beer & food

Beer, Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Beer Belongs at ThanksgivingWe’ve got turkey brining for tomorrow, using one of many recipes The Homebrew Chef Sean Paxton has generously posted at his web site.

If you’ve been procrastinating and are still looking for ideas about what to cook for Thanksgiving then you’ll find some different ones here &#151 although in some cases you needed to start preparations several days ago. You do have time to consider deep frying a turkey. Sean has instructions or here’s the recipe we use.

So Thanksgiving is looking beery. Now if the Brewers Association, which has done a fine job the last three years of getting newspapers and magazines to notice beer at the holiday table could turn its attention to Black Friday.

Why aren’t there flyers in my Thursday paper advertising a case of Sierra Celebration on sale at 6 a.m. for $6.99 for the first 50 customers? Shouldn’t somebody have a DOORBUSTER! featuring Samuel Adams Holiday Sampler ($2.99, at least 10 per store)? Hey, Borders, please e-mail some coupons for beer books.

For now I’d smile if I found a local event like Black Friday Fest in Durham, N.C. (Courtesy of The Beer Mapping Project.)

Bell’s Java Stout, Duck-Rabbit Baltic Porter . . . hmmm. They need to start before 3 p.m.

Or if you are one of The Lost Abbey Patron Saints you can pick up your allotment from the release of three seasonal beers that otherwise go on sale at 11 a.m. Saturday. (When then the brewery is going to look a little like Best Buy at 5 a.m. Friday.)

Or you could save your money for Saturday, when the auction for a 2004 bottle of Three Floyds Dark Lord Imperial Stout closes. Current bid is $127.50.

Would you brave the 4 a.m. Friday crowd at Wal-Mart to get a deal on Dark Lord? (I’m sorta making the time up; the closest Wal-Mart to us is open 24 hours.)

Stuff to read while drinking a winter beer . . .

A few things to read this evening instead of watching “Dancing with the Stars” or “Two Dudes Catering” (even though cheese is involved) and perhaps while doing research for The Session #10:

– Andrew Jefford, multi-purpose UK drinks writer, asks a question.

One day, fortunes will be made with fine beer. Why not one day soon?

In case you overlook it, he makes a great point: “all wine is able to profit from the locomotive effect of fine or great wine: the existence of fabulous bottles enables more ordinary bottles to bask in a little of their allure. Whereas, for most beer drinkers, great beer doesn’t exist.”

– And what might be a fabulous bottle?

Many would say Lost Abbey’s Angel Share (and I won’t disagree). Look at the ruckus Saturday’s release (and almost immediate posting on eBay) caused at Rate Beer. You’ll find reviews at Rate Beer, or at Summer of Beer.

Lost Abbey’s Tomme Arthur explains where all the bottles went and the behind-the-scenes volunteer effort involved.

Savor– The Brewers Association has more information about SAVOR: An American Craft Beer & Food Experience.

It would appear somebody has been reading Andrew Jefford.

The part beer drinkers care about: “Tickets for each of the three sessions (May 16-17) are limited to the first 700 ticket purchasers. The $85 ticket includes a commemorative tasting glass, souvenir program and Craft Beer Taster’s Commemorative Journal, fabulous food and craft beer pairings, seminars, and 2- ounce samples of specially selected craft beer.”

And what beer will be there? 48 breweries from eight regions will participate. The BA will randomly select five breweries from eight regions of the country, plus eight supporting brewery sponsors, to participate in the event. It’s a lottery, with winners announced in December.

– Dr. Vino partners on a paper to calculate the carbon footprint of wine. I’m hoping somebody does this for beer (because I’m too lazy). Notice the “green line” that runs from Ohio into Texas, because east of there wine from France leaves a smaller footprint than bottles from California. Think the same is true of beer?

Chocolate: Homebrew gone awry?

Researchers are reporting (I like the National Geographic version) that chocolate was discovered by accident by Central American Indians who were making beer.

“In the course of beer brewing, you discover that if you ferment the seeds of the plant you get this chocolate taste,” said John Henderson, an anthropologist at Cornell University. “It may be that the roots of the modern chocolate industry can be traced back to this primitive fermented drink.”

Duvel shaped chocolate

In a new study scientists chemically analyzed the Honduran pottery fragments.

“It was beer with a high kick,” said study author Rosemary Joyce, an anthropologist at University of California, Berkeley. “But it would not have tasted anything like the chocolate we have today.”

