What is the best drink to have with your dinner? A delicious beer of course. But imagine what would be even better: a 3-course meal that involves beer in every course. Maybe you have the same problem as us, you are a #homebrewer (or someone else in your family is) and you have lots of delicious handcrafted beer at home, but after 10 bottles of the same beer you get a little bored and maybe because of social distancing, you can't share it with anyone. Some beers should also be consumed as fresh as possible, and if you wait any longer, it could lose its flavor. We from #ZurichBeerTour have the perfect idea for you: use your beer for cooking delicious food at home. Of course you can also use store bought beer. Here we have 3 tasty #recipes that you can cook as a 3-course meal, or as separate meals.
The Beer
First of all let's talk about the beer we are using. We use the same beer for all 3 of our recipes, which is Sandro/Wesley's homebrewed "Man Go Get Me Some Rakia" Black #IPA / Cascadian Dark Ale. It is a dark beer but brewed with a lot of hops, so there are a lot of roasty, coffee and dark chocolate notes from the used malt and also because there were cocoa nibs used in the brew (which were soaked in Bulgarian Rakia first). But at the same time the #hops give a very fruity flavor of tropical fruit, especially mango, which was amplified with a couple of grams Mango puree in the brewing process.
This was our beer of choice but for all of our recipes you can use almost every beer. Of course the outcome can be very different, so we recommend to use darker beers (especially for the dessert). But hey, fortune favors the brave.
The Starter: Dark Beer Bread
The first recipe was inspired by something we ate in #Ireland for the first time, Guinness Bread. So we designed this similar recipe using our own beer:
You'll need:
450g whole wheat flour 2pk baking soda 25g oatmeal 4 tablespoons of brown sugar 80g butter 2 tbsp molasses 400ml dark beer
How it works:
1. Melt the butter and molasses in a small saucepan over low heat.
2. Mix the flour, oatmeal and sugar and sieve in the baking soda. Mix everything well.
3. As soon as the butter has melted, add the beer and stir well.
4. Add everything to the dry ingredients and mix well.
5. Place in a lightly greased tin and bake in the preheated oven at 190℃ for about 50 minutes.
6. If the bread sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom, the bread is finished. Wrap in a towel and let it cool.
Tastes awesome on its own or with a bit of salted butter on top. To pair with this course we would recommend an American Amber Ale (i.e. Chopfab Amber) which with its sweet malt flavors will go perfect with this aromatic bread.
The Main course: Pork stew in beer-mustard sauce
This awesome dish was inspired by this recipe in German from wildeisen.ch. A pork stew in combination with beer is a match made in heaven, if you add mustard to the sauce it 's going to be even better.
You'll need (for 4 people):
10 g dried porcini mushrooms
2 shallots
2 cloves of garlic
3 sprigs of rosemary
1 kg pork stew
Salt, black pepper from the mill
2 tablespoons of butter or oil
2dl dark beer
3 dl meat bouillon
3 tablespoons of coarse mustard
180 g crème fraîche
How it works:
1. Place the dried porcini mushrooms in a bowl, pour warm water over them and let them swell for at least 10 minutes. Then pour off, gently squeeze and roughly chop.
2. Peel and finely chop the shallots and cloves of garlic. Pick the rosemary needles from the branches and chop them finely.
3 .Season the pork stew with salt and pepper. Heat butter or oil in a roaster or casserole. Fry the meat vigorously in 3 portions. Remove.
4. Braise shallots, garlic and porcini mushrooms in the same pan. Deglaze with the beer and stock. Add the meat and rosemary and cover everything and cook on low temperature for 1½ – 1¾ hours.
5. When the meat is tender, take it out of the sauce and keep warm. Put mustard and crème fraîche in the sauce and puree everything with a hand blender. Let the sauce boil down on a large fire as desired. Finally, season with salt and pepper. Add the meat again and let everything get hot again.
The sauce in this dish is the absolute highlight, creamy and aromatic. As side dish we would recommend mashed potatoes or rice. A perfect beer for this course would be a Belgian Dubbel (i.e. Formidable - Bear'N'Stein) with its flavors of dark fruits and pear. The slightly spicy hops in the finish goes perfectly with the mustard sauce.
The dessert: Bieramisu
There are numerous of dessert recipes you could use your beer for. We decided to make this Italian classic with a beer twist. The recipe we used can be found here in German. For this dessert we would highly recommend a dark beer, porter or stout to get the typical coffee flavors. But if you want to be adventurous why not try a fruited sour beer.
You'll need (for 4 people):
270 ml dark beer
200 ml strong coffee
150 g of sugar
3 eggs
350 g mascarpone
3 tablespoons milk
200 ml cream
200 g ladyfingers
3 tbsp cocoa powder
How it works:
1. Boil 200 ml of beer and coffee with 2 tablespoons of sugar in a saucepan and stir until the sugar has dissolved.
2. Separate egg whites and yolks. Beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until fluffy over a warm water bath. Stir in 70 ml of beer. Take off the stove and let cool.
3. Mix the mascarpone with milk until creamy. Fold in the egg yolk mixture. Whip the cream, beat the egg whites until firm and fold in both.
4. Dip the ladyfingers into the beer-coffee mixture and lay half of them in a flat bowl (or small glasses). Brush with half of the mascarpone cream. Place the remaining ladyfingers on the cream and brush with the rest of the cream. Chill and sprinkle with cocoa powder just before serving.
What an absolutely tasty dessert! And you can really taste how well the beer goes with the rest of the ingredients. Our beer pairing tip for the dessert would a coffee stout (i.e. Never lose a feather - Stigbergets). Coffee and dessert? I think there are no more words needed.
Tell us how you liked those dishes in the comments below, which one was your favorite? And let us know if you have other beer recipes for us, maybe we can feature them in a future post!
Cheers,
Your Zurich Beer Tour Guides
Yorumlar