“I firmly believe beer pairs better with food than wine,” writes beer connoisseur and South Orange native John Holl in The American Craft Beer Cookbook (Storey Publishing), his spirited call for allying keg and kitchen.
“If you think about the ingredients in beer and the flavors they produce,” he says, “you can begin to think about how specific foods can pair with beers.” Craft beer boasts as wide a range of flavors and properties as fine wine.
A basic beer ingredient like malted barley, for example, imparts flavors such as toffee, chocolate, coffee, caramel and toast. Hops, the seed cones of the hop plant, provide crisp bitterness with notes of citrus, pine or tropical fruits. Yeast—beer makers use many different strains—contribute banana, clove, bubblegum and stone fruit flavors. The most fundamental ingredient of all, water, can add mineral tastes.
Attractively designed and photographed, the 352-page book presents 155 recipes from brewpubs and breweries across the country for dishes that either pair perfectly with a particular brew or include beer as a main ingredient. A South Orange native, Holl was naturally drawn to Garden State beers, the variety and quality of which have lately skyrocketed. From Ridgefield Park’s Bolero Snort Brewery, for example, comes the recipe for a roasted chipotle salsa burger, to be paired with the brewery’s There’s No Rye-ing In Basebull, a lightly hopped rye lager. The recipe was created by Bolero Snout co-founder Robert Olson and his wife, Melanie.
The book includes thumbnail profiles of each contributing brewery or brewpub, many of which Holl visited—among them Barcade in Jersey City (where Holl lives) and Triumph Brewing Company in Princeton. “With so much going on in the beer industry, I kept traveling down new roads of pairings and flavors,” Holl says. “It was a fun journey.”
Holl, editor of All About Beer magazine, spent substantial stove time testing and adjusting recipes and sampling beers to confirm compatibility. You might envy his friends and family, whom he often invited to tastings. “There was no rhyme or reason to it,” he admits. “It was just, ‘Who’s around and who’s hungry?’” Hey, over here!