Cooking with Beer: Beer Pizza

I spent last summer in the kitchen cooking with beer for my next book, the unambiguously titled Cooking with Beer. The first copies came back from the printers last week and that inspired me to cook a favourite recipe from it.

This beer pizza puts black lager in the dough and in the tomato sauce, where it gives a slightly sweet caramelised depth in the dough and some added richness in the sauce – other good beer choices include hefeweizen or dunkelweizen plus a smooth not-too-bitter porter or stout (I used Asahi Black Dry and that’s one delicious dark lager!). I topped this one with loads of mozzarella, roasted aubergine, mushroom, sun-dried tomato and basil, but the toppings are yours to pile on.

This makes four pizzas

Beer Pizza Dough

500g Tipo ‘00’ flour or strong white bread flour (plus extra for dusting)

1 teaspoon of sea salt

1 x 7g dried yeast sachets

1 teaspoon caster sugar

2 tablespoons olive oil

150ml lukewarm water, plus extra if needed

150ml Black Lager, at room temperature

1.     In a jug, combine the water, sugar, yeast and olive oil, stirring it together to get it activated. Leave for a few minutes and then add the beer – ideally you’ll have poured this out in advance to let it lose some of its fizz

2.     Pile the flour and salt onto a clean work surface and make a large well in the middle. Gradually pour the yeasty beer mix into the well, using a fork to bring it together until you’re able to hold it in your hands (add a little more water or beer if required). Knead it for a few minutes then place in a large flour-dusted bowl. Put cling film over the bowl and leave for 60-90 minutes in a warm place – it should roughly double in size.

3.     Dust a clean surface with flour. Place the dough on the surface and knead it for a few minutes. Divide into four, cover and leave for another 30 minutes in a warm place.

4.     When ready to cook, turn your oven as hot as it’ll go – around 250C – and ideally use a pizza stone or pizza tray. Then on a floured surface, roll out a dough ball until it’s about 10-12” across. Place a layer of beer tomato sauce (see below) on top and then the rest of your toppings

5.     Place in the oven for around 8 minutes or until golden and crisp.

Beer Tomato Sauce

Pretty easy, this: take two tins of good chopped tomatoes and put them in a wide frying pan. Add 4-5 whole cloves of garlic, a teaspoon each of salt, sugar and black pepper, a couple of splashes of beer, a tablespoon of olive oil and a small bunch of basil with the leaves torn. Simmer is all together, stirring regularly, until it’s reduced and thick – this’ll take around 15 minutes. Remove the garlic and set to one side and allow to cool (this can be done in advance).

Cooking with Beer is due to be released late March or early April. It has over 65 different recipes all using beer in at least one way. It’s definitely the best-looking book I’ve written – see these images below, which you can also see on Amazon – and I’m excited for it to be on bookshelves soon.

Curried Dunkelweizen Lamb Chops

The smoking lamb chops of Whitechapel curry houses are legendary because they are so delicious. And as many of the better places are bring your own, you can eat them while drinking delicious beers. Wanting to recreate that at home, I cooked these lamb chops after brining them in Dunkelweizen and curry spices, where the brine makes them incredibly tender (like I said here, brining is a very good thing when Cooking with Beer…)  – something important when you don’t have a searing flame grill to cook them on and you don’t want to chew on spicy boot soles. I used Dunkelweizen here because it has a sweetly toasty malt depth and also some complementary spices for those used on the lamb.

Serves 4

8 Quality Standard lamb chops (at least 8... these are addictive things)

1 bottle of Dunkelweizen (dark lager or Saison also work)

3 tablespoons of salt

3 tablespoons of sugar

1 whole chilli

1 onion, quartered

5 cloves of garlic

1 tablespoon of curry powder

1 teaspoon whole coriander seeds

Dry rub: 2 teaspoons of coriander seeds, 1 teaspoon cumin seeds, ½ teaspoon of fennel seeds. Warm these in a dry pan then grind into a fine powder. Add ½ teaspoon turmeric, ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper, a pinch of cinnamon and lots of salt and black pepper.

