, they tell me my task: I’m to carve a Thanksgiving turkey right there on my mat using the props in front of me—a plastic fork and knife.

It’s possible that I had some anxiety about cooking holiday dinner.

From My Fondest Memory to the Fear of Failure

I can still smell my mother’s kitchen on Thanksgiving morning. The fragrance of her homemade pies mixed with the aroma of the turkey roasting in the oven created an air of anticipation that could be felt throughout the house. My sister and I would watch the Thanksgiving Day parade on TV in our pajamas and would periodically be called into the kitchen to help my mother stir a pot or lick a bowl. The whole day was spent waiting for the moment we were called to the table. By the time dinner was ready, we were practically giddy as we loaded our plates with my mother’s delicious food in the most anticipated meal of the year.

Now that the torch of cooking the family’s holiday dinner has passed to me, my anticipation has morphed into recurring anxiety about living up to my memory of all those Thanksgivings past. One year, the turkey wasn’t fully cooked, the side dishes were cold, and I sat at the table feeling totally defeated. The pressure to replicate the magic of my childhood memories combined with the fear of failing turns out to be the perfect recipe for a really bad time.

Whether in the kitchen or on the yoga mat, fear is like a big bucket of ice dumped on the spark of adventure. Fear leaves us either too much in our own heads to access our inherent creativity and intuition—or so paralyzed that we convince ourselves we’re not even capable of trying. Fear seduces us into a place of complacency, inviting us to avoid what scares us in favor of dwelling in the comfort of our familiar beliefs. Fear prevents us from making mistakes and gaining the kind of wisdom that only comes from taking risks.

How Yoga Transformed My Holiday Stress

Patanjali’s classic text, the , offers several tools to help manage fear. Foremost among them are the principles of practice and . Practice, as outlined in Sutra 1.14, includes three aspects: We must practice for a long time, without break, and in all earnestness. This last one means we have to believe what we’re practicing is actually possible.

Sutras 1.15 and 1.16 describe detachment, which essentially means that our identities are not dependent on our successes or failures. This knowledge leads to freedom and a very real connection to the .

Practicing—continuously showing up in the face of real or potential failure—is trusting that the process is the goal. Ultimately, it’s the intention behind my cooking, the effort I’ve devoted to the meal, and the heart I’ve poured into each dish that will make the meal a success.

Even a botched attempt at cooking Thanksgiving dinner is an opportunity to practice detachment. One year, my apple pie fell apart and I had no backup plan and a table full of guests awaiting dessert. I had to let go of my original plan and quickly adapt to the new situation. So I decided to scoop out the apple filling and spoon it over some vanilla ice cream. No one knew the difference; in fact, it was a huge hit!

It’s often when things have fallen apart that I’ve realized just how much I limited myself with my own expectations. ÌęIt’s often in those moments that you get to know your own resilience and experience a true connection to the moment. Opening myself up to life often results in something greater than I could have imagined. And some of my best memories are of times when nothing went according to plan—when I was forced to surrender.

How to Make Thanksgiving Less Stressful

Once I remembered that the truth of who I am does not depend on my producing a flawless meal, I felt more at ease. Now I know how to overcome holiday stress because I’ve realized the ways that being in the kitchen cooking dinner is a lot like showing up on the yoga mat.

1. Connect With Your Inner State

Bring your yoga practice into the kitchen by tuning into how you feel as you create your Thanksgiving menu. Anxiety, doubt, and fear can all be felt in the body and are signs that you need to reevaluate your approach. Focus your attention on the process of executing what you can manage to the best of your abilities.

Taking risks in the kitchen is about listening to the motivations that drive your efforts. If I’m considering a challenging recipe, such as an apple pie with pastry made from scratch, and I can feel myself getting excited about the process, I go for it. I know that no matter how it turns out, it will have been worth it because it was my commitment to the adventure, not the result, that inspired me to be daring in the first place.

If, on the other hand, I stare at the recipe with a sense of dread or expectation, or if I’m hoping that the finished product will prove something to myself or to others, then I know that no matter how it turns out, I will not enjoy the fruits of my efforts.

2. Focus on the Journey—Not the Outcome

When you can’t do a challenging pose in yoga, the practice is to focus on and appreciate what you can do. Flailing toward an end result will get you nowhere. And if you somehow arrive at the “end goal” by doing so, you will have missed the point because you weren’t connected to yourself in the process.

It matters how you feel during a yoga practice—not what you look like. Cooking is the same: A dish’s value lies in how it was created.

3. You’re Allowed to Change Your Mind

Let go of your expectation that you need to whip up elaborate food just because it’s Thanksgiving. Really. This mindset can free you from the pitfalls of self-inflicted suffering.

It’s perfectly okay to opt out of a challenging recipe if it doesn’t feel right. I’ve learned over the years to ease up on myself by swapping out difficult, time-consuming recipes for simple, foolproof ones, such as incredible, crispy roasted brussel sprouts with maple syrup and balsamic vinegar. (They take about five minutes to prepare before I pop them in the oven.)

4. Follow Your Intuition

Cooking, like yoga, is about connecting to yourself in the moment. Pose cues such as “stand equally on all four corners of your feet” are useful only when you can feel them in your own body. Similarly, a recipe is only a guideline. Great cooking happens when you listen to your gut, trust your instincts, and make the recipe your own. Follow the instructions as a starting point, but allow yourself to experiment, play, and have fun.

I’m not nervous anymore because now I know how to make Thanksgiving less stressful. No matter how the meal turns out, the people who matter most in my life will celebrate the love and effort I put into our shared experience. What I’ll remember most is the attitude I chose to bring to the kitchen and the wisdom I’ll gain from letting go.

