Rhode Island 100 mile » beer dinner

The NYE Beer Dinner Extravaganza

ri100mi — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 01:38:50 +0000

For New Year’s Eve this year, we teamed up with our friends Chris and Grace to do a beer pairing dinner to close out 2010. Ingrid’s sister Jessica and our friend Charlotte joined us in the festivities as well. I took four courses and Chris tackled four as well… here is what happened:

Chocolate cakes cooling…

…we don’t have one of these, so we have to improvise…our version of sous vide pork belly.

…a beet chip that will show up later for dessert.

…candied walnuts that will also end up on the dessert plate.

…Ingrid decided to make edible nameplates out of leftover gingerbread.

…part of the beer lineup to start the night.

…the first course- mushroom tartine paired with the following beer:

…a close-up of the tartine.

…a caged cork from one of the bottles.

…a close-up of the dessert cooling.

…the sous-vide pork belly cut into small pieces and seared on a non-stick pan over high heat.

…the first pairing with the pork belly. The dish was smoked paprika cured pork belly, seared over high heat with marscapone polenta, pickled carrot, cucumber, red pepper and a smoked pepper and cayenne tuile. This was paired with a 2008 Alaskan Smoked Porter…the idea was to match the smokiness of the paprika to the flavor of the paprika…it worked out OK, but the next iteration was better:

…the second- go-round was paired with Southern Tier’s Gemini…the double IPA cut the smokiness and the heat of the tuile and lended to a better pairing than the porter. Score one for the IPA!

…close-up of the bottlecaps…gotta love the bears on the Alaskan Porter cap!

….third course was Chris’s potato-garlic soup with clarified butter and parsley garnish. There was four heads of roasted garlic in this dish!!!

Chris paired this with the Bruery’s Trade Winds Tripel brewed with Thai Basil. The herbal quality of the beer was a nice compliment to the soup.

…for the next course, I chose a Weizenbock to pair with a talleggio angnalotti with apple/celery/prosciutto sauce. This beer did not pair so well…it did not detract nor add to the dish, so we’ll call it a wash…

…the angnalotti.

..next up was the fish course…I chose Idle Hands Golden Strong Ale brewed by Chris himself. I thought it might match some of the vanilla notes in the sauce, but this fell a little short because it did not match up with the fattiness of the butter. We pulled out a Wtitkap Tripel to test that out and it cut the fattiness in the sauce much better. But don’t discount the Golden Strong…it’s still a great beer!

…the fish course up close- haddock, a spinach ball, mashed parsnip and a saffron-vanilla sauce.

…next up was the pairing of the night…Chris chose Unibroue’s Quelque Chose brewed with cherries to pair with his dubbel-braised duck legs and smashed sweet potatoes. The cherry lent itself to a perfect flavor match to the braised duck.

…the duck ready to be eaten!

…dessert was beet ice cream, walnut sauce, candied walnuts, beet chips and flourless chocolate cake pulled from the French Laundry Cookbook. I paired this with a doppelbock…

…it matched up OK, but was not a strong pairing. I thought the earthiness of the beet ice cream would go with the beer, but it missed the mark…

…Ingrid’s name plate is slowly disappearing!

…final course was Chris’s wonderful cheese board with matching accompaniements…paired with his Idle Hands “Double Happiness” English Barleywine….who doesn’t like stinky cheese at 1 AM! The beer went well with the cheeses and capped off a perfect ending to 2010!

…the first beer consumed of 2011!

-Josh

Tagged: beer dinner, new year's eve

Spring Beer Dinner

ri100mi — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:32:08 +0000

Chris and I continued our beer and food pairing series this past weekend with our 2nd annual Spring Beer dinner. As always, Grace and Ingrid were there to indulge and give us constructive feedback…this is what we came up with:

Tomato Sorbet paired with Chris’s Patersbier:

Potato and Leek soup with Castelain Biere de Garde:

Asparagus and Prosciutto with Creme Fraiche Mustard Sauce paired with a Val-Dieu Tripel:

A Roasted Curried Pear salad with Maine Brewing Company’s Spring Peeper Ale:

Of course, we had to observe Earth Hour! It was fun to fry potatoes by flashlight…

A toast!

Steak Frites with dipping sauces…we tried to debunk Garett Oliver’s assertion that his Brown Ale pairs better with steak than a full-bodied red wine…the wine won- at least on this night!

Dessert was a chocolte-chevre brownie paired with Birrifica Plato’s Chocarrubiuca stout:

All the food and pairings worked out surprisingly well- the surprises were the Biere de Garde with the soup and the Choccarubica with the brownie…but nothing clashed or was a total bust…thanks to Chris and Grace for hosting!