In a large plastic container with a lid, make the brine by mixing the beer with the salt and sugar and stirring until it’s all combined. Add the other ingredients and then top up the container with cold water. Put the lid on and place in the fridge for 8-24 hours. When ready to cook, remove from the brine and dry on kitchen towel. Cover in the dry rub and leave for 1 hour. Grill or fry on a high heat for 5-10 minutes (or until cooked to your liking).

These are a brilliant beer snack or starter and I wouldn’t bother serving them with anything other than a cold glass of good beer. Dunkelweizen is clearly a good match here, or go for a good Oatmeal Stout with a nice nutty, liquorice depth as that’s great with the spices and meat char.

The meat for this was provided by Simply Beef and Lamb. Look for the Quality Standard Mark in independent butchers and selected supermarkets to be sure that the beef or lamb is quality assured and responsibly produced by people dedicated to producing great food.

Smoked Porter Carne Asada Tacos

I’m having a thing with tacos right now. It started over the summer when I made some using chicken brined in lager and lime, also using lager in the corn taco mix (this is in book four, Cooking with Beer, coming spring next year!). Then I had rauchbier pulled pork in tacos at a barbecue (also in book four…). Delicious things. And then I went to San Francisco and ate at five different taco places in three days. Since being back I’ve eaten tacos five times in two weeks…

Mates were coming over to drink all the IPAs I brought back from California, so I cooked up a huge batch of Smoked Porter-brined flank steak. Brining, I have learnt, is an incredible way to cook with beer, leaving beer-infused food that’s brilliantly tender, where the sugar-salt combo does magic things to meat. I used BeavertownSmog Rocket in these tacos. And I serve them with traditional California toppings of salsa, onion, coriander and lime.

Smoked Porter Carne Asada

Serves 6

1kg Quality Standard beef flank steak

2 cans of Smog Rocket (or another smoked beer)

5 tablespoons of salt

5 tablespoons of sugar

1 whole chilli, sliced in half

1 lime, sliced in half

1 onion, quartered

5 cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon habanero chilli flakes

In a large plastic container with a lid, mix the beer, salt and sugar until combined. Add the meat then the other ingredients. Top up with cold water until all the meat is covered. Place the lid on the container and put it in the fridge for 8-24 hours.

When you’re ready to cook, remove from the brine and dry on kitchen paper (discard the rest of the brine and ingredients). Slice thinly and then fry or grill on a high heat in olive oil for a few minutes.

Corn Tacos

Buy them – I use Cool Chile – or make your own as they’re really easy. You can also make them with beer: 250g masa harina, 330ml of beer and a pinch of salt. Mix it together into a dough, wrap in cling film for 15 minutes, unwrap, cut into small balls and roll into tacos about 3mm thick (even better, use a taco press) then fry in a dry pan for 30 seconds on each side.

Salsa

6 whole tomatoes

Half a white onion

2-4 chillis

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

Salt and pepper

Splash of beer (optional)

Roast all the ingredients (apart from the beer) at 200C for 20 minutes. Put in a blender and whizz until smooth. Add a splash of beer, if you like, then check the seasoning (I also add a squeeze of lime for more acidity).

To serve: stack two warm tacos (always two), place meat on top, add lots of fresh white onion, finely chopped coriander, a spoon of salsa and a big squeeze of lime.

These are great served with smoked porter as well – that beer loves the meat flavour and can handle the lime and spice.

I can see a lot more taco making in the next few months…

The meat for this was provided by Simply Beef and Lamb and it was genuinely some of the best English meat I’ve tasted. Look for the Quality Standard Mark in independent butchers and selected supermarkets to be sure that the beef or lamb is quality assured and responsibly produced by people dedicated to producing great food.

Wahleeah and cooking with beer

Yesterday I had beer-cured bacon with bacon stout ketchup for breakfast. I’d started making it a week earlier, brining belly pork in smoked porter, brown sugar, maple syrup and salt. I took the pork out of the brine on Friday morning and left it to dry out in the fridge, then cut thick rashers and fried them, the sugars caramelising, the beer giving a toasty, smoky flavour, and the pork itself more porky in depth through the curing process. It was delicious.

