Get Down With the Brown (Ale Banana Bread)

Is there a better time for banking than a grey, wet Sunday afternoon? Autumn has hit like clockwork. The last weekend of February was spent sitting on a beach with temperatures in the high 30’s. The rain hit almost as soon as the pages of the calendar were flipped over to March 1^st.

Summer is all about barbecuing, cooking outdoors and it’s not conducive to baking. No one wants the oven on when the whole house already feels like an oven. Autumn is perfect to get back into baking mode. When it’s wet and windy out, there is nothing like filling your house with the delicious aroma of something baking to send those change-of-season blues away.

A couple of weeks ago the Brooklyn Brewery tweeted a link to this recipe for Brown Ale Banana Bread. It caught my interest. I’ve made banana bread (and muffins too) with beer before quite a few times. In the past I’ve always used a hefeweizen. With the banana and clove flavours you find in a hef it seems like the perfect beer for banana bread, and it always comes up a treat. This recipe grabbed by interest, however, because I really love brown ales. They have lovely caramel, coffee flavours and I could see how that would work in banana bread.

So, the first weekend of Autumn and the planets all aligned. We just happened to have four over ripe bananas in our fruit bowl, waiting to be baked with. We had also done a bit of a brewery tour the day before, which included Mornington Penninsula Brewery where I managed to get the last bottle of their very good brown ale. Sunday was cool and dreary and absolutely perfect for baking. 

I did make a couple of adjustments to the original recipe, as I didn’t have the exact ingredients and wanted to add a couple of things, but it still turned out to be a fairly delicious loaf of banana bread.

How come you taste so good…

1 3/4 cups wholemeal flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3-4 very ripe bananas
2 eggs
1/3 cup melted butter, margarine or oil
180ml (about half a bottle) Brown Ale
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
1/2cup walnuts

I added half a cup of walnut pieces. I love walnuts in pretty much anything, but especially in banana bread. (Added bonus - they’re good for you too.) I also added half a teaspoon of mixed spice, probably out of habit. We didn’t have any normal sugar, so I used brown – seemed fitting. I also only had wholemeal flour, and no butter, so used margarine. The way I see it, this is practically a health food. 


 …just like a banana bread should.

Preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celcius. Prepare a loaf tin by lining with baking paper.

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking power and soda, salt, spice, walnuts) together in a large bowl.

I had three medium bananas and one smallish one. So, I mashed the three medium and sliced the small one into 'coins'.

Add the other wet ingredients - eggs, melted margarine, beer - to the mashed banana and mix. Then, add the wet to the dry and fold through until combined. Try not to over mix, but make sure you don't have any hidden pockets of flour.

Pour the batter into the prepared loaf tin, and place the banana 'coins' on top. Bake for 45 - 50 mins. Do the skewer test to make sure it has cooked through. 

 I was pretty surprised at how light and fluffy this turned out, considering I used wholemeal flour and sticky brown sugar. I expected it to be much denser. Its also very moist, but not overly sweet. The flavor of the beer is not strong, there is  a subtle  caramel taste and perhaps some yeastiness. It definitely is more brown in appearance than any other banana bread that I’ve baked.

I haven’t actually had any of this with beer yet. It would probably pair pretty well with more brown ale or a porter. Anything a bit darker with those nice coffee/caramel flavours.

The Temptress is a Molé

For those who may not be aware, the word molé (kind of pronounced mo-lay) means ‘sauce’ in the Mexican language. It’s a fairly generic term that covers all kinds of sauces, but outside of Mexico it tends to refer specifically to a dark chocolate brown chilli sauce, the molé poblano (poblano is a type of chilli). I’d say that the most common type of molé outside of Mexico is actually guacamole, ‘guaca’ meaning avocado. Traditionally, these sauces contain 20-30 ingredients, and can take days to prepare. They are considered a celebration food, so the effort is worth it.

One such celebration where molé is usually served is Dia de los Muertos – the Day of the Dead. This is a time where people remember and honour their dead and is usually held over two days, November 1-2. Since I first came across this holiday, I’ve found a real fascination and attraction to it. I’ve never been lucky enough to experience it first hand, but it appears to be such a colourful, happy celebration – the brightly painted sugar skulls, garlands of flowers, parades of skeletons in the streets, mariachi bands patrolling the cemeteries. In the western world, we treat death as taboo and with such bland seriousness. I find the Mexican attitude a lot…healthier? By celebrating the people who have passed on and accepting death as inevitable, there is a better appreciation for life.

