Bender - Cookies & Beer: Bake, Pair, Enjoy

Metric Conversions
& Equivalents

Introduction

Milk is for babies. When you grow up , you have to drink beer .

Arnold Schwarzenegger,
PUMPING IRON

Cookies and beer. You just read that and smiled, right? Im smiling, too, because this is a big, silly, wonderful idea.

This is fun. Real, good fun in the kitchen. And at the dining room table. And with friends and a sink full of empty glasses and plates with only crumbs on them.

It is happy conversation and unexpected discoveries. Its the fact that even when we failed to pair the right cookie with the right beer, the worst thing that happened was we had cookies and beer. This is the rare offer outside of an infomercial with no downside.

Good. Now that weve acknowledged that were here for the fun, we can get down to the real work in the kitchen. This book is a blueprinta way for you to begin appreciating two things you think you know about, but in an entirely new light. This is only the starting point, because its probably going to take the forty cookie recipes that follow to find your own forever pairings.

As a journalist for the past fourteen years, Ive had two guiding principles: unshakable optimism and a desire to make people care about a story even if they know nothing about the storys subject matter. The same principles underscore this (my first) cookbook. Whether youre a beer lover or the baker in your family, youll find something new in these pages, and hopefully, youll be both by the time you get to the end.

Cookies and beer are more connected than they might seem on the surface. They can share common grains, spices, and fruits. In the past five years, breweries have made liquid homages to oatmeal raisin cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and even Girl Scout cookies. And bakers have long known that beer can add unique flavor and depth to desserts that go beyond mere novelty.

This book actually began with an event. Cookies and Beer was going to be a one-night-only affair. It was a way to catch the attention of a city and announce that I had a new food writing project, Recommended Daily . We created four cookie and beer pairings, accompanied by tasting notes, and set up a table at Bier Station, a local beer bar/bottle shop. And then we sold more than 250 cookies in about forty-five minutes. Food lovers already knew what I was just learningthis was a winning combination.

Here is the secret to this book: The right beer and cookie pairing is outstanding because it allows you to enjoy more of both elements. Milk washes away or rounds off the edges of a cookie, but beer, the perfect beer, brings out something unexpected from the cookie or has its own lip-smacking revelation. Likewise, a great cookie can awaken flavors in a beer that you may have barely noticed before.

I wear the apron in my family, but I am no baker. So, I did what every food writer does when they need help in the kitchenI asked the folks who do it for a living. I reached out to bakers (including Dolce Bakerys Erin Brown, who provided the first batch of cookies for the event that put us all on this journey), pastry chefs, and savory chefs with the request for a great cookie recipe that I could pair with beer. The responses from places that regularly populate the lists of the nations best cookies ensures that these cookies will wow you before you even take a sip of the accompanying beer.

Once the recipes started arriving, I got out the cherry red stand mixer that I had never used in a decade of marriage, and, as I had with our electric drill, I learned how to use it while keeping my fingers mostly intact. And then I used my own palateIve been a beer writer for the past four yearsto give each of these recipes a specific beer pairing, as well as a suggested beer style in case that recommended beer isnt available where you live.

Since I know this may very well be your first time trying cookies and beer together, I organized the book to help you (and your palate) adjust to the idea. The book begins with cookies like the .

After that, youll wade into a well-established category of pairingchocolate and beerdiscovering how combinations like .

The cookies speak for themselves, but they are also holding a conversation with the beer. So, lets get you fluent in both halves of the dialogue. In the .

The final three sections are where you can earn your masters in pairing cookies and beer. Imagine if they offered that class in college. The beers grain by-product and the tastiest recycling youll ever encounter. In the end, our two worlds meet in one delicious circle: cookies made with beer. Beer can be a beautiful ingredient in the right hands and the right cookie.

This is a guidebook for a new way to enjoy dessert. Its not just milk that might be replaced. You may also find yourself reaching for the beer list instead of asking for port or dessert wine. Beer is the best thing to happen to cookies since Ruth Graves Wakefield broke up pieces of chocolate and created the first chocolate chips in 1938. Enjoy cookies and beer. They were meant to be together.

For Bakers New to Drinking Beer

With a plethora of beers on the market, its easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices. But dont be intimidated, because, as a wise bartender once told me, Nobody is born liking beer. Ask lots of questions. Empty lots of glasses. Pour a few you dont like down the drain. And never let anybody tell you what you like is wrong.

It can take a while to find the beer you love, but the joy of that eventual discovery is worth the effort. The cookies in this book will help you find something unexpected in beer and also show you how it can be a great complement to what youre eating. As part of that journey, heres a primer on the hoppy stuff if you dont regularly have a six-pack in your fridge.

Beer Is a Subtle Ingredient

When it comes to baking with beer, the actual flavor imparted by the brew is more subtle than you think. None of the cookies are boozy or bitter because of the beer involved. Often, the beer provides depth or balances out the sweetness of sugar in a way that you may sense rather than explicitly taste.

Walk Toward the Light and Dark

Lets stick with color for classifying beers. Blonde, golden, and wheat (Hefeweizen is the German-style wheat) are beers on the lighter end of the spectrum. Amber and brown are square in the middle. Porters, stouts, and dark ales are typically inky, opaque affairs. One style of beer that deserves a quick, separate mention is India pale ales. IPAs intensity depends on the amount and type of hopsthe flowers of the hop plant that can lend a piney or citrusy bent to a brew. If you hate IPAs, give it two years and try again.

These are general categories, but the good news is that beer makers will tell you when something is unusuala dark brew with a light taste or bodybecause its how they make their beers stand out.

A Surprise in Every Bottle

If you stopped drinking beer in college and think of craft beer simply as a stronger version of the stuff in a keg you never really liked, youre in for a happy surprise. Beer can be spicy and sweet or salty and sour. Beer can taste like coffee and candy and chocolate milk.