That bacon was something like the 75^th recipe I’d cooked incorporating beer this summer (and a very big clue to what my fourth book, out next spring, is going to be…). So when I heard about Wahleeah, a restaurant specialising in using beer as an ingredient, I planned to go as soon as I could, which was last night. And I discovered that Wahleeah is way more than just cooking with beer.

Take the salt and pepper, for example. The pepper on the tables contains 11 ingredients. The salt takes three days to produce and contains horseradish and a process that involves smoking water. Diners shouldn’t even need to use them, says chef Dave Ahern, but if he has to have salt and pepper on the tables then he wants the best he can get with an exact flavour, and it turns out the only way to get that flavour is to make them himself. This obsessive level of detail is in everything – Dave makes cheese, vinegar, condiments, and more, for the restaurant. Beer is just one small part of it.

But for me, the beer part is the reason I’m there. Having spent the summer cooking with beer, I know all the good and bad things about what happens when you add beer into a recipe and I want to see what Wahleeah has done.

Oxtail and onions cooked in Fuller’s Black Cab Stout is rich with beer, full-on meaty with the onions giving a nice sweetness. There’s delicious crab cauliflower cheese, perfect with the suggested pairing of Weihenstaphaner Hefeweizen. There’s also beer-cured salmon with house pickles, stuffed mushrooms with beer and soy, a beer chilli to go on tater tots.

Larger plates include mussels in witbier with the addition of deeply-savoury ham hock, where it pretty much demands the beer on the side to act like part of the recipe, giving a freshness to lift the richness. A huge rib-eye steak comes with a brilliant beer fondant potato and a stout sauce, where that table salt and pepper gives it a remarkable extra depth of flavour (and recalls one of my favourite ever beer matches: steak, parsnip fries, horseradish sauce and oatmeal stout). There’s also ricotta dumplings with beer butter, tuna meatloaf with bloody beer sauce, bream with beer-braised fennel.

Then desserts: chocolate stout brownie with banana beer ice cream is superb and perfect with a bottle of Liefman’s Kriek, there’s also Porter cheesecake and Oreo trifle.

It’s all big-flavoured but elegantly done; next-level pub food incorporating the pub’s most central drink, but it’s not all about the beer – these are just great dishes that happen to contain beer. 

I love that Wahleeah is taking beer seriously – that’s the best thing about it for me. I love that the food is very good and I love how the beers used in the cooking enhance the dishes in their own subtle ways without ever overpowering – they are additional seasonings, they add depth which other ingredients can’t add, they give their richness, and they compliment the food. I also love how each dish comes with a beer suggestion – and that those matches are very well selected (done by Boutique Bar Brands). It makes the beer important and it encourages people to try new beers. And it has around 12 draft beers and 50 bottles, so there's a lot of choice. These are all good things.

Wahleeah is the first restaurant in the world to focus so completely on beer cooking. This could be seen as a gimmick, a Cereal Café for beer nerds, but Wahleeah really is way more than just cooking with beer. Surprisingly more. You should go.

Beers with Christmas Dinner

My favourite meal of the year is tomorrow! The fridge is bursting with food and the boxes of beer in the garage are constantly calling me. Here’s what I’ll be opening on Christmas day...

The sipping beer for the morning and during the cooking will be Kernel’s terrific Table Beer. I think I’m in love/obsessed with it. So light yet so excitingly overflowing with flavour and juicy hop aroma – my early Christmas present to myself was buying a bunch of these. I’ll probably also open a Thornbridge Tzara which is one of the best new British beers this year, I reckon.

Pre-dinner livener will be an appetite-grabbing gueuze. That brisk carbonation, the tartness and the dry finish makes me ferociously hungry. I’ve got a Drie Fonteinen that’s looking more delicious by the hour.

Starter this year will be pea soup. Simple: smoked bacon, leek, garlic, peas, water, thyme and mint. With that will be a Westmalle Tripel where the slight sweet sulphurous edge is going to mirror the depth of the alliums. It’s also another beer which I’ve come to love this year.

Main course is the full-on turkey experience. Bird, roast potatoes, every kind of veg you can fit on a plate, stuffing, pigs in blankets, gravy in the gaps. It’s a mountainous meal and a tough one to tackle with a beer... I reckon it’s the veg and gravy that you want the beer to match with. I’m going with Fuller’s Past Master’s Old Burton which is rich with nuttiness, there’s hints of chocolate, berries and earthiness, while staying wonderfully light and not overpowering – my gravy gets made with port so that's work wonderfully. 