Last year, I decided to cook up my own molé for Dia de los Muertos, using beer of course. Seeing as I am not Mexican, I’m wasn't too concerned about sticking to a traditional recipe. This was helpful because (a) traditional Mexican ingredients can be quite hard to find here, and (b) I had moved house a week prior to November 1st. There was no luxury of cooking for days. I’m surprised I managed to make anything more complicated than an Old El Paso kit. Traditional recipes also tend to use a lot of lard, which I’m not such a fan of. So, while not exactly traditional, this dish is still super tasty and barely takes hours, rather than days.

The beer of choice is the Holgate Temptress Chocolate Porter. It’s not uncommon for dark beers to be part of a Mole recipe, and this one has the added bonus of being a chocolate porter, enhancing the chocolate that is already added in the cooking.

Well she was just 17…

3 tablespoons oil (whatever mild-flavoured oil you have – I used light olive oil)
8 chicken thighs, or 4 legs, or an entire chicken cut into pieces, or use turkey if you have a big enough pot (turkey is more traditional, but they are bloody big birds)
1 onion, diced
1 capsicum, seeded and diced
1 poblano pepper, seeded and diced – you can use canned or dried if you don’t have access to fresh…which I don’t, so I used canned for this recipe.
3 cloves garlic, diced
2 teaspoons chilli powder (hotness dependant on your pain threshold)
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 can diced tomatoes
1/4 cup raisins
2 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped
1 cup chicken stock
1 cup of Holgate Temptress chocolate porter (or another dark beer - bonus points if it contains chocolate)
2 teaspoons of peanut butter
1 teaspoon of salt
60 g of dark chocolate – the darker, the better

FOR SERVING:

warm corn tortillas
sour cream
fresh coriander, chopped

…and you know what I mean*

Place a large frypan on medium heat and heat half of the oil. Add your chicken (or turkey) pieces and brown on all sides. Once that has been done, remove to a plate, cover with foil and set aside.

Add the remaining oil to the same frypan and turn the heat down slightly. Sauté the onion, capsicum, poblano chilli and garlic until soft and slightly caramelized. Stir in the spices - chilli powder, cumin and cinnamon - and cook until fragrant (about 2-3 minutes should do it).

 

Add the tomatoes, raisins, chipotle, stock, beer, peanut butter and salt. Bring to a simmer and cook for 20 minutes, stirring often.

 

Transfer the sauce into a blender or food processor and add the chocolate. The heat from the sauce should melt the chocolate, allowing it to blend in. Process until you have a consistently smooth sauce.

Now, back to your chicken. Place the pieces into a deep, heavy cooking pot and pour the blended sauce over them. Cover and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until chicken is cooked through.

Serve with warm corn tortillas, sour cream and fresh cilantro. You could also serve with rice, fresh salsa or sautéed greens.

The beer we drank with this was the excellent Mikeller Texas Ranger, which happens to be one of my fantasy beers. It’s a chipotle spiced porter, so the flavour profile of smoky, chilli heat with roasty, chocolate matches the mole pretty darn well.

* On a side note, in the Australian vernacular, the word ‘mole’ (pronounced MOLE) has a completely different meaning. I used to attend a pub bingo night where one of my favourite calls was for #17 – ‘Well she was just 17 and you know what I mean! What do I mean? She was a MOLE!’ By amazing co-incidence, there are 17 ingredients in this particular recipe.

Mad Mushroom Ragout with Gnocchi

What do you get when you combine a trio of mushrooms, a Belgian Dubbel called ‘Mad Abbot’, a Spaetzle press and a stressed out home cook? I don’t know really, but it sounds like a pretty good story…

Once upon a time there was an average home cook who liked to experiment with beer in her recipes. For no apparent reason, she had a sudden desire to try her hand at making her own gnocchi. She’d never had this urge before, but it was such a powerful need it just had to be satisfied. What sauce, though, would be the most delicious? Once again, the idea came to her out of the blue – only mushrooms would do. A mushroom stew…or maybe ragout! (Wait…I think I may have stumbled into Dr Seuss  territory here.) Now the idea was in her head, she couldn’t shake it. This dish had to be made, but she needed some help. She turned to a Mad Abbot. His roots were Belgian, although he hadn’t travelled that far…and he was sure to make the dish DUBBEL-ly good.

