Two schooners of black saison and a portion of kimchi fries please

Last week, I received an exciting package. Contained within was the first freebie I have accepted (alright, the first I've been offered) in association with this blog. And I wasn't offered it, actually - I specifically asked after I was sent an intriguing press release. The contents of that package were three large bags of crisps, sent to me by a PR company on behalf of Walkers. 

What caught my eye was the suggestion that these crisps - three flavours under the Walkers Max Strong brand - have been designed specifically to pair with beer. The email reads as follows;

"Walkers has specifically designed its new range to be a strong, spicy accompaniment to a refreshing pint; so whether you're enjoying a craft ale, a pint of pilsner or a can of cold lager - Walkers Max Strong has you covered."

We could pick that apart, but that's not my intention. I'm mainly interested in the idea that Walkers needs to pointedly market their crisps as an accompaniment to beer.

Beer and crisps belong together. They just do. In this sense, the suggestion of pairing crisps with beer seems an odd thing to hang a marketing campaign around. I can't image a biscuit manufacturer emblazoning the words 'try me with a cup of tea!' across their packaging, though it would be a similarly obvious, common sense, automatic association to make. Pubs sell crisps, and if you're ever peckish in a pub, you're likely to buy a packet without a second thought.

So what might this branding exercise tell us about the state of beer and potato snacks in 2018? Well, perhaps that an increasing interest in the artisanal credentials of the beer we're drinking might extend to the way we snack. Pubs and bars that sell beer from small, like-minded breweries might well extend that principle to the rest of their offering, crisps included. If a craft beer bar sells crisps at all, you might find the words 'hand-cooked' on the packet; cheese and onion crisps that proudly name the specific cheddar in their recipe. Whether Walkers (part of the Pepsi conglomerate) actually feel the loss of this relatively small corner of the market I don't know, but the launch of the Walkers Max Strong brand does suggest that they might want a piece of it.

But, perhaps most importantly, I wanted to know how well they actually went with beer. Sadly, I'll never know the answer when it comes to the Jalapeno & Cheese flavour, since they contain rennet and so are not suitable for vegetarians. At least I appreciate the clear labelling me to tell me so. Oddly, the Hot Chicken Wings flavour are, as are Chilli & Lime. 

Alarm bells rang immediately at the focus on chilli heat - the crisps are labelled for their fieriness on a scale ranging from medium to extra hot. Beer (lager, at least) is often thrown at spicy food arbitrarily, presumably because it's served cold and chilli is hot, and perhaps because both constituent parts are generally thought to be good for the soul. Once a significant hop profile is involved, this pairing generally falters, with fiery chilli either obliterating the subtleties of the beer or, even worse, the beer's bitterness accentuating the scoville effect rather than calming it.

My road-test involved nothing more scientific that munching on a small handful of each flavour whilst drinking whatever happened to be in my fridge over the course of a weekend. The chilli and lime flavour is merely medium on the heat scale, but plenty hot by my standards. The citrus element gives a bit of zingy life to the peppery paprika depth. Brasserie de la Senne's Zinnebir was a surprisingly good companion here; though significantly bitter in a grassy, European way, if anything the beer tames the heat a little. The pairing doesn't particularly add anything to either the beer or the crisps, but they get along well enough. Burning Sky's Grisette didn't fare so well; it's a delicate beer with floral and herbal notes from additions of marigold and chamomile, with a gentle lemon note and a peppery finish. The heat in the crisps treads all over it, and I might as well have washed them down with a glass of sparkling water. Grand Imperial Porter, from Poland's Browar Amber went the other way, the big beer wiping out the lime and curry-like spicing of the crisps but gelling surprisingly well with the lingering heat for a kind of chilli and chocolate sensation.

I expected the spicy seasoning would be the dominant flavour in the Hot Chicken Wings crisps, but they taste very much like I remember roast chicken tasting (or, at least, they taste like existing roast chicken flavour crisps). The heat comes late but is fairly intense, reminding you that you've gone up a notch on the fiery scale as it pokes at the tongue and perhaps leaves a slight sting on the lips. Again, Zinnebir stood up to the plate, holding its own against the fire. The Grisette didn't have a chance - it's delicious, by the way, in other circumstances. The umami meatiness didn't gel with the Grand Imperial Porter, sitting uncomfortably alongside the beer's desert-like richness. One better suited to the 'cold can of lager' end of the spectrum, I think.