This article has been updated. Originally published October 2, 2013.

The post Making Thanksgiving Dinner Doesn’t Have to Be Stressful. Here’s What You Need to Know. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

At a Glance

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Coba’s Coffee- and Tea-Infused Chocolate Bars

These little bars pack a perk-up punch when you need it. Pitched as a trail-ready alternative to brewed coffee or tea, I find the espresso and chai flavors particularly enjoyable in lieu of an afternoon coffee-al-desko. Each œ ounce bar of infused white chocolate contains about the same caffeine as a cup of coffee, and the mind-sharpening boost kicks in without the jitters.

TipTop Proper Cocktails’ Whiskey Box and Gin Box

Hosting a motley crew this Christmas, where half the party is Cali sober and the other half is more, ahem, old fashioned? Look no further than TipTop’s boxes of cocktails, organized by base spirit and delivered in giftable 18-packs, plenty to host a happy hour or keep a home bar stocked with options. We give bonus points for their pocket-sized cans, perfect for chairlift nips.

Spicewalla 18-Pack Kitchen Essentials

Founded by James Beard Award-winning Asheville chef Meherwan Irani, Spicewalla’s collection of foundational seasonings include great-quality kitchen workhorses like dried and ground chiles, crushed herbs, and baking spices. The variety of flavors are sealed inside small stay-fresh tins that stack neatly in a cabinet or bounce merrily in a backpack without spilling.

Yeti 6-oz. Stackable Mugs

The cutest tea party I’ve ever attended involved two toddlers, a chilly afternoon outside, and these mini Yeti mugs perfect for little hands. They’ve become my go-to gift for the under-5 crowd. And while the tea at that particular party was lukewarm, the mugs—like all of Yeti’s–are just as effective at keeping small pours of grown-up beverages ripping hot (like espresso) or bracingly cold (like martinis). Just don’t forget to “Cheers!”

Meater Pro Duo

Our favorite meat thermometer is now twice as nice with the introduction of MEATER’s Pro Duo. The rechargeable WiFi-enabled base connects two super accurate probes to an app that keeps you informed about everything that’s cooking. Simultaneously use one on the grill and the other in the oven for a seamless and perfectly executed holiday meal.

New West Knifeworks 7” Teton Edge Santoku

New West is possibly the best knife manufacturer in America, and their 7” santoku knife serves as my go-to for making dinner every night. Its Goldilocks size and chef-knife-oomph makes it the perfect tool for almost every job. The handles come in nine color options to match your kitchen (or personality), and the Teton range etched into the blade provides both form and function. Razor sharp out of the box, New West’s knives come with free personalization and lifetime free sharpening. This is the knife I’ve told a dozen friends to register for their wedding or give as a milestone gift, and now I’m telling you, too.

The post Love to Cook? Add These Gifts to Your Holiday Wish List. appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

For the last decade, I’ve been brining my Thanksgiving turkeys in champagne. The technique has produced delicious, consistent results from campsites in Big Sur, California, and Baja, Mexico—and in everything from frying oil to pellet grills to standard home ovens. To prove champagne’s efficacy in producing a juicy, tender bird, I tested a champagne brine against a typical water-based one.

Last weekend, I drove over to our local supermarket in Bozeman, Montana, and picked up two of their cheapest $2.99-a-pound turkeys, as close in weight to each other as I could find. I wanted to design this experiment I wanted to design this experiment in a way that controlled for as many variables as possible and set up a worst-case scenario, in which the brine would be the only flavor factor in the roasted turkey.

Turkey is a difficult bird to cook. Not only are turkeys large—each of the birds I bought was 14 pounds—but they also contain both light and dark meat. Tender, more exposed meat in the breast will cook faster than the tougher, tucked-away meat in the legs and thighs, which creates a significant risk of overcooking the white meat while you wait for the dark stuff to come up to temperature. That dries out the breasts and results in the chewy, flavorless bites of turkey we’ve all come to associate with Thanksgiving.

Why Brine a Turkey?

Salt breaks down the proteins in meat, making the textureÌęmore tender. At the same time, a brine can help infuse a bird with flavor, and adding liquids can help keep it moist while cooking.

There areÌętwo main methods of brining a turkey: wet and dry.

A dry brine involves rubbing the outside and cavity of a turkey with kosher salt, dried herbs, and spices. ItÌędraws moisture out of the meat, where it mixes with the salt, which is then transported back into the meat as the moisture is reabsorbed from the surface. Dry brining. produces a crispy skin and takes less effort than a wet brine, but it also struggles to fully infuse all parts of a big turkey with moisture and flavor.

To make a wet brine, dissolve kosher salt in boiling water, along with fresh aromatics like fruit peels, garlic, and herbs. You then submerge the turkey in the liquid at room temperature, and and place it in the refrigerator or outdoors if it’s cold enough for anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. This bath permeates all parts of the meat with salt, breaking down those proteins and infusing flavor throughout the turkey. Pat the bird dry and let it drain, then roast. Don’t worry: lots of this liquid remains present during the cook, adding steam and the additional moisture and flavor it brings to an otherwise dry oven or grill.

How Does Champagne Affect a Turkey?

Brining a turkey in champagneÌędoes three things. Alcohol helps tenderize meat by breaking down collagen. Champagne’s mild fruit flavors also infuse the meat, pairing well with turkey itself along with the herbs, vegetables, and stuffing you use for seasoning and sides. Plus, the champagneÌęhelps create flavorful drippings you can use to make a better gravy. Finally, champagne is acidic. That acid is yet another tenderizer that leads to a flavorful roast turkey.

