Emily Baime - A Year in Food and Beer: Recipes and Beer Pairings for Every Season

Preface

E mily and Darin met through beer: Darin as the beer sales representative, Emily as the community events organizer. Together they have created Community Tap and Table, hands-on cooking classes, personal chef services, culinary travel and beer-wine-food pairing expertise. This book contains recipes and beer pairings tested on several hundred beer bellies at these cooking activities. The goal of A Year in Food and Beer is to bring the same passion for great beer, great food, and entertaining from Community Tap and Table into your kitchen.

Emily has a passion for food exploration, Darin for beer and brewing. As their passion developed together into a focus on pairing, they found a void in the culinary landscape: quality beer and food pairing education. Living in Californias Central Valley, they have at their doorstep northern Californias craft beer revolution, San Franciscos dynamic food scene and brewing and viticulture education at local universities and are surrounded by rich agricultural production. This book weaves these influences together.

While they enjoy the adventurous attempts of beer bars and breweries to provide quality food, many offer only repetitive and mainstream foods. On the flip side, quality restaurants offer seasonal, inventive cuisine but only with wine pairing, with less than a slight nod toward beer. This book bridges these foods with craft brews. The authors believe that just as wine flavors vary within varietal, and vary even from year to year from the same vineyards, so do beer flavors and varieties. Their recipes and menus are created after detailed tasting of a single brew, designed to highlight the smallest detail within the beer.

Emily was raised in San Diego, Darin in Seattle. Recipes and brews in this book span the Mexican influence of Southern California to the fresh seafoods of Washington State. The beers span the United States. Many excellent brews have been omitted, not from their table but from this book, in an effort to offer recipes that teach diverse food preparation.

Cheers!

Chapter 1

Artfully Pairing Food and Beer

F ood and beer pairing is as much an art form as pairing food with wine, but it has yet to be as fully explored. The goal of this book is to educate the reader on the depths of flavors found in artfully paired gourmet foods and craft beer.

A Year in Food and Beer develops the readers expertise in identifying flavors in beers, linking those flavors to seasonal, gourmet foods. Rather than assume all beer-friendly food must be heavy, greasy, and reeking of entrails, we believe in crafting gourmet, seasonal foods designed for communal eating experiences and entertaining. Here, more than forty recipes and brews have been carefully selected to build both culinary knowledge and an understanding of the many flavorful styles of beer. The reader will be exposed to gourmet culinary techniques to create meals that pair with the most prevalent American craft beers including American versions of trendy European beers as well as offbeat Belgian and German beers.

In this chapter the reader can develop a base of knowledge before turning to selecting a seasonal party menu, beer type, cooking technique, ingredient, or specific brew. Note that although the recipes and pairings ensure the home cooks success in reproducing the food and beer pairing experience exactly, the purpose of this book is not to promote one specific recipe, beer, or brewery. Rather it is to encourage the readers to begin their own beer-food pairing journey. Each chapter identifies characteristics in the recommended beers such as predominant flavors, bitterness units, alcohol content, and brewing style and explains why these beers pair with a specific technique in food preparation such as smoking, preserving, curing, roasting, broiling, and pickling. The pairing of food flavors and culinary techniques within beer styles can then be applied to the recommended beers and specific recipes. This will also build a food-beer pairing tool kit for readers to apply pairing skills to other recipes or favorite brews.

Beer: A Seasonal Symphony

We believe there is a natural link when comparing beer and classical music. To perfect the music performed, the members of the orchestra must work in perfect technical precision. Their dedication to the science of their craft becomes almost unnoticeable if the music is performed correctly. The science manifests itself as a seamless artistic performance. The brewing process is the same.