The trouble is, I think, that I thought too hard about all this. We don't need to think about what crisps we chomp on in the pub. The correct beer and crisp pairing is, within reason, any beer with any crisps. Because it just is.

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.  

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.

Priory-Ale-braised-sausages

Beer-braised sausages is one of the most straight forward and obvious ways to incorporate beer into cooking. Google it and you’ll find pages and pages of results; even Stella Artois appear to have a recipe for it (although the link doesn't appear to work in the UK. Probably no big loss; fizzy macro beer may be snidely referred to as ‘cooking lager’, but actually following through with that idea seems kind of nuts). I've been wanting to make a version since having a sausage dish cooked in cider. I wanted to make a similar meal at home, but didn't want to be stuck with the remaining half bottle; I don’t like cider, and it would most likely end up down the sink. And as my mind turned to beer alternatives, I remembered Harvey’s Priory Ale, a beer that has seemed to be screaming out for an accompanying banger every time I've tasted it.

Priory Ale is an interpretation of the kind of beers that might have been produced at a brewery at the Priory of St. Pancras in the Sussex town of Lewes in 1264. It uses only ingredients that would have been available to these brewers; these include hops, but also yarrow, rosemary and thyme, with a grain bill mixing barley, oats and wheat. I first picked up a bottle from Harvey's brewery shop on a whim, simply because I’d never seen it before. I expected little more than a dusty historical curiosity, but was caught out by how unusual this beer is; amongst other things, I taste shandy, Parma Violets and menthol eucalyptus in it, but in this dish, the odder flavours fade into the background and the herbal and citrus notes shine through, working perfectly with the sausages.

My base recipe is this one from the Waitrose website, though I've made several tweaks beyond my selected beer. Perhaps most significantly, I used vegetarian sausages, as I don’t eat meat. I say this knowing full well that Harvey’s beers, amongst countless others, are filtered with isinglass, and therefore not strictly vegetarian. I am personally happy to look past this tiny trace of animal produce in my beer and don’t consider this a contradiction – and in any case, this recipe isn't set in stone, and can be easily produced with a fully vegetarian-friendly beer, or with genuine pork sausages in place of the soya substitute. Whilst I do think the particular beer I used leant a certain richness to the dish, I think just about any ale with a decent depth of flavour will have something to offer.

I made another couple of minor changes – I swapped onions for leeks, for example, because I don't want too much sticky sweetness, and omitted wholegrain mustard from the beer and sausage broth. Instead, I stirred a teaspoon of it through the mashed potatoes than accompanied the dish but, if I were to serve it without mash, I’d include it as per the original Waitrose recipe. Another tweak I made, which might seem a little odd, is the inclusion of a splash of soy sauce. I always do this with veggie gravies, as it adds richness and a little seasoning but the soy sauce flavour per se is not detectable. Apart from anything else, it transformed this dish’s slightly anaemic translucent golden brown colour to something much more befitting a sausage casserole. This step may not be necessary if you're cooking with meat.

This is great comfort food, best consumed on the sofa in front of the TV. My one regret is that I didn't have the foresight to procure a beer to accompany the meal; as I ate, I wished I had a bottle of Fuller’s London Porter on the side.

Harvey’s Priory Ale-braised sausages

Recipe serves a greedy lone diner, but quantities are easily multiplied

Ingredients

3 sausages (vegetarian or otherwise)

1 ½ trimmed leeks, sliced

1 tbsp plain white flour

225ml Harvey’s Battle of Lewes Priory Ale

150ml vegetable stock

Splash of dark soy sauce

1. Heat oil in a frying pan or casserole with a lid, and cook the sausages slightly short of  manufacturer’s instructions, until cooked through but only just golden brown. Remove from the pan and set aside

2. Add the leaks to the pan and cook for 5 or 6 minutes until softened. Add the flour and fry off for a brief minute, then add the beer and bring to a simmer. Add the stock and soy sauce, then return the sausages to the pan and place a lid on for around 15 minutes. Taste a few times, adjusting the seasoning as necessary.

3. Remove the lid and cook for around 5 more minutes, until the liquid has thickened and acquired a rich, sticky texture. Goes very well with a creamy mustard mash.