Cooking with Beer: Beer Pizza

I spent last summer in the kitchen cooking with beer for my next book, the unambiguously titled Cooking with Beer. The first copies came back from the printers last week and that inspired me to cook a favourite recipe from it.

This beer pizza puts black lager in the dough and in the tomato sauce, where it gives a slightly sweet caramelised depth in the dough and some added richness in the sauce – other good beer choices include hefeweizen or dunkelweizen plus a smooth not-too-bitter porter or stout (I used Asahi Black Dry and that’s one delicious dark lager!). I topped this one with loads of mozzarella, roasted aubergine, mushroom, sun-dried tomato and basil, but the toppings are yours to pile on.

This makes four pizzas

Beer Pizza Dough

500g Tipo ‘00’ flour or strong white bread flour (plus extra for dusting)

1 teaspoon of sea salt

1 x 7g dried yeast sachets

1 teaspoon caster sugar

2 tablespoons olive oil

150ml lukewarm water, plus extra if needed

150ml Black Lager, at room temperature

1.     In a jug, combine the water, sugar, yeast and olive oil, stirring it together to get it activated. Leave for a few minutes and then add the beer – ideally you’ll have poured this out in advance to let it lose some of its fizz

2.     Pile the flour and salt onto a clean work surface and make a large well in the middle. Gradually pour the yeasty beer mix into the well, using a fork to bring it together until you’re able to hold it in your hands (add a little more water or beer if required). Knead it for a few minutes then place in a large flour-dusted bowl. Put cling film over the bowl and leave for 60-90 minutes in a warm place – it should roughly double in size.

3.     Dust a clean surface with flour. Place the dough on the surface and knead it for a few minutes. Divide into four, cover and leave for another 30 minutes in a warm place.

4.     When ready to cook, turn your oven as hot as it’ll go – around 250C – and ideally use a pizza stone or pizza tray. Then on a floured surface, roll out a dough ball until it’s about 10-12” across. Place a layer of beer tomato sauce (see below) on top and then the rest of your toppings

5.     Place in the oven for around 8 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Beer Tomato Sauce

Pretty easy, this: take two tins of good chopped tomatoes and put them in a wide frying pan. Add 4-5 whole cloves of garlic, a teaspoon each of salt, sugar and black pepper, a couple of splashes of beer, a tablespoon of olive oil and a small bunch of basil with the leaves torn. Simmer is all together, stirring regularly, until it’s reduced and thick – this’ll take around 15 minutes. Remove the garlic and set to one side and allow to cool (this can be done in advance).

Cooking with Beer is due to be released late March or early April. It has over 65 different recipes all using beer in at least one way. It’s definitely the best-looking book I’ve written – see these images below, which you can also see on Amazon – and I’m excited for it to be on bookshelves soon.

Curried Dunkelweizen Lamb Chops

The smoking lamb chops of Whitechapel curry houses are legendary because they are so delicious. And as many of the better places are bring your own, you can eat them while drinking delicious beers. Wanting to recreate that at home, I cooked these lamb chops after brining them in Dunkelweizen and curry spices, where the brine makes them incredibly tender (like I said here, brining is a very good thing when Cooking with Beer…)  – something important when you don’t have a searing flame grill to cook them on and you don’t want to chew on spicy boot soles. I used Dunkelweizen here because it has a sweetly toasty malt depth and also some complementary spices for those used on the lamb.

Serves 4

8 Quality Standard lamb chops (at least 8... these are addictive things)

1 bottle of Dunkelweizen (dark lager or Saison also work)

3 tablespoons of salt

3 tablespoons of sugar

1 whole chilli

1 onion, quartered

5 cloves of garlic

1 tablespoon of curry powder

1 teaspoon whole coriander seeds

Dry rub: 2 teaspoons of coriander seeds, 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, ½ teaspoon of fennel seeds. Warm these in a dry pan then grind into a fine powder. Add ½ teaspoon turmeric, ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, a pinch of cinnamon and lots of salt and black pepper.