Dessert is always Christmas pudding, obviously. Richly fruity, boozy and bolstered by brandy butter, you need a big beer to handle it. I’ve got some BrewDog Tokyo* or Black Tokyo Horizon which will be up for the job. Port-like, deep with chocolate and dark stewed fruit plus an uplifting floral backnote which keeps it fresh.

Then after dessert I flop onto the sofa with a packet of Rennie – anyone who gets out a cheese board at this point is an obscene food pervert. Maybe later in the evening I’ll go back for some more Table Beer or just grab random nice bottles from the cupboard. Or, more likely, I’ll move over to wine when I visit the in-laws.

Merry Christmas!

(Top image from here)

FABPOW! Sausage Carbonara and Avery Brown Dredge

A typical Saturday morning is waking up and spending the next three-or-four hours split between writing, exercising and looking at every recipe book I own trying to work out what to cook for the rest of the weekend, usually finding everything and nothing and cooking a fish finger sandwich for lunch and buying a pizza for dinner, then repeating the process on Sunday morning.

Sometimes, through the indecision, I do find recipes to cook. And this is one of them. It’s from Jamie’s Italy. Carbonara plus sausages. Many dishes can be improved with the addition of a sausage and I figured carbonara was one of them.

Rich and salty, comforting, simple and delicious; I love carbonara. I needed a beer to cut the richness, to handle the smoked pancetta and to balance the herby banger. Avery Brown Dredge was in my head as it recently passed a year since the beer was brewed. I’ve still got a few bottles left so I grabbed one. Bright orange-gold, big frothy white foam, it’s just as good as it’s ever been, maybe even better – orangey, sweet aroma followed by a Saaz spiciness, with a dry and peppery bitterness. The sweetness balances the richness and the smoke and the whole thing wraps together in a perfect little package. If you haven’t got ABD then try something like Victory Prima Pils or Dogfish Head My Antonia.

With sausages and spaghetti left over, on Sunday I made one of my favourite dishes: fry little balls of sausage, add garlic and chilli, a carton of chopped tomatoes, seasoning, fresh basil and mix with spaghetti. Easy. But I’ve never found a FABPOW for this one. I’ve gone down the dark lager road but I need something bigger, so perhaps it’s time for Schlenkerla...

Two FABPOWs in a week! I call that a successful weekend staring at recipe books.

A note on the sausage carbonara recipe: cooking for one hungry person, I halved the recipe given for four and it was the right amount for me. Four sausages between four people is a bit stingy, I think. 

Cooking with beer: IPA, onion and cheddar risotto

American IPA is brilliant with strong cheddar. Risottos are awesome – rich, savoury, filling. Imagine how good a risotto would be if it was made with IPA and cheddar, plus parmesan and a delicious depth of sweet onion, leek and garlic. I had to find out.

The beer has to be chosen carefully because if it’s too bitter then it ruins everything and no one wants a bitter risotto. The safety net was the butter and cheese which wrap themselves around any bitterness and smother it. I went with Odell’s IPA because there’s loads of juicy fruit (mandarin and mango), a background sweetness and IBUs which don’t overpower (it’s also one of my favourite beers). And it’s delicious with cheddar and chunks of parmesan.

This is a classic risotto recipe, like this one. For one person, I used a large white onion, a medium-sized leek, sliced into half-moons, and a big fat clove of garlic, all softened in butter and a little oil with a sprinkle of sugar and fresh thyme alongside the salt and pepper. The beer went in during the middle of the cooking; I didn’t add at the beginning like you would with wine because I didn’t want to highlight the hop bitterness, instead I poured in about 100ml after three ladles of stock had been added. At the end, a mix of cheddar and parmesan went in.

An IPA on the side and it was delicious. The beer adds a lot in the cooking, with the hint of hop poking the flavours in the onion and cheese in new directions, which is fantastic. The fruit flavour that comes from the beer and cheeses work so well together while the sweetness in the onion, leek and garlic complete the whole thing. Damn good.

