FOOD NEWS
Beer Is The Unanticipated Ingredient For Richer Chocolate Cookies
BY STEPHANIE FRIEDMAN
Stout beer is the perfect unconventional addition to your favorite chocolate cookie recipe. It offers sweet and bitter flavors with notes of coffee, chocolate, and hazelnut.
The beer's slight bitterness helps balance the sweetness of baked goods, and even creates a more chewy texture in cookies. You can also choose between different stouts.
A splash of dry Guinness is largely sweet, creamy, and bitter, with notes of fruitiness, which pairs greatly with cookies that have fruits like cranberries, raisins, or cherries.
You can also use a coffee-forward stout, plus some coffee grounds or crushed coffee beans in the dough, to enrich the flavor of your cookies.
Add about 2 tablespoons of room-temperature beer to your dough after mixing in your wet ingredients. Reduce another liquid like water in your recipe to accommodate the change.
You can reduce the stout with brown sugar in a pot on the stove, which concentrates the flavors in the beer so it shows up even stronger in the finished cookies.