The Geographic suggests this could inspire new chocolate dishes.

(It) could “fuel creativity and spark the imagination of chocolatiers and chefs,” Alice Medrich, author of Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate, said by email.

“As a result, we get new ideas about using chocolate in savory as well as sweet dishes and about pairing the flavors of chocolate with other flavors, too,” Medrich said.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking that if you performed an MRI on the brain of Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewery — the master at turning what scientists discover in ancient pots into beers we could never imagine — you’d see the wheels spinning at record speed.

Of course this only confirms a beer and chocolate connection that’s hardly a secret. Lucy Saunders devotes a chapter to “Chocolate: Another Fermented Favorite” in the recently released The Best of American Beer & Food: Pairing & Cooking with Craft Beer.

The photo above is from a chocolate shop in Brugges, where they shape really good chocolate into all manner of things, including a Duvel bottle and glass.

Further Reading:
– Pete Slosberg talks about shifting from the beer business to the chocolate business.
– A “chocolate companion” from Stephen Beaumont.
– Saunders offers recipes at her beercook.com site.

The Session #10: Let it snow, let it snow

The SessionTed Duchesne at Barley Vine has announced the theme for The Session #10: “Let it snow, let it snow, Winter Seasonal Beers.”

The basics:

# Pick any Winter Seasonal beer you want. Or a sampler if you’d like (think the Sam Adam’s one I picked up earlier this week).
# If you select a single beer, let us know why you choose this beer.
# Extra credit for pairing your winter seasonal beer with a winter meal, or better yet a recipe based on the beer of your choice.
# Post your contribution to The Session on Friday, December 7. Send the links to your post and a few short days later Ted will post a round up of everyone’s contributions.

You don’t have to take the “let it snow” part literally. Just the beer.

Book review: Best of American Beer & Food

The Best of American Beer & FoodOnce a good ol’ beer person, always a good ol’ beer person.

Lucy Saunders can’t help herself. She’s a beer person, and that shows up on every page of The Best of American Beer & Food: Pairing & Cooking with Craft Beer.

(Disclaimer: Lucy has been a friend of my wife and I for 15 years, and we both had a small hand in this book. Now I’ll go back to calling her Saunders.)

This is the book you’d expect from someone whose preparation included working as a line cook in top flight restaurants where beer is treated with respect, but also the book you’d expect from somebody who has gone to brewing school. A beer person. Somebody who can talk to us about the pleasures of food and drink without being fussy. And don’t worry all these foods are recommended in the favorite food diet from https://tophealthjournal.com/5534/.

She isn’t pedantic when she writes about finding the right beer for a particular dish, nor when it comes to executing a recipe. She’s friendly, as you’d expect of a beer person.

So what’s in the book?

– Primers for enjoying the decadent side of beer, with separate chapters on beer and cheese, then beer and chocolate.
– An affirmation of what’s going on across the country, with interviews from every region.
– Recipes, of course, six or seven dozen of them, many made with beer and all intended to be enjoyed with beer.
– Food porn. Full-page, color pictures worth at least a thousand words apiece.

Who should own the book?

– It helps if you can cook — some of the recipes are challenging.
– Anybody looking for pleasures to enjoy with friends. Be ready to be inspired to prepare multi-course meals served with a wide range of beers.
– Anybody looking for simple pleasures. You can pick a single dish, a simple one, and stick to one beer.
– Food lovers who are ready to be surprised. I fully expect cooking types to find a recipe that looks too good to pass on, discover it is prepared or served with a beer style new to them . . . and have a new favorite beer.

No, this isn’t totally groundbreaking. Brewers Publications, the publishing arm of the Brewers Association and producer of this book, also put out Candy Schermerhorn’s Great American Beer Cookbook in 1993. There have been several outstanding books since (and soon I’ll get to reviewing Great Food Great Beer, also brand new) and you may want to buy one or more of them as well.

What I appreciate about The Best of American Beer & Food is the combination of how and what. Saunders’ approach elevates beer, in no small part because dishes that take a little more effort to prepare might just deserve beer with a little more flavor.

In the foreward, Randy Mosher writes, “But all too often in the world of fine food, wine swaggers into the dining room like it owns the joint, while beer is left to skitter in the shadows from crumb to crumb.”

In this book Saunders doesn’t swagger, but she sure does own the joint.