Cooking with Beer: Chicken MaltNuggets and Beer Ketchup

After making beer jelly and ice cream I wanted to beer-up another kids classic and it didn’t take long for me to stop at chicken nuggets.

Chicken nuggets are brilliant. But imagine them with an extra-crunchy coating of pale malt breadcrumbs and then dipped in some ketchup made with beer... Now you’re talking!

I’ve no idea why I’ve never made chicken nuggets before as they’re so easy. Take a chunk of chicken breast, dip it in flour and then into egg, roll in breadcrumbs and bake for 20 minutes. The beer pimp comes by adding grounded pale malt into the breadcrumbs (about twice as much bread to malt – I used the same malt as for the crème brûlées but not the same malt as the cookies...). The finished nugget is fantastic – really crunchy on the outside with a hint of sweetness from the malt.

And what to dip them in? Beer ketchup, of course. I made a small batch so no firm recipe but I softened onion and garlic, added some herbs and spices (paprika, mustard, a little clove, bay, thyme, pepper), sugar and salt, then a few handfuls of tomatoes and let them bubble down to mush. Then I added equal amounts of beer (for this I used Thwaites Very Nutty Black) and vinegar (balsamic as that’s all I had). I cooked it for about 20 minutes, strained it and pressed all the good stuff through the sieve, then reduced it further to get the right consistency. And it’s really very good. Just like ketchup but with a beer kick – it’d be great in a big burger. I made it with the mild on the first attempt as I didn’t want bitterness; I now want to try making this with Schlenkerla and Rodenbach (instead of vinegar) as I think both would also work.

Chicken MaltNuggets and beer ketchup. A bit of kitchen beer fun but also really tasty!

What else could I give a beery tweak to? And I’ve still got lots of malt left – any suggestions? (there’s not enough in there to brew with...)

Cooking with Beer: Barley Wine Cupcakes

Snowed in and cabin fever approaching dangerously fast, I needed something to do before Lauren’s five-minute weather updates drove me to insanity (“It’s still snowing... It’s still snowing... It’s snowing a bit harder now... Oh, look at those icicles... Still snowing...”). I decided that I needed to occupy myself in the kitchen and to make it more interesting I tasked myself to cook with beer. A few inspiration-finding flicks through recipe books later and I was ready to bake some Barley Wine Cupcakes.

The idea was a combination of inspirations: rum and raisin, warming and rich winter beer, the rise in baking beer bloggers and brewers and the Hummingbird Bakery (who make cakes so good that I had one and immediately bought their cookery book). For the beer I chose Nils Oscar Barley Wine because it was pretty much all I had in the cupboard that would work... thankfully, it was the perfect choice given its raisin, booze and bread sweetness and a mellow green bitterness (I nearly used a bottle of BrewDog Paradox Isle of Arran and soaked the raisins in whisky, but then decided to use the Paradox elsewhere...). Something like Fuller’s Golden Pride or Robinson’s Old Tom would also work well.

Beer gets into the cakes in three ways: in the sponge, in the beer-soaked raisins and in the icing. It also leaves you half a glass, which is important. Drown a couple of handfuls of raisins in beer so that they are just submerged. Leave for around an hour and then drain well before adding to the cake mix. With the icing, just add it to loosen the mix and give a little extra beer kick.

The finished cakes were the best I’ve ever made, which is probably down to the Hummingbird recipe than the beer, but I think the beer still deserves credit. They are light and lovely with a delicious butter icing on top and loaded with little bursts of chewy-sweet raisin. The true test of a beer recipe is if Lauren (who hates the taste of beer) will eat it... she loved them. It’s easily adaptable to other beers, too, or you can leave out the raisins or replace them with something else (cherries, blueberries, chocolate). Stout (or, even better, imperial stout) is an ideal choice to use instead of barley wine and the recipe can be adapted to add cocoa; I’d like to try it with a sweetened cherry beer; a Belgian dubbel or quad would be good, I’m also tempted by a really fruity IPA but would want one that’s not too bitter.

