Here are some green onions!  A potato!  Some coconut milk!  I know we have some curry paste in a little can somewhere in here… A HA!  Found it.  Masaman curry paste.

So I slice the potato (I never peel potatoes, period), chop the green onion, and thaw some chicken.  The can of masaman suggests adding the entire contents to one dish, but I tasted a sample and it was pretty spicy.  I figured the whole can would be more than the wife could handle.  I used a little more than half.

The paste is actually imported from Thailand.  I don’t even remember when/where we bought it; we’ve had it a long time.  We bought several varieties at once and have already gone through several cans in the last couple years, just forgot about them for a long time.

Beerwise, my first thought was a Sam Adams White Ale.  Not the best example of the style, but pretty tasty and I thought perhaps the spices in it would work well with Thai.  But then my eyes settled on a bottle of Sweetwater IPA and I decided, “Dammit, it’s my favorite beer sold in Alabama and I’m going to try it with every food on earth eventually. ” Why not try Thai food tonight?

And it worked! It was actually really good.  The peachy character of the IPA was a great compliment to the spices and coconut in this.

In a couple years, you’ll be able to type “Sweetwater IPA” the search box on this site and learn every dish imaginable that it does and does not pair with.  Be forewarned.

Marketing Genius: Just add beer

On a trip to the local Aldi’s grocery store, my wife picked up some potato chips as a novelty, knowing that I’d be interested in trying something that calls itself “Beer Chips.”  The Beer Chips website says that they are “thick-cut kettle style chips with a serious coating of sugar and salt and to top it off, covered with a major dose of the world’s most perfect beverage…beer.”  Okay, sure, “covered with beer.”  I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it sounds good, right?  Certainly, their 1:55 clip of “How We Make” Beer Chips is entirely unhelpful.  It shows ”beer” growing on a hopvine and girls dancing on a keg.  I’m starting to think these things are popular with people (i.e. men) who think that the creation of Bud Lite Lime is the the most exciting beer-releated event since Beerfest the movie was released.   But, admittedly, there is something “beery” about Beer Chips.  They are a little sweet and a little salty.  There is both a malty and a honey sweetness to them.  It reminds me of what a potato chip would taste like with dry malt extract sprinkled on top.  The chips are thick-cut and have a great crunch.  While I enjoyed them, they certainly aren’t for everyone.  My wife hated them and refused to eat them.  Yet I found that I couldn’t stay away–kind of like the first time I tried sweet and salty popcorn.  Likewise, my father-in-law, who is generally a potato chip fan, but not a beer drinker, thoroughly enjoyed them.  For those interested in the ingredients label, “Beer” was indeed listed and in turn had its list of ingredients–”malted barley, corn syrup, hops, yeast.”  What, corn syrup?!?  In beer!?!  Well, I guess if your going to be pouring beer on your potato chips, you’re not going to be using any Dark Lord Imperial Stout.  I mean, it’s not like that stuff just grows on trees.

Got the orange and brown food groups covered.

The food was fore-ordained.  In the course of conversation over the weekend, a friend recommended pot roast with sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes.  Said it made the roast sweet.  Sounded good to me; when I was buying a few necessities Sunday I picked up a roast, some sweet potatoes, carrots, and a sweet onion to throw in the crock pot.  Sliced the onion and sweet potatoes this morning before going to work and threw them in with the roast and the baby carrots.

I had no recipe to work from, so I just added a few random things in hopes of achieving a good end result: water, olive oil, a splash of vinegar, some oregano, steak spice, plenty of salt, and some Tabasco.  Set on low, give it 9 hours or so.

Extra Special Bitter! Not "Early Spring Beer," jerks.

The end result was pretty good, but not quite what I’d hoped.  I didn’t think the roast tasted any different from the many times I’ve made pot roast with white potatoes.  Pretty much identical, really.  So that was a disappointment.  But pot roast is inherenty a tasty food, so it was enjoyable, of course.  And the sweet potatoes actually became savory over the course of the extended slow cook.  There was hardly any sweetness left.  My wife appreciated that, though.  So different strokes for different folks.  The Tabasco did add a nice mild kick that helped things without being overkill for the little ones.

Beerwise I really debated on whether to go very sweet and malty to compliment the flavors in the food, or sharply bitter to contrast.  I went somewhat in between.  ESB’s have decent malty punch, but are still quite hoppy.  Pretty good call.  Enjoyable pairing.

Sierra Nevada releases their ESB as a Spring seasonal, thus the “Early Spring Beer” tripe they put on the label.  But ESBs are not traditionally released in the early Spring.  Looks like they took a page from Redhook’s playbook and just wanted to get “extra” and “bitter” off the label.  I guess it turns some people off.  But it pissed me off when Redhook changed to “extra special beer” and this is pretty annoying too.  ESB is a noble style with a rich history.  Pretending it’s something other than “extra special bitter” detracts from that history.  Bah.