In a large plastic container with a lid, make the brine by mixing the beer with the salt and sugar and stirring until it’s all combined. Add the other ingredients and then top up the container with cold water. Put the lid on and place in the fridge for 8-24 hours. When ready to cook, remove from the brine and dry on kitchen towel. Cover in the dry rub and leave for 1 hour. Grill or fry on a high heat for 5-10 minutes (or until cooked to your liking).

These are a brilliant beer snack or starter and I wouldn’t bother serving them with anything other than a cold glass of good beer. Dunkelweizen is clearly a good match here, or go for a good Oatmeal Stout with a nice nutty, liquorice depth as that’s great with the spices and meat char.

The meat for this was provided by Simply Beef and Lamb. Look for the Quality Standard Mark in independent butchers and selected supermarkets to be sure that the beef or lamb is quality assured and responsibly produced by people dedicated to producing great food.

Smoked Porter Carne Asada Tacos

I’m having a thing with tacos right now. It started over the summer when I made some using chicken brined in lager and lime, also using lager in the corn taco mix (this is in book four, Cooking with Beer, coming spring next year!). Then I had rauchbier pulled pork in tacos at a barbecue (also in book four…). Delicious things. And then I went to San Francisco and ate at five different taco places in three days. Since being back I’ve eaten tacos five times in two weeks…

Mates were coming over to drink all the IPAs I brought back from California, so I cooked up a huge batch of Smoked Porter-brined flank steak. Brining, I have learnt, is an incredible way to cook with beer, leaving beer-infused food that’s brilliantly tender, where the sugar-salt combo does magic things to meat. I used BeavertownSmog Rocket in these tacos. And I serve them with traditional California toppings of salsa, onion, coriander and lime.

Smoked Porter Carne Asada

Serves 6

1kg Quality Standard beef flank steak

2 cans of Smog Rocket (or another smoked beer)

5 tablespoons of salt

5 tablespoons of sugar

1 whole chilli, sliced in half

1 lime, sliced in half

1 onion, quartered

5 cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon habanero chilli flakes

In a large plastic container with a lid, mix the beer, salt and sugar until combined. Add the meat then the other ingredients. Top up with cold water until all the meat is covered. Place the lid on the container and put it in the fridge for 8-24 hours.

When you’re ready to cook, remove from the brine and dry on kitchen paper (discard the rest of the brine and ingredients). Slice thinly and then fry or grill on a high heat in olive oil for a few minutes.

Corn Tacos

Buy them – I use Cool Chile – or make your own as they’re really easy. You can also make them with beer: 250g masa harina, 330ml of beer and a pinch of salt. Mix it together into a dough, wrap in cling film for 15 minutes, unwrap, cut into small balls and roll into tacos about 3mm thick (even better, use a taco press) then fry in a dry pan for 30 seconds on each side.

Salsa

6 whole tomatoes

Half a white onion

2-4 chillis

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

Salt and pepper

Splash of beer (optional)

Roast all the ingredients (apart from the beer) at 200C for 20 minutes. Put in a blender and whizz until smooth. Add a splash of beer, if you like, then check the seasoning (I also add a squeeze of lime for more acidity).

To serve: stack two warm tacos (always two), place meat on top, add lots of fresh white onion, finely chopped coriander, a spoon of salsa and a big squeeze of lime.

These are great served with smoked porter as well – that beer loves the meat flavour and can handle the lime and spice.

I can see a lot more taco making in the next few months…

The meat for this was provided by Simply Beef and Lamb and it was genuinely some of the best English meat I’ve tasted. Look for the Quality Standard Mark in independent butchers and selected supermarkets to be sure that the beef or lamb is quality assured and responsibly produced by people dedicated to producing great food.