Okay…so my story telling skills are pretty lame. The basic details are true though. I had a burning urge to make gnocchi. I had a craving for mushrooms. I used the Mad Abbot Belgian Dubbel in the dish….and it was good. I do admit, half way through the gnocchi making I was questioning my sanity.  Why on earth did I think it would be fun or beneficial in any way? I had already made beer bread (half the batch turned into thyme and garlic rolls, half into a fig and walnut mini-loaf) and beer brownies (which were disappointing and put me off my game) that very afternoon. I was stressed out and beginning to think that ordering a pizza might be the smart thing to do. The story does have a happy ending though.


Have what it takes...


Gnocchi:

450-500g potatoes (3-4) – I’ve found conflicting information on which potatoes to use. You want something dry I believe, but if you shop in an average supermarket there may not be a huge range.
2 egg yolks
¾ cup of ‘00’ strong flour
½ tspn salt
1/8 tspn nutmeg

Ragout:

1 tablespoon butter
2 Shallots, sliced finely
4 cloves Garlic - diced
100g Mushrooms – Swiss brown
100g Mushrooms – Shitake
100g Mushrooms – Enoki or Portobello
1 tablespoon fresh Thyme
Pepper
Salt
½ cup Belgian Dubbel
½ cup Sour cream

 To do what you gotta...

The Gnocchi:

There are two ways you can go about cooking your spuds. If you have time, preheat oven to 190 degrees and bake potatoes on a bed of rock salt for 45 to 50 minutes. If, like me, you realise you would like to eat your dinner before midnight, stab your potatoes with a fork a few times and place them in the microwave with a few paper towels under them. Nuke for five minutes on high, then roll them over and replace the paper towel with some fresh stuff. Give them another 5 minutes, and then test with a skewer to make sure they are soft all the way through.

Let the potatoes cool so you don't burn yourself, and when you can handle them comfortably, cut in half and peel the skin off. If you find this difficult, just scoop out the flesh with a spoon. This is where the Spaetzle press comes in. Actually, it’s a ‘multi-purpose’ press, but you can apparently make Spaetzle with it, so I call it my Spaetzle press, just because I like saying the word Spaetzle. You can use a potato ricer (BORING) or even a food processor (LAME), OR you can stick the potato flesh in your Spaetzle press (I used the smallest…hole thingy) and squeeze the little potato worms into a large bowl.

Add the egg yolks and spices to the potatoes and mix until well combined. Now add the flour to the potato mixture, mix it in with your hands and form a dough. I can’t lie – this is super messy. Eventually it will stop sticking to your fingers and that’s when you' know it's ready. Tip the dough onto a liberally floured surface and form into a thick log, about 10cm wide. Cut into about eight even pieces, and roll out each piece into a 1 cm thick rope. You may need to keep flouring the surface and your hands during this process. Cut the dough into pieces about 1cm long, trying to keep them as even as possible and keeping in mind that they expand when cooked. Lay them on a tray and squish each piece slightly in the middle with the tines of a fork dipped in flour. Let them dry at room temperature while you make the sauce.

The Mad Mushroom Ragout:

I don’t really know what a ragout is. It just sounds better than ‘sauce’. Over a low heat melt the butter. Add shallots and cook until they begin to soften. Add garlic and cook for a minute or so. Add mushrooms and cook until they start to wilt and release their liquid. Add the beer, salt pepper and thyme. Bring to the boil, and then simmer until the liquid reduces by half. Add the sour cream and stir to combine well. Bring back to a simmer and allow to thicken.

While simmering, bring a big pot of water to the boil. Drop your gnocchi in. They only take a couple of minutes to cook and they float to the surface when done. Use a slotted spoon to scoop them up. Transfer the cooked gnocchi onto a plate and top with your ragout and some grated parmesan.

The happy ending…my gnocchi was light and pillowy like it should be. The ragout was really tasty and matched really well with the soft, gentle gnocchi. There a couple of things I’d do differently next time. I wouldn’t try making gnocchi when I’d already spent most of the day cooking. Give yourself plenty of time so you can be relaxed. While I think the taste and texture of the gnocchi was great, it looked fairly ordinary – the pieces were irregular and misshapen due to rushing through. The ragout was great, but the sour cream didn’t combine as well as it should have. There were visible white flecks through the sauce. A plain cream might be better, although it may lose some of the taste. Or perhaps I just need  to experiment with different brands of sour cream.

