Christian DeBenedetti - Beer Bites:Tasty Recipes and Perfect Pairings for Brew Lovers

To my mom, Ellen, who taught me to love cooking, eating, and drinking, and who always said: If you can picture it, you can pull it off.

Christian

To my dad, Steve, for offering me my first taste of beer if Id grab him one out of the fridge.

Andrea

Text copyright 2015 by
Christian DeBenedetti and Andrea Slonecker.
Photographs copyright 2015 by
Chronicle Books LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4521-4059-9 (epub, mobi)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-3524-3 (pb)

Designed by Alice Chau
Photography by John Lee
Food styling by Lillian Kang
Prop styling by Christine Wolheim

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, California 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

Aside from its obvious virtues, beer is one of the most versatile and intriguing beverages to match with food. Yet the clear potential of food-and-beer pairing has been woefully underexplored.

Fine restaurants may pay occasional lip service to beer, but when its time to recommend what goes best with their food they focus on the far more profitable wine list. Great beer is most cherished in taverns and pubs. There, the standards for beer service may be exacting but the food too often tends toward fraternity faredessicated burgers, frozen prefabricated pretzels with the texture of plastic foam, stringy fried mozzarella sticks, gloppy wings. Pitiful excuses for pub grub.

The United States has come a long way in understanding that beer can be complex and fascinating. The next step in treating beer with the respect it deserves is to make sure it is surrounded by great food. Enter Christian DeBenedetti and Andrea Slonecker. Their new book, Beer Bites, does exactly that.

I know both Christian and Andrea by their previous works. Christians book The Great American Ale Trail is a brilliant guide to finding great beer all around the country. And with Andreas book Pretzel Making at Home, I conquered my own fears to achieve a long-nurtured ambition of baking great soft pretzels myself. She has a rare talent for simplifying seemingly complicated tasks. Together, they strike just the right tone: knowledgeable and authoritative but easygoing. They understand that cooking, eating, and drinking are joyful acts. Fear of making mistakes has no place here.

Relax. Beer is not wine, they write, to which I say, What a relief! The pairing of food and beverage is a practical skill, borne of experience. The more you do it, the more instinctive it becomes as you discover what works and what does not, what you like and what you dont. Yet, so many guides to food-and-wine pairing turn it into a hard-and-fast, anxiety-ridden procedure full of arcane rules and complicated charts. With Beer Bites, pairing becomes instead an enjoyable journey on which nothing goes wrong because you learn something every time.

Beer Bites does not fall into the trap of over- specificity. Its not the hint of coriander that makes all the difference in selecting a proper accompaniment, but the overall sense of a dish. Let the professionals fuss over whether a poppy- seed bun rather than a sesame bun dramatically changes the sort of beer you want to go with your burger. Home cooks require more general guidelines, which Christian and Andrea understand and provide.

Instead of adhering to hidebound definitions of beer styles, Christian and Andrea recognize that twenty-first-century brewers all over the world have blended traditions to forge new types of beers. They draw up broader categories for beer that require simple common sense to understand rather than rote memorization, and then offer a range of recommendations for each dish.

The recipes draw deeply from global beer cultures. Some may appear dauntingdrunken chicken hearts, anyone?but most play with established forms and turn them into altogether new and enticing dishes.

Playful, down-to-earth, unpretentious, encouragingthis is the beer-and-food book that you didnt know you needed but now cant do without.

Eric Asimov

What would life be without beer? Waitlets not go there. Too depressing. A better question is, what would beer be without food? You may have an answer in mind, but this is not a book about going without. This is a book about combining the joys of the tap with those of the table, in ways that will seem both familiar and, we hope, surprising. When we set out to write this book, we really had no idea where the ingredients would take us, or where the beers would take us, or, most of all, how those bites and beers might travel together to a third destination, hard to describea certain sort of sensory heaven.

Sometimes were inspired to cook at home; sometimes we gather with friends. Often we reach for a beer in there somewhere. But how often do we match pints and plates intentionally? We are not the first to say that while pairing cuisine with wine is an age-old pursuit, its time for beer pairing to catch up. Where it arrives, though, is likely a different placenot one with starched white tablecloths, piped-in classical piano, and solicitous waiters carrying silver platters and scraping crumbs out of sight. No, beers best place seems a lot more like a room full of weathered wood tables, fireplaces, friends, maybe a fiddle. The culture of drinking beer with food at home is as ancient as agriculture itself; beer, brewed communally for both sustenance and celebration, originates from the farm, the fields, the hearth and home. Scores of culinary traditions survive and thrive reflecting the inclusion of beer at the dining table across the ages.

There are also new traditions coming to life as beer evolves and styles morph across continents. Until recently, it seems even home cooks with a passion for beer have had little inspiration when it comes to thoughtful pairings. Weve been winging it.

We neednt any longer. Thanks to ambitious brewers and beer-championing chefs who appreciate the intensely satisfying ways that beer and food can work together in the dining experience, a beer table consciousness is coming to life, or back to life, around the world. Michelin-starred chefs curating sold-out beer dinners with barrel-aged rarities? Check. Gastro-pubs with deep, lovingly curated beer lists in city centers and secret corners? Check. World-class, top-ranked restaurants commissioning house beers from nomad or gypsy brewers, the pop-up chefs of brewdom? Check.

To shape this cookbook, we rolled up our sleeves and started with the classicsrecipes from regions around the world with longstanding beer traditions. We did this with the goal of leading a deeper and more informed exploration of the interplay between beer and food. From there, we got creative, dreaming up dishes inspired by urban street carts; new-era innovators; and our own half-mad stove-top tinkering, with fifteen bottles of beer open on the counter. Within these pages, you can step into our Beer Bites kitchen, equal parts huge hoppy experiment and potential roadmap for your own tests and tastings. Our hope is that youll be inspired to open a good bottle of brew and cook something that accentuates its unique taste, creating an experience beyond just drinking a beer.

As mentioned, we want this book to launch fun, flavorful explorations of your own. So choose a few recipes (how about a theme night?), procure some beers, and let the experiments begin. Who knows, you might just have the most fun ever eating and drinking beer.