Wahleeah and cooking with beer

Yesterday I had beer-cured bacon with bacon stout ketchup for breakfast. I’d started making it a week earlier, brining belly pork in smoked porter, brown sugar, maple syrup and salt. I took the pork out of the brine on Friday morning and left it to dry out in the fridge, then cut thick rashers and fried them, the sugars caramelising, the beer giving a toasty, smoky flavour, and the pork itself more porky in depth through the curing process. It was delicious.

That bacon was something like the 75^th recipe I’d cooked incorporating beer this summer (and a very big clue to what my fourth book, out next spring, is going to be…). So when I heard about Wahleeah, a restaurant specialising in using beer as an ingredient, I planned to go as soon as I could, which was last night. And I discovered that Wahleeah is way more than just cooking with beer.

Take the salt and pepper, for example. The pepper on the tables contains 11 ingredients. The salt takes three days to produce and contains horseradish and a process that involves smoking water. Diners shouldn’t even need to use them, says chef Dave Ahern, but if he has to have salt and pepper on the tables then he wants the best he can get with an exact flavour, and it turns out the only way to get that flavour is to make them himself. This obsessive level of detail is in everything – Dave makes cheese, vinegar, condiments, and more, for the restaurant. Beer is just one small part of it.

But for me, the beer part is the reason I’m there. Having spent the summer cooking with beer, I know all the good and bad things about what happens when you add beer into a recipe and I want to see what Wahleeah has done.

Oxtail and onions cooked in Fuller’s Black Cab Stout is rich with beer, full-on meaty with the onions giving a nice sweetness. There’s delicious crab cauliflower cheese, perfect with the suggested pairing of Weihenstaphaner Hefeweizen. There’s also beer-cured salmon with house pickles, stuffed mushrooms with beer and soy, a beer chilli to go on tater tots.

Larger plates include mussels in witbier with the addition of deeply-savoury ham hock, where it pretty much demands the beer on the side to act like part of the recipe, giving a freshness to lift the richness. A huge rib-eye steak comes with a brilliant beer fondant potato and a stout sauce, where that table salt and pepper gives it a remarkable extra depth of flavour (and recalls one of my favourite ever beer matches: steak, parsnip fries, horseradish sauce and oatmeal stout). There’s also ricotta dumplings with beer butter, tuna meatloaf with bloody beer sauce, bream with beer-braised fennel.

Then desserts: chocolate stout brownie with banana beer ice cream is superb and perfect with a bottle of Liefman’s Kriek, there’s also Porter cheesecake and Oreo trifle.

It’s all big-flavoured but elegantly done; next-level pub food incorporating the pub’s most central drink, but it’s not all about the beer – these are just great dishes that happen to contain beer. 

I love that Wahleeah is taking beer seriously – that’s the best thing about it for me. I love that the food is very good and I love how the beers used in the cooking enhance the dishes in their own subtle ways without ever overpowering – they are additional seasonings, they add depth which other ingredients can’t add, they give their richness, and they compliment the food. I also love how each dish comes with a beer suggestion – and that those matches are very well selected (done by Boutique Bar Brands). It makes the beer important and it encourages people to try new beers. And it has around 12 draft beers and 50 bottles, so there's a lot of choice. These are all good things.

Wahleeah is the first restaurant in the world to focus so completely on beer cooking. This could be seen as a gimmick, a Cereal Café for beer nerds, but Wahleeah really is way more than just cooking with beer. Surprisingly more. You should go.

Cooking with beer: Shepherd’s Pie with London Porter

I’ve spent the summer blinkered by beer and food, whether it’s trying to come up with great combinations or using beer as an ingredient in different recipes. So when I get an email from Sainsbury’s seeing if I’d like to shoot a YouTube video for them, I thought I’d have a go at taking one of their Live Well for Less recipes and giving it my own beer tweak.

I cooked up a classic, simple Shepherd’s Pie and included some Fuller’s London Porter in the lamb mix. The beer is perfect for this: roasted, a little sweet, a bit chocolatey and there’s something wonderfully savoury about it when it gets cooked with meat and tomatoes. It gave a delicious extra depth into the dish and worked really well. Reunite the beer and pie and pour the Porter when you eat – it’s a great match.

