Strange Brew: Beyond the bottle
**Note: Before I even begin, I’m going to preface by owning up to how strongly I fought the urge to make a “malt-ernative” pun as a post title. It was hard. Really, really hard. But thankfully, nothing gelled and alas, I was able to resist.**
I’m no Homer Simpson, by any stretch of the imagination, but I love beer. Mmmm…beer. And mostly, I love good beer- microbrews, craft beers, homebrews and so on (thanks to my Dad, who hasn’t so much as looked at a Budweiser since 1968), but I’m no snob. I’ll take a cool Corona with lime at a summer BBQ, I’ve been known to enjoy a few Heinekens while watching a football match, and I certainly can’t deny having been sucked into the inexplicable PBR craze a few years’ back. I’m just glad that happened before Facebook arrived on the scene. On top of all that, I’ve enthusiastically used beer in the kitchen: as a marinade for grilled meats, in whipping up a belly-warming Flemish carbonnade and always, always in my many variations of chili.
Of course, it’s not so much of a leap to bring beer into the savory cooking fold; the realm of sweets and baked goods could be a bit more challenging. A few years ago, I made an excellent Guinness Stout chocolate bundt cake that was dense and moist and not-to-sweet, with the perfect notes of bitterness where the stout and dark chocolate met and fell in love. I hadn’t much thought of expanding my baking-with-beer horizons until I came across this recipe for Baked’s Chocolate Stump de Noel, wherein they introduced their signature use of malt powder. Truth be told, I never did make that Stump (but the recipe is clipped and added to my collection, so I’ll get around to it someday), but the idea stuck in my mind. Fast forward to a few months’ ago, when I picked up a copy of their latest cookbook, Baked Explorations, and the perfect opportunity arose to see what this malt craze was all about (I made the malted waffles- awesome!).
As I noted in my last post about the chicken-and-waffles brunch, the malt flavor added depth and richness, providing just the right touch of sweetness that never crossed into cloying. You can feel free to haul off and conduct your own internet search about where, when and how you can alternate between using malt powder, a la Ovaltine (malted milk powder) or using brewer’s malt, as I did (specifically, I used a Dark Amber variety, but there are a number of different choices which vary in their respective maltiness). The wonderful baker’s catalog offered by King Arthur Flour also sells the most basic non-diastatic malt powder. Very briefly, and very (very) basically, non-diastatic malt powders bring a subtle, molasses-like sweetness to baked goods. Diastatic malt is also a common ingredient in baking, because it develops enzymes that digests starch into sugar, and therefore provides a tasty treat to hungry yeast in rising dough. Diastatic malt does impart sweetness, but less so than the non-diastatic variety, and it’s also important to really have a good understanding of the proportion of malt powder to yeast. You’ll have to do your homework.
Anyhow, in a significantly less academic pursuit, as a salty-sweet fanatic, I dreamed of adding an English toffee to my holiday gift roster that would turn the classic beer and pretzel combo into the ultimate salty-sweet treat. Hence I arrived at Malty-Salty Toffee, and it was a revelation. I actually think I read about someone making this somewhere, but I couldn’t hunt down a recipe, so I considered my options and came up with my own thing. It wasn’t rocket science: I simply subbed out dark and seductive barley malt syrup for the more typical corn syrup (boo, hiss! I use Lyle’s Golden Syrup instead of corn syrup across the board anyway) and replaced the water with one of my perennial faves, Rogue’s Chocolate Stout to make what I called the “beer-amel.” Then I topped the whole operation off with coarsely crushed pretzels and a little pinch of extra sea salt. The resulting flavors were beguiling, even perplexing, yet completely addictive. This treat could make next years’ holiday gift box starting line up. For reference, I started with this very simple Martha Stewart recipe (I mean, if it ain’t broke…right?)
Since I’m now stocked up on a few varieties of malt powder, and have a surfeit of barley malt syrup, the experiments have only just begin. What about a barley-malt marshmallow…that could bring something unexpected to the next batch of campfire S’mores. Hmmm. What next? Any ideas? How can I work beer into breakfast?
