Beer As A Ingedrient- It Just Makes Sense

Cooking with beer makes sense: not only is it more flavorful than water, but it’s also more flavorful than any store-bought chicken stock and less ethically objectionable as well. And unlike wine or liquor, you can substitute beer cup-for-cup for stock or water when you’re braising or making soup. Yet like wine, beer is acidic, which comes in handy when you’re baking quick bread, cake or fried foods, because you need a little acidity to activate baking soda.

In fact, beer’s flavors are arguably more varied and complex than any ready-made liquid besides wine. And like bread, to which it’s closely related, beer loves to team with meat, cheese and strong flavors like onions, garlic and spices.

I knew all this in theory, and I had done some work on these things before contacting Garrett. For starters, I wanted to make a beer bread; a basic quick bread with whole-wheat flour and a little cornmeal. I had experimented with this a couple of times and loved both the ridiculously easy method (stir, pour, bake) and the finished loaf’s tender crumb and warm, yeasty flavor. (Yeast bread with no yeast. Interesting.)

Similarly, I had made carnitas — that irresistible Mexican pork shoulder braised for hours with spices, then fried in its own fat until crisp — with beer as the braising liquid, but I wanted further guidance. Lastly, a kind of old-fashioned cheddar-beer soup is less my style, but still intriguing — I was eager to try that as well. Most versions of this soup contain copious amounts of cream in addition to the cheese, but I was confident I could come up with a version using cauliflower to provide the velvety body.

The dishes I made were good but could be better; the difference could be the right beers. So I consulted Garrett, and he did not disappoint. In fact, he was so specific that I had to ask him for common substitutions for those of us who are not fanatics (see the recipes).

For the bread, he suggested a doppelbock (double bock), often referred to as liquid bread: a semisweet, supermalty, high-alcohol beer whose aroma reminds you of bread baking in an oven. Belgian wheat beer (witbier), he said, would be best for the carnitas, because these beers are often spiced with coriander and bitter orange, obviously akin to braised meat, Mexican-style; they are also a little sour, which lends the meat a nice complexity.

Finally, for the soup, he had me use Belgian dark abbey ale (and plugged his own, but, hey — we owe him that), whose yeast strain, he said, “has its own funky sulfurous quality and caramel notes” that show off both cauliflower and cheese nicely.

It’s delicious, but frankly this all gets a little over my head. You can use any full-bodied, full-flavored beer in any of these recipes. Rheingold, you’ll be pleased to know, is back on the market with a reformed recipe.