Cooking with beer

"In truth, beer can do pretty much all the things in the kitchen that we usually ask of wine: deglaze a pan, marinade a piece of meat, add body and flavour to everything from casseroles to cakes. "

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Yes you can even make ice-cream with it. You will find lots of recipes if you google beer ice-cream.

On Friday night I decided to make a beef stew with beer for a change. Haven't done it for a while. And very nice it was too - I just used a lager, and had beef, spinach, mushrooms, onions with sliced potatoes on top. Added flavours - garlic, paprika and dill. Just because I had some dill. If I had a criticism I would say the spinach was a bit slimy. I only chopped it roughly - should have either shredded it fine or chopped it up I think. But it did smell good when it was cooking.

So I thought I would do a post on cooking with beer, and when I started to Google found that I had forgotten all sorts of ways that beer is used in cooking and also found some new ones - like the beer ice-cream above and things like, a beer dip, beer chilli con carne, beer macaroni cheese and perhaps most surprisingly of all tiramisu.

Beer, of course, is an ancient drink and for centuries perhaps was drunk in preference to water because you were likely to die from drinking the water, but not from the beer. It was nutritious too, tastier and let's not forget the effect of getting drunk. Initially this is pleasant let's remember..

"Beer was the smoothie of the pre-industrial age." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

So what are the ways I had forgotten? Well beer batter. Now how on earth could I forget that? It is said to make the lightest batter and saying that your batter is a beer batter tends to give it kudos. Fried chicken too - a sort of batter. And apple fritters - from Jamie. I guess none of them are particularly good for you, but I'm not talking about health here.

As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall pointed out in his article on cooking with beer, it goes particularly well with cheese. He talked about a Welsh Rarebit that included beer but I also saw recipes here and there for fondue, cheese soup, onion soup, potted cheese and macaroni cheese, all of which included beer in the ingredients.

Then of course there is the enormous range of beer and mostly beef stews, though I did see one for venison too. The most famous of these is Carbonade Flamande from Belgium, which I have made on occasion and which largely consists of beer, onions and beef.

Obviously the flavour of your stew will change depending on what kind of beer you use, and these days the range of beers available is enormous. The only kind that I saw as being not recommended was one that had a very high hop content. I think it mentioned an Indian beer whose name I did not recognise. Sometimes a bit of sugar was added to mitigate the bitterness, sometimes not. I didn't add any but I had quite a lot of onions which are sweetish of course. I was also surprised to see how many versions of a beer chilli con carne there were.

And whilst we are still on meat and fish - the Brazilians have a marinade for chicken, beer is often used as a glaze for ham and ribs - beef or pork, and it is also used to just baste fish with on the barbecue. Glazes often use mustard as well and beer can be used when making mustard.

And then we can accompany our meal with a Swiss beer and cheese bread. Well I'm sure there are other bread recipes too. Maybe you could use it to make scones?

And finally - dessert. Lots of recipes for cakes and cookies are to be found on the net. And the traditional Christmas pudding or Christmas cake can be made with beer too. Delia had a recipe for this, and also for a rather rich looking chocolate cake.

And ice cream - there are companies making ice cream for sale, but I don't know where you can find them.

So it's an amazingly versatile ingredient and one that we should use more often. I'm a bit of a sucker for those damper type breads, so I might give the bread a go some time soon. In the meantime I vow to use it in my stews more often.