Cooking with beer has to be one of my favorite activites. While wines are ideal for certain dishes, beer has proven its worth as a viable ingredient when cooking. One particular dish that I am seeing on a lot of menus is beer battered fish; whether it be fish and chips or fish tacos, beer has found its way into cupboard and cookbook alike.
When deep frying fish and making your own batter you need some sort of carbonation to fluff up the flour to provide that crispy texture on the outside of your fish. Some people use a combination of baking soda and water, some use club soda, but really it’s all so plain and not very interesting. Beer has flavor to it and when combined with spices and flour you can make yourself a pretty tasty beer batter. We recently decided to make some beer battered fish tacos using a recipe that was found doing a quick Google search. India Pale Ales seem to be a popular choice for most batters so we picked out a crowd favorite, Racer 5 IPA from Bear Republic, to go with our fresh tilapia.
Cumin, paprika, and chili powder were combined with the beer and flour to make a tasty batter.
Mango salsa was made.
We then tossed the fish into some hot oil. For best results, use a deep fryer or a pot with a good thermometer.
Let the fish get to a golden brown outside and place them in the oven to keep the fish hot.
Dress the tacos in your salsa or whatever fixings you feel fit best; we did a little avocado creme sauce for ours made of yogurt, sour cream, and (of course) avocado.
Although you don’t get the full flavor of the IPA used in the batter, it is still an awesome way to incorporate craft beer into food, and offers an interesting alternative for battering your fish and meat. I don’t know what we will pop out of the kitchen next but this was a great experience, and I can offer assurance that more of this kind of content will appear in the future.
-Brian