Not only does Beer Lao taste good, in recipes it makes a good white wine substitute too.
The recipe
“Tomato-Based Fennel Pasta Sauce”, courtesy of my latest produce of the week from Good Food Easy. Ingredients included 1 onion, butter, olive oil, Italian sausage, a parsnip, 1/2 a fennel bulb, 2 stalks of celery, 4 cloves of garlic, 1/2 cup white wine, and various other bits and things. (Due to respect for copyright, I won’t reproduce the recipe. Come over for dinner sometime instead.)
The dilemma
I had everything on-hand… except for the white wine. Besides, I have a rule that if you open a bottle of wine, you drink a bottle of wine. However it was just me around tonight, and I didn’t feel like getting that hammered.
Still, no problem — the light, nearly sweet flavor of Beer Lao actually has a few similarities to white wine. So I poured the requisite 1/2 cup of beer into a measuring cup, stirred it to flatten, and soon my kitchen smelled of 2 of the grandest things on earth: beer and sausage.
As for the rest of the beer, it harmonized quite nicely with the chef.
