Stouts and stews. Wheat beers and mussels. Lambics and desserts.
They’re all great matches, not just as beer-food pairings, but also within the dish itself.
Beer’s malty (sweet) and hoppy (bitter) flavors can complement food at the table, yes, but also in the kitchen. Beers can be used in marinades, stocks, salad dressings and even reduced sauces for rich desserts.
“One of the things people think is that cooking with beer came around with the rise of brewpubs,” said Lucy Saunders, author of “Cooking with Beer,” the upcoming “Grilling with Beer” due out in June, and the beercook.com and grillingwithbeer.com Web sites. “Wrong. It has been around a long time.” And, mostly in “the domain of home cooks, not restaurants.”
Winter is the perfect time to experiment with hearty or complex beers in the kitchen. The right brew can add new layers of flavor or help draw out existing flavors, such as brown ale in stews (the caramelly sweetness can bring together the heartiness of the root vegetables with the richness of the meat) or white ales with mussels (the citrus flavor slightly rounds out the brininess of the mussels without overwhelming it).
To start, look for matches between the beer type and the other ingredients, said Saunders, who has created beer-flavored recipes ranging from marinated mushrooms to ice cream.
“There is a huge range of flavors in the styles of beers,” she said. “You can wind up with very different flavors. But you want a balance and harmonious flavors.”
“It’s like wine,” said Brian Marin, chef/owner of the Beer Bistro in Toronto, which uses beer as an component of nearly every dish served. “There’s 32 different styles of beer and each style lends itself to something different.”
Marin uses oatmeal stouts in his pizza dough, makes wasabi with Belgian white ales, rolls maki featuring rice cooked in pilsner, cures salmon in white ales before it’s smoked, and even brines bacon in beer for a week.
His recipes don’t require a lot of complex steps, he said, just a little experimentation.
“It can start with picking the main ingredient, or [picking] the beer,” he said. For example, when trying to come up with a beer-based salad dressing, “you take five vinegars and take the beer and sample the vinegars until you find one that works really, really well.”
And if the salad dressing works, “there’s not the acidity problem with the salad at the beginning of a course, where [the dressing] wipes out the palate,” Marin noted.
Choosing a brew
Saunders recommends starting by finding a beer you like, then thinking of a recipe that would be a good match.
Start by substituting a little beer in some recipes for a more common component, such as broth or vinegar.
“If it tastes good when you drink it, it’s good to cook with,” said Michael Roper, owner of Hopleaf Bar, which specializes in Belgian beer and food, and where beer makes its way into some dishes.
However, quality isn’t the only thing to worry about. Cooks also should be careful which beer styles they choose. Sweeter, maltier beers can work great as marinades, braising agents or stocks. But hoppy beers–great as palate cleansers–are very tough to cook with.
“It takes a while for hop bitterness to break down in the cooking process,” said Garrett Oliver, author of “The Brewmaster’s Table” and brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery in New York. “If you have a lot of bitter beer, unless you simmer it for a long, long time, it will remain intact in the dish.
Because of the bitterness, Roper doesn’t recommend cooking with overly hoppy beers. But Oliver said you can use somewhat bitter beers as an ingredient; it just involves extra attention from the cook.
Marin does use some hoppy beers, but in cold preparations, such as a marinade for a dish that won’t be cooked. Saunders uses bitter pale ales as a contrast in a sweet batter, such as an apple fritter, but echoes the concerns about long cooking times and concentrating the bitterness.
“Bitter is not one of the favorite flavors of Americans, judging from the use of corn syrup,” she said.
Cautionary notes
Just remember that various beers have their own distinctive flavors, just as other ingredients do, she said. There is no universal beer flavor.
“A lot of people, when they list in a recipe `[a pint] of beer,’ it’s misleading,” Saunders said. “You would never list `one pound of animal protein.’ “
And be careful within beer styles, Oliver said.
For example, most stouts are malty, but some carry some bitterness, including the most common, Guinness.
Oliver learned about that bitterness, and its effects in cooking, when he was a student at Boston University. He was just discovering the idea of cooking with beer. His big dish for dinner dates was Swedish meatballs.
“I thought I could make them with Guinness,” he said. “I concentrated the sauce down and it was amazingly bitter.
“So I took the meatballs to the sink, rinsed them off and made a whole new sauce.
“I learned the hard way about concentrating bitter beer,” Oliver said with a laugh. “You can cook with it. I just didn’t know how to do it at the time.”
