From Flickr Creative Commons, taken by Renaissancechambara.

We usually leave recipes to the experts but make the occasional exception when it comes to foods which are an inextricable part of our beer culture.

In Britain, after several beers, when everything else is closed, you can always rely on the kebab shop and everyone’s favourite guilty pleasure: lamb doner kebab. No-one would dream of eating one while sober. The great round of meat is often referred to as an “elephant leg” because it is so heavily processed that it’s hard to be sure exactly what it is composed of. Meat, fat and salt are the three main ingredients but beyond that… Asbestos? Industrial grease? Who knows.

Nonetheless, they are delicious, and we decided to make one at home so that we could feel a bit less grotty eating it.

We were inspired partly by Kenny McGovern’s The Take Away Secret although we ended up adapting his recipe substantially for our own. The main tip we picked up from McGovern is the importance of garlic powder. It’s the magic ingredient in most fast food.

Ingredients (for 2-3)

Kebab

* 300g lamb mince or cubes of stewing lamb

* One lamb’s liver

* 30g porridge oats

* 1 tbsp plain flour

* spice and herb mix: tbsp garlic powder, tbsp italian herbs/mixed herbs, tsp Cayenne pepper, tsp salt

For cooking the kebab

* 1 tomato

* half an onion

To serve

* bread of your choice (naan, pitta, Turkish pide, etc.)

* salad of your choice

* chilli sauce, garlic mayonnaise, etc., to taste

Method

1. Grind up all of the kebab ingredients until they form a fine, cohesive paste. If the mixture is too liquid, add a handful more oats.

2. On a piece of oiled clingfilm, form into a log or loaf. (N.B. it won’t look nice between this point and when you slice it. Sorry.)

3. Wrap it up in the clingfilm like a sausage, twisting the ends until it forms a tight roll. Put that in the fridge for a few hours.

4. Heat the oven to 120 degrees centigrade. Remove the meat from its wrapper and put it on a lightly greased non-stick roasting tin or baking sheet. Put slices of tomato and onion on top. Cook at 120 for two hours, turning after an hour.

5. When it is browned all over, take it out of the oven and leave it to rest for 10-15 minutes while you prepare your bread and salad. Then slice it as thinly as possible along its length. An electric carving knife would probably work best but a bread knife is a good alternative.

6. Layer bread, salad, meat and sauces.

7. Eat with a flimsy plastic fork on a blood-spattered pavement, after dark, with the sound of sirens  in the distance.

And here’s our chicken doner recipe, now sadly outdated. We’ll be reviewing and rewriting it soon. Short version: more garlic powder!

I have very happy memories of visiting Poland. Chief among them is the great joy I experienced in Wroc?aw when presented with a free — yes, free! — plate of bread and dripping with my first pint at Piwnica Swidnicka.

Since then, I’ve also enjoyed it at as ‘schmaltz‘ in various places in Germany, most notably Klosterbräu in Bamberg which has several varieties, including goose fat.

They say you shouldn’t eat greasy food with beer and, yes, if you’re carrying out any kind of formal tasting, it’s probably a bad idea. But, in the real world, nothing makes a wheat beer zing like a piece of rye bread spread thickly with spicy, salty, onion-laced lard.

These days, it’s thankfully very easy to get schmaltz/smalec in the UK in any shop which stocks Polish foods.

The one I bought to eat with my beery bread had a higher meat content than some (try saying “mechanically recovered chicken and pork” without saying “mmmmmmm”…) and was very satisfying indeed. Sometimes, you’ll find it in tins; in blocks like butter or lard; or in glass jars. It’s cheap however it comes.

Let’s be clear, though: it is not health food.

That salad I had with it cancels out the fat, though, right? Right? And it’s normal to have shooting pains in your left arm, isn’t it?

If you like your grease cut with other fats, why not give Obazda a go?

Bailey

I’ll be telling you tomorrow all about my personal favourite snack for accompanying beer — something I prefer even to pork scratchings, and which is even filthier — but, to make the most of it, I’ll need some special bread. So, today, I’m sharing the recipe for a dark rye bread with a couple of extra beer-geek tweaks.

Ingredients

• 250g strong white bread flour
• 200g rye flour
• a large handful of malted barley (I used pilsner malt)
• 1 tablespoon of caraway seeds
• 1 tablespoon of cocoa powder (for colour)
• 3 tablespoons of dark brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon (or 1 sachet) of fast acting dried yeast
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 330ml of slightly warmed beer (I used Cooper’s Stout).

