Gottle of geer.

[88V8]

It's sometimes said that alcohol is the chef's secret weapon.

This recipe, originally posted here http://boards.fool.co.uk/steak-and-ale- ... 92246.aspx in 2004 by Nobby478 who disappeared from TMF in 2013, is interesting not so much for the recipe itself, good though I do not doubt it is, but for his comments about beers.

How far we've come in just 14 years.

Every chef has a "signature dish" as it is now called. This was mine:
I shan't give quantities, more of a method really which has served me well. The secret as such is the beer that you use.

The word "Ale" goes back to Norse times and I suppose the recipe does too. If you use a modern British beer, by the time it has reduced it will be too bitter. We grow the best hops in the world and we like to use them. Even using a beer called ale today it will be too bitter. The secret is to use a style of beer that copies the beer from the days before we used hops.

Somewhat surprisingly that beer comes from the Caribbean!
Any stout from that area is a different beer to what we know as stout. Even Guinness from the Banks's brewery in Barbados doesn't taste like Guinness which is made with Patent malt, i.e. burned!
These stouts like Dragon or Lion stout are sometimes in our supermarkets and often in back street non-chain off licenses.

I don't use any other cooking liquid, just a knob of butter at the end for gloss. They just get richer as they cook and make a superb gravy. If you are unable to find Caribbean stout, our last milk stout; Mackeson, makes a very acceptable substitute. Sainsburys still sell it.

So, brown some onions with a little oil. Add your stewing or braising steak and let it take on a little colour.
Add the beer, sufficient to cover the meat and bring up to simmer. Hold at the simmer for as long as it takes to become tender, perhaps 2 to 3 hours. [pressure cooker needed!! V8]
Don't boil it you want a gentle simmer to break down the tougher components of the beef. This can be done in the oven at around Gas Mark 3.You will notice I don't dust the meat in flour, this induces burning if not stirred.....and a dish that can be left alone is a great advantage in a busy restaurant.

Towards the end of cooking add the following, to suit your taste:

Mustard powder, or ready made.
Tomato ketchup or paste.
Pinch of mixed herbs.
Touch of garlic puree.
Burgess mushroom ketchup or Lea and Perrins Worcester Sauce.
Salt and pepper.

Leave the lid off now to let the vinegar escape from the ketchups if used.
I thicken the gravy now with slaked cornflour or just cheap gravy granules....though don't season with salt until you've used the granules.

Stir in a knob of butter and you will have a delicious, glossy, very dark gravy.....the meat should be tender and falling apart. You now need to cool the filling......you can't put pastry on a hot filling.
I usually served this as a top-crust pie and decorated with a pastry steers head.. just a letter "T" with the bar sharpened and turned as horns.. a knife flick for ears and eyes and holes for nostrils. Then when you serve it you can puncture the nostrils with a skewer and they appear to snort!

I've had a few ideas nicked by celebrity chefs over the years...this is my last secret..........it won't let you down.

****
Sweet stout is probably the same as milk stout, it was sold as a health drink in the 1880's.. it has lactose sugar in it, which is unfermentable, thus it stays sweet. Usually these beers are less hoppy. Actually that's not quite accurate, they have the same amount of hops in them, but for some reason don't absorb the bitterness. When a brewery decides to brew a dark beer they often have quite a problem getting the hop ratio right...and always use more than they thought. No one has yet worked out why this is so, yet almost any yeast goes mad with a dark brew, even though it's never seen one before....s'funny stuff beer !

A surprising number of back street off licenses sell Caribbean stout and considering the high alcohol content it is remarkably cheap. But Mackeson is a good substitute....if you look carefully you'll see a milk churn in the middle of the label. They're not allowed to call it milk stout anymore, so this is the only clue left. I fear it won't be made for much longer as the demand for it decreases......Ena Sharples and Minnie have been gone a long time.
As to accompaniments?.........be guided by your guests, mash or chips certainly , and perhaps an old fashioned veg, maybe mushy peas? I/m married to a northern girl....but mushy peas don't seem to popular down South. No matter what you use, the pie will stand on it's own. I promise.

It seems one can still buy Mackeson's Milk Stout
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&key ... 3t0x308o_e
My wife recalls her mother used to buy a bottle every year to put in the Christmas pud.

Which ale do Fools favour for rich meat dishes nowadays?

V8

[sg31]

Which ale do Fools favour for rich meat dishes nowadays

I don't use ale as much as I should although after reading about stout I may well do so in future.

