Good evening all. Today's post marks the first in a new and potentially ongoing series regarding cooking with beer. Now we've all read plenty of posts extolling the virtues of food and beer pairings, but sometimes it's necessary to integrate our favourite beverage into the food we eat, particularly when a recipe calls for alcohol and it just won't suffice to use adjunct-laden liquid cardboard. Last night I took a wild, boyish fling at, well, cooking, and dug up a recipe from the venerable oracle of school dinner advocacy, Jamie Oliver. The recipe, which you can find here, called for Guinness, but in true craft beer fashion (and because I didn't have any cans to hand) I opted to use a bottle of Rip Tide, BrewDog's 8.0% ABV Imperial Stout. I'll discuss the outcome and how the beer contributed to the recipe after the obligatory preparation pics below....
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| The star of the show, patiently awaiting sacrifice |
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| Starting the proceedings, sans stout |
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| In the oven, hard part over! |
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| The final product (it wasn't just for me by the way) |
The pie didn't look as picturesque or impressive as it probably could have, but as they say the proof is always in the tasting, and it tasted very good if I say so myself. So what did the Rip Tide add to the overall experience? Well, it gave the meat a richness and darkness that worked really well with the buttery flavours from the pastry, and the sauce/gravy was certainly thicker and more robust than similar pies I've had that utilised more ubiquitous stouts. I didn't get any characteristic stout flavours from the pie, just the sense that the concept of richer, amplified flavours had been imparted onto the constituent ingredients of the pie, which isn't a bad thing really as I don't think coffee and chocolate works too well with rustic cooking. This exercise has certainly compelled me to think about cooking with beer more in the future, so expect more food-related posts in the coming months.
Until next time....
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