Beers with Chuck: Share This O.C. from The Bruery

by Chuck P

I’ve been a big fan of The Bruery from Orange County, California ever since they began distributing here back in 2013. Their bourbon barrel aged beers are some of my absolute favorites. And now I’ll be adding the Share This: O.C. Imperial Stout made with orange zest, cacao nibs and vanilla to that list as well.

This addition to the Share This series is in partnership with Food Forward, a program that donates fresh produce to hunger relief agencies throughout southern California. These fruits and vegetables from backyard fruit trees, farmers markets and orchards where most would normally go to waste. For every bottle sold The Bruery donates $1 to this great cause.

The aroma hits the senses with with bits of orange, chocolate, vanilla and a light roastiness. A great balance of the cocoa and citrus comes through as well with a bit of the booziness lingering. The taste is fantastic with the orange zest coming first giving way to hints of chocolate and vanilla creeping in along with some light coffee notes. The orange fades to give way to some tartness and the alcohol of the imperial stout that finishes smoothly with minimal burn considering it comes in at a pretty big 11%.

The O.C. is a great imperial stout with a nice balance of citrus and chocolate notes that brings together the tart and sweet ingredients perfectly. Make sure to grab a bottle and enjoy while also donating to a great organization in Food Forward.

Recipe: Rösch Bakehaus Pretzel Bread Pudding with Rougaroux 13 Pennies Praline Sauce

by Chef Aimee Tortorich

One of the best desserts that you will find in the Deep South is bread pudding. In Louisiana, we take our bread pudding seriously, and rightly so. So simple to make, but celebrated by all, it is no mistake that this dessert canvases menus across the state.

We like sticking to the basics: bread, custard, and rum sauce. No crazy fillings, just bread pudding done right. For our version, we decided to use pretzel bread from our friend Jim Osborne at Rösch Bakehaus. After having a surplus of pretzel buns left over from Brats & Brews at Great Raft Brewing last fall, we decided to give it a shot. The finished product was stunning. A little salt, a bit of sweet and a lot of love made it a perfect bread pudding. Check out Rösch Bakehaus for pretzel bread that is sure to make a difference in your next bread pudding!

Rösch Bakehaus Pretzel Bread Pudding with Rougaroux 13 Pennies Pecan Praline Sauce

Pretzel Bread Pudding
Yields 30 servings

20 bratwurst or hamburger sized pretzel buns from Rösch Bakehaus
1 ½ quarts heavy cream
20 egg yolks
2 whole eggs
2 cups sugar
2 tablespoons of vanilla extract
1 tablespoons of cinnamon

Praline Rum Sauce

2 cups light brown sugar, packed
1 cup (2 stick) unsalted butter
1/2 cup Rougaroux 13 Pennies Praline Rum from Donner Peltier Distillers
1 cup heavy cream
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 cups pecan pieces

Praline Pretzel Bread Pudding served at a holiday party

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350F.

Crumble pretzel buns with hands into small pieces and set aside. Mix together egg yolks, whole eggs, and sugar until smooth. Add heavy cream, vanilla extract, and cinnamon to egg and sugar mixture. With your hands, mix custard with pretzel crumbled until it resembles oatmeal consistency. Bake uncovered until middle is set and top is golden brown, about 45 minutes.

For rum sauce, heat brown sugar and butter in a heavy saucepan over medium heat until melted. Add rum, cream, cinnamon and pecan pieces and simmer until thickened. Serve over bread pudding.

Praline Pretzel Bread Pudding served at a luncheon in New Orleans

Rama Thai Cuisine

Sometimes, well, a lot of the time, I'm in the mood to find authentic hole-in-the-wall restaurants that make Baton Rouge such a great food town.  The Red Stick doesn't get enough credit in the culinary world due to all of the national chain signs that you see while driving down the interstate and New Orleans being only another 60 miles down the road.  However, if you hop off the freeway and hit a side street, you'll find some locally owned eateries with some exceptional flare.  One of these quaint places is Rama Thai Cuisine.  The Perkins Road Overpass area Thai restaurant is one of the forgotten gems in Baton Rouge, and it is time I give it some respect on Bite and Booze.  Eusebio and I dined at Rama a little while back, and we couldn't have left more satisfied!

Rama Thai Cuisine on the Inside and Out

It only felt natural to begin my meal with some Thai beer, so I ordered a Singha and started to get my taste buds ready for some Asian flavor.  Singha is a fairly standard lager with that Asian bite that you'll recognize from other Japanese beers like Kirin Ichiban.  It is pretty tasty, but I'd rather get to the food.

