Eating with Beer
Beer is being increasingly used as a foodstuff rather than a drink to be knocked back down the local corner pub. From ale in pies to fancy beer-flavoured crisps (such as ‘Cheese and Adnams Broadside‘ flavour Kettle Chips that appeared a couple of years ago). We’re no strangers to combining beer and food here on the BeerCast, with new member Elliot posting a video of a rather fine version of moules frites cooked in Hoegaarden on his website. Watch out, Keith Floyd. So in honour of the multiplying ways in which you can find excuses for getting beer into yourself, it’s another BeerCast regular feature – Eating with Beer. First up, soup!
The Yorkshire Provender are a small company based in Ripon, North Yorkshire, where they produce a range of seven soups in plastic tubs for the ever-increasing market (it’s good to see someone taking on the might of the Covent Garden lot). Varieties such as Tomato and Red Pepper with Wensleydale Cheese sound interesting – but this being a boozy website I had to sample their Onion soup with Hambleton Ale and Mustard. Established in 1991 in the Swale Valley, Hambleton’s produce a fine range of bitters with the distinctive white horse logo.
But in a soup? According to the label (which features Nick Stafford, Hambleton’s founder), this is Yorkshire Provender’s take on the ‘classic French Onion theme’, using Best Bitter as a base for the other ingredients. Well, after polishing off most of a tub – it’s very sweet, almost too sweet to finish, with a strange almost meaty lasagne-type smell, which must be the combination of onion, beer and mustard. There was a background taste alongside the onion, but I couldn’t tell if it was the beer, or the mustard, or something else. It’s an interesting idea, but I think I’d rather have another of their soup varieties followed by a few of Hambleton’s beers – afterwards.