There’s no reason to use anything other than the cheapest champagne you can find. The less subtle flavors and greater acidity will actually work better than the nice stuff. I used AndrĂ©ÌęBrut simply because, at $7.39 a bottle, it was the most affordable stuff on the shelves at my grocery store. AndrĂ© comes from California and not the champagne region of France and cannot technically be called champagne, it does the job just fine.

How Do You Wet Brine a Turkey?

First, make sure you don’t buy a pre-brined turkey. This should be prominently labeled on the packaging, or is something you should ask your butcher about if you’re buying a bird straight from a meat counter. The words, “kosher,” “enhanced,” or self-basting,” can also be understood to mean pre-brined.

You can find pre-made brining kits for turkeys which contain measured portions of salts, spices, and herbs that you just add to boiling water. But fresh ingredients are always going to taste better, and making your own brine allows you to to tailor it to your own unique tastes.

The most important step is dissolving salt in water. To do that, you just need to start with a ratio of four parts of water to one part kosher salt. This will give us a base brine to which we can add our champagne or water later. Bring that water to a boil, pour in the salt, let it return to a boil, then turn the heat off and let the solution cool to room temperature. You don’t want to submerge a bird in hot water; doing so can lead to bacteria growth.

For this taste test, I kept the brine simple. To that base brine, I just added orange and lemon peels, garlic cloves, peppercorns, and some chopped-up sage and bay leafs. Once that’d cooled, I placed the turkeys in a brining bag, rested them in their foil roasting trays to support the weight and catch any leaks, then poured additional water on one turkey and champagne over the other until each was fully submerged. When you add enough water (or champagne) to fully submerge the turkeys and further dilute your brine, you should end with a salt-to-water ratio of around 1:16.

The only variable here is that one turkey was submerged in brine and water, and the other was submerged in brine and champagne. It took five bottles of champagne to fully submerge one of the turkeys. I simply put the other bird under a cold kitchen sink tap in its brining bag, and didn’t measure how much water it took to fully cover it.

You can (and should!) add more stuff to your brine. Ingredients from Worcestershire sauce to chicken broth, herbs, and spices are all common, and will all add flavor to your end result. Again, I tried to keep this cook as simple as possible so nothing else was working to mask the effect of the different liquids.

What Cooking Methods Work with a Champagne Brine?

The answer to that is simple: Every method I’ve tried works well with a champagne brine. When I prepare a turkey in camp, I prefer to use a propane-fueled fryer, simply because it’s the easiest thing to transport and use outdoors. If you’re frying, just take extra care to fully dry the bird, inside and out, before sticking it in the hot oil. The wet brine should help ensure the turkey is defrosted, and can be transported to a campsite or patio in a small cooler or lidded five-gallon bucket.

At home, I prefer to use a pellet grill due to the controlled level of moisture present in quality wood pellets. But I’ve also cooked champagne-brined turkey on my Big Green Egg using lump charcoal with excellent results.

For this cook, with the goal of testing champagne’s effectiveness in the worst possible circumstances, I simply used the ovens in my kitchen. I pre-heated both ovens to 350 degreesÌęFahrenheitÌę(without any convection), filled the cavities with wedges of the leftover fruit, brushed a stick of melted butter over the top of each, and baked them until done.

Prior to 2008, the USDA recommended cooking turkeys until a thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the thigh reached 180 degrees Fahrenheit. But that recommendation was updated in 2008 to 165 degrees. That lower temperature should result in a moister bird, but I cooked both turkeys through to 180 degrees to account for a worst-case scenario.

The mad scientist in me was pleased when the probes in both birds registered 180 degrees at the exact same time. That meant both ovens were heating consistently with each other,Ìęan indication that I’d managed to remove one more variable from the result.

Can a Champagne Brine Really Produce a Juicier Bird?

I pulled the turkeys out of the oven, and rested them on my stove top for 15 minutes before carving. One difference was immediately apparent: the skin on the water-brined bird was noticeably crisper, and more deeply browned. My theory there is that the champagne broke down the skin on its bird that much more. While irrelevant toÌęflavor, this did represent less than ideal presentation. If oven cooking a champagne-brined bird, it may be a good idea to add some honey to the melted butter before you brush it on the bird, which should help its skin crisp up and look a little darker.

But that one downside disappeared as soon as I sliced into the breasts. There, the water-brined bird displayed noticeably more separation between muscle fibersÌęand was visibly less juicy. Biting into that water-brined bird took more effort, and the bite contained less flavor.

In contrast, the champagne-brined turkey was visibly juicy, with no separation between muscle fibers. The bite was tender, and was noticeably moreÌęflavorful.

While the dark meat in both birds was similar in appearance, the tenderness and flavor was again far superior on the champagne-brined turkey.

I ended up throwing out the water-brined turkey, but carved and saved the champagne-brined one. I’ll make a turkey sandwich for lunch after finishing this article. Even with such a basic cooking method, in which no additional flavoring from herbs or spices was added, the champagne brine produced a turkey I’d be happy serving to dinner guests. Its level of tenderness was as good as I expect from better equipment and more elaborate recipes, and its nice, but somewhat bland flavor could have been masked with a good gravy.

Can You Serve a Champagne-Brined Turkey to Children?

As with other cooking methods that include wine, beer, cider, or liquor, the alcohol cooks off with temperature and time. There should be no alcohol content remaining in the final dish.

Can You Taste the Champagne?

Flavor-wise, there were some faint notes of fruitiness in the meat of the champagne-brined turkey that weren’t present in the water-brined one. But that could be explained as much by the champagne better transporting the flavor of the orange and lemon peels into the juicier meat as it could by anything remaining of the booze. I certainly couldn’t detect any strong flavor of champagne or alcohol.

