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“Enoteca - Fine Wine & Beer” posted a nice-looking recipe that uses bock beers as an ingredient. And the recipe is called Bock Bock Bock Chicken, which pretty much can’t be beat in terms of the name. One nice thing about this recipe is that you don’t have to break the bank finding obscure and exotic ingredients. The blog entry that we’ve linked to is pretty long, and the recipe is under the #4 heading. Also see that they’ve recommended a few beers to use.

Corkjoy.com seems to be a great place to find out about great beer and food pairings. Here’s more about them.

I read a lot of beer blogs, everything from blogs that are basically tasting notes to blogs that are basically self-published magazines. One of the blogs I’ve been enjoying recently is Tom Cizauskas’ Yours For Good Fermentables. Tom works for Clipper City Brewing and writes about craft beer from a unique perspective. He’s a brewer and a beer salesman. One of the things he writes about is beer and food, and today he posted the full recipe for Captain Thom’s Peg Leg Beer Cheese Soup, which uses Clipper City’s Peg Leg Imperial Stout. Beer cheese soup is one of the classic foods prepared with beer, and is a great winter meal.

This month’s session is about Barley Wines with The Brew Site being the host. Flying Dog Brewery had a sales and marketing soirée up in Steamboat last weekend, and we decided to prepare our own beer dinner. Among our courses, we decided to include our Barrel-Aged Horn Dog Barley Wine paired with smelly Stilton cheese. Barley Wine pairs extremely well with the Sharpness of the blue cheese. If blue cheese isn’t your thing, barley wine also pairs wonderfully with chocolate.

We decided to shoot some HD video of the event, and you can click the image below to be taken to the HD video.

Course 1: Stilton Cheese on toasted bread paired with Flying Dog Barrel-Aged Horn Dog Barley Wine (an über-limited release based off our standard production Barley Wine). Blue Cheeses pair well with Barley Wines.

Course 2: Maryland crab puffs paired with Flying Dog Tire Bite Golden Ale. Our Jim Lutz brought a $30 can of Maryland crab out to Colorado and showed us how to make crab puffs. Basically it’s crab, old bay seasoning, salt and pepper, scallions and Flying Dog Road Dog Porter. Next the crab gets placed into some crescent rolls (crescent, croissant…) and baked for about 18 minutes (whatever it says on your croissant recipe).

Course 3: Salmon pie paired with Flying Dog Double Dog Double Pale Ale. Recipe available here.

This month’s session is about Doppelbocks. Seeing as I work for Flying Dog and we just released our Collaborator Doppelbock, I figured this would be a nice time to make a Beer Dinner featuring our Doppelbock with the main course. I’ve been reading Garrett Oliver’s “The Brewmaster’s Table” periodically over the last 6 weeks, and there’s a great section on Bocks and Doppelbocks (pages 268-279). I was going to talk about the history of Doppelbocks here, but there is already lots of information out there, so check the following sites for some background. As with most beers, Bocks and Doppelbocks have an amazing history.

Bock/Doppelbock on Wikipedia
New York Times article on bocks

According to Oliver, here are a few foods that go well with Doppelbocks:

Venison (Oliver says this is the best combination)
Duck
Goose
Pork
Traditional Mexican dishes (like Mole)
Custards (flan or creme brulée)

So yesterday I decided to make something with pork tenderloin that could be paired with our Collaborator Doppelbock. More on that later. You can’t skip the earlier course, especially the tasty salad I made!

The first dish in this simple beer dinner was a Pear and Toasted Walnut Salad with In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen Vinaigrette, paired with In-Heat Wheat Hefeweizen.

I’m not one to always follow the recipe, so instead of just red pears, I used one red pear, one asian pear (yellow), and one green pear. This added some color to the dish. You can also add blue cheese crumbles if you wish, but I decided to skip this part. It was interesting to reduce beer in a pan (from 3/4 cup down to 1/4 cup), the process took only about 5 minutes compared to the 10 minutes the recipe says. And with the walnuts, toast them right as you’re about to serve the dish so that they’re warm. The vinaigrette worked great with In-Heat Wheat, and I’ll definitely be making this again. Total prep time for the salad was about 10 minutes.

