Name: Cooking with Beer by Mark Dredge
Publisher’s Landing Page: Ryland, Peters, and Small
Mark Dredge’s landing page for the book
About the book:
75 delicious recipes using beer as a key ingredient.
A beer with your food is a great thing. But what about beer in your food? It’s an even better thing! The next step for any beer lover is to try using beer as an ingredient, and that’s where COOKING WITH BEER comes in. Self-confessed beer geek Mark Dredge has combined two of his passions—great brews and delicious food—to come up with over 65 awesome recipes using beer as a key component.
Every occasion is covered, from lazy hangover brunches featuring a beer-cured bacon sandwich and Hefeweizen French toast to tasty main meals like Tripel Pulled Pork and desserts including a must-try Carrot Cake made with a Double IPA. If you really want to go to town, the Ultimate section has meal ideas where every element involves beer in some way—beer pizza anyone? And of course there is a selection of beer snacks that you can enjoy with a well-earned pint in your hand.
As I may have mentioned, prior to starting The Tap Takeover, I wrote book reviews for many years at a few different outlets: SFFWorld, SF Signal, and Tor.com. I still do review books for two of those sites (sadly SF Signal closed a couple of years ago) so I figured reviewing a book about beer a natural fit for The Tap Takeover. Hopefully, I’ll be writing about more beer-related books in the future.
I received this cookbook as a gift for Christmas in 2016 and through early 2017, my wife (with only limited assistance from me) made many of the recipes in the book. But more about some of those recipes in a bit.
The book begins with an introduction to pairing beer with food, the various styles of beer, and the best meals to incorporate each beer into as a cooking component. From there, the chapters are broken into “Breakfast,” “Snacks and Starters,” “Mains and More,” “Ultimate Meals,” “Baking,” and lastly, “Sweet Things.”
Each recipe is spread over two pages and includes the instructions (occasionally including a specific brand of beer to use), a picture of the finished meal along with a suggestion of a beer pairing to enjoy while eating the meal. The information presented and –how– the information is presented make this a superb cookbook in terms of the physical product; good fonts, clear writing, and lovely photos.
A cookbook can look great, but the most important aspect of any cookbook is that the recipes must produce good food when executed properly. As I said, my wife and I made many of the recipes in this book and with the exception of one (largely because I realized an ingredient in it just isn’t to my liking), the meals were terrific.
Standouts include the chicken wings pictured above. Simply outstanding wings that have been the hit of wherever we’ve brought them. Although they are quite spicy, they are not buffalo spiced wings and are brined overnight using an IPA. The last time we made them we used Victory’s Mighty Things Imperial IPA. Prior to that, we used Spellbound Brewing’s IPA. I think next time I want to try it with Founders Centennial IPA or Flying Fish Jersey Juice. The only thing about this “Snack and Starter” is the sauce on the side which while tasty, wasn’t used too much any of the times we made the wings.
Another standout, and perhaps my favorite dinner from the cookbook is the Triple Tripel Pork. There are three courses to this meal and each one utilizes some of the beer. The one time we made it we used Valar Dohaeris, one of the Game of Thrones beers from Brewery Ommegang. I really need to have this meal again as it was probably the best pork chop meal I ever had. Plus it will give me an “excuse” to try another Tripel.
The dessert standout, thus far, has been the Framboise Lemon Cake, which is a very straightforward raspberry-lemon cake but oh so delicious. The beer for this one was a classic Belgian Lambic, Framboise from Brouwerij Lindemans.
Great food/meals, a great look and design, and the opportunity to explore new and different beers. In other words, this book has just about everything you would want from a cookbook with recipes featuring beer. Except maybe a coupon for a free six pack of beer.
Highly recommended.
The Tap Takeover 