Singha Lager Beer

To wet our appetites a little more, we ordered a couple of appealing appetizers.  First up were the fried wontons.  These were nothing too special but they were fried to a nice crisp and had pretty decent flavor.  We had the shrimp chips for second app.  The chips were light and delicate with a great shrimp taste.  They came served with a delicious peanut sauce to dip the chips in.

Fried Wontons and Shrimp Chips with Peanut Sauce

The next dish to leave the kitchen and make its way in front of me was the lemongrass soup.  This fantastic soup was sweet and spicy with a citrus flavor.  It came loaded with shrimp and mushrooms, and I ate every bite.  I love a good, simple soup like this!

Lemongrass Soup

For an entree I called on the Rama Duck.  This delightful half of a duck was seasoned with Thai herbs and spices, then roasted until fork tender.  Each bite of duck put a smile on my face as the flavors filled my mouth and tickled my tongue.  The duck still tasted like duck meat should, and was only complemented by the sweet and savory Thai seasonings.  Steamed vegetables were served with the duck, and they tasted alright, but the duck certainly highlighted the plate. 

Rama Duck with Steamed Vegetables

For dessert, Eusebio and I couldn't decide between the fried apples with ice cream or the fried bananas with ice cream.  So, we did what any good person should do: we got both!  These fried-fruit desserts each came with three scoops of homemade ice cream.  Rama offered a selection of ice cream flavors, of which we ordered all of them: vanilla, coconut, and durian.  Yes, that's right, that durian! 

Durian Fruit as eaten by Andrew Zimmern in Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel

Eusebio and I were a little nervous to try it as an ice cream flavor, but it was actually quite good.  The vanilla and coconut icecreams tasted pretty standard.  They were not very rich, but still had a smooth texture and the right amount of flavor to provide a condiment to the fried fruit and something sweet to end the meal with.  The durian icecream certainly had a unique flavor but it was nothing offensive.  I actually think I liked it more than the other two, even if it was just for originality alone.  I wouldn't hesitate to order it again next time I go to Rama, that's for sure!

Fried Apples and Banana Topped with Ice Cream, Durian Ice Cream on a Fried Banana

You can also check out the Cuisine Rouge post about Rama to see what they have to say about this little Thai Restaurant!

A Culinary Adventure on Government Street Part I: Bistro Byronz

Wednesday evening Eusebio and I were hungry and bored... usually not a good combination. For us, however, it was just a good excuse for a culinary adventure. I had heard of a few things that I needed to eat since I started this blog and we decided to go give them a try. Bistro Byronz on Government Street was our first stop. We walked in and sat at the bar, ordered a couple drinks, and looked over their menu.  The restaurant is fairly small and creates a cozy atmosphere for its diners.  We were there to try the Blue Cheese Chips... a plate of freshly sliced, thin cut, golden fried, unsalted homemade potato chips that is topped with a creamy blue cheese sauce and chucks of crumbled, fresh blue cheese and garnished with some green onions.

Blue Cheese Chips at Bistro Byronz

Let me tell you friends, they were worth they hype.  I'm not going to sit here and type that they were the best things that I've ever eaten or that they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize or anything, but they were pretty damn tasty!  The potatoes were everything you want in a homemade chip.  They were light and crunchy with the perfect thickness to provide a great dipping mechanism.

We also ordered a couple of other items just to give them a try and give us a little variety.  The two dishes we tried were the carrot souffle and the Abita chili.

Carrot Souffle at Bistro Byronz

Abita Chili at Bistro Byronz

The carrot souffle was sweet and smooth, although in my opinion was a little too runny.  It tasted like candy in the same style as candied yams during Thanksgiving but the texture was almost more of a thick soup than a creamy souffle.  Still, the taste was great and being an item that you can't order everywhere in town, was worth a try.  The Abita chili was a little disappointing.  It had no flavor of any Abita beer whatsoever.  The taste was fairly ordinary even with the addition of cheese, sour cream, and chives, and would be easy to duplicate at home.  On tap of that, the chili was served at a luke warm temperature which was not even enough to melt the shredded cheese.

Bistro Byronz also makes a dessert that we wanted to taste but we were going to sample some dishes at another place on Government Street as well so we got it to go and ate it when we were back at home.  The Bistro Bread Pudding was a delicious dessert that had blueberries baked in and was covered with a vanilla cream sauce.  The texture was not as firm as I would like and felt like it may have needed a little more time in the oven.  It almost had a custard texture which seemed odd for a bread pudding of that nature.  The vanilla sauce was good but not out of this world.  The Bistro Bread Pudding was certainly a good treat but not the best bread pudding I've ever had.

I enjoyed our samples from Bistro Byronz but we weren't there to eat a full meal as we had another place to go try.  We left still hungry and made our way to Opie's Cajun Cafe for some more.  To read about that part of the adventure go to the next post.