Recipes from Afar: Kentucky Beer Cheese on Toast
Bourbon optional
A few months ago in Louisville, Kentucky, we went hunting for beer cheese. Much in the vein of England’s Welsh rarebit, this state specialty combines cheese with beer and spices in a dip of sorts and serves it, traditionally, with crackers. It turned out beer cheese wasn’t terribly hard to find in Louisville; brewpubs served it with pretzels and even the farmers market had a stand selling the stuff. But it wasn’t until we went to Eiderdown, a restaurant in Germantown, late one afternoon, that we really got the appeal of the stuff.
A local guy—whose apartment we were renting via Airbnb—told us Eiderdown had “perfected the perfect beer cheese,” so we packed up our one-year-old and drove the 10 minutes southeast of downtown to Germantown. It was our fourth day in town, we were tired, and here I was making us try yet another beer cheese, convinced by our host’s recommendation that we hadn’t yet had a great one. Immediately, we saw we’d made the right move: Unlike the previous cold, harder varieties we’d tasted, this one came to the table warm, paired with a thin-sliced baguette baked at a local cafe. Unbelievably creamy, with a pleasant savory bite, the bowl before us didn’t stand a chance. We polished it and our excellent local beers off before our kid could even think of getting antsy.
I haven’t thought much about that beer cheese in the ensuing months [our Louisville food guide is forthcoming, this winter], until I was casting around for a food pairing with a bourbon cocktail this weekend. A few neighbors in our co-op building in Queens were getting together for a second self-styled “cocktail crawl”—one cocktail and snack in six apartments—and Scott and I were, as usual, claiming bourbon as our spirit (we went with a pitcher of Gold Rush). I remembered the beer cheese and found a recipe I thought sounded like the one we had loved in Louisville: served warm, not as a dip but spread onto sliced baguette. I was slightly nervous that it would be too sharp, too bite-y, for our friends, but I needn’t have worried: The entire bowl of beer cheese disappeared amid requests for recipes. Here’s the one I used:
Adapted from Food & Wine
Kentucky Beer Cheese on Toast
3/4 cup dark beer**
1 garlic clove, finely minced
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp cayenne
2 baguettes, thinly sliced
We also reserved some of the cold beer cheese and served it with crackers. Warming the cheese and putting it on bread mellows the flavors a bit, so it’s nice to let others try it bold and cold as well.
