Learn 5 Things About Belgium's Cuisine

When we think of Belgian food of course the waffles, chocolates, and beer come to mind. But Belgium has contributed a looooooot of other dishes to the culinary world (and most all of them seem to come with fries, according to our own Benjamin).

Here are five of the most delicious ones we've found, and some we even tried for ourselves when our team went to Belgium last year.

Holiday Beer & Food Pairings for the Season from our Certified Cicerone™

Our very own Director of Marketing has some thoughts to share on pairing seasonal beers with seasonal foods. For today's pairing suggestions, Ben give us his best Certified Cicerone™ thoughts on what to pair with Saisons, pumpkin beers, and holiday ales which fit this time of year all too well.

Thanksgiving is right around the corner. The weather has changed and parts of the country are about to see their first snowfall. It’s time to fatten up for the winter. May as well do it in style. Right?

This is a great time of year for both food and beer. It’s not too hot to enjoy something hearty or spicy and it isn’t too cold that a frosty beer seems out of the question. There are great new vegetables popping their heads up at the farmers market and all of those malty holiday ales are starting to hit the shelves at the local bodega. So, where do we begin? As with any classic tasting, let’s go light to dark.

A Feast of Food Pairing Ideas for Autumn Maple

Autumn is here and it's time to take a look at the great seasonal eats on the horizon as the leaves turn. This guest post comes from cookbook author and freelance writer (and our friend!) Randy Clemens:

Autumn Maple is a beautiful thing. Chock full of yams and the perennial potpourri of pumpkin pie spices, it’s pretty much a natural choice to have alongside a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. But that’s just a little too predictable for you, isn’t it? You want to dig a little deeper because you’re a gourmand. You’re clever... and I like that about you.

Funny enough, when I gave Saison Rue a shout out in a piece I did on beer pairing last year, I got an email shortly thereafter from The Bruery’s Director of Marketing, Benjamin Weiss, exclaiming, “You put a Bruery beer in a Thanksgiving article… and it wasn't Autumn Maple?! You are crazy!!!”

So, what else could you pair with Autumn Maple? I thought you’d never ask. Here are a few of my favorite things to match it up with:

Baked Pumpkin Autumn Maple Doughnuts

This month we've collected recipes for food made with or made to pair with our fall seasonal, Autumn Maple.  Today's comes from the Food + Words blog.  Read below and check out their blog for some incredibly delicious food articles!

so you know the phrase, “go nuts for doughnuts?”

if you know me, you know i say that all the time, whether it’s about doughnuts or not. i just like that phrase. it’s silly.

i’m going to drop some stone-cold truth on you right now: i have never actually gone nuts for doughnuts. at all.

my whole entire life, i’ve just never really…liked doughnuts. that’s crazy, right? i know. everyone loves doughnuts! they’re sweet and sometimes colorful, and can be filled with delicious things, and topped with sprinkles…what’s not to like?

in theory, i should love doughnuts for all of those reasons listed above…but i don’t. i’ve sworn a lifelong allegiance to  another round, holey breakfast treat. my heart belongs to bagels. me + bagels = love.

however, i think i finally found a doughnut i can love.

these pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts are baked, and that’s one of the many reasons why i love them!

i’ve never been a huge fan of fried food, with the exception of fried chicken and french fries, so it makes sense that i could never fully get on the doughnut bandwagon. i’ve always found them to be a bit too greasy and oily for my taste.

plus, many commercial doughnuts are so beyond overly sweet that i can’t stomach them. i mean, one bite makes me feel like i’m slipping into a doughnut-induced diabetic coma. not a fan.

don’t get me wrong: i love sweets, obviously–otherwise i wouldn’t be specializing in baking and pastry at culinary school! i just feel that desserts should be sweet without being overly saccharine or cloying.

enter: baked pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts. they’re chock full of pumpkin, wonderful autumn spices, and coated with cinnamon sugar.

oh, did i forget to mention that they also have beer in them? yes, beer!

recently, i was contacted by The Bruery, a California brewery that specializes in craft beer. they asked me to develop a recipe featuring their Autumn Maple seasonal offering, and i jumped at the challenge. i love cooking and baking with beer, wine and spirits, and i knew i could come up with something amazing for fall!

i’m not a huge beer drinker, but i’ve always loved the pumpkin ales and lagers that are available during autumn. The Bruery’s Autumn Maple beer is a spicy, sweet take on the pumpkin-style beers that i love so much. each barrel is brewed with 17 pounds of yams–that’s a lot!

as soon as i tasted the Autumn Maple beer, i knew it would be a perfect compliment to a pumpkin dessert. i’ve been wanting to make apple cider doughnuts for an incredibly long time now, but i decided instead to use the Autumn Maple beer to make sweet, spicy pumpkin doughnuts, full of delicious fall flavor.