For the recipe, go to the Sainsbury’s website. The only tweak I made was to forget the mint sauce and add about 200ml of porter, plus a teaspoon of sugar to balance any beer bitterness - this is a useful tip whenever you're cooking with beer and just a little bit of something sweet can help a lot.

Thanks to Nathan Nolan who shot the video and edited it (and let me wear his shirt because my grey jumper made me blend into the background!). He’s cool so you should check out his website, Mr Drink ‘N’ Eat.

FABPOW! Blueberry Pancakes and Palo Santo Marron

FABPOW, where have you been?! The last one was so long ago; I’ve been neglectful. Not that I haven’t tried. I have tried. Most weekends I’ve tried. I just haven’t succeeded. I’ve had some good matches but good isn’t good enough. A FABPOW is better than that.

And this one is seriously good. It’s also in time to celebrate Pancake Day.

My version is a classic pancake recipe (English-style, not thick American-style) with a slosh of stout in the mix and a handful of blueberries in the pan, then covered in maple syrup on the plate. The beer on the side was Dogfish Head's Palo Santo Marron. The bottle was almost three years old but it still had loads going on: cocoa, vanilla, berries, a brandy-like booziness. Just imagine those flavours with the burst of sharp sweetness from the blueberries and the maple syrup. Perfect. Any big, rich stout will be brilliant.

Happy Pancake Day!

The picture above is not mine, of course. It comes from the BBC. My photos were terrible so they got deleted. I must get better at taking photos...

Cooking with beer: IPA, onion and cheddar risotto

American IPA is brilliant with strong cheddar. Risottos are awesome – rich, savoury, filling. Imagine how good a risotto would be if it was made with IPA and cheddar, plus parmesan and a delicious depth of sweet onion, leek and garlic. I had to find out.

The beer has to be chosen carefully because if it’s too bitter then it ruins everything and no one wants a bitter risotto. The safety net was the butter and cheese which wrap themselves around any bitterness and smother it. I went with Odell’s IPA because there’s loads of juicy fruit (mandarin and mango), a background sweetness and IBUs which don’t overpower (it’s also one of my favourite beers). And it’s delicious with cheddar and chunks of parmesan.

This is a classic risotto recipe, like this one. For one person, I used a large white onion, a medium-sized leek, sliced into half-moons, and a big fat clove of garlic, all softened in butter and a little oil with a sprinkle of sugar and fresh thyme alongside the salt and pepper. The beer went in during the middle of the cooking; I didn’t add at the beginning like you would with wine because I didn’t want to highlight the hop bitterness, instead I poured in about 100ml after three ladles of stock had been added. At the end, a mix of cheddar and parmesan went in.

An IPA on the side and it was delicious. The beer adds a lot in the cooking, with the hint of hop poking the flavours in the onion and cheese in new directions, which is fantastic. The fruit flavour that comes from the beer and cheeses work so well together while the sweetness in the onion, leek and garlic complete the whole thing. Damn good.

Now it’s got me thinking about other beery risottos...

The only trouble with a risotto is that I always go into it thinking that it’ll be wonderfully soothing and relaxing to make as I stand there and gently stir the rice and watch as it softens and soaks up all the stock, but the reality is that it always stresses me out – the constant stirring frustrates, the adding of stock annoys me, there’s the hope that the next taste won’t be crunchy (which always takes longer than expected) and I just end up getting hot from the hob and angry or drunk while I wait. 

Cooking with Beer: Spicy Scotch Ale Pork

The current stretch to my cooking skills is sandwiches. I’m always too late to make breakfast in the morning and I get home needing to lie down and sleep not stand around and cook. Sunday is now the day I get to spend in the kitchen. Needing to flex my over-relaxed culinary muscles, I wanted to cook something new. As usual, I didn’t know what.

