Cheese cake and stout

Cheese cake and stout night was the pairing. Cheese cake is not something I would normally make, as it is made from fake cheese, sugar, and cookies, thus clearly fails the "real food test" miserably. Also I dislike fancy cake type things in general, far too finicky for my tastes. But, a friend asked me nicely. Anyway, I got this pairing from The Brewmasters Table, and I am still not all that sure why it works so well, but it does.

The basics for the pairing are there. That is, the impact of the dish and the beer are generally of the same level. The smooth carbonation clears all the fat and sugar of the tongue, which is critical here. Also there is little hop aroma in the style, which would probably interfere with the flavors here. The chocolate sauce on top of the cake matched to toasted malts in the beer as well. But, it still seems like a weird pairing to me for some reason. Still glad the book provided me with yet another good pairing, and as my first serious pairing of desert and beer, I was quite happy with the result.

Beer steamed mussels

Last night was mussels steamed in beer sauce. I had been wanting to do this one for a while, but just now got around to it. The dish is quite easy to make, but tastes wonderful, and looks like it should be on the front of a cook book. For starters I made oven fries, and edamame as well. Tried a wide variety of beers actually. Most of them were from Minamishinshu. Not great but solid beers, I especially liked the hefeweizen, and the amber worked quite well as the base for the steaming. The shop is my favorite local beer shop Iseya.

Basic procedure

1. Take basic aromatic veggies , and spices and sweat them in a pan
2. Then  add the mussels and beer, keep on med-high heat, until they open up.
3. shut off the heat and add some garnish/flavor type spices.

Example Ingredients

1. Onions, Garlic, Tomatoes
2. Minamishinshu amber
3. Scallions, Red Pepper, Parsley