Now it’s got me thinking about other beery risottos...

The only trouble with a risotto is that I always go into it thinking that it’ll be wonderfully soothing and relaxing to make as I stand there and gently stir the rice and watch as it softens and soaks up all the stock, but the reality is that it always stresses me out – the constant stirring frustrates, the adding of stock annoys me, there’s the hope that the next taste won’t be crunchy (which always takes longer than expected) and I just end up getting hot from the hob and angry or drunk while I wait. 

The Six Types of Beer and Food Pairing

There are traditionally two thoughts when it comes to matching food and drink: you either go with something which compares or contrasts. I think there are four further categories: there’s a geographical pairing, the ‘calm down’ pairing, there’s the pairing which creates something more than the sum of its parts and there’s the ‘whatever’ match.

A Compare pairing would be something like chocolate and imperial stout, carbonnade and dubbel, roast beef and bitter; matches where the beer has flavours which marry nicely to the food.

A Contrast pairing would see foie gras and lambic, fish and chips and pale ale, cheeseburgers and IPA, where the use of hops, carbonation or sourness is there to slice through the richness and fattiness of the food or the full flavours.

Geographical matches pair up food and drink from the same locations, whether it’s a taste of holidays or the bringing together of two things which are linked by place: gyros and Mythos, Estrella and paella, jumbalaya and Budweiser. They are often the simplest of matches and there’s also some crossover into other categories with this: US IPA and a cheeseburger, for example. There’s a psychological link to some of these, too; the pairing works because we think they belong together or we’ve long been told that they belong together: pizza and Peroni, hot dogs and Bud, oysters and Guinness.

The ‘calm down’ pairing is one which aims to round out flavours rather than boost them. It’s a hot curry with a cold lager or wheat beer. It’s about not overloading the tastebuds with things to worry about. Hops punch chilli heat in the face so a spicy curry and a hoppy beer is just too much. It’s big flavoured dishes with simpler beers because some matches need calming down and balancing out. Sometimes part of the dish can act as the calm down factor, such as coleslaw with jerk chicken, in which case a stronger flavoured beer, like a fruity-floral IPA, can work well.

The opposite of this is the hardest pairing to get right and it’s the sort of match that makes you wonder why any other beers even bother. It’s cherry beer and chocolate brownies, rauchbier and sausage, barley wine and blue cheese. These pairings each make something new, something bigger and better than the composite parts and set the match off in an exciting new direction with an explosion of flavour. It’s also often more unusual or esoteric matches, or bigger and bolder flavours, which create these pairings. And they are the sort that you remember for longer and return to. It’s not appropriate for every match because sometimes you just need to compare or contrast pairing, but sometimes, when you want something special, this is the way to go.

The final pairing is the ‘whatever’ match. It’s about not caring and just taking a beer and drinking it while eating and it working because you want it to. Not everyone cares for planning out pairings and as long as they like the match then that’s good enough.

Six types of beer and food pairing. Are there any other types I've missed?

FABPOW! Paella and Estrella

It's too easy, obvious even, but the Food and Beer Pairing of the Week, this week coming from beside the beach in Menorca, is paella and Estrella (which like last year's gyros and Mythos has a likeable rhyme to it).

This is one of those matches which is made perfect in the mouthful. Sure, the bright lift of carbonation, the sweet body and the dry quench of hops help, but the flavours themselves only go so far together. Paella and Estrella is a psychological kind of pairing where local flavours come together. It's why dumplings and Gambrinus work so well in the Czech Republic and why Carbonnade and dubbel work so well in Bruges, but take them somewhere else and they lose something: the psychological link lifts them up.

Paella: Fishy rice, rich and salty, golden from the tang of saffron, livened by lemon and fresh with seafood. Estrella stamps in rather than slides over, with its full body and hints of bubble gum, sherbet, honey and bread. There's an inelegance to it but it works like a pint of bitter and a ploughman's served in a pub garden: because it does, because they seem to belong on the same table, because it's simple, a no-brainer. And of course they taste good together but it works best because it's two local flavours enjoyed locally and that's enough for some of the best food and beer matches.

