We hiked back to the campsite, wet but warm on a balmy summer evening in the high country of Northern California. Fishing with fly rods, my dad, my two brothers and I had caught a dozen brook and rainbow trout, and in camp, we decided to try a dinner diversion from the usual coal-grilled trout. We filleted and deboned the fish, then whipped up a batter of pancake mix and beer. We dipped and fried the fish, and we still remember that meal, in the mountains of Siskiyou County, as one of the best we’ve eaten while camping.
Food nearly always tastes good on backpacking trips — and others would say it always tastes better when cooked with beer. That trip was in the early 1990s, and I assume the beer, in those days before the craft craze, was the sort of mass-brewed lager that beer today’s aficionados tend to scorn. Yet, it seemed to make a fantastic beer batter.
Today, beer-battered fish is the most basic of pub grub, as seen in the fish and chips at Marin Brewing and Moylan’s brewing companies. Onion rings and other fried foods also often receive the beer-batter treatment. All the while, cooking with beer in more complicated ways has become a hallmark of advanced cuisine. Stewed beans, steamed mussels and clams, braised meat and beer-baked bread are just a few items made better with a slosh, or a few bottles, of beer. Cider, too, makes just about anything on the stove better.
But cooking with beer and cider, as with wine, requires a little understanding of the beverages, how they taste, and how different styles’ properties can affect food they’re cooked with. Starting with cider, it may be the simplest of beverages to cook with. Not to disparage cider, but for culinary considerations, they’re basically all the same, with some variation in sugar content. Whereas wines range from reddish-black to almost water-clear — differences that correlate to flavor and which will strongly influence a dish — and whereas beers run the same spectrum, ciders do not, and I’ve never fouled up a dish by adding a slug of fermented apple juice.
Now to beer. Virtually all are sweet, and that residual sugar plus a spike of alcohol adds wonderful flavor to food. However, there is one firm rule, in my opinion: Reserve the IPA for drinking. Bitterness — the signature quality of an IPA — can spoil some foods, like fish, especially after cooking a beer down into a concentrated sauce.
For sautéing or deglazing a pan, use a pilsner, kölsch, saison or a wheat beer instead. (For an experiment, you could also use a hazy IPA, which is brewed in a unique way that minimizes bitterness.)
You’ve probably cooked with wine, which tends to be rather acidic and adds fantastic flavor to just about anything it touches. With that in mind, think of sour beers like wine. They are complex and acidic and can be used for marinating, sautéing, steaming or even poaching.
The parallels to cooking with wine continue with very dark beers; pair them to strong and flavor-forward foods. Adding a porter to a turkey or beef stew will enrich the broth without overpowering the dish. At Iron Springs Pub and Brewery in Fairfax, the kitchen offers pork braised in stout, for example. Many people describe stouts as bitter — but they are not bitter in the same way that most IPAs are. The bitterness of a stout comes from roasted grains, whereas an IPA’s bitterness comes from hops’ alpha acids. Thus, the bitterness of a stout is different, and more food-friendly, than the bitterness in an IPA.
You might also use a dark, heavy beer to make bread, pancakes or scones. Replacing some of the recipe’s water, by volume, with a stout or porter will add color and malty flavor to what you bake. If you use a milder beer, like a pilsner or a session IPA, try replacing all the water with beer. Your bread will not only come out of the oven with more flavor but may also be fluffier, thanks to the bubbly nature of beer.
In general, when cooking with beer, remember that a little can go a long way, and a whole bottle isn’t necessarily a good idea. Just a small pour of beer can take a simple dish to the next level.
Also keep in mind that there is no need to use expensive, or particularly good, beer for cooking. The nuances that make some beers great versus good will evaporate when added to a hot pan or crock. So, if you want to use a whole bottle in a dish, buy something on the lower end of the pricing scale.
With all that said, take your beer into the kitchen without overthinking it. As a general rule, whatever beer is in your hand will do good things for whatever dish you’re cooking.
Alastair Bland’s Through the Hopvine runs every week in Zest. Contact him at allybland79@gmail.com.
December 02, 2020 at 03:01AM
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Cooking with beer can take food to a new level - Marin Independent Journal
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