these doughnuts are crazy-good, people. the beer lends a wonderful depth and spicy quality to the doughnuts, while the cinnamon sugar crust on the outside provides the perfect amount of sweetness. i’m in love!

we had an evening last week that was cool, crisp, and beautifully autumnal. we sat outside in our backyard as the light of the day faded away with a paper bag full of warm, just-baked doughnuts and two mason jars full of Autumn Maple beer.

we ate these doughnuts like it was our job. we consumed them like they were going out of style. we licked our cinnamon sugar-coated fingers and sipped Autumn Maple beer and reveled in the wonderful weather. it was a damn good night.

make these pumpkin autumn maple doughnuts this weekend, and share them with the people you love. once they taste these doughnuts, they’re apt to love you just a little bit more. pinkie swear.

Want the recipe? Click on over to the Food + Words blog!

Beer Battered Asparagus

We've teamed up with The Beerista to start bringing you some great recipes to go along with your beer, make using your beer or even make using the spent grain that many homebrewers just throw out (or in our case, donate to a farmer).  Stay tuned for more from The Beerista including some special recipes just for our own beers.

What better way to eat your vegetables then soaked in beer and fried! Your mom and dad would be proud. As part of an afternoon soirée I had at my house, I made beer battered asparagus for the first time using Allagash white. It was easy and they turned out great. In my experience I have found that you can fry almost anything and it would be good, but with a tempura beer batter, these were crisp, light, and not too greasy. I served them alongside a garlic lemon mayonnaise dip and they were a hit. Another plus with this recipe is that it’s a versatile dish that feels right at home at for an afternoon of college football or a fancy cocktail party.

If you want to whip up a batch of your own, here’s what you do:

Ingredients:

• 1 cup white ale, heffewizen, or pale ale
• 1 pound asparagus – ends trimmed and cut into 3 inch sized pieces
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon lemon zest
• Salt & pepper to taste
• About 4 cups vegetable oil

What you do:

1. Whisk the flour, beer, lemon zest, salt, and pepper in a bowl until smooth and well combined.
2. Heat up about 3 inches of oil in a large pot or deep fryer. The temperature should be around 375 degrees. If you drop a small amount of batter into the oil and it immediately rises to the surface with bubbles around it, the oil should be hot enough and ready.
3. Drop handfuls of the cut asparagus into the batter, ensuring they are completely coated. Pull them out, allowing excess batter to drip off.
4. Drop the batter coated aparagus in the hot oil. You should fry the pieces in batches, being careful not to over crowd the pot–if you do, the temperature of the oil will drop too low, creating soggy, sad asparagus.
5. Fry until golden brown, about 3 – 4 minutes. Pull out with a slotted spoon and drain on a paper towl.

And that's it!  We're talking about less than 15 minutes between you and beer battered asparagus goodness.  Mixing up a bit of mayo with lemon juice, lemon zest, salt and pepper makes a great dip.  But, get creative.  These would also be good with peanut sauce, a miso based sauce, or any kind of aioli.  And they taste great with beer.

View the original blog post and more by The Beerista 

on her blog www.thebeeristablog.com

Spent Grain Coccodrillo Bread with Brown Ale

We've teamed up with The Beerista to start bringing you some great recipes to go along with your beer, make using your beer or even make using the spent grain that many homebrewers just throw out (or in our case, donate to a farmer).  Stay tuned for more from The Beerista including some special recipes just for our own beers.

In a quest to cram even more beer into my life, I came up with a recipe for spent grain bread that involves beer in the dough in addition to the spent grain. To my delight, this was my first really successful attempt at making spent grain bread. I have tried multiple times in the past and ended up with hard, dense bread that was not palatable, but this time I got it right.

I needed to create a recipe for the bread of a grilled cheese that I was entering into a competition (the Grilled Cheese Invitational – more on that later). The name of the sandwich I was entering was The Beer Baron and it consisted of homemade spent grain bread, porter braised pulled pork, Vermont cheddar, and picked onions. Bread is a pretty critical ingredient in a grilled cheese, so it had to be great. I started off by trying a few recipes I found online for spent grain bread, but was not happy with any of them. I needed a rustic bread with nutty flavors to hold up to the pulled pork and cheese. I decided to modify a recipe for Coccodrillo bread (a special Italian bread) from my Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking cookbook. The recipe called for dark beer, so thought I would try it. Spent grain and beer in the bread?!?! That was taking the sandwich theme to a whole new level. My modifications worked out great and the bread was perfect. The sandwich went on to win a judge’s award at the competition, complete with a ridiculous trophy. Here is what I did:

Spent Grain Coddodrillo – Makes 2 loafs (adapted from Willams-Sonoma’sEssentials of Baking)

For the sponge:
1 package (2.5 teaspoons) active dry yeast
¾ cup dark beer, at room temperature (I used Lost Coast’s Downtown Brown for the nutty flavor, The Bruery's Rugbrød would also work great)
3 cups cool water
1 cup spent grain flour (dried spent grain processed to a fine powder in a food processor)
2.5 cups all-purpose flour

For the dough:
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup spent grain
1 tablespoon sea salt

What to do:

Start by making what is called “the sponge”. To do this, in a large bowl combine:
Yeast
Beer
Water
The flours (spent grain and all-purpose)

Whisk them all together until combined, then cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit over night or for 8 hours at room temperature. The sponge will grow in size and look like, um, a sponge when ready – light and airy with some holes in it.

1. Once the sponge is ready, add the flour for the dough, spent grain, and salt to it. Mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together. The dough will look a bit shaggy and messy – that’s OK. It’ll get its act together later. You just need to give it some time.
2. Scrape the dough out of the bowl onto a floured work surface. You will probably need quite a bit of flour since the dough will be sticky.
3. Knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic, about 5 – 7 minutes. Continue to flour the dough as needed to prevent it from sticking. Don’t overdue, however. The dough is supposed to be soft.
4. Form the dough into a ball and place it in a lightly oiled bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let the dough raise in a warm, draft-free place until it doubles in size (about 2 hours).
5. When the dough has finished doing its magic, dust your counter and a sheet pan with some flour (yes, more flour).
6. Get out a little aggression and show the dough who’s boss by punching it down (for those of you not familiar with baking, this literally means punch the dough to get the air out of it). Then, scrape it out of the bowl onto the floured counter. Bounce it around a few times shaping it into a large, round loaf.
7. Put the loaf on the floured baking sheet, cover it with a towel, and let it have a little rest again in a warm, draft-free location to recover from all the activity. 30 – 45 minutes should give it enough time to rise again and double in size.
8. When the bread is almost finished napping, move a rack in your oven to the lower third and pre-heat it to 400 degrees.
9. When the bread is ready for action, sprinkle the top with all-purpose flour and using a sharp knife, cut the loaf right in half. Separate the two half’s and turn them a quarter turn so that the cut side is now facing up. You will end up with two oval shaped loafs
10. Space the 2 loafs apart and bake until they are brown and hallow sounding (give the top a tap to determine this). Should take about 35 – 45 minutes.
11. When they are done, turn the oven off and let the bread sit for 10 minutes without opening the door. I know it will be hard to not sneak a peek, but resist your temptations and leave the door closed!
12. To reward your awesome baking skills and patience, take the bread out, let it cool, slice, and top with all sorts of goodness. I recommend cheese, peanut butter, pulled pork, jam, butter… (not necessarily all at one time)

The Beer Baron in all its glory.

View the original blog post and more by The Beerista on her blog www.thebeeristablog.com

Pizza & Beer

A rather unfortunate misconception about beer is that it only pairs well with 3 foods: burgers, sausages and pizza.

Anyone who knows us and our beer knows that we push the boundaries on beer and food pairings.  We've done quite a few beer dinners and they almost always incorporate some truly delectable dishes from hamachi crudo to sous vide caribou to rabbit confit or pastrami cured duck breast...and sometimes dishes made from vegetables too.  We love working with competent chefs who understand flavors and respect our beers in the same way that we respect their food.

Burgers, sausages and pizza aren't necessarily a bad thing though.  There is a reason those foods are so popular - they are delicious.  And of course, there are some beers out there that perfectly compliment a simple cheeseburger or a slice of pepperoni pie and there is a time and place for everything.  But, what makes us giddy is a chef who can turn a simple classic concept into a work of art.  And what makes us even more giddy is being challenged by that chef to make a beer good enough to pair with his food.

That's what brings us to today's post.  Wine dinners and beer dinners have existed for years and they follow a simple planning formula: taste several wines or beers and come up with dishes to serve with each.  But what if we turned that on it's head in the same way that a gourmet chef deconstructs a burger, rebuilding it into something different, yet similar.  What if the food came first and the beer came later?

We were recently approached by the great people of Pizzaquest.com with this very question.  Our answer was to bring it on.

Pizza Quest is helmed by the great Peter Reinhart, who is, for lack of a better term, a bread baking deity.  He has written several cook books on baking including winning a couple of James Beard awards for cook books such as The Bread Baker's Apprentice.  More recently, Peter wrote a fantastic book about his search for the perfect pizza and that is what brought him together with the producers of Pizza Quest.  He's a dough guy with a pizza fetish.