Here’s the recipe, which is copied/adapted from the Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook (makes 11/12):

Cupcakes

120g plain flour

140g caster sugar

1½ teaspoons baking powder

Pinch of salt

40g unsalted butter at room temp

20ml milk

100ml beer

1 egg

Drop vanilla extract

Two handfuls of beer-soaked raisins

Frosting

200g icing sugar

80g unsalted butter at room temp

25ml beer (maybe a little extra)

Drop vanilla extract

Oven to 170C. Mix the dry stuff with the butter in an electric mixer. Gradually pour in the milk and half the beer. Separately mix the egg, vanilla extract and the rest of the beer. Add this to the flour mixture and continue to beat together. Add the raisins, draining off the beer and discarding, and stir through. Spoon into baking cases until two-thirds full. Bake for 20-25 minutes. Once cooked, allow to cool before adding the frosting. To make the frosting, whisk (electrically, if possible) icing sugar and butter until well combined. Add vanilla extract and mix. Gradually add little splashes of the beer until the icing is the desired thickness (really thick) and then beat until light and fluffy, ‘at least 5 minutes’ the book says. Spread the icing on and EAT.

What other beer cakes could work?

This wasn’t all I made while snowed in and the rest of the time I was making Imperial Chilli which I’ll blog about soon... 

P.S. This is my 400th blog post! 

Deconstructed Beer Ice Cream

Beer ice cream is cool. The idea behind this deconstructed recipe comes from a fairytale mash-up of raspberry ripple ice cream and beer: it’s a malty wort-like ice cream with a fresh hop syrup ripple.

I’ve made a few beer ice creams and some have been good but some have been terrible. The thing to know is that sweetness is dulled by freezing but bitterness doesn’t seem to go with it, instead it remains and leaves a horrid clash of sensations with cold and creamy meeting bitter and dry, and nothing about that goes.

The first idea for this was to use the first runnings of wort from a brew of beer but the trouble with adding what is essentially just water into cream is that it doesn’t give the best texture (and ice cream needs to be thick and luscious not spiky with shards of ice). The next plan was to ‘brew’ some malted barley in cream and milk as part of the custard-making process but this was later abandoned through the unknowns of what would actually happen if I did this. The final choice, and the one I decided to go with, was using malt extract (a thick syrup of pure malt flavour used by homebrewers). For the ripple I wanted a streak of fruity sweetness with an underlying hop flavour but very little bitterness. I chose the hops with the lowest alpha acid content I could find (Hallertauer at 2.3% - the lower the alpha acid, the less bitter the hops are) because that was the best chance I had of avoiding a tangy oil slick ruining everything. Getting the ripple right required a few tests. Stewing the hops in hot water for just a few minutes made for a face-puckering bitter overload but leaving the hop flowers in cold water for an hour was much better, leaving the flavour with little of that ruinous bitterness.

A classic custard is the base of the ice cream, it’s just sooped up with the addition of 150ml of malt extract (I used amber extract but I think pale would be better – amber was all the homebrew shop had. Also, taste it as you add it; 100ml might be enough for you). Knowing it had been given a dose of extra sweetness from the extract I took away 25% of the usual volume of sugar which is mixed with the eggs. Once made into a malt custard leave until completely cool. The ripple starts as a sugar syrup: 600ml of water and 100g of sugar reduced to around 200ml (though you likely won’t need all of this – you just need enough liquid to infuse the hops). Allow it to cool and then add 10-15g of dried hops for around an hour, or until you’ve got the flavour you want. Strain the liquid and set aside (here I also added the tiniest drop of green food colouring which was purely aesthetic but didn’t have the dramatic stand-out effect I hoped for!). Once the custard is cool pour it into an ice cream machine until ready. To get the ripple effect I poured part of the now-frozen ice cream into a container then drizzled over a layer or hop syrup, added more ice cream, then more hop syrup, then a final layer of ice cream and then whirled it all through with a spoon handle.

And how is it? Well it doesn’t taste exactly like beer... but it is good! And it’s the hop ripple through the middle which makes it, adding a little fruity cheekiness to the caramel-like malt ice cream. I didn’t know how it’d turn out but I’m impressed – next time I’d add a little less malt extract (or use a pale one) and maybe try and get little extra hop flavour in by either adding more hops or cold-stewing them for longer. Otherwise, a good first attempt, I think! It would also be great with toasted malt sprinkle.

Experimenting with the basic ingredients of beer is fun. I’ve tried smoking hops but what other recipes are there which use malt or hops? Perhaps a malt-crusted piece of fish with hop shoots and a hop sauce? Malt crème brulee with a hop/sugar topping? Roasted malt truffles with candied hop sprinkles? Any ideas?

I've just looked back over the ice cream recipes I've got on the blog and I found this one for Crunchy Nut Cornflake ice cream! That was great. I remember eating it at 3am in the morning while I stayed up late to watch baseball.