FABPOW! The Search for the Best Beer for Sausage, Chips and Beans

Two weeks ago I asked an important question on the back of many failed attempts to find the answer for myself: what is the perfect beer for sausage, chips and beans? This weekend I made it my mission to get the definitive answer by using those responses.

The beers were gathered and I soon realised that I had to call in some assistance, so I invited Mark and Matt over to my sausage party. We started off with seven bottles but this jumped to nine by grabbing two other possible choices from the fridge. I could see from their enthusiasm for all things sausage, chips, beans and beer that they were well up for this, even if it was possibly the most ridiculously geeky thing we’ve ever done: three of us squashed around a small table with three plates of food, nine bottles and nine glasses and an hour talking about sausages.

We had a mix of beers from pale to dark, bitter to fruity to smoky to sour. The sausages were Waitrose gourmet pork (cooked to slightly beyond caramelised...), homemade chips cooked in the oven and seasoned with salt, pepper, a little paprika, a clove of garlic tossed in and a pinch of thyme. The beans were beans.

Anchor Bock was my first sip with a sausage. Smooth, chocolatey and surprisingly light bodied, it works ok and just handles the beans but veers off in different directions at the end and almost crashes.

Monsieur Rock was suggested by Andrew from the Bottle Shop, where I picked up a few of the bottles. He thought it was be a refresher able to lift the heavy flavours off the tongue and I could see where he was coming from. Sadly the beer got lost in everything and didn’t work but it's such a good beer that we finished it off alone after eating.

Bath Barnstormer, with its dark, fruity malt flavours, was nice but the badass beans blew it away and left it a little lifeless.  

I picked the Strong Dark Mild from Kernel and Redemption because I wanted a dark mild and I love Kernel and Redemption. It was probably a little too bitter to work and left the flavours blurry rather than clear.

My fridge is a constant source of Avery Brown Dredge so we grabbed one of them and I’ve never tasted a beer that works so perfect with a meaty, herby sausage. It was amazing. The almost-savoury bitterness means it’s made for meat, herbs and garlic. However, it is not made for baked beans...

Rodenbach was an interesting choice but it totally makes sense if you think of it like a ketchup or HP sauce with a beer-as-condiment match (because I think Rodenbach tastes like tomatoes and vinegar). The first taste got me excited: the beans softened the sourness and the flavour profile works really well, sending it off in an exciting new direction, but between forkfuls of food it doesn’t work so well and, as Matt said, it doesn’t sit with the tone of the meal, which calls for something simpler.

Purity Pure Gold was a late entry, plucked from the fridge in a desire for a pale British beer with British hops, and we’re glad we did grab it as it was excellent. It doesn’t add anything in terms of flavour but it does a great job of clearing the palate and compliments the mouthful. Together the food and beer taste better, and that’s always a good thing.

Rochefort 6 was my choice for a Belgian brune and was also my choice as the best match of the night. It doesn’t do anything special but it’s able to balance everything out perfectly. The simple, dried fruit body, more carbonation than found in the other beers, plus a dry bite of hops in the finish were spot on. Uncomplicated and excellent. Somehow it also made the chips taste more potatoey.

Finally there was Schlenkerla Marzen, which Mark and Matt chose as their top match. Like a sprinkle of MSG it makes the whole thing taste bigger and meatier, complementing the sausage and the beans excellently while adding its own flavour to the overall pairing. It did work superbly well.

All three of us listed Schlenkerla and Purity Pure Gold in our top 3. Matt and I had Rochfort 6 in there and Mark had Rodenbach (for sausage alone Avery Brown Dredge was a winner – if we have somehow created the perfect beer for sausages then I’ll be inordinately proud of that). If we hadn’t been geeky enough already we then spent half an hour discussing the relative merits in depth while we sipped the rest of the beers.

What is interesting in this example is the type of match you want for the dish. Rauchbier was spectacular with sausage, chips and beans but do you want something spectacular with such a simple meal? I don’t. It’s a meal we eat without thinking; a regular meal that doesn’t want beautifying with beer, but one which can benefit from a nice choice, so I want a beer which is equally simple and complimentary to go with it. The extension of this is that the beer should be something you drink before, during and after the dinner – where Rodenbach and Schlenkerla work really well as flavour explosions, I don’t want to drink them (mainly because I don’t really like them) away from the plate.

