Jo found a recipe for beer-braised pork chops in a magazine she was reading this week. Sounded good, so I gave it a go yesterday evening, with a few twists and refinements of my own. The original recipe was German in origin, so called for using pilsner to do the braising, but Jo’s never too keen on lager. Enter a bottle of Irelands’s finest ubiquitous cooking stout, stage left (although I’m sure that blue-starred Geordie cooking brown ale would have worked just as well).

Very easy indeed to prepare:

1. Refinement #1 – The recipe calls for pork chops, but I prefer shoulder steaks for flavour and tenderness, so a couple of those were used instead.
2. Refinement #2 – According to the recipe two table-spoons of olive oil should go into the pan to fry the pork. Wrong. Rub olive oil into the pork and season to taste, then bring the pan up to temperature (bloody hot) and add the pork. Incidentally, I used a steep-sided, small-based pan, with the next step in mind.



3. When the pork has been fried to a lightly caramelised golden colour on each side (see right) reduce the heat and add 350ml of the beer of your choice. I added a few cloves of garlic at this stage as well. I also drank the other 150ml of cooking stout. It was okay (but only okay…)
4. Bring heat back up until you’ve got a rolling simmer going (bubbling gently, but not boiling) and braise the pork for about 5 minutes more.
5. Remove the pork steaks from the liquor and put them in a warm place to rest (which, in case you’re wondering, allows the fibres of the meat to relax a little, improving the tenderness of the steak).
6. Put two heaped teaspoons per person of gravy powder in a measuring jug and add hot water to make a thick paste. Gradually add cooking liquor from the pan until you have achieved your preferred gravy consistency. (You can pour the rest of the cooking liquor into a mug and drink it, if you like – tastes a lot like bovril, unsurprisingly).
7. Serve the pork steaks with your sides of choice – we had baked spuds, broccoli and a healthy dollop of apple sauce (the recipe included instructions for deep-fried apples, but I didn’t fancy those).

Of course, the choice of accompanying beverage is an important one. Jo went for a bottle of M&S own-brand stout, and I decided to crack open the Kernel Porter (lovely, lovely stuff – more on that at another time…) that I’d been saving for just such an occasion.

The pork was deliciously tender, the gravy one of the richest and tastiest I’ve ever made and it all went down extremely well indeed. Highly recommended, and a recipe I’ll be re-visiting again in future, I’m sure.

Anyone who’s read the Harry Potter books (it’s okay, you can admit to it, you’re among friends here…) will probably remember that the beverage-of-choice for trainee wizards is something called “butterbeer”. And, like me, you’ll probably have assumed that this was an invention on Ms Rowling’s part: innocuously kiddie-friendly but vaguely mystical-sounding; a little weird, a little off-the-wall.

A quick Google search would seem to confirm that impression, but it turns out that the author may actually have been inspired by an actual, historical drink that was widely enjoyed in Tudor times.

I know this, because I watched the latest episode of Heston’s Feasts (a highly-recommended show in which that mad genius Heston Blumenthal creates weird and utterly wonderful dishes from historical inspiration and serves them up to unsuspecting and almost unilaterally delighted celebrity guests) last night, and he actually made some of the stuff. And apparently it tasted really nice.

So, what we need now is a couple of intrepid, inventive souls (Boak and Bailey, I’m looking at you, for obvious reasons) to check out the programme on Channel 4′s Watch Online (it’s the Tuesday 17th March Tudor episode and the first segment of the programme), or make note of the helpfully-posted recipe on the Channel 4 Food Blog, then get cracking in the kitchen and report your findings to the beerblogosphere. Is it just a beery variant of egg-nog? Is it little more than mulled beer with added fat content? Does it in fact taste any better than it looks?

We await the results with baited breath…