Fermented Friday: Pumpkin Beer Apple Butter

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation.

Apple butter and pumpkin butter in each silky smooth spoonful. 

Fermented Friday: Beer Apple Crisp

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation.

Apple crisp is a longstanding tradition at our house.  I remember helping my mom turn the crank on the peeler, watching the bright red peels squiggle off onto a heap on the table. The sweet, pale yellow slices were then haphazardly piled into a nearby glass baking dish.  After a quick dusting of cinnamon, we attempted to pack a generous mound of oat topping over a dish already overflowing with crisp apple slices.  It wasn't long before warm, cozy aromas of apple and cinnamon wafted out of the oven and filled the house.  With all those enticing aromas one could hardly wait for the first bite.  I remember sneaking little clumps and clusters of the golden brown topping while waiting for the bubbling juices to cool.  Oh wait, I still do that.

Fermented Friday: Beer Pitas (with a beer bottle rolling pin)

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation.

Today's innovative use of beer bottle turned rolling pin was inspired by my brother.  Over the summer he lived on his own and began to dabble in the kitchen.  I was super impressed with his initiative to make bread and cookies each weekend to have on hand for his lunch. I often received texts with baking questions such as, "what happens if I leave out the vanilla?" or "what was that trick you use so the honey doesn't stick to the spoon?"

One weekend he called me up just as I was about to start washing my car.  (How ironic is it that I was washing the car while he was in the kitchen?!?) After he helped me figure out which of the 12 bottles of car soap in our garage was okay for me to use, I walked him through a few options for a cookie recipe gone askew. The next question was something along the lines of "can I use margarine in place of shortening?"  Well, that depends on what your using it for.  Margarine is 80% fat and 20% water while shortening is 100% fat.  Long story short,  (wait, this isn't very short is it?) he was out of tortillas and decided to make his own! Seeing as I've never made my own tortillas, I wasn't quite sure how the substitution would work out and suggested he try it out but perhaps use a little less water.  It wasn't until later that I realized he didn't have a rolling pin.  Necessity is the mother of invention, especially when thinking like a typical college-age guy.  Who needs rolling pins when you have beer bottles?

Fermented Friday: Spicy Beer Cocktail

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

Sooooo, I tried a beer recipe that falls more under Weird Recipe Wednesday.  I like the components separately and was intrigued by a recipe that mixed them into beer.  I figured this was the perfect opportunity to test it out.........annnnnnd it wasn't even drinkable.  Fail.  I even had my brother try some in case it was just me.  Still a no-go.  I snapped a picture, but I'm not going to post the recipe.  It's definitely not worth repeating, and I didn't want to waste another beer trying to tweak it.  I will not be stirring lime, sriracha and Worcestershire into my beer anytime soon.

I have a bad habit of trying to save recipe failures.  Hmmm, what can I do with this?  I thought about a spicy beer bread, but I really didn't want a loaf of bread that tasted like this mixed beverage.  Sometimes further fiddling yields amazing results, but there are also times I end up wasting even more ingredients in the process.  Every once in a while I'm wise enough to leave well enough alone and realize it will only get worse.

Just as I was about to dump this concoction down the drain, I decided to turn it into a beer syrup.  I added 1/4 cup sugar and boiled it down until thick and syrupy.  It tasted okay but what do you do with a spicy beer syrup?  Candy coated nuts?  There may be some potential there, but not with these flavors.  At this point I decided to call it quits. Some things just aren't worth saving.

Even when a situation doesn't turn out as you'd hoped, you can learn from it.  What I took away from this failure was a tip about making beer syrup.  The exact time it takes to reduce beer to a syrup depends on the amount of added sugar and the temperature.  However, there is a good visual indicator that your beer syrup had reached the right consistency.  After slowly simmering the solution will suddenly begin to boil vigorously due to the high sugar concentration.  At least it was entertaining and educational, even if it wasn't too tasty.

Food for Thought: "To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong." -Joseph Chilton Pearce 

Fermented Friday: Oatmeal Stout Raisin Cookies

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

The characteristic smoothness of an oatmeal stout comes from the addition of oats to the mash. If you're interested, this article gives a brief overview on the science of brewing oatmeal stout.  While brewers need to understand the gelatinization, viscosity and gum content of oats, you just need a reason to make cookies with beer.

Oatmeal stout seems like a good enough excuse to stir up a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies.   But how will we infuse beer into our cookies?

Not to worry, I've come up with a recipe, you just need enough patience and self-control for a decent portion of dough to make it to the oven. I've got less than zero advice in that area.  Unless you need an example of what not to do?  Ummm, let's just get to the recipe.