By spending $37 on champagne, I meaningfully increased the quality of my Thanksgiving turkey—without relying on my preferred cooking methods or added seasoning. Consider a champagne brine as an additional step to your favorite recipe. Paired with a superior cooking method like grilling or frying, a champagne-brine can help elevate your results to new levels.

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In the of The Road Less Eaten,Ìęseason two, chef, author, and show host, Biju Thomas, visits the south shore of Lake Tahoe, California. He and snowboarder Hannah Teter explore the lake by boat and clear kayak before Thomas tries some of the best food this outdoorsy paradise has to offer.

Here are the highlights of Thomas’s stops on The Road Less Eaten: Lake Tahoe.

Azul Latin Kitchen

blends South and Central American cuisine with influences from all over the world, includingÌęThailand and India. The South Tahoe restaurant is also known for its fresh-squeezed margaritas.

In the show, Thomas works with chef and manager Jeff McWilliams to cook up some steak fajitas, complete with vegetables and a secret sauce. The secret sauce, McWilliams shares, is a blend of tamari, Worcester sauce, lime juice, and a mix of spices. Thomas also samples a dish called tacos three ways that features a fish taco made up of battered cod with lemon and pickled red onion. Then, there’s the Thai curry taco, which consists of slow-cooked chicken with red curry, pickled mango, and candied jalapeños and Fresnos. The dish also comes with a vegetarian option: a sweet potato and black bean taco with chipotle slaw.

Toulouse

Next, Thomas heads to , a CajunÌęrestaurant also located on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. It was founded by four friends who met on Toulouse Street in New Orleans more than 30 years ago. The friends chose Lake Tahoe because many of them are big skiers and they wanted to be closer to the mountains.

Thomas samples a variety of dishes during his visit, including the house salad, shrimp and grits with mushrooms and tasso ham, and the blackened ahi tuna, which gets a kick from the Japanese seasoning yuzu kosho. Many items on the menu are made from local and sustainable ingredients.

Desolation Hotel, Maggie’s

Named for the nearby Desolation Wilderness, the micro hotel is themed around outdoor exploration. Maggie’s, the connected restaurant, is named after Maggie McPeaks, one of the first women to explore the Sierra mountains. The staff of uses seasonal ingredients, which keeps the menu fresh and ever-evolving.

±őČÔÌęThe Road Less Eaten,ÌęThomas tries the New York strip, which comes with a side of asparagus stuffed with goat cheese and fondant potatoes. Also on the menu: the Sacramento rack of lamb, with crispy, roasted potatoes and roasted baby carrots with an orange glaze. Thomas also samples the Spanish octopus with a cucumber salad and edible orchid.

Elements Eatery and Bar

For breakfast, Thomas visits , a newer restaurant in the area. Elements infuses diner classics with a Latin flavor. Thomas samples the eggs Benedict, with marinated adobo-style pork, house-mashed avocado, and an heirloom tomato on charred English muffins, served with lard-fried tater tots. The entire dish is topped with their hollandaise sauce, which has an acidic base of cutÌęgreen salsa.

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At the end of August I get the call. “The apricots are ready,” my mom says excitedly. I grab a few buckets, jump in my car, and drive the 100 or so miles from my home in Dillon, Colorado, to her place in Carbondale. We pile into her Subaru and wind a bit higher into the slopes above the Roaring Fork Valley. We wave as we pass our friends’ house, then park below their orchard, a century-old stand of apricot trees that sits at 6,500 feet.

The 50 trees here are old, and time has gnarled their branches. A weathered wooden ladder reaches into the canopy; the perfumed air reminds us of the jam making and baking that will (happily) occupy our time in the week ahead.

These days, grocery stores sell firm apricots the size of golf balls, but the soft, ripe fruit in these trees are the diameter of a quarter. It takes a while to fill a bucket, but the intense flavors are worth it. Other scavengers are around—birds, deer, even bears—and we give them plenty of space.

This orchard, which contains several apricot varieties, is believed to date back to 1915, and being here makes me think about the people who planted it, and what the trees have endured. Surely, there have been periods of extended drought and extreme cold, and yet, year after year, they continue to bring forth treasures.

“Fruit trees watch several generations go by,” says Michael Thompson, who, along with Jerome Osentowski, cofounded an organization called the , a nonprofit that maps and catalogs ancient specimens like these all over the valley.

Great old trees are not unique to Colorado or the West, of course. They dot the nation, languishing in plain sight in forgotten corners of cities and towns, and across rolling farmland. But in recent years—spurred by a renewed interest in things with rich stories and heritage behind them—there’s been a movement not just to save old trees but to propagate them for the future.

In New York City, Sam Van Aken, an artist turned farmer, planted a permanent heirloom “exhibition” on Governors Island called . The public site opened in 2022; the 102 specimens it comprises are grafted from trees—apricots, apples, pears, persimmons, cherries, and others—that once thrived across the city’s five boroughs. In total, they represent about 400 years of local agriculture.

Although most Americans get by with the fruit they find piled in grocery bins, that represents only the tiniest slice of what once freely bloomed. Take the apple. Our commercial, homogenized food system promotes varieties like the crisp but boring Fuji and Granny Smith because they are easily grown, universally accepted, and hardy enough to transport and store.

“There were once thousands of cultivated apple varieties, and now we’re down to hundreds,” says Vanessa Harmony, a tree propagator and the owner of Colorado Edible Forest in Glenwood Springs, which works in tandem with the Heritage Fruit Tree Project. “There are so many delicious fruits that could be lost if they’re not found,” she says.

That’s the role of organizations like ; Washington State University’s MyFruitTree, which works only with apples; and regional entities like Thompson’s Heritage Fruit Tree Project. Indexing each heirloom’s type, location, approximate age, fruit characteristics, and site history culminates in a written log and map of agricultural diversity. This information helps when experts are grafting clones to ensure that varieties aren’t lost to time.