I use home made cider quite a lot particularly pork in cider, the two do seem to go together very well, I often include apples in the dish, it just depends what is available.

Red wine goes in a lot of my beef dishes. Red wine sauce goes well with lamb and is easy to make.

All in all I use a lot of alcohol in cooking although not enough ale.

[DiamondEcho]

I've cooked with cider, red and white wine and ale and stout, each seems to have their recipe-types they work well with. What I learned was initially a surprise to me. You can't use a cheap product [example: 'cooking wine', or even table wine] and expect it to taste good in the end dish. If anything the cooking process will condense the worst qualities of the drink added, so you need to use one of a parallel quality to one you'll be happy to be drinking alongside the dish, if not better.

[sg31]

I've cooked with cider, red and white wine and ale and stout, each seems to have their recipe-types they work well with. What I learned was initially a surprise to me. You can't use a cheap product [example: 'cooking wine', or even table wine] and expect it to taste good in the end dish. If anything the cooking process will condense the worst qualities of the drink added, so you need to use one of a parallel quality to one you'll be happy to be drinking alongside the dish, if not better.

Are you suggesting my home made cider is rubbish?

[redsturgeon]

It seems one can still buy Mackeson's Milk Stout
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?ie=UTF8&key ... 3t0x308o_e
My wife recalls her mother used to buy a bottle every year to put in the Christmas pud.

Which ale do Fools favour for rich meat dishes nowadays?

With the revival in small craft breweries these days there are many more alternatives to use.

Here is one of my favourites, fifth down on the list Caribbean Chocolate Cake!:

http://www.sirencraftbrew.com/our-coreb ... tal-beers/

Other small breweries will have similar stouts that will lend themselves to cooking.

John

[Hallucigenia]

What I learned was initially a surprise to me. You can't use a cheap product [example: 'cooking wine', or even table wine] and expect it to taste good in the end dish. If anything the cooking process will condense the worst qualities of the drink added, so you need to use one of a parallel quality to one you'll be happy to be drinking alongside the dish, if not better.

That's overstating it a bit. The most important thing is to use the right kind of wine. As you say, cooking will concentrate things like tannins, so you don't want big tannic reds that people think of as typical cooking wine. Remember that the archetypal "wine" recipe is coq au vin, which classically uses red Burgundy - a cool climate Pinot Noir. You want to cook with light, fruity wines - which don't have to be red. In fact, when many people are chucking in a big tannic red, I'm using an unoaked New World white - something like a £5 Chilean chardonnay will work better than a £8 Rioja in most dishes. Or Beaujolais Nouveau would be appropriate at this time of year - in fact I had my first French 2016 wine tonight, although it was a Syrah Nouveau from the Languedoc, as you do.

Similar thinking would work with beers - you don't want anything too bitter, which would push one towards malt-led beers like porters and dubbels. Porters often have a useful touch of sweetness to them as well. Something like Titanic Plum Porter is great for cooking, you can use it in anything from chutneys to ham glazes - and it's a fantastic drink as well. I can imagine one could do some interesting thing with the Belgian fruit beers, maybe make a sauce with Timmermanns peach or Boon Kriek.

I've also heard of people cooking with lager - but again you don't want anything too bitter which would rule out most pilsners, a good helles or kolsch might work. I'm not sure if a modern American-style pale ale would work, something like Punk IPA or First Chop Classic IPA - I'm not sure what would happen to all the aroma hops. You'd probably want to leave them to the end rather than risk boiling them away - might have to give that a go.

[Generali]

What I learned was initially a surprise to me. You can't use a cheap product [example: 'cooking wine', or even table wine] and expect it to taste good in the end dish. If anything the cooking process will condense the worst qualities of the drink added, so you need to use one of a parallel quality to one you'll be happy to be drinking alongside the dish, if not better.

That's overstating it a bit. The most important thing is to use the right kind of wine. As you say, cooking will concentrate things like tannins, so you don't want big tannic reds that people think of as typical cooking wine. Remember that the archetypal "wine" recipe is coq au vin, which classically uses red Burgundy - a cool climate Pinot Noir. You want to cook with light, fruity wines - which don't have to be red. In fact, when many people are chucking in a big tannic red, I'm using an unoaked New World white - something like a £5 Chilean chardonnay will work better than a £8 Rioja in most dishes. Or Beaujolais Nouveau would be appropriate at this time of year - in fact I had my first French 2016 wine tonight, although it was a Syrah Nouveau from the Languedoc, as you do.