The husband and I drank a growler of the Bridge Road Saison Noir with this, and it worked really well. You want a darker malty beer to compliment the earthy flavours of the mushrooms, but nothing so heavy that is drowns out the delicate aspects of the dish.

The Lazarus Blog

Okay, so I haven't actually been dead, but you may (or may not) have noticed I’ve had a bit of a break from the blog. Longer than intended really. I did one of those major life things and bought a house in the hills, then moved into said house, and since then life has been kind of…different. Between the challenges that a  new home brings (like discovering a major leak in part of the roof that caused a lovely indoor waterfall effect) and tripling my work commute, the time I have to get things down on the screen has dwindled down to…not a whole lot. Most of my spare time has been spent on feathering the nest and making a start on my dream garden (OMG – I put herbs in! I put them in the ground!). Hours of my weekends have been lost to traipsing zombie-like around IKEA and furniture stores that all seem to sell the same product for roughly the same price. Bunnings has become like a second home to me.

However, there has been no break from beer. I’d even say that the stresses of moving and settling into a new home have necessitated a LOT of beer. Even though the relocation has taken us a little out of the way, we’ve found ourselves in the lucky position of having a local bar that is passionate about good beer (you can read about the wonderful Oscar’s Alehouse here), and local bottle shops that stock a reasonable range of good Australian and NZ beers. Even the local Safeway Liquor (yes, Woolworths hasn’t made it up the hill yet) stocks some Mountain Goat and Hargreaves Hill brews. We’ve also finally joined the BRB Posse, so we get some delicious brews delivered straight to our door (or at least to the top of our driveway), and we finally took that step of ordering beer online…from a shop that used to be in walking distance (hey, no walking required now – the beer will come to us!).

Why yes, I have moved to heaven.

I do admit to a fair amount of slackness on the cooking side of things though. Mainly I have been going back to the well, baking a loaf or two of beer bread, beer pizza, and seeing as it has been (kind of) Summer, doing some marinating for the BBQ.  It takes time to ponder and research new ideas, and that time has been in short supply. I’m kind of lucky that Australian Beer-lebrity Paul Mecurio has made life a little easier by releasing an entire book of beer recipes (called, not surprisingly, ‘Cooking with Beer’). The recipes are set out clearly, not too chef-y, but foody enough to be interesting to…foodies…but also easy enough to be accessible to amateurs like myself. If you don’t have a copy yet, why not? GO BUY NOW. If you know someone who likes cooking, but is not really into beer, buy one for them too. We can start a beer-food revolution, people!

I’ve also been exploring the world of beer and cheese matching, after some inspiration from the Barley’s Angels meeting in October last year. I don’t know a great deal about cheese, except that it is delicious and I like to put it in my mouth. It is fortuitous then, that beer (another delicious thing I like to put in my mouth) goes really well with cheese. Better than wine. Better than anything. So much so that the husband and I decided to forego the traditional Christmas day fare this year in favour for an all-day beer and cheese festival of awesomeness. Twelve beers, six cheeses and a whole lot of other bits and pieces on the side. Possibly the best Christmas EVER (but possibly only due to the lack of having to spend most of the day slaving over the oven).

Gratuitous cheese porn.

I’m not going to make any vows or promises I can’t keep, but I’m hoping to get back on the blogging-wagon soon and try to keep my seat. I actually have a back-log of recipes from last year that I never got around to posting, so I best start there. I also have a few new ideas forming, so hopefully they will come to fruition. Here’s a sneak peak of what I celebrated Australia Day with – Ale-soaked tofu burgers. (Recipe and rant to come!)

 

No animals were harmed in the making of this burger.

Beer for Breakfast Part 2 - Blueberry Ale Pancakes

Let’s talk about fruit flavoured beers. They’ve got fruit in them, which in my books makes them a healthy choice. Berries especially – they are full of antioxidants and stuff that will make you live forever or something. Not everyone is a fan of fruit in their beer, which is fair enough. They are a bit of a novelty, but maybe their place is in the kitchen?

You could make pancakes with almost any beer probably, but fruit beers add that lovely fruity (healthy) twist that works really well in the pancake format. I’ve made these before with a few raspberry beers – there are a couple of good ones that are pretty easy to get your hands on – but I was pretty excited to find Prickly Moses had made a blueberry hefweizen. Blueberries are by far my favourite of the berry kingdom.