But the beer is good.

I guess it really is what's for dinner.

This is more or less the quintessential Southern meal, no?

Good steak is a relatively rare treat for us, so I carefully weighed my beer options for this.  I didn’t want to screw it up.  On one hand, on this very website Stuart has been praising the virtues of red meat with malty beer pairings.  On the other, I found some beer discussion forum talk at BA with several respondents recommending IPAs with steak.

What to do, what to do?

I went with Great Divide Hibernation Ale.  A winter seasonal in the style of an English Old Ale.  Malty won out.

This was simply incredible.  The sweet, malty, nutty flavors of the beer combined with a little alcohol bite and some subtle, spicy hops melded perfectly with the steak.

Admire the grill lines. And the smoke.

USDA Choice cut Rib eye.  Medium rare.  (USDA Prime is a bit above my pay grade.)

Anyway these were mongo hunks of steak.  Again, Costco to the rescue.  Around $25 for 4 large steaks.

I’m pretty hardcore on using charcoal over gas.  I love that smoky flavor.  All I did was let these sit out about an hour and a half before grilling to hit room temp.  A little olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Bam.  Grill over the hottest coals I could muster, 4-5 minutes each side.

And a malty old ale is definitely the winner.

The beer pairing was not on par with the previous dopplebock pairing.  I wanted to try something else malty, so I went with Schmaltz Brewing’s He’Brew Genesis Ale: the Chosen Beer.  It’s a nice, mild beer which seems to barely evade classification.  The label calls it a “light brown ale,” but the Schmaltz wesbite calls it “a west coast style pale and amber ale” (which is it guys, a pale ale or amber ale?), and the BeerAdvocate deciders list it as an American pale ale.  If I were the judge here, I’d say it’s an English style brown ale brewed with (mostly) American hops.  The English descriptor indicating the hops are reserved and the malt plays an important role.

But it ain’t as malty as a dopplebock.  And even in their minor role here, the hops try to clash just a tiny bit with the flavors in the brats and potatoes.  This is an acceptable pairing, but I won’t be repeating it.  I think German dunkels and various bocks are probably the best fit for this meal, and I will be going that direction again in the future.

Of course it’s easy to pair a bland, watery beer with any given food.  The challenge comes with flavorful beers.

Just missing the accordian.

But contra my own skepticism, this evening I proved true one significant example of “X country’s beer goes well with X country’s food”: a German style doppelbock with bratwurst and German potatoes.  It was earth-shatteringly perfect.  And it also gave me some insight on the Malt Barrier.  I tend to eat a lot of Italian style food, and I’m starting to get the feeling that malty beers don’t pair well with tomato and garlic-centric foods.  As you can tell, I’m still figuring all this out.

I’d never made German potatoes before, so I had no idea what I was doing.  I was already at the store when the epiphany hit me that I needed to try German food with my remaining bottle of doppelbock.  So I just Googled “recipe german potatoes” on my mobile and clicked on the first thing that came up.

The authenticity of that recipe is dubious in light of the fact that it calls for an Italian dressing seasoning packet, but it worked very well nonetheless.  I did make a couple tweaks.  For one, I hate raw onions.  Can’t stand them on burgers or in salads or anything else.  So I  sautéed the onions and celery.  Also, I didn’t want to buy any apple cider vinegar because I knew we’d never use it again.  So, I used white vinegar and added some chopped apple to the recipe to shake things up.  Finally, I didn’t want to be eating on it for a month, so I cut the whole thing in half.  And I’m glad I did.  We still had a lot left over.

Brats are simple.  I marinated them in some old homebrew.  It was actually an attempt we made at imitating a commercial brew we’d never even tried, Sam Adams’ Boston 375 Colonial Ale:

… a hearty and unfiltered brew made with blackstrap molasses. This traditional ingredient of the colonial-era provided one-third of the fermentable sugars for this brew, turning into carbon dioxide and alcohol, and lending an old-school sweet edge to the beer. To provide some depth, caramel and Munich malts were added, plus a touch of German smoked malt to lend a bit of tradition – as once upon a time all malts were dried over wood flame.

Heaven is sausage simmering in beer.

We were never happy with the results of our homebrewed version, partly because this was back in our first year of brewing (05) and we had a bottle-cleaning issue producing harsh phenols that tainted most of every batch.  But also, blackstrap molasses is not a desirable ingredient in beer.  Food, however, is something else entirely.  Obviously.

I suspected this malty, molasses-laden homebrew would go well soaked up by some brats, and it was a brilliant move.  I let them marinate for several hours, then simmered them gently in the beer on medium-low heat for maybe 25 minutes or so.

Then, of course, we covered them in sauerkraut.  A thoroughly German experience through and through, and I’ve got to say they know what they are doing when they put beer and food together.

Prost!