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A match game
Some suggestions on what styles of beer and what foods they’re best cooked with, from Garrett Oliver, author of “The Brewmaster’s Table”; Lucy Saunders, author of “Cooking with Beer”; Michael Roper, owner of Hopleaf Bar, and Brian Marin, chef/owner of the Beer Bistro in Toronto.
Barley wines: Mustards or vinegars
Belgian brown ales: Carbonnade a la flamande, the classic Belgian stew, or mixed into hamburgers or in salad dressings
Cherry lambics: Duck
English (i.e., not overly hoppy) pale ales: Chicken or roasted veal
German or Czech pilsners: Batters or cheese fondue
Hoppy American pale ales: Vinaigrettes and cold marinades or in a batter that is fried quickly
Mass-market pilsners: Not much, if you’re looking to add flavor, but you could use it as a water substitute. “The mass markets have so little flavor, there is no real place for them in cooking,” Oliver said. “The beer-can chicken is fairly ridiculous. I wouldn’t want to give it the paint flavor on the outside of the can, and that’s all you’re really getting.”
Porters: Meat stews
Smoked beers: Barbecue sauces and marinated pork
Sour lambics: Mussels
Sweeter stouts: Braised meats, stews, pizza dough, oysters or chocolate desserts
Wheat beers: Steamed seafood, poached chicken or fish, batters and fish stocks
–J.B.
Ale-brined chili wings
Preparation time: 25 minutes
Marinating time: 4 hours
Cooking time: 30 minutes
Yield: 6 servings
This recipe is adapted by cookbook author Lucy Saunders from her original grilled version. She suggests using Bell’s Best Brown Ale, Goose Island Nut Brown Ale or Sprecher Pub Brown Ale for the brine.
2 bottles (12 ounces each) brown ale
1/2 cup each: brown sugar, coarse salt
5 pounds chicken wings, tips removed, cut into two sections
2 sticks (1 cup) butter
4 each, minced: garlic cloves, jalapenos
1/2 cup each: Asian sweet hot chili sauce, hot pepper sauce or more to taste
1 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon ground cassia or regular cinnamon
2 tablespoons black sesame seeds, optional
1. Reserve 1/4 cup ale for chili sauce. Whisk together brown sugar, salt and the remaining ale in a large bowl until dissolved. Add wings, stirring to coat. (You may need to put a plate over the bowl so that the chicken is completely submerged in brine.) Cover; refrigerate 4-8 hours.
2. Melt the butter in a large skillet over low heat; add the garlic and jalapenos. Cook, stirring, until jalapenos are tender, about 2 minutes. Stir in the chili sauce, hot pepper sauce, black pepper and cinnamon. Heat to a simmer; cook 3 minutes. Transfer to a blender; add reserved ale. Puree until smooth; reserve.
3. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Drain wings from brine; place on shallow baking pans. Cook, turning once, until brown and crispy, about 25-30 minutes. Arrange wings on platter; sprinkle with black sesame seeds. Serve chili sauce in ramekins for dipping.
Nutrition information per serving:
757 calories, 70% of calories from fat, 59 g fat, 27 g saturated fat, 202 mg cholesterol, 16 g carbohydrates, 40 g protein, 1,547 mg sodium, 0.5 g fiber
Mussels in Belgian beer
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 6 minutes
Yield: 4 servings
This recipe is adapted from Michael Roper, owner of Hopleaf bar in Andersonville. Serve these mussels with plenty of good bread for sopping up the cooking juices, and wash them down with a cold Belgian wheat ale, such as Wittekerke (which you can also use for cooking the mussels).
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 shallots, sliced
1 small rib celery, thinly sliced
2 pounds mussels, cleaned, debearded
1 bottle (12 ounces) Belgian wheat ale
1/4 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves or 1/8 teaspoon dried
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
Freshly ground pepper
1. Heat oil over medium-high heat in a large skillet; add shallots and celery. Cook until softened, about 5 minutes.
2. Add mussels; add beer, thyme, bay leaf, butter, salt and pepper to taste. Cover; cook until mussels are open, about 4-6 minutes, keeping pan moving frequently. Discard mussels that do not open. Serve in shallow bowls.
Nutrition information per serving:
186 calories, 69% of calories from fat, 14 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 36 mg cholesterol, 5 g carbohydrates, 9 g protein, 559 mg sodium, 0.3 g fiber
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ctc-goodeating@tribune.com