Like Open Orchard in New York, Harmony, Thompson, and Osentowski have had a hand in creating a research site filled with fruit trees. The parcel, established in 2020, sits within an old orchard in Emma, Colorado, outside Basalt. It’s open to the public and will eventually feature informational placards, so visitors know what they’re looking at. Harmony helps maintain the old trees and the newly planted clones gathered from around the valley. “It’s become a living library for me,” she says.

Observing the trees through the seasons means Harmony can identify desired qualities—whether it’s the best-tasting fruit, tree hardiness, or something else. She can also send leaf samples out for genetic testing to determine exactly what kind of tree she’s dealing with. Sometimes that information yields an entirely new variety—or, rather, one so old that no one around today knew about it.

Thompson enlisted Harmony’s help with his favorite: a grand old apple tree he affectionately calls Mo. It was planted in 1910 and produces what Thompson considers the best apple he’s ever found for pie making. In recent years, this magnificent tree has suffered from blight, and even with thoughtful pruning its future is in question. Harmony has already grafted multiple clones from healthy parts of the tree. Those “Mini Mos”—two of which are planted in Thompson’s daughter’s backyard in Oregon, and two of which are doing well at Harmony’s nursery—are the next generation. “The tree will live on,” he says.

As for the apricots that leave my mom’s and my hands sticky with juice, our friends have largely let nature take its course. In the thirtyish years they have owned the property, Susy Ellison says they’ve had the orchard pruned only a couple of times. The trees, she tells me, seem to like being left alone. “You don’t want to fuss with them too much,” she explains, adding that they’ve been cataloged by the Heritage Fruit Tree Project.

We gather our buckets and load them into the car. As soon as we close the doors, we’re enveloped by the thick and heady scent of apricots. We wave again as we pass the house and drive straight to my mom’s. There’s jam to be made.

Fruit Forward: Interest in Heritage Fruit Has Blossomed

Although the Heritage Fruit Tree Project is specific to Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, there are other organizations doing similar work around the country.

The biggest among these is the Historic Fruit Tree Working Group of North America. The serves as a national database and registry of historic trees and orchards.

Anyone interested in heirloom fruit, especially apples, should sign up for the University of Idaho Heritage Orchard Conference. The free monthly webinars are packed with info on subjects ranging from cider making to tree propagation.

New Yorkers (and those just visiting) can check out Open Orchard on Governors Island, where approximately 100 trees represent the bounty that once grew in the city’s five boroughs.

The and the are based in southwestern and western Colorado, respectively, and focus almost exclusively on apples. Both are intent on saving orchard culture as well as legacy genetics.

Apricot Snack Bars

There are a million and one jam-bar recipes out there, and this is mine—except that I use fresh fruit instead of preserves. The recipe works equally well with fresh and frozen apricots; you can also swap in seasonal berries or peaches and plums. What makes the treats so irresistible is the sweet-tart play of crust and fruit.

Makes about 12 bars

For the Filling:

• 3 cups apricots, halved or
  quartered, depending on size
• ÂŒ cup sugar
• Âœ lemon, juiced
• 2 tsp cornstarch

For the Crust:

• 1Âœ cups flour
• Âœ cup old-fashioned oats
• Âœ cup sugar
• Âœ tsp baking powder
• Âœ tsp salt
• Âœ cup unsalted butter, chilled
• ⅓ cup full-fat plain yogurt

Prepare the filling by combining apricots, sugar, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Set aside and allow to macerate at room temperature. (This step can be done in advance.) If fruit is frozen, allow it to thaw before macerating.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter an eight-inch square baking pan.

Prepare the crust by stirring together flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Cube butter and add to flour mixture. Use your fingers to smear and incorporate the butter into the flour mixture. Add yogurt and stir. The mixture should be dry.

Add about 1œ cups of this crust mixture to the prepared pan, or enough to cover the bottom evenly. Press mixture down with fingers or use the base of a measuring cup until firm. Press a square of parchment paper onto the surface of the crust and then add pie weights (you can also use dried beans or rice). Par-bake for 12 minutes, until set but still soft. Carefully remove parchment and weights.

Stir cornstarch into the apricots. Pour apricot mixture over crust. Sprinkle with remaining crust mixture. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or until top is golden brown and fruit is bubbling. Remove from the oven, allow to cool, then cut into squares.

Amanda M. Faison, a writer and editor based in Colorado, is working on her first cookbook.

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“Scarcity fosters creativity,” said chef Aaron Lopez as he placed a small woven basket on my plate. He removed the lid to reveal two amaranth-leaf-topped squares that looked like artisanal chocolates. I lifted one and took a bite. The crĂšme-brĂ»lĂ©e-like shell shattered, releasing a sweet, fibrous, squash-filled interior laced with subtle heat.

It was late June and Lopez, 38, had invited me to his hometown, the inland Southern California city of El Centro, to preview the menu of his ambitious new restaurant, , which pays homage to the deserts of the American Southwest.

The freshly limewashed walls of the dining room were decorated with tumbleweeds gathered from his mom’s backyard and lined with cacti growing in clay pots. In the kitchen, his fridge and pantry were stocked with esoteric ingredients: a cactus glaze, cold pickled desert mallow shrub, prickly pear sambal, bee pollen shoyu, mesquite sap.

