72 Recipes with Beer (2024)

FAQs

What can I use beer for in cooking? ›

Beer can create light, airy fried foods and baked goods

You've probably heard of beer-battered fish, but imagine dishes like fluffy Blue Crab Beignets and Fried Cheese Curds coated with beer batter, too.

The Basics

Beer adds a rich, earthy flavor to soups and stews that makes them taste like they've been simmering for hours. Beers with a sweet or nutty taste can add depth to desserts. And don't worry about getting drunk – virtually all of the alcohol evaporates during the cooking process.

Its natural leavening abilities give extra lift to quick breads and layer cakes. It adds moisture and can cut down on proof time in yeast breads. And because the alcohol inhibits gluten formation, baking with beer results in a tender, delicate crumb.

Wheat beers are great for chicken and seafood. If you're cooking pork, beef, and lamb, you will need ales, porters, and stouts. Hearty meat goes well with belgian ales. Stews pair well with ale.

Beer Can Add a Deeper Flavor

Baking or broiling meat in beer for dishes such as pork chops, short ribs, or pulled pork can add a dark, rich color to the meat and give it a deeper flavor. Some people prefer to use beer as a brine or marinade for meat.

Surprising but true: Cooking with beer can actually be a healthy way to flavor food—here's why. A 12-ounce bottle of regular beer has about 150 calories and is free of fat and cholesterol. It also has very little sodium-only 1% of the recommended daily allowance.

Adding a bottle of beer to homemade chili can add some additional flavor and depth to the dish, but whether it makes the chili taste better or not depends on personal preferences. The addition of beer to chili can add some maltiness, bitterness, and sweetness to the flavor profile.

Alcohol does partially evaporate during cooking, but not as much as you might think. Depending on the cooking method and how much alcohol is used, anywhere from 4 to 85 percent of the alcohol may remain. After 15 minutes of cooking, about 40 percent of the alcohol remains.

It's a play on the “Evolution of Man” graphic, called “Evolution of a Beer Snob.” Instead of transforming from one species to another, the beer snob evolves from drinking lager, to IPA, “big stouts,” sours, and then, finally, back to lager.

Does alcohol burn off when cooking beer? ›

Sorry to spoil the party, but here's the real deal: Simply heating alcohol, or any other cooking liquid, does not make it evaporate as quickly as a child's allowance in a candy store. The longer you cook, the more alcohol cooks out, but you have to cook food for about 3 hours to fully erase all traces of alcohol.

Baking with beer starts with flavor and moves into science. Because of its carbonation, it assists with leavening baked goods. When used as the liquid in a recipe, it gives extra lift and tender texture to breads and cakes.

As beer cooks and reduces, its flavor concentrates, becoming stronger and more intense over time. This is especially true of more bitter, hoppy beers, like IPA. When cooked down too much, it can render your dish unpalatably bitter.

Lighter beers, such as lagers, ales and pilsners, will give your bread a lighter color, and mild taste that just about everyone loves. Darker beers like stouts and porters make a darker-colored loaf and have a stronger beer flavor. Hoppy beers like IPAs will give your bread a more bitter taste.

First, the bubbles provide lift as they escape from the batter during frying. Second, the carbonation makes the batter slightly more acidic, which limits how much gluten can form when the beer and flour mix, preventing the batter from turning tough.

COOKING WITH BEER for added flavor has become quite the trend with recipes such as beer can chicken, beer-braised pot roast and dark ale chocolate cake increasingly popular. Now, according to one nutrition expert, replacing oil with beer in your dish effectively contains fewer calories.

Alcohol does partially evaporate during cooking, but not as much as you might think. Depending on the cooking method and how much alcohol is used, anywhere from 4 to 85 percent of the alcohol may remain.