1. Put all the dry ingredient (flour, sugar, malt, cocoa powder, caraway, salt and yeast) into a big pile on your work surface.
2. Make a well in the middle.
3. Add the beer bit by bit, mixing between each addition, until you have a big, slightly wet, shaggy ball of dough. (Your hands will be a mess but one of these might help.)
4. Knead it until it becomes smooth and pliable (10-15 minutes). Something I learned about bread making recently: if the dough isn’t soggy and horrible to work with for the first five minutes, it’s too dry.
5. Put a drop of oil in a bowl. Put the dough in and turn it round in the oil until it’s lightly coated. Cover with a carrier bag.
6. Leave somewhere warmish (the kitchen is usually fine) for one or two hours or until doubled in size.
7. Knock it back down to size and then push it into a small cane basket coated with rye flour. If you don’t have one of those, just shape it on a floured baking sheet. Cover it with the carrier bag again and leave for another hour or two.
8. About 30 mins before you’re ready to bake it, if you’ve got one, put a pizza stone in the oven to heat at the maximum temperature.
9. When the loaf is ready, turn it out onto a floured baking sheet (or a peel). Be careful — you want it to retain it’s shape. Then, with a really sharp knife, cut three or four slashes across the top.
10. Put it on the pizza stone to cook.
11. After 20 mins, turn the oven down to about 180 degrees centigrade.
12. After another 20 minutes, check if it’s cooked. It should be dark and sound hollow when tapped.
13. Leave it to cool completely on a rack before slicing.

Bailey

Schnitzels are a real guilty pleasure of ours. Boak likes one or two a year; Bailey would eat them every night, if he could.

They’re pretty cheap and easy to make, although they’re not good for you, and do generate a lot of washing up. This recipe has been tweaked to reduce the amount of butter used and, we think, make the schnitzels crisper and less greasy than some of the oily, orange slabs you get served in German pubs.

A couple of notes:

1. We use pork rather than veal. If you use veal, you’ve got a bona fide Wiener schnitzel. German pubs tend to go for pork because it’s cheaper and describe them as ‘in the Vienna style’.

2. The origin of the schnitzel is disputed but we like the theory that it comes from Austria’s near-neighbour, Italy. Certainly, your best bet for finding a decent schnitzel in the UK is to go to an Italian restaurant and order a Cotoletta alla Milanese.

3. That’s what schnitzel means, by the way — cutlet.

Recipe after the jump.

Ingredients (for two)

1. Two pork chops or pork fillets
2. Half a loaf of bread, for crumbs
3. One egg
4. 100g flour
5. Salt, black pepper and paprika
6. 50g of cold (firm) butter
7. A lemon or lime
8. A bloody great big hammer or rolling pin

Making a schnitzel

1. You want only the ‘medallion’ from the centre of your pork chop, with no straggling bits or bones, so trim them that way. You can leave the fat on if you like, as long as you remove any skin or rind.
2. When they’re neat and tidy, take your knife and butterfly the meat, cutting most of the way through from one long side to the other until both steaks fold open fairly neatly.
3. Cover each in cling film and batter them with your hammer. This is quite good fun. Don’t go too mad or they’ll fall apart. They should end up about twice as big as when you started.
4. Arrange three plates with, in this order, flour, beaten egg, and breadcrumbs. Take each piece of meat and coat them in flour; then dip them in the egg, making sure they pick plenty up; finally, press them into the breadcrumbs quite firmly, making sure that they are properly crusted.
5. Grease a large roasting tin. Put two slices of butter on the bottom, one for each schnitzel. Put the schnitzels on top and then put the remaining butter in as many slices as you can manage over the top. The butter is there for a bit of flavour and to help the breadcrumbs brown — if you’re not worried about your heart, chuck on as much as you like.
6. Put the tin in a pre-heated over at around 160-180 centigrade for 25-30 minutes, or until they’re golden brown, turning once after about 15 minutes.
7. Dish them up and put a wedge of lemon on top, and serve with a side salad if you’ve got the crazy idea that pork does not, on its own, constitute a meal.
8. You’ll want a German beer with it.

Nakladaný hermelin is, as far as we can fathom, a soft Camembert-type cheese (hermelin) steeped in oil with various flavourings.

We had several rounds of it in pubs in the Czech Republic (Pivni Filosof seems to live off the stuff) and thought it looked like an easy recipe to recreate at home.