The theory is that the carbonation in the beer makes the pancakes light and fluffy. I’ve actually found this isn’t always the case with the raspberry beers, but it’s entirely possible that I’ve been doing it wrong. Sometimes beer pancakes tend to be a bit flatter and have a more chewy texture – they’re not tough, but have more bite to them. Having said that, I actually like the beer pancakes better. Maybe it’s just knowing that there is delicious craft beer inside them – it warms the cockles or something.

However, the blueberry hef actually did make for fluffy pancakes. Could it be the difference between blueberries and raspberries? Or maybe the hefeweisen influence?Either way, they puffed right up and tasted pretty delicious.

The pancake recipe I used is from here, but I didn't have butter, so subbed with yogurt. It makes enough for two and it also leaves a little beer in the bottle which you can use to make a beery syrup to go on top.


The makings of a good start:


Pancakes:
1 cup plain flour, sifted
¼ cup white sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 cup of Blueberry Hefeweizen
(Or Raspberry Ale)
2 Tablespoons plain yogurt


Blueberry syrup:
Remainder of the beer
(about ½ cup)
1 ½ Tablespoons blueberry jam
2 Tablespoons of honey

Fresh or frozen blueberries

(If you are using Raspberry beer, just substitute the blueberry jam for raspberry)



Getting it together right:

For the Pancakes, mix together the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt) in a large bowl. Combine the wet ingredients together (egg, beer and yogurt) in another bowl or jug. Add the wet to the dry and whisk until all the lumps are gone and the ingredients are combined. How easy is that!

Heat oil or butter in a frypan over medium heat. Spoon or pour batter onto the pan and cook until bubbles appear on the surface of the pancakes. Flip and cook until finished on the other side.

For the Blueberry Syrup, combine ingredients in a small pot and reduce over medium heat by half, stirring so it doesn’t stick or burn.

Pour the syrup over your pancakes. If blueberries are in season, scatter some over the top for an added extra boost of berry goodness, or use frozen ones.

Would it be irresponsible to suggest a beer to drink with breakfast? I guess you could be having pancakes at any time of the day. Still, a good Saison would go wonderfully with this at any time of the day. Try the Bridge Road Saison.

Taking a backseat

Actually, it's always the passenger seat for me, but what I’m getting at is a metaphorical backseat when it comes to cooking with beer. As much as I like experimenting with beer in the kitchen, what I really like is having someone else do the beer cookery. You know, someone who actually knows what they're doing. Recently I've been to a few of the places that do great things with beer and food, and I felt like sharing (and raving) about them. I guess this is a bit of a personal journey story for me too, as I revisit some of the places that inspired me to try my hand at cooking with beer.

Holgate Brewery – Woodend

It all started for me at the Keatings Hotel in Woodend, home of the Holgate Brewery. This as the first brewery that the husband and I visited and we both had epiphanies of different sorts. His was about the beer, or more accurate a beer, a beer called Big Reg - a Vienna lager, which was once bottled, but is now only a seasonal release (but will hopefully be bottled again!). My light bulb moment was more about the food. The menu is full of items that use the brewery’s own beers (and occasionally the by-products), and it goes way beyond the old standard of beer-battered fish.

Since that first time, we’ve tried to get back there to eat and drink whenever possible. It’s a bit of a drive, which does make the drinking part difficult for at least one person. However, we recently discovered it only takes an hour on the train and you can drink as much as you like, as long as you can stumble back to the train station.

Such is our love for this place and its warm pub atmosphere, fantastic brews and beery food, we decided to spend our first wedding anniversary there. Oh, did I not mention that you can actually stay there, right above the pub and brewery? You can’t beat that for convenience!

We had our anniversary dinner in the dining room, and I think all the dishes we ordered used beer in some way. We started with some beer bread to share, made with the wonderful Temptress Chocolate Porter. This is not the yeasty style bread (like the type I blogged about right at the start), but the quick and easy beer bread. It’s less elastic and more crumbly,  like a savory cake really. However it is still incredibly delicious, especially when served warm with the porter butter. On this occasion the bread had also been made using the spent grain from the day’s brew.