-Josh

Tagged: beer dinner

Great minds think alike!

ri100mi — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 01:37:00 +0000

In my last post (yes – it is weird that I have posted so many in a row but I’m on a roll!) I wrote about Track 84 - Josh’s new favorite bar in good old Warwick RI. I forgot to mention that the corned beef sandwich we split had no frills but really good. The guy sitting next to me shared his cinnamon-brown sugar almonds with Josh and I too. They were good but not as good as the corned beef.

Anyway – one of the beers he had while we were at Track 84 was Rapscallion – the Rapscallion Premier . Rapscallion saw my post from yesterday and posted a comment. It led me to head over to the Rapscallion website and I’m glad I did. Rapscallion Brewery is owned by Peter and Cedric Daniel and their operations are located in Milford NH and Holyoke MA. Their motto is “Reducing our dependency on foreign ale One pint at a time”. I love it! Their website says they support local business and sustainability – music to my ears (and great beer to Josh’s mouth!)! Josh looks forward to having more Rapscallion and I look forward to support another business that believes in supporting a local food economy.

Tagged: beer dinner, Rapscallion Brewery

We’re back!

ri100mi — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:33:00 +0000

Sorry for the hiatus everybody…we have finished up our two month 100 mile adventure as of September 1st…we ended up having sausages we bought at the Hope Street farmer’s market on Labor Day…we then promptly ran out and bought some bread, bananas and orange juice…it’s nice to be able to make a sandwich every once in a while! We definitlely have learned a lot on our 100 mile challenge…we now know what local produce becomes available at various times throughout the summer and who we can go to for certain items. More importantly, we have learned to judge our portion sizes differently and because of that, we both have lost an aggregate of 26 pounds over the two months we were eating locally. Moving forward, we will continue to buy as much as we can locally and will go 100% local next summer once again. As for the blog, you can expect more of our food adventures and we will continue to update on a regular basis…and now for our latest food adventure…the beer dinner:
…as some of you may know, we had previously mentioned on the blog that we were tossing around the idea of doing a dinner complete with beer pairings…my friend Chris up in Charlestown, MA has been brewing his own beer for a while and has become pretty knowledgeable about beer in general, so I came up with a menu and he matched each dish with not one, but two beer pairings…one Belgian pairing and one non-Belgian…after a night of eating and drinking beer, I can say we’ve left the 100 mile challenge behind…

Course 1: Gruyere Gourgeres (Belgian Wit – Blanche De Bruxelles (Brasserie Lefèbvre SA) and Coal Porter)

Course 2: Cheese, carrot salad and golden raisin puree. (Belgian Dubbel – Lost & Found Abbey Ale (Port Brewing Company/Lost Abbey) and Belgian Strong Dark Ale – Raison D’etre (Dogfish Head Craft Brewery).

Course 3: Bacon and Eggs- Poached quail egg with smoked bacon. (Belgian Tripel – Tripel Karmeliet (Brouwerij Bosteels) and Scotch Ale – McEwan’s Scotch Ale (Scottish Courage Ltd.)).

Course 4: Creamy Lobster Broth (Belgian Strong Pale Ale – Pranqster (North Coast Brewing Co.) and Rauchbier).

Course 5: Petite Tomato Salad with Tomato Sorbet, Brioche Crouton and Garlic Tuile (Belgian Pale Ale – Rare Vos (Brewery Ommagang) and American Wheat Ale).

Course 6: Mini Tuna Burger (Belgian Blonde Ale and American Pale Ale – Austin Street APA brewed by Chris).

Course 7: Parmesean breaded chicken breast with brown butter lemon caper sauce on swiss chard. (Flanders Oud Bruin – Monk’s Café Flemish Sour Red Ale (Brouwerij Van Steenberge N.V.) and American Pale Wheat Ale – White Gold (Ithaca Beer Co)).

Course 8: German Chocolate Cake…the picture did not come out so well…but the cake did! (Belgian Quadrupel – Quad (Weyerbacher) and Russian Imperial Stout – Old Rasputin (North Coast Brewing Co)).

…everything came out great and there were some tough things for Chris to pair…mostly everything worked together, but some standouts were the Scotch ale with the quail egg, the sour ale with the chicken and the quadrupel with the German Chocolate Cake (I wanted to like the Rasputin with the cake because it is one of my favorite beers, but it was way too ovewhelming…)…also, special thanks to Grace for her input and critique!

…so stay tuned for more food fun in the upcoming weeks…we’ll keep posting our adventures!