Now, to the pork and Doppelbock! I was specifically looking for something that wasn’t too difficult and something that I could grill. I had considered making a mole sauce, but the ingredient list was too long, and I wanted something that was more easily doable for more people. A search on food.com resulted in a very nice recipe for Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Mustard, Rosemary & Apple Marinade. The link has the full recipe and directions. A few things that I did differently (you don’t always have to follow the recipe). I kept the fat on the tenderloin, I think that when you grill it, the fat adds flavor and helps keep the meat moist. I used fresh thyme instead of rosemary because the supermarket I went to was out of rosemary. Instead of port or brewed black tea in the shallot sauce, I decided to use Doppelbock instead. The results were pretty decent. We cooked one 12 ounce tenderloin on Medium on our grill 10 minutes per side (20 minutes total). The tenderloin came out between medium rare and medium and I think it was perfect. We decided to add a side of broccoli to this dish, but feel free to add mashed potatoes, instead.

I felt that the malt sweetness of the Doppelbock complemented the pork wonderfully. Some Doppelbocks tend to be too smoky flavored for my tastes, but the pork really brought out the subtle smokiness that Collaborator has. The total prep time for this course was about 30 minutes, with an additional 20 spent cooking the tenderloin. I’ll definitely be making this dish again!

For dessert, I decided to make the Beer Float that Chef Scott made for a previous beer dinner of ours (it’s the last course, obviously). Being an equal-opportunity blog, I decided to use Ska Brewery’s Ten Pin Porter. I melted some Ghirardelli 60% Bittersweet chocolate in the microwave (1 minute) and chocolate covered some beautiful fresh strawberries and a few of the leftover pear slices, put them on some wax paper and let them cool. When dessert came around, I threw a scoop of vanilla and a scoop of chocolate ice cream into a wine glass and poured Ten Pin Porter over the ice cream.

The first spoonful of the float was intensely bitter, due to the hop bitterness of the porter. I found that this was perfectly offset if you took a bite of the chocolate covered strawberry and then took a spoonful of the float. The pears were a nice touch, too. It’s imperative that if you make this float to offset the bitterness with some sort of sweet fruit. Total prep time was about 15 minutes, just to dip the fruit into melted tasty chocolate.

All in all, including taking photographs of this beer dinner, it took about 2 hours to prepare and eat. The total cost for 3 people was about $50, but we had a bunch of the ingredients already. But you get an exquisite meal at the fraction of the cost that you would, if you went out to a fancy restaurant.

Off the Gonzo Grill Beer Dinner

Menu overview - Go directly to recipes - More photos here

1st course
Grilled Calamari, Chickpeas,
Watercress, Lemon, and Peperoncini
with In-Heat Wheat

2nd course
Watermelon Gazpacho with Chili Marinated
Shrimp over Grilled Bruschetta
with Tire Bite Golden Ale

3rd Course
Grilled Peach and Crispy Proscuitto with Herb Ricotta Cheese,
Curry Cashews and Old Scratch Peach Coulis
with Old Scratch Amber Lager

4th Course
Grilled Chicken Summer Rolls with Mango
and a Lime Peanut Dipping Sauce with
Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale

5th Course
Grilled Sausage, Jicama and Apple Slaw,
and Scottish Porter Apricot Mustard
with Road Dog Porter

6th course
Grilled Ground Lamb Skewers,
Couscous Salad, and Cucumber Yogurt Sauce
with Snake Dog IPA

7th Course
Grilled Rockfish, Littleneck Clams, Grilled Fennel,
Pickled Roasted Peppers, in a Pale Ale Lemon Broth
with Double Dog Double Pale Ale

8th Course
Gonzo Imperial Porter Float
with Chocolate Covered Cherries

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Spicy Dog Beer Dinner

Menu overview - Go directly to recipes - More photos here

1st course
Pork and Shitake Dumplings with
Shredded Carrot, Cucumber, and Chili Lime Sauce
served with In-Heat Wheat

2nd course
Poached Pear Salad, Mixed Greens, Pecans,
Blue Cheese with Old Scratch Amber Lager Balsamic Vinaigrette
served with Old Scratch Amber Lager

3rd Course
Doggie-style Classic Pale Ale Steamed Mussels
with Chorizo, Roasted Peppers, Bay Leaves,
and Lemon served with Doggie-style Classic Pale Ale

4th Course
Road Dog Porter BBQ Pork Ribs, Bok Choy with
Roasted Shitake Mushrooms,
and Apricots

5th Course
Chili Roasted Shrimp with Mashed Sweet Potatoes,
Watercress, Mango, Avocado, Citrus and Jalapeño,
served with Snake Dog IPA

6th course
Pan Roasted NY Strip with
Roasted Cipollini Onion, asparagus,
and a Double Dog Cambonzola Cheese Sauce

7th Course
Salami and Fresh Goat Cheese
with Horn Dog Barley Wine mustard fruits,
Watercress and Crustini

8th Course
Gonzo Imperial Porter Molten
Chocolate Cake with Blackberry Sauce and
Vanilla Ice Cream

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