It was cold outside and I wanted something rich and filling but at the same time I wanted it to be sweet and spicy. It also had to be a cure for a week of drinking far too much. I looked to see if I had any beers which I didn’t mind emptying into a saucepan – Founder’s Dirty Bastard was dusted off and put beside the oven. The inspiration came somewhere between a meat and ale stew and jerk pork: all the spices and flavours of jerk plus onions, stock and beer, slow-cooked so that it reduces into a sticky, spicy bowl of gut-warming dinner.

Take some pork, preferably a fatty cut which can handle a few hours at 200C. Season some flour with salt, pepper, paprika, thyme, cayenne pepper and all spice. Dust the pork in flour and then seal in a hot pan. Remove and then add thickly cut onions or shallots. Soften with some sugar. Add garlic and scotch bonnet chilli then a few sprigs of fresh thyme, more seasoning, paprika and a pinch of all spice. I added some mushrooms here. Then some tomato puree. Cook for a few minutes then return the pork. Add some beef stock (about 400ml) and then pour in the beer – I used the whole bottle (minus a few sips for the chef, of course). I added some little carrots to up my veg intake, plus a few shakes of Worcestershire sauce and a teaspoon of marmite. Put the pot in the oven, covered, for 45 minutes and then uncover for up to an hour (until it’s the thickness you want it to be), stirring every 30 minutes or so. Serve with whatever you want – rice, mash potato, green vegetables, roasted sweet potatoes.

The finished bowl of food is exactly what I wanted: deeply spicy but still a little fruity from the scotch bonnet, richly savoury from the stock and marmite, sweet and a little bitter from the beer. One of those dinners that you have in a big bowl and it leaves you feeling full and warm.

No beer needed on the side – this was about recovery from beer, recovering from a busy week.

Beer Can Chicken (aka Punk Ass Chicken) with Roasted Garlic IPA Mash

Chicken cooked with a can of beer up its bottom. Also known as beer butt chicken or, in this case, Punk Ass Chicken.

I think people cook Beer Can Chicken for one reason: it looks awesome. Seeing that bird perched on the can, legs and wings akimbo, almost human, as if you’ve stitched up your mate big time and tied him to a bin, naked, cannot fail to impress the inner school boy (just look at the image above!), while the machismo of grilling a bird whole appeals to the manly man’s manliness. Who doesn’t look at a Beer Can Chicken and think ‘I need to cook that’?

So Beer Can Chicken was a dish I needed to cook. It’s a BBQ dish but I don’t have a BBQ (third floor flat, no outside space; disposable BBQ in the park not up to the job) so I used the oven. I decided on Punk IPA because it gave me an excuse to buy a four-pack and because I could call it Punk Ass Chicken. It wasn’t a difficult decision.

The first job is the best one: drink half a can of beer. You need the can open and half full. Then you need to get the chicken ready. I gave it a luxurious massage in oil, salt, pepper, paprika, fresh thyme, sugar, cloves of garlic and a little Punk before leaving it for an hour or so. When ready, heat the oven to 200C and empty it from all shelves except the lowest one.

Inserting the beer can is not the easiest job, especially with a heavy bird rubbed in slippery oil. Thankfully, like a nostril and a forefinger, a chicken’s back cavity appears to be the exact same size as a beer can, so once you’ve got hold of the bird it goes in with a satisfying push. At this point it looks a bit sorry for itself, all pink and cold with a can up its arse, but don’t feel remorse as it’s time to get it in the oven (do this very carefully – the bird is top heavy and mine fell after about 15 minutes in the oven and I need to go on an awkward recovery mission).

Around 90 minutes later (more for a bigger bird) and it’s done and looking resplendent and wonderful and crispy (I think there are few finer food sights than a roasted chicken). The only issue comes when trying to get the can out of the chicken at the end; the bird is heavy and hot and the can is filled with boiling beer. Place your hands on either side of the chicken and lift and wiggle until the can slides out.