You need

• One Camembert cheese or similar
• An onion (we used red onion)
• Juniper berries
• Paprika (sweet, hottish)
• Salt and pepper
• Olive oil
• Red pepper
• Pickled chillies

To make it…

1. Cut the cheese in half horizontally, like a sponge cake ready for filling. Spread a teaspoon of paprika, several slices of onion, and salt and pepper inside, and then press it back together.
2. Put more slices of onion, a pickled chilli and three or four juniper berries in a dish and then put the cheese on top.
3. Put more slices of onion and another pickled chilli on top of the cheese.
4. Cover the whole lot with olive oil.
5. Clingfilm it and stick it in the fridge.
6. After a few days (three’s probably a safe bet — any more and you’re dicing with death when it comes to preserving in oil) take it out and drain off the oil. Remove the juniper berries.
7. Serve it on a plate with all of the onions and chillis from the dish, plus some small slices of red pepper.
8. Eat it with a nice beer and some crusty bread.

Happy Christmas!

Kebabs are intrinsically associated with beer in many European countries. We don’t know about Germany where the vertically-grilled doner originated, but in Britain, they’re more-or-less only eaten by drunk people.

They’re different all over the continent, of course. In Germany, they favour a fluffier, lighter ‘fladenbrot’. In Britain, it’s usually a boring old pitta bread. Our local is run by Mauritians, though, who (weirdly) do the best naan breads in London, which is what they use as the base for their kebabs. That’s covered in grilled meat, stacks of veg, yoghurt and lethal chilli sauce.

When it’s done, you’re left with a polystyrene box full of bright red grease.

We know kebabs are bad for us, but that doesn’t stop us craving them from time to time. For the sake of our hearts, though, we’ve learned to make a slightly healthier version at home.

Here’s the recipe.

Ingredients (for two)

4 chicken thighs or

2 chicken legs (you could use breast, but it’s just not dirty enough for the authentic flavour and mouthfeel)

4 tablespoons of vegetable oil

2 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 teaspoons of sweet paprika

1 teaspoon of salt

The juice of 2 lemons

One small onion

Half a crisp lettuce (if you’re posh, cos or little gem; iceberg is fine)

Two tablespoons of runny natural yoghurt

1 teaspoon of finely chopped mint

2 naan breads, pitta breads, Turkish “pide”, bread rolls or anything else suitable for turning into a dirty sandwich — we buy naans from the kebab shop!

Chilli sauce (Thai is good; Jamaican sauce is OK if you like Scotch Bonnets; otherwise, see what your corner shop has in stock).

Method

1. First, cook the chicken thighs or legs in the oven at about 180 degrees centigrade for 45 minutes. When they’ve cooled, take all the meat off the bones and chop it into bite-sized pieces.
2. Get a big frying pan (we use a wok) and put the vegetable oil in. When it’s really hot, chuck the chicken in. Cook for about 5 minutes or until it starts to get quite dark on the outside.
3. If you watch the chaps in our local kebab house, you’ll note that they’re spraying lemon juice over the chicken the whole way through grilling. We need to do the same to keep the chicken moist and stop it sticking. Add a tablespoon of lemon juice every now and then.
4. After about 8 minutes, add the chopped garlic and all the remaining lemon juice. Turn the heat down.
5. While the chicken is finishing, slice the onion and lettuce. Put the mixture on your bread.
6. Add the paprika and stir it in. The chicken will turn a violent red/orange — chicken kebab colour, in fact. Add the salt, stir in and give it another minute or so to finish cooking.
7. Put the chicken onto the onion and lettuce mix. Drizzle the yoghurt over the top, sprinkle the mint, and then add chilli sauce to taste.
8. You can add any other veg you like — grated carrot, slice tomatoes, pickled chillis — whatever it takes to match your own local kebab shop.
9. Finally, shove it down your face.

I’ve been trying to work out how to make proper German-style pretzels for a couple of years now. They’re just perfect with a pint — filling, salty and, well, German.

Today, I finally nailed it.

There are lots of recipes around and I tried most of them, but none quite seemed to do the trick. The texture was never quite right – it should be chewy on the outside and fluffy in the middle. Our recent trip to Germany only made me more determined to crack the problem — I couldn’t bear the thought of waiting until our next holiday to have another pretzel!

Boak did manage to find authentic pretzels in a German bakery on the Brompton Road and it was inspecting one of those that helped me perfect my recipe.

Almost any fluffy white dough will do. The tricks are all in the finishing. Specifically, the shape you roll the dough into before you make the famous pretzel shape; the fact that you boil it before baking; coating it with a solution of bicarbonate of soda [UPDATE: use about one level teaspoon of bicarb]; and slashing the top with a knife.

Recipe after the jump.

Ingredients

400 grams of white bread flour

1.5 teaspoons of salt

1 tablespoon/1 sachet of dried yeast

150 millilitres of warm water

75 millilitres of milk

Rock salt

Bicarbonate of soda

Method

Mix together the flour, salt, water, milk and yeast — I did it in my Magimix with the dough hook, which took about 30 seconds.

