My Bamberg onion

Bamberg might be getting a lot of things right, but vegetarian food isn't necessarily one of them. Actually, that’s not really true – finding good veggie fare in Bamberg was no problem at all when I visited, but the traditional dishes you’ll find served in the brewery taverns are as carnivorous as they come. I begrudge nobody their mountains of gravy-soaked pork, you understand, and was particularly envious of those getting to sample a speciality of the Schlenkerla pub, the Bamberg Onion. As it turns out, Bamberg is notorious for its onions as well as its beer, and in this dish an onion is stuffed with lots and lots of smoky meat and served with a gravy made from rauchbier and the drippings – the recipe can be found here. Quite understandably, a vegetarian version did not appear on the menu, so I started to think about how I could create such a thing at home.

How does one go about constructing a meat-free equivalent of a dish that revolves around pork, smoked pork, and a little smoked bacon for good measure? The answer was to fall back on the old vegetarian staples of mushrooms and cheese. Mushrooms bring a vaguely meaty depth of flavour, and cheese is, you know, delicious. In order to replicate the smokiness, I opted for smoked applewood, and decided to cook the mushrooms in Schlenkerla rauchbier. I sautéed them at a high heat until they took on a caramel colour and their liquids started to evaporate, then threw in around 100ml of beer, a teaspoon of smoked garlic powder and some smoked sea salt and cooked briskly until the liquid had mostly reduced. These mushrooms, even on their own, were a bit of a revelation, and something I’ll be cooking again. Leftovers made a sublime grilled cheese sandwich the next day.

I didn't have a genuine Bamberg onion at hand, of course, so went for the biggest Spanish one I could find. Spooning the middle section out was no fun at all. If I had to do it again, I’d seriously considering donning swimming goggles for this stage. I chopped these parts finely and fried them off, then added them to the mushrooms, before stuffing this mixture alternatively with grated cheese until the onion was bulging. I roasted this for about 45 minutes, occasionally topping up the water in the bottom of the dish whilst making a quick sauce out of vegetable stock and beer, thickened with a little flour and simmered in a frying pan. The sauce was simple but tasty, and the dish didn't need much anyway. The final touch was a smoked applewood crisp, tucked between the onion 'lid' and the main body where normally a slice of smoked bacon would rest.

I served it with mashed potato and some steamed veg, washed down with the remaining beer. It was delicious. That onion is no mere vessel – all of its sweetness is revealed, but it retains some texture and bite at the same time, and the filling was full of smoky umami flavour. It may insult Franconian tradition. It may sound unappealing to meat eaters drawn to the deeply porky original. It may have taken all afternoon. I don’t care. It’s my Bamberg onion and it made me happy.

Sorachi onion soup

French onion soup with IPA – that was the idea that leapt into my head one afternoon, whilst daydreaming at work.  Not French onion soup accompanied by IPA – I mean with the beer in the soup, as part of the broth. There’s nothing new, of course, and as I googled the term I discovered I’m not the first to have the idea. But I did come up with a twist that I figured was worth a try – what if I was to use a single hop Sorachi Ace IPA? It’s an unusual and divisive hop that, to me, is a big burst of citrus (lemon and clementine) with a herbal edge which recalls dill. The fruitiness will match the tang of the cheese toasts which sit, oozing on top of the broth, whilst that savoury element is a natural partner for the herbs in the soup.

Beers showcasing Sorachi Ace aren't as unusual as they used to be, though they tend to stick to the saison style (the eponymous examplefrom Brooklyn Brewery, Wild Beer’s Epic Saison, or Adnams' version for Marks & Spencer – all great beers). The only beer I've come across that fits the bill is Weird Beard’s Sorachi Face Plant, so that’s what I'm using here.

As a guide, I referred to Felicity Cloake’s ‘perfect’ French onion soup recipe, making certain changes where necessary. I'm not using any cider or brandy, as I don’t want to confuse the flavour of the beer, and I'm using vegetable stock in place of beef, as I don’t eat meat. I'm also using cheddar cheese for my toasts – not very French, I know, but I love cheddar with sweet onions and I think it’s a perfect foil for hop bitterness.