That’s what pushed Purity Pure Gold forward: it’s a simple beer but a good one. You can open it while sizzling the sausages, sip between mouthfuls and then finish it after you’re done eating. The same with the Rochefort which works before, during and after.

So there we have the definitive selection of the best beers to eat with sausage, chips and beans. My FABPOW would be Rochefort 6. The malt sweetness, the carbonation and the dry hops work amazingly well to compliment and then to cut through the fat and creamy, beany sweetness. If you want something completely different, but completely awesome, then go for Schlenkerla Marzen which is a faceful of meat.

FABPOW! Black Isle Yellow Hammer with a Summer Supper

A golden summer ale with a fluffy white foam, this beer bursts with a lively balance of citrus zest and floral freshness from the Cascade hops. It’s incredibly clean in the flavour with the hops shining bright and vibrant rather than muted or squished together anonymously (you know how sometimes hops in beer just become a white noise of bitterness, lacking any clarity in their flavour? This is the opposite of that). The mouthfeel and body are that of a just-pulled pint of cask ale, with a soft carbonation. Combine that with the sort of bitterness that exemplifies the dictionary definition of balance and drinkability and this is a cracking beer for the sunshine.

For dinner I had fresh lemon sole, baked potatoes and salad. A simple summer supper, something I'll cook most weeks, something light and healthy and fresh. The lemony, zesty quality in the beer chimes with the lemon in the fish and the dressing on the salad (usually just oil and lemon) while the creamy, starchy potato is lifted by the body of the beer.

Black Isle's Yellow Hammer is a bottle to open in the garden with a dinner that wants a light burst of freshness to bring out the fresh flavours in the food. Make sure you've got a couple of bottles though as you'll drink the first one fast.

FABPOW Wanted! What beer to go with sausage, chips and beans?

I need your assistance and I need some suggestions for a FABPOW! (a Food and Beer Pairing of the Week!)

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve tried to pair a beer with sausage, chips and beans without success. It’s one of the greatest meals in the world (add egg as well if that's your preference) and my lazy Friday dinner of choice (Friday also being a night when lots of beer bottles are emptied) but I just haven’t found a beer to go perfectly with it.

I’ve tried stouts and bitters, brown ales, dark lagers, ambers, pales ales. Nothing I’ve had has worked. The sausages and chips are the easy bits and most beers work with that, the difficult part comes with the beans – sweet, savoury, creamy, mouth-filling; they aren’t beer’s best friend.

Personally, I think the beer needs some dark malt, lots of body and sweetness and a fair amount of booze, something around 6%, but I'll try anything if it works. I’ve never tried a bock because I want to have an English beer with it but that’s possibly the next step I’ll take. I also think a good oatmeal stout could work but I haven’t found a winner yet.

So help me out: what beer do you think will be ideal? I’ll try and do a taste-off with some of the suggestions soon.

Image from here

Katz’s Deli, Burgers, Pizza and Fried Chicken: New York Feasting

New York wasn’t just about getting drunk and watching baseball. We were also there to eat as much as possible.

Burgers were the early focus and Shake Shack, 5Napkin and Burger Joint were the top three targets.

Shake Shack at Citi Field

Shake Shack came at the baseball, a soft and cakey bun and a succulent slab of meat. The experience of having it with a great beer in a ballpark made it even better.

5Napkin: Great burger, crap photo

5Napkin came at the end of a long drinking day as we hustled to order before they shut. The fattest hunk of beef, a round and glazed bun, basket of fries and a bottle of Racer 5 (Matt had Racer 5 anyway; I made the mistake of not ordering it). I almost fell asleep on the pillowy bun, the lull of a lupulin haze and the hit of jet lag taking their toll, but it was still brilliant.

Burger Joint

Then there’s Burger Joint. What a place. It’s one of those used-to-be-secret hangouts, hidden inside the plush hotel lobby of Le Parker Meridien (you can tell how fancy it is by the use of ‘Le’ instead of ‘The’). We swish through the revolving doors to see nothing but a reception desk and a sweeping red curtain, but look a little closer and there’s a small, dark alley between the desk and curtain and inside that alley is a sign: an illuminated burger and an arrow. That’s all you get.

