Cooking

Beer . . . Food . . .

. . . two of the great pleasures in life.

Put them together in the right way and you can more than double the enjoyment. That’s the aim of the project which John’s World of Beers is running in conjunction with the Adur Brewery.

The idea of ‘beer cuisine’ is not new. It has been made to sound more mysterious with a pretentious pseudo-French title. Our great-grandmothers (and their great-grandmothers before them) already knew that cooking with ale was an excellent way to tenderise meats, impart delicious flavours and create good nourishing dishes. So our aim is to find recipes, some of them dating back to the Middle Ages, to produce good old-fashioned hearty traditional British meals. At the same time the recipes should be practical, easy enough to use at home, not requiring hours of finicky preparation yet producing results which impress by their sheer flavour.

We have so far collected over 160 exciting recipes featuring beer. Over the course of the next year we shall be re-working them to include the appropriate ales from the Adur Brewery and carrying out trials. As we get each recipe into a practical form we shall put it on the World of Beers website. We’d like as many people as possible to try out the recipes, and let us know how you got on: Did you need to modify cooking times or quantities, or substitute ingredients? And the crucial question, did you enjoy it? This kind of feedback will be very useful in enabling us to refine the recipes, and the most successful recipes will then find a permanent place on the Adur Brewery’s main website – and who knows – they may even appear in a book.

Find the section on cooking with Adur Brewery’s beers on John’s World of Beers website.