Cooking and Eating With Beer

Peter La France
John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
$24.95, Hard Cover, 194 pp.
ISBN 0-471-13564-X

This is neither a cookbook, nor is it a beer guide-rather, the author hopes to instruct the reader in the perfect pairing of beer and food by exploring the science and art of both. The subtitle is "Fifty chefs, brewmasters and restaurateurs talk about beer and food," but the emphasis is on chefs, "from the wildly enthusiastic to the cautiously interested," who are incorporating beer into their menus. These conversations are the heart of the book and the longest part: the shorter collection of recipes at the end serves more as an appendix to illustrate the principles discussed by the chefs.

In creating a fine meal, a chef does not necessarily start with a sheaf of recipes, as we kitchen mortals do, but with a clear idea of the desired result. The professional chef then assembles ingredients and draws upon practiced techniques to reach that result.

Among beer and food books, this one stands out as the first to highlight basic cooking fundamentals and apply them to the use of beer.

The first chapter reviews beer basics: beer ingredients, the fundamentals of brewing, and the styles of beer-material that is fairly familiar to readers of AABM. However, the description of each beer style is followed by an example, very useful information for a cook: if a recipe calls for a Vienna lager or a British bitter, the cook knows to shop for a Dos Equis or Fuller's London Pride.

The next ten chapters explore the art of cooking-and cooking with beer-through the eyes of people who cook for a living. These chefs talk knowledgeably about the use (and mis-use) of beer in fine cuisine.

Most chefs who work in brewery/restaurants started their own beer education by exploring ways to pair beers with food, and some prefer to stop at that. There are descriptions of serving combinations, some classic, some novel: oysters with porter, dry pilsner and caviar, hoppy ale and steamed chocolate pudding.

The section on beer dinners continues in the same vein. Few dishes in the dozen elaborate menus are prepared with beer; the challenge is the creative pairing of each course with an appropriate beer. The menus themselves are outside most readers' reach, but the accompanying tasting notes contain valuable lessons on how to integrate flavors.

When it comes to incorporating beer into recipes, caution and cooking principles rule. The chefs are wary of using beer just for the sake of it: "we don't make a big thing about it," says one. They employ beer to finish soups, deglaze, and braise; and warn against the concentration of bitter flavors if the beer is used in reductions. Seven short chapters are devoted to courses from appetizers to dessert. The chefs discuss specific dishes-many beer-based, the rest just beer-friendly-some of which appear in the later recipe section.

It is not only finished beer that becomes an ingredient in recipes: having a brewery on premises, as many of these chefs do, has led many to incorporate beer ingredients into dishes, an option not open to most domestic cooks. So, Joe Kubik of John Harvard’s in the Boston area adds Cascade hops to the smoker for house smoked salmon with a "cool, minty dimension," and prepares a between-course sorbet based on beer wort and Ceylon tea. Wynkoop's John Dickenson prepares a brewer's breakfast of granola, fruit, yoghurt and hot, unhopped wort.

While the recipes in this book read well, understanding the cooking principles may teach me why some of my own beer-based dishes are distinctly less than the sum of their parts. Leave the last word to Richard Hamilton of Chattanooga's Big River Grille and Brewing Works: "Since there is no ingredient in beer that you don't already use in food preparation, the process of substituting beer for a specific flavor or effect is relatively simple, if you pay attention to what you are doing."

-- Julie Johnson Bradford