The Ginger Pig, whose recipe I initially found, suggested that the chosen beer shouldn't be “too gutsy”. This is clearly not the case for the 8.6% beast I'm using. There is a lingering, boozy bitterness in the finished dish but, I would suggest, no more than there would have been had I added a nip of brandy at the last moment, as many recipes suggest. To me, it isn't too much, especially in combination with the cheese toasts, and a taste of the beer on the side pulls everything together beautifully. If you don’t want this bitterness, something like Adnams' Marks & Spencer saison, or Bristol Beer Factory’s Sorachi, a more subtle golden ale, might make a good substitute.

This recipe takes time, but it’s not labour intensive – most of the time, you can be elsewhere while the dish cooks.

INGREDIENTS (makes 2 small, starter-sized portions or one main course)

80g butter

5 onions (based on the medium-sized ones in a kilogram bag)

1 tsp plain flour

1 tsp balsamic vinegar

Pinch of dried thyme

1 bay leaf

300ml vegetable stock

200ml beer (Sorachi Face Plant or other Sorachi Ace beer)

1 tsp sugar

6 medium-thick slices of baguette

Grated cheddar cheese

METHOD

First, prepare the onions by peeling, halving and finely slicing.

Melt the butter in a large pan over a low to medium heat. When it’s melted, add the onions. Fry for a few minutes, then sprinkle with a generous pinch of salt. Stir frequently for about 10 minutes, until they begin to become soft and translucent.

Stir in the thyme and bay leaf, then turn the heat right down and put a lid on the pan. This will retain the moisture and help the onions to soften and caramelise quicker. They’ll still need at least an hour – 90 minutes if possible – until they’re a rich caramel colour.

Add the flour to the pan and stir for a minute or so. Now add the vinegar and roughly half of the beer along with the vegetable stock. If your flour has gone lumpy, you may need to use a whisk at this point. Simmer the broth for around another hour until it has significantly reduced, which will allow for the addition of the remaining beer at the last moment.

While the soup reduces, heat the grill and toast your baguette slices on both sides. Set these aside. Grate as much cheese as you dare to top the toasts later.

When the soup is looking thicker, heat the grill again, ready to grill the cheese toasts when the soup if finished.

Add a teaspoon of sugar to the broth, which will counteract some of the bitterness in the beer. Check the seasoning, and then stir in the remaining beer. Keep the heat very low, and stir just long enough to heat, but not reduce any further.

Ladle the soup into bowls. Top with the toasted baguette slices, then cover in grated cheese. Place the bowls under the grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling.

Serve, ideally with a glass of the same beer you used to cook as an accompaniment.  

London Smoke porter & chipotle BBQ sauce

With BBQ season firmly upon us, smoked beer is never far from my mind. And since my BBQ beans cooked with Beavertown Smog Rocket porter went a while ago, I decided to tweak the recipe to make a rich, tangy BBQ sauce that I could store in my fridge in anticipation of my first BBQ of the year. I only made a few changes – a little less passata, a little more beer. Some added mushroom ketchup (which I use as a vegetarian alternative to Worcestershire sauce – if you don’t mind the anchovy content, you could use that instead) and tamarind sauce for extra depth and tang. And some chipotle chilli, for added smoke and a fiery kick.

Having used Smog Rocket already, I didn't want to go with the same beer this time around. Smoked porter is undoubtedly the way to go – the smoke is appropriate, and the roasted malts match the sweet treacle in the sauce. So this time I've opted for Five Points’ London Smoke. It’s a big beer in many ways – rich, boozy, full of coffee, chocolate and currant flavours, amongst others. The smoke is not hugely pronounced, but gives a meaty background that will work. It’s quite bitter, so an extra touch of sugar is needed.

The sauce tastes great. If you eat meat, I imagine this could make for a really special burger. And as you tuck into your juicy half-pounder, you might pity me with my dry, lifeless soya patty – but you needn't bother, because I've come to love the ‘hockey puck’ veggie burger. Especially with one of these on top.