Knead the ball of dough (which should be soft and elastic) with a little more flour and then put it in an oiled mixing bowl covered with a teatowel. Leave it to rise for about 30-40 minutes.

When it’s doubled in size, knock it back, knead it a bit more, and then put it back to rise for another 30 minutes.

Get a large pan of water boiling and put the oven on to 190 degrees centigrade.

When the dough is ready, take it out of the bowl and cut it into about six equal pieces. Cover them with a teatowel.

Take one piece and roll it out into a kind of sausage shape. Don’t flour the surface — that will stop you rolling it properly. Once you’ve got a cylinder, start rolling it so that there is a bulge in the middle, with both ends tapering out to about 1.5 centimetres in thickness. The whole thing should be around 30-40 centimetres in length.

Then take the two ends, bring them into the centre, and fix them to the bulge in the centre with a bit of water.

When you’ve shaped six pretzels, boil them one or two at a time, for about a minute each. When they come out of the water, put them on paper towels to dry.

Make a solution from the bicarbonate of soda and about 100 millilitres of warm water and thoroughly oil a baking sheet. Then dip each pretzel into the solution and put them on the baking tray. Sprinkle them with rock salt (or pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds — whatever you fancy).

Then, with a sharp knife, cut a line a centimetre or so deep across the thick part of the pretzel. This makes them split, and makes them look like a proper pretzel.

Then put the tray in the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until they’re dark golden brown.

When they come out of the oven, let them cool for an hour or two, which will help the outsides harden, giving that familiar chewy-but-fluffy texture that makes pretzels so satisfying.

If you try it, let me know what you think.

Bailey

PS -Germanophiles going to GBBF may want to note that the K&S bakery, which specialises in German breads, cakes and has the most authentic pretzels in London, is just down the road from Earl’s Court.

This excellent little festival was brought to us by Zeitgeist, a great German pub in Vauxhall, Stonch’s beer blog, and Bier-Mania, who organise beer trips to Belgium, Germany and beyond.

This won’t be a detailed review, as we drank too much to remember many details — as did everyone else, by the sound of it … there are now no more festival beers left.

We remember a large range of beer from the Bolten-Brauerei from outside Duesseldorf, with their Alt being particularly nice. Hofmann Export Dunkel Lagerbier was a great example of the complexity that Franconian Dunkels can deliver. Our stand-out favourite was a Dunkel-Rauch by SternBrau-Scheubel which had a gorgeous Maerzen-like malt flavour and amber colour, with a hefty hoppiness and a subtle but complex smoke taste.

We thought the mix of people and the atmosphere was great – some tickers, some trendies, some locals, but everyone getting into it. It was the kind of place you could bring non-beer geeks to (we did) without worrying about whether they’d have a good time.

Also, the excellent range of Brotzeit really helped line the stomach – Obatzda is an acquired taste, but I love the stuff, and they make it well here.

This was easily one of my favourite festivals of all time. Do it again, chaps!

Boak

For another perspective, see Allyson’s write-up on her Impy Malting blog.

Ron Pattinson blogged about Hofmann here.

Although they´re to be found all over Spain (particularly in studenty places like Salamanca), the Basque country is the spiritual home of the pintxo, where even the caff in the railway station has a few on the counter.

In some bars, they bung you a couple for free, to accompany your drink. In most places, they’re a Euro-or-so each. You help yourself, generally, and present all the used cocktail sticks at the end of the night so they can tot up the bill.

They’re yet another brilliant “snack-to-beer”. Whatever the experts say, salty food is great with beer. Sometimes, we find we really only get a real sense of the taste of a particular beer when we’ve calibrated our tastebuds with a salty snack.

Here are some excellent Pintxo toppings to accompany a glass of almost anything:

1. Pickled fish — sounds grim, but sweet, salty little bits of herring or anchovy go exceedingly well with beer.
2. Tapenade (olive paste) — salt and oil, basically, with some spiciness from the olives.
3. Small pieces (what they call “goujons” in pretentious pubs) of battered salt cod — salt, oil… are you beginning to see the pattern here?
4. Spanish omelette — nothing soaks up booze better than spuds and, although the thought of eggy potatoes and beer might not sound that appetising, it works a treat.
5. Anchovy and cream cheese — not the pickled variety, but the dark brown salty, oily ones you get on cheap pizzas.

To be honest, you can put just about anything on a bite-sized slice of bread and it works. And they’re very easy to make. Give it a go.