Second came in Chef Kelly Whitaker of Pizzeria Basta in Boulder, CO.  Kelly is a kick ass chef who's only source of heat in his entire restaurant is a wood fire brick oven.  He can cook just about anything in that thing from pizzas to short ribs to scallops.  He's an impressive guy and paired with Peter's knowledge of dough, he's seemingly unstoppable.

Thus came the challenge.  Peter and Kelly would team up on a special pizza for us to try and we would then have to concoct a beer to pair with that pizza.  

The whole Pizza Quest team showed up at our brewery early in the morning just a couple of weeks ago and when we say team, we do mean it.  Peter, Kelly, the PQ producers, a special cheese delivery of cheeses made just the night before from a local artisan, and of course...a portable wood fire brick oven. 

The day was incredible.  Peter filmed a segment on creating a couple of different pizza doughs, including the special one he would use for our "challenge pie".  That particular crust delved into the world of beer, which is, after all, liquid bread.  Besides some of the more standard flours and yeasts that he normally uses in his doughs, Peter added a bit of rye flour and shockingly, a bit of ground crystal malt.  Yes, he used malted barley, ground finely like flour, in the pizza dough!  

Peter and Kelly cooked us pizza after pizza, just demonstrating their skills and trying their best to go through the gallons of fresh tomato sauce and pounds of burrata cheese that had just been made 12 hours earlier that we had at our disposal.  It was a good day.

But then, when the oven was just at the right temperature, Kelly whipped out two different possible "challenge pies" for us.  One was a white pie and one a red pie.  After taste tests by everyone within reach, the white pie was decided on for the ultimate challenge.  It was a pie made on top of Peter's special dough using super fresh burrata, squash blossoms, white sardines, fresh arugula sprouts and flowers, preserved lemon and fennel salt along the crust.  All of the ingredients had been picked up earlier that morning at the famous farmer's market in Santa Monica by Kelly and they combined on this pizza to form something extraordinary.

Our job now is to create a beer recipe to brew and debut at a party outside of the Great American Beer Festival that will pair perfectly with this special pizza.

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it.

We had an incredible time learning about dough and bread with Peter and we highly recommend you check out his blog post from this day as well as his others to learn something yourself.

Brick Oven outside of our brewery

Peter setting up his work station to make some dough. 

 Peter and Kelly discussing sauce.

 Patrick about to take our guests on a tour.

This was the alternate challenge pie. It had pistachios and some sort of lardo on it plus more.  Delicious.

 Tasting the challenge pies.

Our intern Kristen is a bit of a bread geek and a huge fan of Peter's.

About to put Kristen's pizza in the oven.

The challenge pie.

An extra gift for Holiday Beer Geek Show & Tell

We've got an extra little surprise for you guys this Saturday and I'm horrible with surprises so I'm just gonna spill the beans.

When you show up here on Saturday with your awesomely delicious beers to share. Or if you are just here to grab a glass of Two Turtle Doves or Rugbrød as a lovely holiday warmer and perhaps pick up a gift basket for that beer lover who you still haven't bought a gift for, we aren't going to leave you hungry.

Saturday, at about 5:30, the infamous Frysmith truck will be pulling up to our Tasting Room to share their delectable french fry concoctions. If you haven't had a chance to try this new LA food truck yet, this is a great chance, especially since it will be a rare OC appearance for them. And seriously...what pairs better with beer than french fries smothered with fire roasted poblano chiles, caramelized onions and shawarma-marinated steak with jack cheese? What?! I ask, What?!

Check out the Frysmith at www.eatfrysmith.com and start thinking about what you're gonna order once that Saturday night hunger emerges.

Rajas Fries

Chili Cheese Fries

BeerAdvocate Magazine: November and December

I've been very lucky to have some sort of content in three consecutive issues of BeerAdvocate Magazine.  

The first was in October, when Orchard White, Black Orchard and Saison Rue were given "A" Ratings.  

The second was in this month's issue (November 2008) where I write about "Why I'm a Brewer" on the Last Call article.  Thanks to Sean Paxton for the photo featured in this article.

The third will happen in next month's issue in Sean Paxton's excellent food article where he uses Orchard White and Black Orchard in creme brulee.  Thanks Sean for experimenting with my beers and making this delicious dish!

Both Photos: Sean Paxton

Orchard White Clams

We might not be doing a great job at posting recipes to go with our beers (we're working on that, I promise), but Phil over at My Life as a Foodie is making up for it!  Phil featured Orchard White on his most recent episode, and used it as the base broth for cooking clams.  Now I know Orchard White goes with shellfish-- sounds good to me!  If you haven't listened to this Podcast, you really should.  It's funny, informative, and inspires me to try new recipes when I cook.  Thanks Phil!