Lopez is on a mission to reimagine forgotten desert foods and ignite a sense of pride and possibility around a cuisine largely defined by chiles. Those bite-size squash snacks were created by borrowing from the Indigenous technique of nixtamalization. Traditionally, the process involves steeping and cooking corn in an alkaline solution, which makes it easier to grind into masa for tortillas. Lopez applies a similar method to this dish, soaking the mixture in the solution for two days before cooking it in agave syrup. He then shapes it into squares that are lightly fried to create a paper-thin, sugary crust, and then tops the whole thing with a sticky, fudge-like sauce made from fermented Hatch chiles and squash-seed shio koji, a Japanese marinade. The result was a perfect combination of sweet and savory.

“What drew me to cooking wasn’t a desire to nourish people,” Lopez told me over kombucha he ages in Sonoran clay pots. “I was fascinated with manipulating ingredients, turning something unexpected or unappetizing into something delicious.”

Before he embarked on a career in the kitchen, he was a sculptor and played bass in a punk band. Perhaps it takes the eyes of an artist to see a landscape of sun-scorched earth, spiky plants, petrified forests, and stinging critters as bountiful.

Since leasing the 43-seat restaurant space in January, Lopez and his wife, June Chee, have been hiking, foraging, and camping across the Southwest, including Joshua Tree National Park, 95 miles north. On his journey, Lopez has learned how Native people thrived in these harsh landscapes, relying on drought- and heat-tolerant crops such as chia, with its fiber-rich seeds, and tepary beans, small brown legumes with a chestnut flavor. “I bring foraging guides on what the Pueblo ate and a point-and-shoot camera, and we pull into secluded areas, pluck some ingredients to taste, and scribble field notes,” he said.

The desert is often a punishing place to harvest from. “It can feel like you’re foraging on the sun,” said Lopez. In summer, it’s not unusual for the couple to head out as early as 3:30 in the morning to beat the heat. They bring along their dogs, Lola and Jupiter, to warn of rattlesnakes and chase away tarantulas. Thick gloves are essential; Lopez estimates that he owns two dozen pairs. “I’m constantly shopping for ones that won’t puncture when I’m de-thorning things like prickly pear,” he said. “I’ve almost become immune to the cuts and stab wounds.”

Lopez never imagined he’d return home. As a teenager, he didn’t see a future in El Centro, a gritty city just over two hours east of San Diego in California’s Imperial Valley and 15 miles north of the Mexican border town of Mexicali. “I ran away from the desert as soon as I could,” he said. After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Los Angeles in 2012, he spent four years cutting his teeth at some of the city’s top restaurants, notably the Michelin-starred Orsa and Winston, where he helped craft the 25-course tasting menu nightly. He then decamped to Honolulu for six years and made a name for himself pushing flavor boundaries at the now shuttered Heiho House, a high-end gastropub.

But it was during his time in the tropics that Lopez started to feel the tug of the desert. “I’d come back to visit and look at the landscape with a different perspective,” he said. On these trips, he’d speak with foragers and members of local Indigenous communities, and those conversations turned him in a new direction. “I realized my heart was in the desert. I want to show the culinary community that our products can compete with those grown in a more hospitable climate.”

Lopez isn’t the only one exploring the potential of resilient desert flora as ingredients. Scientists think that wild desert plants, such as nitrogen-fixing tree legumes and water-efficient succulents, could be critical to sustainable farming in a hotter, more arid world. Ahead of my trip to Ursa, I called Erin Riordan, a conservation research scientist at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum outside Tucson. She told me that many crops grown in the nation’s deserts—wheat and barley, to name two—aren’t naturally designed to survive in xeric climates, because they didn’t originate there. As weather becomes more extreme, such crops will require more water, chemicals, and electricity to grow.

This is of particular concern in Imperial County, which is the state’s driest and only receives two to three inches of rain each year. The county is allocated the single largest share of water from the Colorado River. But that waterway continues to dry up, forcing the valley’s 400-some farmers to drastically reduce their usage for crops like broccoli, lettuce, and wheat.

In 2020, Riordan coauthored a University of Arizona study that evaluated plants traditionally eaten by the Sonoran Desert’s Indigenous cultures, such as cacti and agaves. “These species are already adapted to arid weather, require less water and energy, and produce more reliable yields,” she told me. “They’re also rich in nutrients and antioxidants.”

Like Lopez, Riordan sees deserts not as wastelands but as laboratories for food. She’s involved in a three-year project funded by the USDA that’s working with Arizona farmers to identify hardy, desert-adapted crops, promote climate-smart farming practices, and raise consumer awareness. She believes that chefs like Lopez can help influence the appeal of these foods. “Farmers are wary of switching to desert crops, because they don’t know if they’ll be able to move the product,” she said. “We have to expand the palate of the general public to build a market.”

Back at Ursa, named for the constellation, Lopez excitedly showed me a space he’s building as a kind of lab dedicated to exploring the terroir of the Great Basin and the Mojave, Chihuahuan, and Sonoran Deserts. His inspirations: star Nordic chef RenĂ© Redzepi’s forthcoming Copenhagen food lab and acclaimed Peruvian chef Virgilio Martinez’s research center in Lima, which employs a team of sociologists, botanists, and anthropologists to study native ingredients.

Lopez is in the process of hiring a director to research recipes and techniques used by Indigenous communities. When the lab is completed early next year, the two of them will meet with the restaurant’s network of foragers, then test ingredients and develop recipes that address culinary questions like: What happens when you dehydrate lamb’s-quarters (an edible weed)? Can you age, brine, and lightly cold-smoke barrel cactus seeds to emulate caviar?

Lopez has also sought out wisdom from Indigenous communities. On a series of R&D trips, he met with members of Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Nation, who introduced him to the prized buds of the cholla cactus, which bloom each spring. Lopez cooks the buds sous vide in a mushroom brine, dries them, and then shaves them like truffles to add an earthy punch to dishes.