Inside it’s small, busy and warm, with walls lined with photos. The servers are squeezed into a small space, running as fast as they can when you can only jump forward or back two steps. Ordering is easy: do you want cheese or not; how do you want it cooked; do you want onions, gherkins and sauce (go Fully Loaded); do you want fries, soft drink or a beer.

Burger Joint burger with Sam Adams

The burger is excellent – no frills bun, oozing cheese, a stack of tomato and onions struggling to stay in place, and a great piece of meat. The Sam Adams Lager we have with it is the best we’ve ever tasted it.

Burgered out, we moved on to pizza. Just down the street from Mugs Ale House in Brooklyn is a by-the-slice place cutting floppy, hot triangles from huge rounds of pizza. It was so good I had to order another. The top of our pizza hit-list was Artichoke Pizza but when we were researching it the website didn’t work so we gave up hope and forgot about it, only reminded of its existence when we walked past one on the way to Chelsea Piers. Still stuffering from a massive lunch we shared a slice but probably could’ve forced ourselves to eat a whole pizza it was so good – we went for the eponymous choice, a creamy white-sauce base topped with artichoke and cheese. It was amazing (and the first ‘white’ pizza I’ve had – I’ll definitely be having more).

Matt wanted chicken and waffles (no idea why – the idea of fried chicken served with waffles and maple syrup is beyond me but I think he wanted some culture or something) so we headed to Amy Ruth’s in Harlem for some soul food. I ordered Nandos-style: chicken wings, fries, coleslaw. It was the best chicken and coleslaw I’ve ever had. Like normal fried chicken and coleslaw but about 100-times better - highly recommended.

And then there’s Katz’s Deli. An NYC food attraction in its own right, complete with a queue to get in, door men and tickets. Most famous for selling ridiculously big sandwiches, it was also where the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene from ‘When Harry Met Sally’ was filmed.

Walking in you are given a ticket as you hit a humming wall of noise and excitement. This place is like no other deli. It’s huge, it’s completely packed with people eating and there’s a five-deep queue to get served at each of the six serving points where enormous men wearing blood- and meat-juice-stained aprons wield giant knives and slice massive hunks of meat before organising (stacking – the meat comes about two inches thick) them on top of impossibly thin (comparatively speaking, anyway) pieces of bread.

The hunger builds as you see the people in front of you turn excitedly with their skyscraper sandwiches as they look to seat and eat. And this place is all about the sandwiches. They also serve a few Jewish classics, and then sodas, fries and sides from a second serving area a little beyond the unending line of sandwich making, but it’s mostly about the meat and bread.

We order a pastrami on rye and a Reuben and it’s made fresh in front of you with the maker taking boulders of beef and slicing a few pieces off for you to try while they work. The meat is just about the best we’ve ever tasted – impossibly tender and full of flavour. When the sandwich is ready it’s passed over with a pile of pickles on the side and we turn excitedly and begin the hunt for somewhere to sit.

It’s really busy so spare seats are a premium, even if this place can fit around 300 people in, and you have to fight through a queue of people just to get into the dining ‘space’ (space isn’t the right word as there is none of it...). We find a spot, sit and prepare ourselves for the meat mountain. The Reuben is corned beef (not like the stuff in tins), Russian dressing and cheese, somehow held together by the bread which is really just a form of transport for the meat. The pastrami is thin slivers of fragrant pink meat served with lots of mustard and piled between rye bread.

Brace yourself for meat sweats...

The sandwiches are insane. They are so big, so juicy, so meaty and so good. It’s hard to not be impressed just by the volume of food you are getting, but it tastes great too. The pickles on the side provide a bolt of sharpness to cut the richness while the fries (we couldn’t not order them once we’d seen how good they looked!) are chipped perfection.

Katz’ Deli is the Globe of sandwich-making; food theatre from beginning to end, with excitement (look at that sandwich!), fear (how am I going to eat this sandwich?!), suspense (can I finish this sandwich?!), a chase for seats, the gut-wrenching choice of what to order, the sounds and sights of the people in the dining audience. It’s an amazing experience.

We ate and drank far too much in New York and it was brilliant.