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Some foaming facts about cooking with beer
Thursday, September 03, 1998 By Suzanne Martinson, Food Editor, Post-Gazette
The first thing you need to know about cooking with beer: It foams. Big time. When we tried several recipes in Rodef Shalom Biblical Botanical Garden's "Cooking with Beer" booklet, we began with Beer Bread. That first bottle nearly got away from us. From then on, as we tested five different recipes, we poured more slowly.
Some of our best advice came from Karen Herzog, of Whitehall, who gathered the recipes and testers for Rodef Shalom's collection, which is sold for $1 to people who visit the garden.
"One of the most important points," she says, "is that unless the recipe calls for a specific beer, use a lighter beer. Darker beers can overwhelm the recipe."
She says one of her volunteer testers used a dark beer in the Cheddar Chowder with Wild Rice. "It was way too strong. She had to throw it out and start over."
Herzog says she and her husband belong to a gourmet dinner group. "I decided we might as well choose cooking with beer," says the garden docent. The resulting booklet, which includes 28 recipes, has been so popular that more had to be printed.
Although she recommends the conservative approach to choosing a beer (she used I.C. Light in many of the recipes), she says a darker lager does work well with beef. She is especially enthusiastic about the Beef in Beer Sauce (she used Samuel Adams) and the Beer Bread, which she describes as "a wonderful, easy, quick recipe - it's amazing how good it is."
Ours drew enthusiastic reviews, too. In our tests we used beer from Penn Brewery, North Side: Penn Pilsner, Penn Gold, Penn Dark and Penn Weizen. For the bread - it only takes a couple of minutes to mix - we experimented with both the Pilsner and Weizen, a wheat beer that the bartender described as having a hint of cloves. Although the self-rising flour contains baking powder for leavening, the yeast in the beer seemed to add its own special effects. The loaves rose beautifully, and we were glad our pans were larger than the recommended pan.
Penn Gold went into our Beef in Beer Sauce, and Penn Dark into Beef Brisket in Beer. We used Penn Pilsner in the remaining recipes.
Mary Beth Pastorius and her brewmaster husband, Tom Pastorius, have been making Penn Pilsner since 1986. They opened their Penn Brewery Restaurant nine years ago.
"We try to showcase our beer in as many ways as we can," says Mary Beth Pastorius, a home economics graduate of Penn State University. "We are steaming with beer, making sauces with beer and have gourmet beer tasting dinners."
The winner of the microbrewery's cooking with beer contest, Chicken Cordon Brew, is now on the menu. (This year's contest is Nov. 14.)
They steam all of their wursts in beer. They also steam the mussels in Penn Pilsner, which she describes as "a full-bodied amber lager. It packs a lot of flavor and has a full mouthfeel."
They also make Penn Pilsner Beer Cheese, and a new entree this summer is Penn Brewery Tenderloin, which has a dark beer sauce. Penn Pilsner flavors the braised sauerkraut and Friday's lunch special - beer-batter fish sandwiches.
Beer-food pairings are fun, too. "The challenge comes at dessert," she says, "though dark beer tastes great with chocolate."
At the Foundry Ale Works in the Strip District, Blaise Katich was asked if they cook with beer. "We sure do," he says, referring us to chef Charles Pittman.
"We have beer-battered fish, our own Southwestern barbecue sauce with beer," Pittman says.
To make pizza dough, he says he uses "a nice hearty stout beer with the yeast - and let it bloom."
He suggests light beer for seafood, and something heavy for meat, "so it can soak in."
At Strip Brewing Co., owner Larry Umenhofer says their brews go into the kraut on their Reuben sandwiches. In the fondue sauce, either Redhead Ale or Golden Ale adds to the mix.
They're always looking for ways to use up the beer they brew. One warning: "If you're not going to drink it, it wouldn't be good to cook with it, either," Umenhofer says. "We pull it out right from the tap."
Strip Brewing executive chef Dave Achkio says beer is good as a marinade and good in sauces - as long as they won't be boiled too long. "Try not to reduce the sauce too much. The hops' bitterness comes out," Achkio says.
Another tip is to use a beer that's "malty" as opposed to "hoppy." An experiment with Smoke Ale in the fondue "came out a bit smoky," Achkio says. "We'll balance it with another beer next."
Executive chef Tony Stafford of John Harvard's Brew House, Wilkins, says cooking with beer is different from cooking with wine. "Beer has the hops - hops give it more aroma," he says.
"You're more or less finishing an item with a beer. We actually put it in right at the end. It's a subtle flavor, rather than very intense."
Still, he admits, "You can't tell a lot of difference when something is marinated in beer. It's more a marketing gimmick, to get the name of the beer on the menu."
The Brew House also does something creative with the spent grains after head brewer Pete Seimans makes the beer. "We put it in our pizza dough," Stafford says. "It's almost like having cereal grain - it has a crunchy texture."
They use their Pale Ale as the liquid in batter for fish, New-England-style. "We dip it in real quick. Like soda water, the beer helps leaven it. It puffs up in the hot fat."
And he has a special touch when it comes to dessert.
"We put stout in our hot fudge sauce - we add it right at the end." Cooking with beer can be tricky. There's the art of the chef, and then there's the science, too. "Oftentimes, when you cook with beer, that bready yeasty flavor of beer is imparted," says Mark Daeschel, an Oregon State University food microbiologist who researches hops. "Beer is liquid bread."
Flavors become accentuated when it's cooked with food, he says, and the cook creates "biscuity, bready flavors. Bitterness is fine in beer, but you may want to avoid beers that contain a lot of hops. That bitterness won't boil off, and can be imparted to the food."
Daescel says the proteins in barley - specifically, the component amino acids - that are present in beer can react with sugar, making the dish darker. "It's like when custards get baked on top - that can occur with a beer."
Mary Beth Pastorius has a practical suggestion. She recommends starting with the "Great American Beer Cookbook" by Candy Schermerhorn (Brewers Publications, Boulder, Colo.; 1995). Pastorius suggests that when using beer in recipes, you could use the same quantity of beer as wine - and maybe a little bit more. "I think you have to do some experimenting," she says.
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