To go with it I cooked a recipe which I’ve read many times but never dared cook: the brilliant Homebrew Chef’s roasted garlic IPA mash potato. Roast garlic until soft, heat milk or cream with butter, thyme and seasoning, make a paste with the roasted garlic cloves and add to the milk mix, add a little IPA (I used Punk) and then mix it all together with mashed potatoes. Creamy, garlicky, rich and then a little fruity from the IPA, the hop bitterness is covered by the butter while the roast garlic brings its own bitterness. It’s fantastic and a great side for the chicken.

The question I was most interested in when cooking this was how much impact does the beer have on the taste? By using a strongly scented beer I hoped to get something fragrant in the meat which I could then adapt in the future by using different beers and birds. When hot I couldn’t taste the Punk (I got a little on the skin as it’d been marinated and basted in it) but when it cooled and I was picking my way through the rest of the carcass I could definitely taste a Punk-like fruitiness through it.

One of my favourite things in the whole world to eat is a just-roasted chicken with crispy, salty skin. Add a beer can into that and things get even better. Served with the IPA mash, some cooking juices and a Goose Island IPA on the side and it was a feast of wonderful hops. Beer Can Chicken (or Punk Ass Chicken) was a great success. If you’ve never made it then what are you waiting for?

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: Pale Malt Crème Brûlée

Wort, the sweet liquid that yeast turns into beer, is made by mashing malt in hot water for an hour. A thought: what if you attempted the same process using cream and milk and use it to make a custard? As soon as that burrowed itself into my brain I had to find out.

I popped to my local brewery – Royal Tunbridge Wells – to pick up a few handfuls of pale malt. Back in the kitchen I loosely repeated the brewing process by heating some cream and milk in a cast-iron casserole to roughly (i.e. I guessed and when it started bubbling I moved it onto a smaller gas ring) 70C and then added the malt and a vanilla pod, stirring it every few minutes for an hour and hoping it stayed at a regular temperature. From there I followed the typical recipe for a crème brûlées.

And did it work?

Hell yeah! The finished brûlées are fantastic. Even better than I hoped they’d be. Creamy and smooth, the malt is subtle but definitely there, adding extra sweetness and a different depth of flavour, almost white chocolate-like and somehow wonderfully comforting. If you’ve got any pale malt lying around (or if you pinch some from your local brewery like I did – you don’t need much) then I definitely recommend this.

This will make six brûlées (or four brûlées and some ice cream):

900ml double cream

500ml milk

150g pale malt

1 vanilla pod

8 egg yolks

100g caster sugar

Heat the double cream and milk to around 70C (there’s a lot more than a usual recipe but you lose some to the malt), then add the vanilla and malt and heat for 45-60 minutes, stirring to avoid it clumping together. Strain the creamy wort into a clean pan, pressing as much liquid through the sieve as possible.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar then gradually pour the hot cream over it while still whisking. Strain into a pouring jug and then fill some ramekins. Bake in a bain marie at 150C for 30-40 minutes (or until it is set on top but still wobbles), chill in the fridge for at least six hours and then before serving top with sugar (I tried a sugar and malt topping but the malt burnt before the sugar caramelised) and caramelise it with a kitchen blowtorch or under the grill.

(To make ice cream... save back some when you fill the ramekins and put this into a clean saucepan, stir with a wooden spoon until it thickens – you are making custard – and then let it cool before freezing or churning in an ice cream maker – the ice cream tastes amazing!).

Not quite cooking with beer, more cooking with pre-beer, but it's a fun little beery recipe but one which works generally and isn’t just for beer freaks like me – the malt genuinely adds a fantastic flavour to it. I’m also guessing that this would be great with a massive imperial stout on the side, something like Bourbon County Stout or oak aged Yeti – the bigger the better.

Inspiration for this came from BeerBirraBier’s malted pancake post. And while at Royal Tunbridge Wells Brewery I also picked up a few bottles, of course. I drank Royal, their best seller, while I cooked, and it’s a really decent easy-drinking best bitter.