For my main, I chose from the specials board, as I could not go past a risotto made with squid ink and the Big Reg lager. The waitress made sure she warned me that it was black – I guess not everyone might realize that squid ink is really…inky. It came topped with basa goujons (that's food speak for 'fish bites' I think). The risotto itself was just right, with that little extra flavor that I find beer lends a dish, and the goujons were possibly the crispiest fish bites I have ever have. I swear you could have heard the crunch across the room.
The husband treated himself to the kangaroo marinated in ESB, which came on a tasty bed of salad. Now is confession time for me – it looked and smelled so good, I had to take a bite outta skippy. It would seem that after a few pints of Big Reg and ESB I am open to the concept of eating our national emblem. It was actually not as bloody as I expected – I found the flavor quite subtle although the texture was a little chewy.

As it was a special occasion, we both ordered desserts. Mine was the porter fruitcake, I think with crème anglaise (things are getting hazy by now), while the husband went with the chocolate beetroot cake with ganache. They were both decadent, without being too much. The perfect end to the meal.

Red Hill Brewery – Red Hill

The next chapter in my beer-food journey concerns Red Hill Brewery. Sitting about two hours out of Melbourne, with no public transport and limited accommodation options in the immediate area, it's almost impossible to get there without a designated driver. However, it’s well worth the journey for the food alone. It has more of a restaurant / café feeling, with a light airy bar area and a huge outdoor deck nestled among the trees. While I’ve had a multitude of fantastic meals there, there is one thing I always order without fail – the Welsh Rarebit.

This is a classic beer-food dish and on paper is not really that special – just fancy cheese on toast, right? Yeah, but the cheese, it has beer in it. Let me just make that clear for you….it’s CHEESE with BEER in it. There is more than beer – there’s mustard and paprika and leeks too. To top if off (or more accurately, bottom it off…but no one says that) they use fantastic local baked bread. This would have to be my ultimate comfort food. The cheese sauce is creamy and packed with tangy flavor and a little spicy bite. I think I raved about it so much on one visit that the lovely Karen Golding actually gave me the recipe. I have made it at home, but its not the same really. Maybe it’s something about sitting out on the big deck with a beer, relaxing with that feeling of ‘all is well in the world’.

The Local Taphouse – St Kilda

As far as both Holgate and Red Hill are, I think we have visited them both more than this iconic beer pub located in St Kilda. To get there either involves an hour on a tram, or someone willing to battle with traffic on Punt Road. It’s a shame though, because they put a lot of thought and beer into the food they serve. I only really discovered this when we attended an excellent Good Beer Week event there, and not only did every single course contain beer (and some amazing beers too), but they really bent over backwards to look after this non-red-meat eater (that was before the skippy incident, okay?). I was pretty blown away by it and was lucky enough to bend the ear of one of the owners. I discovered they are very passionate about beer food and educating their kitchen staff in the use of beer in cooking, and yet they don’t make an issue out of it.

A great example of their work is a dessert we were served at the most recent Barley’s Angels meeting. It was a stout panna cotta, with strawberries macerated in Framboise and a barley malt brittle. It was A-MAZ-ING. Every element was seriously good. I expected the panna cotta to have a heavy, bitter flavor to it, but there was no bitterness at all. The sweetness was off-set by the slight sourness of the strawberries…and the barley malt brittle? It was just plain good – crunchy caramelized sugar coated barley good.

There are a growing number of places who are using beer and by-products in their dishes now, popping up all over Australia. I can highly recommend all the places I’ve mentioned, but there are plenty of places still on my to do list as well. If you are into beer and food, you should definitely pay a visit to these or any of the other establishments who are exploring the uses of beer in the kitchen.

Gardeners Pie (No Shepherds required)

Yes, this is another vegetarian recipe. Don’t act surprised, and before the carnivores all walk out in a huff I should point out that I actually had a request for more Vegetarian recipes. I am always both shocked and amazed when I discovered that someone has actually read the blog and taken the time to give me feedback, so I am more than happy to take their requests on board. It is certainly no problem for me to cook more vegetarian food. The good news for lovers of all things meaty is that once again you can use meat if you really want to.


Shepherds pie is made with lamb and cottage pie is made with beef, right? I’m going to call this ‘Gardeners Pie’ since its chock full of vegetable good ness. There was a suggestion it could be called ‘Brewers’ Pie’ as well, because I ended up using two different styles of beer in the finished product. Next time I might try for three.