As-Live FABPOW! Pancakes and Apple Wood Cider

20.08: I believe in the new media circles this is what is known as a mash-up: it’s an As-Live Tasting meets a FABPOW.

20.10: It’s Pancake Day tomorrow and not doing something would be simply unthinkable, so this is it. Pancakes mixed, fried and flipped; apples sliced and fried in cider; ice cream dolloped on top; cider poured into my glass; ready to go.

20.12: First of all you are all probably thinking the same thing: why the hell is he drinking cider? Especially during a Food and Beer Pairing of the Week? Well, if cider is good enough for CAMRA then it’s good enough for me. Plus, this particular cider is made by Thatchers for Badger’s, the brewery, so that’s doubly okay.

20.15: I made the pancakes mix with the cider in the batter (70% milk, 30% cider, or something like that) and then I fried the apples in butter, vanilla sugar and cider, until soft and sweet and sticky. If I do say so myself it's damn good. The pancakes are thin and crispy on the edges and light and floppy in the middle. Perfect. The apples make a great topping too (although, to be honest, can you really beat sugar and lemon?!).

20.18: Writing is distracting me from eating. I can see why I’ve never done an As-Live FABPOW before, logistically it’s awkward.

20.21: On to the cider. It’s Apple Wood Cider, 6%, oak aged and medium dry (so the bottle says). It pours an electrifying orange colour with those fast-paced bubbles that hurry to the top. It’s not one of those Grandpa's Ballbag Scrumpys that smells like horse shit and comes with a few stray pieces of straw in the pint glass, this is one of those apple-core and apple-skin ciders, woody and, thankfully, fruity. It’s clean and just-sweet, I want to say it’s bitter but then I remember it’s cider, so that dryness I taste is from the barrel, and it manages to retain a certain rustic character, which is nice.

20.25: The pancakes are gobbled down. They worked a treat with the cider; the apples in each matching up perfectly. FABPOW!

20.28: You know what I’ve always wanted someone to brew for me? A 10% imperial oatmeal coffee stout, rich and thick, flavoured with fresh blueberries and maple syrup (maybe a little oak to add texture). I want that beer with a huge stack of fat American-style pancakes, bacon and maple syrup. If I could find Founder’s Canadian Breakfast Stout then that might be the closest thing out there. The trouble is I can’t find CBS, dammit.

20.30: I just spilt some cider on my chin.

20.31: Oh yeah, I’m doing this a day early because if I did it tomorrow and posted it at 9pm then it’s too late, of course. And you could make these pancakes with beer, that’d be great. I only used cider because I’m running low on beer in the flat (beer that's suitable for cooking with, anyway) but have some cider, I also had some apples which needed using up. Ta-da.

20.36: I like a drop of cider. My drinking days began with turbo snakebites – strong and cheap lightning cider, crap and cheap lager, blackcurrant cordial and vodka (that was killer stuff). A few years later it was always the last drink we chose at the end of a beer festival and I’ve had some dodgy old pints of scrumpy over the last few years. Perhaps the most memorable (or not...) experience was a snakebite made from Old Tom and some 8% cider. After that there was some dancing. At a beer festival. Ooof.

20.42: Being distracted by the terrible TV that Lauren is watching...

20.45: I did this thing last year with BrewDog’s Hardcore IPA and their Coffee Imperial Stout. Neither were perfect but not too bad. And I’ve just realised that I haven’t done an As-Live Tasting for AGES!

20.49: Cider gone. It’s pretty good; better than I expected, it just needs more hops. As for the pancakes... they were bloody delicious! I think pancakes might be on the menu a few more times this week (and whenever I make them I’m always surprised how easy they are – just 125g plain flour, two eggs, 300ml of milk, or 200ml milk and 100ml booze).

20.53: That’s me done with an As-Live FABPOW Mash-up. Relocation Relocation is now on.

Beer Floats

I’ve attempted a couple of beer floats before but never had anything 'wow' inducing. I think my problem is that I just want to drink the beer and eat the ice cream separately, rather than risking a strange looking mess in a glass and ruining two perfectly good treats. But I am curious, you see, about things like this.

It’s one of those frequently recurring topics on the forums of RateBeer and BeerAdvocate - What’s your favourite beer float? – and it always gets me thinking about which beers could work with which ice creams.

