Autumn Beer & Food Pairings from Stephanie Grant of The Share: Bi-weekly musings about beer, food, cocktails, and the dope Black women behind them.
“Your favorite beer will lend that particular flavor to the dish complimenting sweet mussels and spicy sausage. A pint of chilled ale would be delicious on the side.” - Sybille van Kempen
Moules frites are easily one of my favorite things to order at a seafood restaurant. If you eat a dish like this outdoors in the summertime, ideally with your feet in the sand or resting gently on the grass, you will remember it forever. Don’t be afraid to work with mussels—they take a little while to clean, but they cook in minutes and are very inexpensive.
This beer jelly isn’t dessert; it’s distinctively savory, and that’s what makes it interesting.
The master recipe for the ur-beer-can chicken, the showstopper that will dazzle your family and friends.
Smoked chicken, served warm or cold, alongside sweet barbecue pit beans and the melon salad, is refreshing for any picnic, in your backyard or at the beach.
Serve these refreshing beer coolers over ice with lime and some salt -- then it's just a matter of adding as many dashes of hot sauce as you can take.
Note: To toast caraway seeds, place them in a small skillet. Heat the skillet over medium heat, just until the seeds become aromatic, 1 to 2 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally to keep the seeds from burning.
Perfect for the grill, beef ribs are more readily available in summer - when the demand for boneless steaks increases. I actually prefer them to a steak, because there's a bit of meat and all that bone to chew on. They are sold in racks or cut into individual ribs; ask your butcher for meaty ones. This is serious finger food. Grill them rare or medium-rare, but don't go past that.
This probably doesn't even qualify as a recipe, I'll admit, but it's so smackingly refreshing and summerlicious it deserves a whole page of its own. The story goes like this: in 1922, an innkeeper in Bavaria didn't have enough beer to accommodate the bicyclists and other guests, so he cut the beer with lemon-lime soda and it was a hit. He named it "radler," which means "cyclist." So, is this the German equivalent of Gatorade? Kinda. The beer tempers the sweetness of the soda, and the soda mellows the bitterness of the beer, and the result is fruity and light tasting and has half the alcohol of beer. In my experience, though, it's so good I drink twice what I should, so be warned. I like it with pale American beer (full honesty moment: Busch Light), but by all means, experiment with different brews.