Ramona Button, the proprietor of Ramona Farms on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, has become Lopez’s fixer for a finely stone-ground, cob-roasted Pima corn known as Č”Čč’i±čČőČč, a dying ingredient he hopes to revitalize. For my meal, he turned it into comforting, nutty grits, topped with sour corn, corn pudding, and fall-off-your-fork corned antelope, his twist on corned beef.

Lopez has adopted the zero-waste mentality long embraced by Native communities, too. He steeps the pods of the ironwood tree, for example, to make tea, and he turns scraps of wild boar into an umami-rich fermented garum, a riff on fish sauce. My favorite example of whole-ingredient cooking was a flan-like dessert crafted from all four parts of mesquite, a food so important to the Tohono O’odham that they once had a lunar-calendar month dedicated to it.

My meal complete, we walked outside to Main Street, where the temperature had soared to a withering 114 degrees. Lopez wanted to show me downtown, although, he admitted, “There isn’t much to see.” (The man at the rental-car counter in San Diego concurred. When I told him I was driving to El Centro, he incredulously asked, “Why?”)

I asked Lopez if he thought his hometown—where one-fifth of the population lives in poverty—is ready for a fine-dining concept. He scratched his scraggly brown beard as his pale blue eyes gazed toward a dilapidated storefront. “We have to be accessible for the locals to trust us,” he replied, and acknowledged that he’s abandoned his original tasting-menu concept. Instead, the restaurant offers a menu of 15 sharable items priced between $6 and $22 per dish, served to a funky soundtrack of disco, hip-hop, and soul.

“Do I have dreams of Michelin coming to our town one day? Sure,” he admitted. “But I care more about making our community—and all desert people—proud of the foods that shape our identity. That’s how I define success. And like most things in the desert, you just need to work a little harder for it.”

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My cousin David is a beer man, the sort of guy who was early on sours, unmoved by IPA mania,Ìęand able to explain the contributions of lactose to the perfect hazy—not to mention his mental map of the best brews worldwide. So, when he visited me in Montana several years ago, I sipped the samples he’d brought from Brooklyn’s boutique breweries and asked what felt like an obvious question. Had he ever thought about brewing his own?

He swallowed a mouthful of gose.

“No,” he said. “I’d never be able to match the quality of craft beer today. So, what’s the point?”

I chewed on that for a few years. My wife, Hilly, tended to agree with David. What was the point? We are living in an era of peak beer. In my town we can bike down to the neighborhood grocery store and buy premium six-packs for $10 from half a dozen independent local breweries. We’ve learned our favorites and venture into other styles as our palates expand. New varieties show up almost weekly. At our favorite tap houses, the options are overwhelming. The quality of this beer is the culmination of 6,000 years of humanity perfecting the craft. I had about as much to contribute to it as I would to the ceiling frescoes of the Italian Renaissance.

The only regular homebrewer I knew was my late father-in-law, who took up the hobby for two reasons: he liked to drink, and he was cheap. His recipe, scrawled out for my brother-in-law on the back of an envelope, called for amber malt, corn sugar, ale yeast, and honey, free to him because he was a beekeeper. He grew hops up the side of the barn and occasionally brewed with garden habaneros for an extra kick. His process was precise, but not exactly fussy. He fermented 15-gallon batches in a plastic garbage can in the bathroom.

And yet, when I think about his beer, I picture him walking into the house after a day’s labor and pulling from the fridge a weathered 32-ounce Tecate bottle that he’d brought back from Mexico to store his homebrew. He’d crack off the cap and pour a glass for anyone in the room who wanted one, the anticipating smile on his face of someone about to jump into water on a hot afternoon. The beer was fizzy, golden in color, crisp and sometimes a little sour. I’m not sure how a connoisseur would rate it, but if a beer is only as good as the people you share it with, then his was the best. Nothing in a can came close.

During the pandemic I learned, along with the rest of the country, to make sourdough bread, a process that began with an oven fire in the middle of my son’s kindergarten Zoom class. I tried again and failed again and then read an awful lot and eventually learned enough so that now, with just four ingredients—water, flour, sourdough, and salt—I bake two airy loaves for our family every week.

My confidence buoyed by that gateway drug of bread baking, I found myself thinking again about beer, my father-in-law, and my cousin David. I knew what David said was true: I would always be able to buy better beer than I could brew. Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking what I had to offer the world of brewing, though, but rather what the world of brewing had to offer me. After all, do you bother planting a garden when you can buy bigger, juicier vegetables at the farmer’s market? Do you ever string together a few chords on the guitar, knowing you’ll never sell out Madison Square Gardens? Surely, I thought, the process adds value to the product.

So this year I made a resolution to learn. The library books I checked out told me any idiot could do it. If you can make a simple soup, you can make beer. I went to our local brew shop and quickly dropped $100 on supplies including a fermenting bucket, some plastic hose, an airlock, sanitizing solution, and a hydrometer. I paid another $50 for two boxes of old swing-top Grolsch bottles that I found on Craigslist. A friend who had dabbled in zymurgy lent me some other equipment and gave me a copy of Charlie Papazian’s bible of beer: “,”Ìęwhose continual refrain to “Relax. Don’t worry. Have a home brew,” calmed my nerves. Papazian is a former schoolteacher and nuclear engineer who counts among his students the co-founder of New Belgium Brewing Company. His book is almost evangelical in tone. The question isn’t why should you brew beer, it seems to shout, but why would you not?