Following a post from Boak and Bailey, I made myself a Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and vanilla ice cream float. It’s one of those ‘beginners’ floats that I’d wanted to try for a while now. I suspected that the full, rich body of the beer (you need it full and rich or it might all get a bit cold-soupy and insipid) would be perfect for the ice cream as it melts into the darkness of the stout, leaving a sweet, creamy, fun treat.

The result was good. To begin it was all beer and little ice cream, which only succeeded in pointing out the hop bitterness and adding an unwelcome carbonation, but as it melted together things got a lot more interesting. The roasty, chocolatey beer swirled with the ice cream into a great beery dessert, leaving it thick and smooth, cold, rich, slightly boozy and just a little naughty. But it has to melt first, or it’s just a stray ball of ice cream in your beer, and that’s just a little odd to begin. And share it too, beer and desserts are both made for sharing. Of course, the other option is to scoop out the ice cream into a bowl and pour a little beer over the top, that works wonderfully too.

Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and vanilla ice cream was a good combo, but I think there are better ones to be had. Hops are pretty much a no-go, causing such a tremendous accident that it’s just not worth bothering, instead a strong coffee stout could be excellent with a milk chocolate ice cream, Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout and vanilla would be another good one, as would BrewDog’s Tokyo, with or without the *, and with vanilla ice cream. Or what about using beer ice cream in a float? RipTide ice cream, perhaps.

Does this kind of thing float your boat or is it a waste of good beer and good ice cream? Have you had any good beer floats? What do you think would make a good one?

A 'New' Recipe Book

I am a bookworm, and one of my favourite things to do is walk around second hand book shops. Many of the books I own are secondhand - some of the copies are sharply new, while others are musty and yellowing with crumbling hard covers - but I buy them because each book carries its own story, and has its own history outside of the one printed on the page. There may be physical reminders of its previous life – smudges, tears, fingerprints, even a photo or receipt – or it may just carry the idea that someone, somewhere has looked over the words before me, but I find it all rather romantic and intriguing.

I never shop with a book in mind, but I am always interested in the old cookery books. Shopping this weekend, I found a book imaginatively called Cooking with Beer, written by Carole Fahy in 1972. The cover looks all of its 36 years and there are a scattering of pictures inside (one of lobster on a silver platter and another of a fondue, both classic 70s). This book is an odd one. As someone who likes to pair food with beer I am always interested in recipes actually containing the good stuff, so as soon as I found this book I picked it up and popped it under my arm. Later, sitting on the beach drinking a cool pint in the warm sun (perfection itself), I read through the book and, well, I never would’ve dreamt of so many recipes!

Firstly, the beer styles are separated into Pale Ale, Mild or Brown Ale, Stout and Sweet Stout, Old Ale and Lager. There are no mention of individual beers in the recipes, just whether one requires, for example, ½ pint of sweet stout, or 1 cup of lager. Many of the recipes are classics: carbonnade, stews and casseroles, a beer batter, beer bread and rarebits. None of these would be out of place in any cookery book, modern or old, and as timeless a drink as beer is, the recipes which feature it at their heart remain constant.

Then there are some more unusual recipes: melon in beer, the alliterate bass boiled in beer (apparently, ‘you will find white fish, shellfish or even oily fish – whichever is your favourite – more exciting when cooked in beer’), cassoulet, beer ratatouille, beer scrambled eggs, beer potatoes (potatoes deep fried in the beer batter), a lager salad dressing, and the intriguingly named cheese muff, beer puffs and English monkey.

But then there are the recipes which are, to put it politely, interesting: beer soup with milk (brown ale, milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon lemon and salt), beer omelet, banana welsh rarebit, and then the dessert section which includes a cheesecake with beer and suggests in the intro to ‘try experimenting with a little light ale or lager poured over your own fruit salad mixture’ – lager and fruit?! Sounds like a cocktail to me!

It is quite some book I tell you, but a really interesting find and great to compare how current tastes have developed. I will try out some of the more unusual recipes - out of intrigue more than anything else – and report back. If this has whet your appetite for cooking with beer, then check out An Appetite for Ale by Will and Fiona Beckett, or jump over to Pencil&Spoon and check out some of my recipes and the beers I suggest to have with them. I’m off for an evening snack of party beer tomatoes (page 78 of the book) which directs as follows (I won’t give exact measurements, use your finer judgment): ‘Wash and thinly slice tomatoes. Arrange on a serving dish and pour over beer (a light ale). Sprinkle with parsley. Serve as a side salad.’

Yummy.