Pale Malt Cookies

Cookies made with pale malt.

This recipe gave me 10 fat cookies, crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle:

150g unsalted butter

85g caster sugar

85g soft brown sugar

1 egg

One drop of vanilla extract

200g plain flour

Big pinch of salt

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

80g pale malt (with a little reserved)

20g oats

Cream the butter and sugar in a mixer. Add the egg and mix. Add the vanilla extract and then mix all the remaining ingredients (if you want to crush the malt in a pestle and mortar then you can - I didn’t and liked the texture). If the mix gets too sticky then add a few drops of water (or beer!). Butter some baking trays, spread them out, sprinkle some more malt on top and bake for about 15 minutes at 170C.

These are delicious! The malt has a nutty and light sweetness to it which works so well with the buttery cookie, adding great extra flavour and texture. If any brewers or homebrewers have any spare malt (of course you have!) then I recommend baking these. They also work really well with beer on the side.

I’ve now got a few other recipes I want to try with malt as an ingredient, so I’d better find a nearby brewery who can spare a few scoops... I’d also love to try this recipe with dark malt and add chocolate chips.

This idea was inspired by a box of maris otter malt biscuits which I received in the post from Little Rose Bakery. There were two different kinds, one semi-sweet and one savoury, and they were so good I wanted to make my own.

Beer Jelly and Ice Cream

I used to eat a lot of jelly; a huge bowl made with half a bottle of vodka and as little water as we could get away with to make it set. That was as good as dessert got when I was at university and we’d sit around tucking into it between cans of lager and shots of Tesco Value gin (we lived like kings in those days).

I’ve wanted to make beer jelly for too-long. I’ve wanted to make it with beer ice cream to be a boozy twist on the kids classic. I wanted to serve it in a beer glass so it looked like a pint. I also wanted it to be a play on a black and tan, with IPA jelly and stout ice cream. 

It’s a simple recipe. The ice cream is a pot of good vanilla custard and about 100ml of Guinness FES (any stout will do) – you can make your own custard if you want but I cheated. The jelly starts by softening gelatine sheets in about 100ml of the beer – I used a can of Punk IPA. Then make a sugar syrup – you want it to be very sweet (four tablespoons of sugar in about 100ml of water) so that it balances the bitterness (if you used a different beer then you could use less sugar). When the syrup is ready, take it off the heat for a few seconds and then stir in the gelatine with the beer it’s been soaking in. Let the gelatine dissolve and then pour this into a jug along with the rest of the beer. Put it into glasses or serving dishes and leave to set in the fridge.

And the taste? It’s really interesting... It’s jelly and ice cream but not like we know it, far from the bright red wobble of Rowntree’s with white rectangles of ice cream cut from a box. It’s fruity, a little fizzy and there’s some bitterness at the end. Put it with the ice cream and it dulls that bitterness, giving the flavour of beer in both, which is great, really interesting and unusual – it’s not over-sweet and there’s a savoury depth to it.

I used Punk IPA to see if the tropical fruit aroma and flavour stayed with it and it does, just. The trouble is that the bitterness is harsh on its own and that’s not something you want in a dessert. Some pieces of fruit, mango or mandarin (tinned, of course), would balance this and most other beer jelly recipes I’ve seen come with fruit in them (they are also made with fruit beer).

I now want to try it with kriek (a proper sour one) or a sweetened fruit beer. I’d also be interested in a Budweiser jelly or one made with wheat beer. Or maybe black tea jelly with milk ice cream and a biscuit on the side... I’d like to try ice cream and jelly made from the same beer as well – I think it’d make a playful dinner party pre-dessert, especially if served in shot glasses so it looks like beer. Or taken to the next logical stage it’s a full-on beer trifle (beer cake used as sponge, beer jelly, beer-soaked fruit, beer custard, BEER!).

My kitchen experiments continue and I’ve got lots more things I still want to try! Anyone got any cool ideas for using beer in food that I can steal and try out?