If you love beer, it’s hard to imagine having too much of it around—after all, it keeps well and goes with everything. But say you are tired of drinking it or you have plenty of half-full bottles (that have not been sipped from…) after a party.
Or maybe you just love beer so much that you want to eat and drink it—which can sometimes be said of me.
There are a zillion savory dishes made with beer (from soup to waffles to chicken) but I particularly love beer in sweets and desserts because they highlight the lovely caramel-y, malty, hoppy, banana-y, grapefruit-y, and other beer-ish flavors that might get lost in spicy and complex meat dishes and barbecue.
Recently, I made beer caramel sauce and beer toffee sauce. (I have an entire list of things I’ve been meaning to try with beer… I'm just trying to check them off!)
Both sauces were excellent, but the toffee sauce was so darn simple, it had to be shared immediately. No thermometers or caramelized sugar are involved. All you need is beer, cream, butter, and brown sugar, plus a little salt and vanilla. Regular brown sugar (the moist type, not the crystal kind) is fine, but you’ll get more nuanced flavor by using light muscovado sugar instead.
More: All about muscovado and 5 ways to use it.
Toffee sauce is plenty sweet by design, but the beer adds a pleasing bitter edge and extra dimensions of flavor. The sauce is perfect over vanilla ice cream; it should grand with coffee, chocolate, and other ice cream flavors as well, but vanilla is always my go-to starting point for dramatic contrast and for drawing out the flavors of a sauce.
All kinds of beer will work here—even a hoppy I.P.A. that might be too bitter for some other desserts—so feel free to experiment.
Notes: You can put open bottles of leftover beer in the freezer to be used later, by the way. And, you can use flat or fizzy beer for the recipe. To measure fresh beer: Pour the beer carefully down the sides of the measuring cup to avoid raising a head (or, weigh out 8 ounces/225 grams of it, head and all).
| 1 1/2 | cups (300 grams) dark or light brown sugar or light muscovado sugar |
| 3 | cups heavy cream |
| 1 | cup beer |
| 1 1/2 | teaspoons vanilla |
| 1/8 | teaspoon salt, or more to taste |
| 1 1/2 | cups (300 grams) dark or light brown sugar or light muscovado sugar |
| 3 | cups heavy cream |
| 1 | cup beer |
| 1 1/2 | teaspoons vanilla |
| 1/8 | teaspoon salt, or more to taste |
Check out my other beer and wine desserts, too:
Are you often faced with leftover beer—and how do you put it to use? Share with us in the comments!
Written by: Alice Medrich
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