Cooking With Beer - Where to Begin

Cooking with Beer

Beer and Food – Where to begin

The ingredients in beer are full of varying characteristics and underlying flavours and aromas.  These flavours, aromas and characteristics come from the four basic ingredients in beer.-      

Hops with their herbal, citrus, resiny aromas      

Malts and grains provide the toasty, roasty flavours      

Yeast adds an element of fruitiness and spiciness      

Water, well this can help make a good beer great! 

To understand how these characteristics work it is important to understand how to pick out these aromas and flavours in beer.  This can be done by following some easy steps.  Much like wine tasting having a rounded glass is key as well as the iconic swilling of the liquid. 

Step 1 - Eyes – Look for the clarity of the beer, colour and carbonation.

Step 2 – Nose – To capture the aroma (swill glass, take short sniffs) identify the bold top notes versus the underlying ones.

Step 3 – Mouth - Sip to understand the body, strength and character.  Slurp to understand the taste and flavour.

Step 4 – Palate – How does it react on the palatte?  Sweet, savoury, umami, dry (bitter) 

Beer and Food transform each other.  The contrasting elements featured above help to balance and even sometimes blend the flavours together.  The key to great beer and food matching is down to finding combinations that work.  By identifying the flavours and ingredients in both the beer and food the experience can be astonishing. 

The certain elements in beer that should be acknowledged are:-     

- Bitterness (Hop)

- Malt Sweetness

- Carbonation

- Alcohol

These elements when paired with certain foods are the catalyst for transformation.

HOP BITTERNESS  -  ROASTED MALT  -  ALCOHOL - CARBONATION

BALANCES

SWEETNESS  - UMAMI - FAT

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MALT SWEETNESS  

BALANCES

SPICY HEAT -  ACIDITY

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HOP BITTERNESS

EMPHASISES

SPICY HEAT

There is no right of passage in terms of the order when pairing food with beer.  However there are guidelines that need to be followed.  Choose a topic, whether it is a certain style of beer or a specific cuisine, by having a concept this will make the matching process more cohesive. 

The following guidelines are: 

Match Strength with Strength

Identify the strength of the dish first.  A delicate light dish requires a beer that is mildly hopped and delicate on the palate, whilst a robust strong dish requires the same level of strength in a beer.  Strength does not refer just to alcohol content; this can be representative by hop bitterness or robust maltiness as well.  Strong dishes can vary as well, from that of heavily spiced dishes to that of roasted meats.  By understanding the strength of the dish can you find a perfect match. 

Find Harmonies

Understanding the flavours and aromas in both the food and the beer can help you in creating a perfect pairing.  Find commonalities, such as citrus hop aromas in the beer with citrus fruit, pepper vinegar, or, toasted malt flavours in the beer with grilled or roasted meats, aged strong cheeses.  Once commonalities have been found, the door to pairings can be swung wide open; there is no right or wrongs, just common sense. 

Contrast Elements

As explained in the diagram above, certain elements contrasting can provide the benchmark to great combinations.  Sweetness, bitterness, carbonation, heat (spice) and richness (fat) interact with each other in food and beer and provide an interesting and obvious result.  By picking out the characteristics of the food you can then look at contrasting elements within the beer to either balance or emphasize.  Such as carbonation balancing fat and richness.  So a dense pastry pork pie is balanced by the carbonation in Worthington’s White Shield IPA.  This is just one example of contrasting elements at work. Take the sweet malts of a Czech Pilsner balancing the spicy heat from a chorizo sausage.  The result is a transformation of both the beer and the food. 

Use beer as a condiment

The final guideline hightlights the underlying theme for this book.  Using beer as a condiment within cooking.  We’ve all had a steak and ale pie, but more often than not the use of beer in cooking is overlooked.  Why should this beer, when beer is practically food, and especially with the vast flavour profiles that are immersed in beer.