This is one of the easiest pies in the world to make, due to the lack of pastry. You could put it in a pastry shell if you want, but it’s not necessary. It’s just a case of making the delicious savoury filling, covering it with delicious mashed potato and baking it the oven until delicious. I upped the delicious ante on this one by using Sean ‘Homebrew Chef’ Paxton’s roasted garlic IPA mash on top. This magic mash converted my mash-hating husband into a mash-lover, thus is the power of beer.

As it seems to be the case in most of my recipes, I just happened to have an appropriate bottle of beer in my cupboard - the Bridge Road Robust Porter. Porters are fantastic for cooking savoury dishes of both the vegetarian and meaty kinds, as they have the dark roasty flavour without being overly bitter. For the mash I used a Lobethal India Pale Al, but have made the same mash successfully with other IPAs. Only a small amount is used in the mash, so bitterness isn’t an issue. The hoppier the better though.


What to plant in your pie:

1 tablespoon olive oil
½ cup diced shallots (or 1 medium brown onion, diced finely)
3 cloves garlic, diced finely
1 large carrot, grated
2 stalks celery, diced
½ cup frozen peas
½ cup frozen corn
1 bag quorn mince (or the equivalent amount of minced meat)
1 can brown lentils
1 bottle of porter
¼ cup Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 tablespoon thyme*
1 tablespoon rosemary*
1 tbsp cornflour, mixed to a paste in 1 tbsp cold water
Salt & pepper

*I just happened to have these herbs on hand. You could sub them out for others – sage, bay leaf, parsley. Again its up to what you like or what you have.


The Mash Mulch (based on the Homebrew Chef recipe):

450g potatoes
1 head of garlic
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 sprigs thyme
Salt & pepper
½ cup butter
½ cup heavy cream
2-4 tablespoons IPA

Start by preparing the garlic for the mash. Preheat your oven to 150C.  Remove as much of the papery outside skin from the head of garlic as you can, then cut enough of the top of the head off in order to expose the tops of each clove.  Place it in the middle of a square of aluminium foil and drizzle olive oil over the top. Add a sprig of thyme and season with a little salt and pepper before wrapping up in a nice little parcel. Put on a baking tray and place in the oven for 25-30 minutes.

While the garlic is cooking, chop up your potatoes and place them in a pot, covered with cold water. Place on a high heat and bring to the boil. Cook until they are soft enough to pierce easily. Drain well and mash until smooth. (Or if you are fancy enough to have a ricer, put them through that.)

By now the garlic should be done (the original recipe says you know when it done, because the aroma will fill your entire house. It really does, and it is awesome!). Take it out of the oven, open the foil and allow to cool for five minutes.  Squeeze the cloves out of their skins and into a bowl, then mash with a fork until smooth.

In a small saucepan, place the butter, cream and 2 sprigs of thyme on to medium heat.  Bring to a boil, then turn down to low and simmer for 10 minutes.  Remove the thyme and add garlic paste and whisk to combine. Simmer another three to five minutes, then remove from the heat and add salt and pepper, and your IPA. Add the garlic cream to the mashed potatoes and fold in.  You might want to add half first, then check the flavour to see if it needs more garlic or IPA. I generally add the whole amount, but I like both garlic and hops.


Cultivating your pie:

Turn your oven to 180 degrees.

Slice and dice all of your vegetables. In a large saucepan, put 1 tablespoon of olive oil on low heat and sauté your onion and garlic until soft. Add the Quorn, breaking it up and cook until defrosted. Add the rest of the vegetables, stirring to combine, and cook for five or so minutes. (If you are using mince meat, add at the same time as you would add the quorn and cook well before adding the vegetables.)

Add the beer, Worcestershire sauce, herbs, tomato paste and bring to the boil. Turn down to a simmer for about 5 minutes, then add the cornflour paste and stir well. Allow to simmer until the sauce reduces and thickens nicely.

When the filling is ready, take your pie dish (or several small ones) and fill ¾. Top with the garlic IPA mash and ‘rake’ the surface with a fork. Some people might also put cheese on top, but considering the butter and cream in the mash, that could be considered overkill.

Bake for 25 – 30 minutes or until the top has browned and filling is bubbling up around the edges.

You could serve with a green salad if you want even more veggies, or with some warm beer bread rolls if you'd like some extra carbs. As for beer, pair with something along the lines of a brown ale, or more porter - something dark, but not too serious.