Cooking With Homebrew

Cooking With Homebrew By Pete Ricks Cooking with beer can be an interesting experience. Malty beers can be used as a sweet, sugary replacement for regular sugar in many food recipes. If you don't like or want barley sugar, Honey can also be used as a replacement for refined sugar. But since this is an article on how to cook with homebrew, we are going to use beer! Before you can brew with beer though, you need some beer. When I cook with beer, I like to use dark beers but I have used Oktoberfest, Bocks, and many other different styles. I tend to stay away from the hoppy beers but you can use them in some interesting recipes where maybe some hop flavor and aroma might be appropriate. One thing we probably should warn you about is trying this recipe with domestic yellow, fizzy beer. You'd be better off sticking with water and maybe some honey as there isn't a whole lot of malt character in domestic yellow, fizzy beer. For the first recipe, we are going to use Desert Imperial Porter to make home made pizza dough. Desert Imperial Porter is a dark, sweet beer brewed with 2-row barley, brown malt, chocolate malt, and a generous dose of Arizona Desert Honey at the end of the boil. Check out the recipe database for the full recipe. This beer has the consistency of an Imperial Stout as well as the richness of a Porter. Thick and sweet, this beer can also be used to make a mean batch of pizza dough. Let's start by going over the ingredients for the homemade pizza dough. If you are a homebrewer, you can also take a half cup of your spent grains, grind them up in your blendor or food processor, and then add them to the mix for even more barley flavor. For this recipe, we're are going to stick with regular flour and the malty beer. 2 cups all purpose flour 1 packet rapid rise yeast 1 TSP Salt 2 TSP Extra Virgin Olive Oil 1 Cup of Water 1 Cup of Desert Imperial Porter Now, before you go hog wild and throw everything togther at once, you need to get the yeast going. First, heat up the water to 100 degrees and pour it into the bowl. Then add the yeast and stir it up. I like to add a little bit of flour at this point to help the yeast wake up. Stir it up some more and let it sit for a few minutes. Then add the Olive Oil, stir, add the Salt, stir, and then add about half to 2/3rds of the beer. Stir it up and start making dough by adding more flour and folding it in. If you have ever made dough, you know the drill. Once you have made a nice ball of dough, then pour the rest of the beer in and add some more flour. What you should end up with is a patchy looking dough with some dark spots, but this is a good thing. Now you are ready to make some pizza dough balls. Remember that these are going to swell up to twice the size that they are now, sometimes bigger. For this batch of pizzas, I made a big crust, a medium crust. 2 small crusts for the kids, and a breadstick. Take a cookie sheet and grease it with Olive Oil. Roll the doughs in the Olive Oil and space them apart on the sheet. After a few hours of dough rising, we are ready to make the pizzas. Take the dough balls and roll them in some flour. Then start stretching them out into a circular shape. Pizza dough made with malty beer or honey is more elastic than regular pizza dough so you should be able to stretch it out with no problem. If you want to, you can even act like the pizza guy down at the parlor and throw it up in the air. Whatever method you use, you should end up with a nice pizza crust like the one in the picture. The crust doesn't have to be perfect either. After all, this is home cooking! Now it is time to add the ingredients! I like to use a pizza stone out on the BBQ grill, but you can cook these in the oven too. And in case we haven't mentioned it yet, kids love to make their own pizzas! Since you can make the doughs any size you want, making home made pizzas is a way for everyone to make the pizza of their choice. You can make a basic white pizza(above left), or maybe a saucy pepperoni, canadian bacon, and pineapple. Whatever you want, its your pizza!