Cooking With Beer

Using homebrew to cook with is a great way to make some delicious dishes and additionally you can proudly say that the 'secret ingredient' is beer I brewed myself. It highlights the creative process and gives me just one more way of saying to my wife "Hey, look at me, I'm like a modern day renaissance man! Right?"
Or, just a way to be inventive in the kitchen and have fun using beer to make good tasting food.

I'm not locked into just homebrew. I'll use commercial beer too but I tend to weight the cost of good commercial beer over the results expected in a dish. Often times I'd just prefer to drink the $5 a bomber beer.

The other night, with the help of the wife (actually, she did all the work while I lurched over her trying to help but really just getting in the way), I worked up a recipe for BBQ sauce that is just plain good. Spicy with a plenty of heat offset with the sweetness of brown sugar and a bottle of under attenuated belgian tripel I had that was taking up space in my kegerator. If you recall from a previous post, (here) I attempted to ferment a small amount of excess wort in a mini fermentation setting. The beer ended up tasting quite good but was on the sweet side because it only fermented about 50% of the sugar. Turns out this was the perfect beer for this recipe as it added sweet fruity spice flavors to the recipe.

The following are ingredients and techniques for preparing this sauce and of course, like homebrewing, substitutions are welcome.



Add caption



Belgian Q Sauce

4 tbls Cooking oil

1 small diced onion

1 cup of Belgian Tripel

1 can tomato sauce 14oz.

1 cup brown sugar

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 tsp garlic salt

1/4 cup raisins

1 tsp lemon juice

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1/2 tsp. cardamon

1/4 tsp. ginger

5 teaspoons chili powder

4 teaspoons salt

4 teaspoons pepper

1/2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

In a sauce pan, brown the onions in oil, add remainder of ingredients and bring to a boil then remove from heat. Blend until smooth and baste meat in sauce prior to cooking and use some for on the side.

This sauce has some medium heat with a sweet/tart quality that goes well with chicken.