Beer and fine cuisine make a harmonious duet.

Byline: JIM BOYD The Register-Guard

`MY FIRST INSTINCT is to reach for the stout," Jay Harlow, the author of "The Microbrew Lover's Cookbook," told his class at Cook's Pots & Tabletops last week when he tasted the Korean grilled beef called bulgogi that he had just prepared.

Then he sipped the last of the eight beers to be served during the class, the Wild Duck Brewery's Octobeerfest, a malty ale with a moderate amount of hop flavor (unlike the heavily hopped ales common on the West Coast).

"This is really a tasty beer to sip on its own, I think, but it also goes nicely with the food," Harlow said. "It's too simple to always say soy sauce sends me to dark beer. But I do find that a lot of the times when I've got something that has a lot of soy sauce flavor to it, I'm drawn to the beers that bring a lot of malt flavor into the equation.

"Red cooked chicken is another example, where you simmer chicken in soy sauce, usually with (rice) wine and ginger and green onions. And that's where I think something like this Octobeerfest would really shine," he said.

"The dish itself has sort of a gentle and really comforting kind of flavor ... and so I'm not looking for a beer to come in and make a real strong statement on it's own," he said. He also ruled out a bland beer because the flavor would just disappear.

Pairing microbrews with food is similar to matching wines with food, he told the class. There are two approaches to both. One is to achieve balance by having the drink supply something that is missing from the food - for example, oysters with a crisp white wine, he said.

Oysters by themselves "get kind of heavy on the palate after a while, with all that richness and brininess and sweet glycogen kind of flavor," he said. "You want something sharp to come in there and cut through that. So that's an example of completing it."

The other approach is to have the drink echo the flavors in the food, he said, explaining that's the approach he was taking in matching a malty beer to the soy-flavored Korean dish.

"I'm wanting a deep flavored, malty, soulful kind of beer," Harlow said. "It just seems to go with that kind of food, more than something that's just light and crisp and refreshing."

"The Microbrew Lover's Cookbook" (Sasquatch Books, $19.95) is the latest of the 12 cookbooks that the Berkeley, Calif., chef and cooking teacher has authored or co-authored. He considers his previous cookbook, "West Coast Seafood: The Complete Cookbook" (Sasquatch Books, $23.95), to be his "magnum opus so far."

After giving the microbrew class one evening last week, Harlow followed up the next day with a class on Dungeness crab and a book-signing, also at Cook's Pots & Tabletops.

"The Microbrew Lover's Cookbook" contains an international array of 125 recipes with Harlow's recommendation for the appropriate styles of craft-brewed beer to accompany each dish. "Eat Globally, Drink Locally" is the title he said he would have liked for the cookbook, and it was the title he used for his Eugene class.

In an interview, he explained that he starts this class by preparing two appetizers - individual gougeres (rich pastries made with Swiss cheese and pate a choux) and jalapenos stuffed with cheese and rolled in bread crumbs - that participants taste with a pale ale and an amber ale.

"What I usually find is people take a sip of the pale ale and like it, and like it with the gougeres," he said. "But when you have it with the chilies - wow! - that's not so refreshing."

The amber ale, which has a milder hop flavor than the pale ale, shows better in that tasting because it doesn't add the hotter edge to the chilies that the typical pale ale or IPA does, he said.

For the next course, he makes a grilled salmon sandwich with basil mayonnaise, a dish that has become a standard offering in most brewpubs because it goes with so many styles of beer, he said.

"What I do at that point is pour the hefeweizen and the stout and let people sort of taste at that point and see what they like, and I find it's about 50-50, or a little heavier on people liking the hefeweizen," he said. "There's something about the lighter, slightly crisper flavor of the hefeweizen that gets people to thinking that this is something to go with seafood. And I like it a lot too. But I also like to go to the other extreme ... I sometimes like that really dark coffee quality of a good stout."

The point of this tasting, he said, is to show participants that white wine isn't the only thing to serve with seafood.

For the final courses, Harlow served an Indian-style curry and the bulgogi, allowing participants to sip various beers to determine their preferences.

In keeping with his "Drink Locally" motto, all eight of the beers were brewed in Eugene at the West Brothers and Wild Duck breweries.

Harlow advocates giving as much consideration to microbrews as to wines when planning a meal. However, he's not a beer buff who simply drinks beer all the time.

"I enjoy both, probably equally, frequently," he said. "It's a matter of my mood to a certain extent, the food that I'm having, the setting, the weather, all sorts of things. Within a given week I'll probably have wine with dinner three or four nights of the week and beer the other three or four."

Here's the recipe for Red-Cooked Chicken from "The Beer Lover's Cookbook." Serve it with an amber ale.

Red-Cooked (`Master Sauce') Chicken

"I think Master Sauce Chicken was the first dish I ever made out of Barbara Tropp's 1982 cookbook 'The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking' and I have made it hundreds of times since then. The 'master sauce' refers to the rich soy sauce broth left over from cooking the bird, which can be used time and again - just replenish the seasonings - and gets better each time."

2 cups water

2 cups soy sauce

1/2 cup Chinese rice wine or dry sherry

2 tablespoons sugar

4 or 5 slices ginger

2 green onions, halved and crushed

2 pods star anise and 1/2 cinnamon stick, or 1 teaspoon Chinese five-spice powder 

1 strip dried orange peel (optional)

1 whole chicken, 4 to 5 pounds

Combine the liquids and seasonings in a deep covered casserole (hold back some of the water if you are making the dish for the first time and are not sure of the capacity of your pot). Bring to a simmer. Meanwhile, remove the excess fat and the kidneys from the chicken, rinse well inside and out, and pat dry.

When the liquid is nearly boiling, carefully lower the chicken into the pot, breast side up. If the liquid does not cover the chicken, add more hot water (as much as you can without overflowing the pot). While the liquid comes back to a boil, ladle it over any exposed skin to provide even coloring. Reduce the heat to very low, cover the pot, and simmer 50 minutes to an hour, uncovering the pot a few times to baste the exposed skin with the sauce. For the best flavor, turn off the heat and let the chicken steep another half hour to 2 hours, basting occasionally.

To serve, either lift the chicken out of the pot with a spoon inserted in the cavity and another outside (be careful not to tear the skin) or pour off the sauce into a bowl. Carve the chicken Western style or chop it through the bone Chinese style, as you like. Serve warm, at room temperature, or cold.

Strain the sauce through a fine sieve and freeze it for the next time.

Discard the fat before thawing and refresh the flavors each time you use it with 1/2 cup fresh soy sauce and half of the other flavorings.

CAPTION(S):

Cookbook author Jay Harlow talks up the fine points of beer and food recently in Eugene.