Ingredients      

• 1 chopped onion

• 1 tsp smoked garlic powder, or 2 cloves fresh smoked garlic, minced or crushed

• 1 tsp chipotle paste or half a dried chipotle chili, deseeded and finely chopped

• Generous pinch of smoked paprika

• Pinch of oregano

• 200ml Five Points London Smoke, or other smoked porter

• 150ml passata

• 1 tsp black treacle/molasses

• 2 tbsp tomato puree

• 1 tbsp soft dark brown sugar, plus an extra pinch

• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard

• 1 tbsp red wine vinegar

• 1 tsbp mushroom ketchup or Worcestershire sauce

• 1 tsp tamarind sauce

Method

• Fry the onion on a medium heat for about 5 minutes, until soft and golden.
• Stir in the smoked garlic, chipotle, oregano and smoked paprika and fry for another minute or so.
• Add the passata and stir in all of the other ingredients and season. Retain a small amount of the beer (around 10-15ml) and keep to one side.
• Reduce the heat as far as possible whilst keeping the sauce at a simmer. Stir frequently to make sure it isn’t burning, and simmer for around an hour, or until thick, checking the seasoning several times. It’s unlikely to ever become quite as thick and gloopy as a bottled BBQ sauce, but use this consistency as a guide.
• Once you reach your desired consistency, remove the pan from the heat and set to one side to cool.
• Once cooled, transfer the sauce into a blender or food processor with the remaining beer. Once smooth, return to the blended sauce to the pan.
• Whilst the sauce reheats, wash and sterilise a jar. To do this, thoroughly wash the jar with washing up liquid and hot water, but don’t dry it. Then place it in the oven upside down on a baking tray and turn on the heat. After a few minutes, turn it the other way up. Keep checking it, and when the moisture has dried, remove it from the oven. Fill it with the warm sauce and fit the lid tightly. Once the jar has cooled, put it in the fridge until ready to serve. 

Beer and food fail; onion bhajis with Guinness Foreign Extra Stout reduction

Not all beer and food experiments are successful. This post is about a failure. It began whilst I was idly daydreaming about onion bhajis, which I love. Whilst I was studying for my undergraduate degree, I was mildly obsessed by these weird packaged bhajis you could buy in the campus shop – they were round and flat, like a giant cookie, incredibly dry and doughy and tasted like they’d had no contact with any onions whatsoever. Somehow, I loved them, and one of these joined a packet of crisps to make up a none-too-healthy lunch all too regularly. But I also like good bhajis; crisp and golden-brown on the outside, doughy and packed with gooey, stringy onion in the middle. So, I decided to make some of my own.

So far, so good. But the daydream didn't end there. I moved onto thinking about tamarind sauce, which is often served as an accompaniment to onion bhajis. Tamarind has a rich, deep, savoury flavour, but also a sweet-and-sour tang and, whilst it doesn't taste of tamarind as such, Guinness Foreign Extra Stout shares these characteristics. I began to wonder whether I could replace tamarind sauce with a sticky reduction of the beer. What could go wrong?

The bhajis themselves were excellent. I followed Felicity Cloake's ‘perfect’ recipe – I often follow Felicity’s stuff and it never lets me down – with a couple of small alterations. One word of advice I would share with anyone embarking on bhajis for the first time is to be careful with the consistency of your batter – there’s no measure of water given in this recipe, so you have to judge it by eye, but add even slightly too much and you’ll struggle to shape the onions into balls when it’s time to fry them. Even with this minor problem, the bhajis were crisp on the outside and full of fresh, soft, sweet onion on the inside, so I was perfectly happy there.

I’d poured myself a glass from a 600ml bottle of the beer and put the rest in a pan, heating it over a low heat with a couple of teaspoons of sugar for a little over an hour. The glass of beer was delicious, but the reduction didn't work out so well. A couple of tentative dunks were passable to begin with, but dipping with more enthusiasm, it became clear that reducing the stout had only accentuated its bitterness. It tasted burnt and, in combination with the crispier outer edges of the bhajis, the overwhelming flavour was of ashy bitterness. Luckily, I’d also make a portion of bhindi bhaji and this, together with the onion bhajis and a bottle of Radeberger I pulled from the fridge, still added up to a satisfying meal.

Was I disappointed? A little bit, but the more I thought about it, the more obvious it was that this was never going to work. I've often thought that Foreign Extra Stout would be a great companion to a packet of Walker’s Worcestershire sauce crisps, and this might be a much safer food and beer match to try in future. But I’d still prefer to be curious about food, trying things that don’t work, than not give a shit about what’s on my plate. So maybe that’s the point.