Fermented Friday: Honey Beer Bread with Blue Cheese and Thyme

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

 A drizzle of golden honey over a crumble of creamy blue cheese will do wonders for skeptical taste buds.  The sharp, earthy flavors of blue cheese are toned down with sweet honey for the perfect sweet-savory balance.  While this pairing is often perched atop crackers, I decided to present it to you in an even milder form by incorporating it in beer bread.

Fermented Friday: Beer Hummus with Beer Rye Crackers

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation


The hoppy bitterness of an IPA is less than ideal for cooking or baking.  Yet somehow, an IPA found its way off the shelf and into my six pack mix.  An IPA is also not the first thing I would pick to drink.  If we cross off cooking, baking and drinking this IPA, then what's left?  Marinating fruit doesn't require cooking or baking, but I've done that (twice) in the past few weeks.  Hmmmm, it has been a while since I've made any dips or spreads....let's make hummus. Beer hummus.

 And while we're at it, let's just make beer crackers too.

Tuesday's Twist: Artisan Bread in the Slow Cooker

Tuesday's Twist:  A basic recipe with a fun twist.  In other words, just another excuse for me to play around with weird recipes I've been dying to try.


When it was way too hot to turn the oven on I tried baking bread in the slow cooker.  For those of you who haven't heard of the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day technique, it's a simple, no-knead dough that takes less than five minutes of your time. Baking with a hot stone and steam yields a crusty loaf bursting with texture and flavor.  I have both the original and healthy cookbooks and have tried many of  the recipes.

Typically, the recipes require you to pre-heat your oven to 450 for 20 minutes before baking a loaf.  There was no way my oven way going all the way to 450 in last week's heat wave. I was going crazy not being able to use the oven, and then I came across this idea of baking bread in the slow cooker.  A little extra heat from the slow cooker wasn't going to heat up the whole house, so I ended up making it 3 times to try out a few variables.    

Fermented Friday: Frosty Beer Kabobs and Watermelon Beer Pops

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

Since 4th of July was in the middle of the week you can spread it out all week and use it as an excuse to make these.  Lately the blogosphere has been loaded with watermelon pops and spiked watermelon.  I decided to put my own spin on it and use beer.

Then some other fruit jumped in with the intention of a fruit salad.   And then I started to cut the watermelon into stars.... because a) I have star cookie cutters that never get used, b) it's 4th of July week and c) what else are you supposed to do when it's soooo hot out and you don't have air conditioning?... But wait, now that I have watermelon stars wouldn't it look cuter to make fruit skewers instead of a fruit salad?  So the fruit jumped onto skewers.  Then it took a bath in blueberry wheat beer.  Oh, and then I changed my mind yet again and decided frozen fruit kabobs would be even better.  So there was a party in my freezer.  You never know what might happen when I'm without an oven.  Watch out.

Fermented Friday: Summer Ale Couscous Salad

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

I'm not really sure how I came up with this one.  Sometimes even I can't follow my own train of thought.  It could be the result of 9+ hours of driving time this week to think.  Yay for summer road trips! Or it might have more to do with the fact that I haven't been home as much and needed to make something quick, take a few pictures and leave enough time to try something different in case this was a total flop.  Or maybe my brain is just going crazy in all this heat.  But hey, I had a lot of other weirder ideas that I held back on, well for now.   Let's just stop trying to figure it out and get to the food.

Fermented Friday: Slow Cooker Beer Chicken

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

I planned to share this with you last Friday, but then this happened instead!  Now that the excitement has died down I'll tell you about beer chicken.

Fermented Friday: Jalapeno Beer Bread (with a few tablespoons of science)

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

Double fermentation, again!  Most beer bread recipes use baking powder for leavening rather than yeast.  The really simple ones use self-rising flour which already contains baking powder. Since it's Fermented Friday, we're using yeast in this beer bread.  Last week I finally found the manual to my bread machine and it had a recipe for jalapeno beer bread, score! (It's driving me crazy that I can't get the tilde over the n in jalapeno for this post. Trust me, I've tried.) The bread machine (got it for $1 at a thrift store) has been passed onto my brother for the summer while he's off at his internship.  I thought it was pretty cool that he wanted to take it with to make his own bread.  To cut down on ingredients he needed to buy I measured out all the dry ingredients he would need for one loaf and put them in resealable bags.  I labeled the bags with the additional wet ingredients he needed to add for a complete loaf.  Only time will tell how that all works out, but at least he showed interest.  Sorry, back to the beer bread.  

Fermented Friday: Beer Pretzels

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

Pretzels and beer.  

Beer and pretzels.  

How about beer IN your pretzels? 

Okay.

Fermented Friday: Beer Mac and Cheese

Fermented Friday: recipes featuring yeast, wine, beer or some form of fermentation

I think it's about time for a recipe using beer.

 Beer Mac and Cheese anyone?