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.
