April - Australian White Wines
Team N April's Brunch Tasting
Team N will be serving Yalumba Viognier
Lemon Lavender Avocado Bread
Ingredients
Directions
- YieldMakes about 1 quart
- 2 cups whole milk
- 1/4 cup dried lavender
- 1/3 cup honey
- 5 large egg yolks
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 cup heavy cream
Directions
- In a medium saucepan, combine milk, lavender, and honey. Bring to a gentle boil, cover, and remove from heat. Let steep for 5 minutes. Strain mixture, reserving milk and discarding lavender.
- Combine egg yolks and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer. Beat on medium-high speed until very thick and pale yellow, 3 to 5 minutes. Meanwhile, return milk to a medium saucepan, and bring to a simmer over medium-low heat.
- Add half the milk to egg-yolk mixture, and whisk until blended. Stir mixture into remaining milk, and cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.
- Remove from heat, and immediately stir in cream. Strain mixture into a medium mixing bowl set in an ice-water bath, and let stand until chilled, stirring from time to time. Freeze in an ice-cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions. Store in an airtight plastic container up to 2 weeks.
White Beer Cookies
It's been a while since Team BJ has made dessert (OK January bit that was a dessert tasting and doesn't count), so we figured a nice beer desert would be in order. Normally an easy task but a bit trickier with a light beer.
I was leaning toward bacon beer cupcakes, but the J insists that cake is a lie so we came to a cookie conclusion instead.
They are pretty cakey for cookies so they are almost just sweet beer biscuits with cookie icing, but hey I like cake. We are serving them with Harpoon Brewery's UFO White (an unfiltered white Belgian style), which is what we used to make them.
Ingredients
Cookies:
- 2 bottles (12 ounces each) Belgian style white beer (we used UFO White from Harpoon Brewery)
- 5 tablespoons honey
- 1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter, at room temperature
- 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
- 1 large egg
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 medium orange, zested
- 2 teaspoons ground coriander
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
- Icing:
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1 tablespoon orange juice
- 1 tablespoon whole milk
- 1/2 orange zested
Directions
- Put the beer and honey to a medium saucepan and reduce over medium heat until you have about 1/3 cup of liquid. You will occasionally have to skim the foam off the top of the beer. This takes about 40 minutes. Be careful the last 5 minutes or you will have beer caramel, which sounds better than it tastes. Let this reduction cool to room temperature (ok I am impatient and just stuck it in the fridge till I was ready).
- Cream the butter and sugar together. As a side note, creaming butter with powdered sugar doesn't result in fluffy butter, just creamy butter....weird.
- Add the egg and blend thoroughly. It ends up looking like cottage cheese....gross.
- Then add the vanilla, orange zest, coriander, and beer reduction and blend again. Now it looks king of like you used a potato ricer on small curd cottage cheese....even grosser.
- Mix the flour and baking soda together then slowly add to the batter. Hey it looks like dough...well really wet cookie dough, almost frosting consistency. If I had though ahead I would have put it in the fridge a bit to make scooping easier....so if you are cooking these put the bowl in the fridge for 20-40 minutes.
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
- Scoop mounds of cookies onto an aluminum cookie sheet lined with parchment. Bake for 15 minutes. My oven is super hot, you might need 20 minutes.
- Let the cookies cool completely on wire racks.
- Icing: Using the icing ingredients whisk the vanilla into the sugar. Mix the orange juice and milk together. Add milk and orange juice mixture until you reach the consistency of a thick paste. Using a butter knife put a dollop of icing on each cool cookie and spread it over the top. Put a small piece of orange zest from the grater as garnish. Let the icing harden to desired hardness and consume or store
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Team N's Contribution to Beer & the Western Hemisphere
We decided on a green salad with beer dressing.
About Light Beer
"Watering down" and reducing carbohydrates in the mash are used to cut calories, alone or in combination. Some companies do indeed simply dilute their beer, which reduces the calories but also the taste and alcohol content. Others add the enzyme alpha amylase, which converts most of the dextrins (which are carbohydrates responsible for much of the beer''s aroma and flavor) to alcohol, allowing you to use a lower-carb mash and make a beer with less carbohydrates but the same amount of alcohol. Or you can add glucose in the place of some of the barley malt (glucose is more easily fully converted to alcohol than the malt), which also bumps up the alcohol content while letting you use less carbs.
Most light beers, however, are made from a process made possible in 1964 with the commercial introduction of amyloglucosidase. This enzyme makes all the dextrins fermentable, unlike alpha amylase, which only affects some. All the starch in a beer can then be converted to alcohol, producing a slightly more alcoholic beer (about 1% higher than standard beer). In addition, because there are no dextrins left, the alcohol is absorbed more rapidly into the bloodstream. Tasteless beer that gets you drunk pronto? Sounds like a frat boy's dream. However, not wanting their customers to get blindsided by an unexpectedly potent drink, and perhaps realizing they can produce the beer less expensively with the same intoxicating effect of regular beer, brewers generally add water to adjust the alcohol content to slightly below that of a regular beer. There you have it--a weak-flavored, low calorie (from the loss of dextrins and subsequent dilution) beer with the same "kick" as regular beer.