Similar thinking would work with beers - you don't want anything too bitter, which would push one towards malt-led beers like porters and dubbels. Porters often have a useful touch of sweetness to them as well. Something like Titanic Plum Porter is great for cooking, you can use it in anything from chutneys to ham glazes - and it's a fantastic drink as well. I can imagine one could do some interesting thing with the Belgian fruit beers, maybe make a sauce with Timmermanns peach or Boon Kriek.

I've also heard of people cooking with lager - but again you don't want anything too bitter which would rule out most pilsners, a good helles or kolsch might work. I'm not sure if a modern American-style pale ale would work, something like Punk IPA or First Chop Classic IPA - I'm not sure what would happen to all the aroma hops. You'd probably want to leave them to the end rather than risk boiling them away - might have to give that a go.

The way to get around the tanin thing is to add a small amount of sugar or something else sweet like red current jelly.

Sugar is the oft unmentioned ingredient in boeuf bourgignon.

[Hallucigenia]

Young tannins are still young tannins, however much you try to disguise them, and I'd rather not have them in there to start with. If you're making boeuf bourguignon with red burgundy then you're more likely to have an excess of acidity than tannin. Which sugar can also help with.

[DiamondEcho]

I was writing re: 'cooking wine or table wine', but I don't see you Hallu approaching that low grade in the wines you suggest. I think it also depends on your location. If in say France a 'vin de table' might be a perfectly acceptable quality for everyday drinking together with a meal, and perhaps for use in a recipe. Also most major UK supermarkets do not sell low quality wine, I expect it's because there is not enough profit margin in it for them.

But in Germany if you go and buy one of the many sub-5 euro wines from Aldi/Lidl etc IME it's potentially going to be undrinkable unless you're really desperate - and I'm no wine snob. I made the mistake of cooking a dish [likely moules maraniere] one time in Germany with cheap white wine and the problem with that shone through like a beacon. That was a real shame but I learned not to prejudice an entire dish for the sake of thinking I can skimp 1-2 euros on cheapo wine. The parallel with that is considering which ingredients in a recipe are going to be the 'stars of the show', and being willing to pay a bit more for them to get certain good quality to lift the whole resulting dish.

[Hallucigenia]

I'd disagree that there's no crap wine in British supermarkets - but as a country that has traditionally been the biggest importer of wine in the world our trade is rather more sophisticated than other countries. It's also true that the drinkability of cheap wine varies from country to country, and cheap wine in a cool-climate country (ie tendency to under-ripe acid) with lots of iffy varieties like Müller-Thurgau, or a really hot country where only tannic reds can thrive, will tend to be far worse than cheap wine from a Mediterranean climate with half-decent varieties planted. And the amount of sugar in the average Germanic style wine just doesn't suit moules, no matter how far up the price range you go.

It's the tax that saves us from the really worst stuff - that £5 bottle I mentioned will be paying 83p in VAT and £2.08 in duty. By the time you've thrown in a quid for bottle/closure/label/transport and a bit for the retailer's costs, the actual liquid will only cost mebbe 60p or less. A mere 10% cut in the retail price will see the cost of the liquid drop by 70% or more - and whilst some customers are that price-sensitive, most would rather pay that extra 10% and get >3x the quality of the wine.

[voelkels]

“. . . I'm not sure if a modern American-style pale ale would work, something like Punk IPA or First Chop Classic IPA - I'm not sure what would happen to all the aroma hops. You'd probably want to leave them to the end rather than risk boiling them away - might have to give that a go.”

FWIW, classic IPA (India Pale Ale) was brewed with extra hops to withstand export. In the U.S.A., I have noticed that beers and especially ales brewed in the southern states tend to have more bitterness than those brewed in the more northerly states. Our local brewery, Abita (See; https://abita.com/brews), brews a number of different beers and ales. Many of the ales are a bit too bitter for my taste, especially for cooking which would also concentrate the bitterness. This year’s “Christmas Ale” is what I would call a fairly heavily hopped amber brew that is o.k. for drinking but I wouldn’t want to cook with it. For cooking, “Turbodog”, IMHO, would be a better choice along with their “Coffee Stout” (See; https://abita.com/brews/coffee-stout ), which, unfortunately is a limited release and costs $9.99 for a 22-ounce bottle plus around 10% local sales tax.
;-(
C.J.V.