Like bread, beer is fashioned from four main ingredients: water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. (OK, five, if you count love.) For a homebrewer, though, I learned that what goes into your beer is less important than what doesn’t. If you’re not scrupulous in your procedure and cleanliness, you might accidentally introduce too much oxygen into the beer, or bacterial infections, or wild yeast, all of which can produce off-flavors as diverse as “buttered popcorn,” “cheerios,” and “used band-aids,” according to Papazian.ÌęToo much direct sunlight can render a beer “light-struck,” giving it the flavor of skunk urine, a fact that delighted my children, aged 10 and 7, who wondered if skunk urine, exposed to darkness, would take on the flavor of beer. Hazards lurked around every corner. Duly vigilant, I set to work.

My first batch was out of a beer kit I bought for $35. It was a Kölsch. I like Kölsch. It’s light, refreshing, and very un-band-aid-like. The first steps involved steeping a small bag of malted grain in a big pot of water, like a giant cup of tea. Then I added some hops and the malt extract, which nearly bubbled over into a sticky mess on the stovetop. This was my wort (pronounced wert), a cool new word I planned to use as often as possible. It boiled for an hour, giving our house the steamy, industrial smells of a brewery.

When the batch was almost done, I added a clarifying agent called Irish moss, and more hops for aroma. Then I cooled it, a long process involving an ice bath in our sink. When it was about 68 degrees, I poured it into my five-gallon fermentation bucket and pitched the yeast (cool new verb, check). I attached the airlock to the rubber stopper on the lid, and slid the whole thing into the closet, next to our vacuum cleaner. Within 48 hours I was thrilled to see bubbling in the airlock, proof that the yeast was alive and metabolizing the malt sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. I was on my way. Two weeks later, I siphoned it into bottles with a bit of corn sugar for carbonation, and two weeks after that, I gave it a taste. It was
.mediocre. It was much darker than a Kölsch should be, and had a funny aftertaste. Hilly didn’t love it, meaning it was up to me to finish off 37 bottles.

If you’re wondering, yes, 37 bottles take up a lot of space. So does all the other gear. Brew days are time-intensive, often stressful experiences that involve me banging around the house, cleaning buckets and pans in the bathtub and making a mess of our counters with bags of malt extract and packages of hops. Between batches,Ìęmy equipment takes up a not insignificant corner of our garage. I’ve taken to storing the bottles in two giant Styrofoam boxes in my kids’ room, next to a basket of stuffed animals on top of their dresser.

The hobby is mentally intrusive, too. Brewing beer made my self-doubt soar to new heights. I’ve started to worry in words I didn’t even know before. Have I adequately sparged my mash? Has my yeast flocculated? Is my beer properly attenuated? What should I do with the “trub” (troob), that inch-thick layer of yeast sediment at the bottom of the fermenter?

My head swirled late into the night. Call it the brewer’s burden. I’d lie awake, staring at the ceiling. “What are you thinking about?” Hilly would probe.

“Oh, nothing,” I’d say. “I just can’t decide if I should dry hop in secondary.”

Or, sighing in despair after a bad batch had to be poured down the drain: “I just had invested so much time and hope into it.”

“Well, you don’t learn much when everything goes right,” Hilly said cheerfully.

I rolled over, pointedly.

Often, my worries were well-founded. When I over-boiled some corn sugar in a batch of MĂ€rzen, I imbued the wort with the flavor of burnt toast. A quick chemistry lesson on the internet taught me the culprit was a process called the Maillard reaction. The beer was undrinkable. A total loss. But, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. When I moved on to a hop-heavy IPA, it came in below my expected alcohol content, which I calculate by measuring the change in density before and after fermentation. But the flavor of the beer was excellent; I’d be happy if I paid good money for it, which, in fact, I did. Next, I brewed a cream ale with flaked oats and cracked corn. The result was crisp and refreshing—the perfect summer backyard beer.

The beers I’m brewing aren’t perfect. They likely never will be. But they’re getting better. They might be getting cheaper, too. After my initial investment, I have what I need in equipment. I’m still using malt extract to brew, and with these recipes the beer costs about the same as it would at the store. When I muster up the courage to try an all-grain batch, it will get a lot less expensive. I still have much to learn, but I have the feeling that I’m going somewhere. Things are looking up. I have even felt a measure of pride in my handiwork.

What’s more, my beer isÌęenvironmentally friendly, in that it’s not being shipped anywhere farther than a friend’s house, and I’m reusing my bottles. It has health benefits, too. A bottle of homebrew has much more suspended yeast than commercial beer. Yeast is rich in vitamin B complex, which helps us metabolize food and maintain fluid levels. This may be why so many homebrewers say they get less of a hangover drinking their brews. So there. Brewing your own beer is better for the earth, and better for your body.

Homebrewing has taught me about physics, biology, math, chemistry, and, yes, beer. It’s also provided this bit of wisdom: if you want your life to expand, it usually has to get more complicated first. I think it’s good for my kids to watch me stumble through learning a new skill, too. Brew days in our house are a family affair. Hilly, an artist, carved a hip woodcut logo for what she thought should be my brand name: Tall Hop. (DM me for merch.) Our seven-year-old, Julian, controls the tap of our fermenter on bottling day and is also chief bottle organizer. Our oldest, Theo, loves the pop when he opens the swing-top bottles, and says things like, “Whoa, look at the head on that.” Both boys are my main morale boosters, too. My first batch was barely bottled before they were telling me I should start a brewery, and that they’d decided to save their lemonade stand money until they could contribute $100 toward my capital. My very own angel investors.

By now, the hobby has taken on its own rhythm in our house. I’m brewing about a batch every month. And it’s easily one of the best parts of the day when Hilly gets home from work, I close my computer and we crack open a cold bottle from the fridge, pour it between two frosted glasses, and play a game of cribbage, just like my father-in-law used to do. At these moments, neither of us is thinking about how much it cost or how long it took. It just feels like life well-spent.

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