Most excellent! I forgot it was session day today and the topic is food and beer as picked by the poetical industrial complex behind Beer Haiku Daily. As it happens, a few weeks ago…or more likely months…beer cook extraordinaire Lucy Saunders was kind enough to forward a review copy of her handy book Grilling with Beer – with, I just noticed, a very nice inscription. And, as it turns out, I took today off to make an extra long weekend and as it turns out it is the last stinking hot day of the year here at the east end of Lake Ontario. So it is time to BBQ and we are ‘cueing and brewing with Lucy.
Updates throughout the day as I review my options, pick my victims and start the fire.
Later: OK. Things can take surprising turns as I seem to have wanted to deal with (by which I mean “eat”) the entire ark with a shoulder and center roasts of pork, beef and pork rib and lamb sausages – and corn…and bunch of peppers, too. My theory of BBQ is that if you are going to spark the dang thing up you may as well cook from match to the final orange glow. Going through Lucy’s book, I decided to do a dry rub and a beer mop for the most of it and cook everything on a slow smoke.
So I got out a bottle of Black Irish Plain Porter, chopped up some cilantro, red pepper and green onion for the mop. For the rub, I put together kosher salt, paprika, cayenne, ginger, cumin, fennel seed and a few other things. An hour and a half on the dry rub and then on to the grill with a steady supply of dampened smoking wood added as I went along.
In the end we were left with an insane amount of meat…unless you believe that is something of an oxymoron. As I mopped, I had a Southern Tier IPA as well as a Great Lakes 666 Devil’s Pale Ale, a new LCBO listing here in Easlakia. Both were solid BBQ brews for the last hot day of the year.
So was I cliche going with the BBQ? Should I have made beer ice cream or a lager and partridge tarte? Not a chance. Beer is the partner to the flaming pit and is where the sweet notes and smoky tones play out best. And that porter mop added a layer chocolate espresso over the bite of the pepper adding even more depth. Even though I didn’t follow a particular recipe, Grilling with Beer is a source of great inspiration if you are into this sort of thing and a book I will return to again and again for great ideas for cooking with beer outdoors.