Any Guy's Food Blog

I decided that I needed one fruity beer for the challenge. Since I actually kinda like Pyramid's Apricot Ale, I figured I'd just use that. I'm not a fan of the "new" naming scheme they came up with a while adding "buzz" words to the beginning of their old names in hopes to sell more beer the the Mike's Hard Lemonade crowd. I'm pretty sure that it failed, but they invested so much in the new labeling that they have decades worth of bottle labels still in storage. I'm totally making that up and it's totally true in my mind.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Pyramid Apricot Ale
1 red snapper filet
seasoning salt
salsa

Directions:

Before I get into the directions, I want to talk a little about the salsa. If you don't care, get whatever salsa you want. However, I made a mango-ginger-habanero salsa as a garnish. I was going to post the recipe, but it didn't turn out quite right this time, so I'll post that recipe at a later date when I figure out what the heck I did wrong. I WOULD RECOMMEND that at the very least you go with a fruitier salsa. Make your own if you feel competent and/or adventurous. Or you can look for something on the fruitier side at your local grocery store.

This is actually a really easy meal. If you buy all the ingredients and don't make your own seasoning salt mix or salsa, you can make this in about 10 minutes. Lightly season both sides of the snapper filet. Toss in a frying pan. Add 1/2 bottle of beer. Cook on medium for about 5 minutes until half of the beer has cooked off. Flip the filet. Cook until the fish is cooked all the way through and the beer is mostly cooked off.

Garnish with salsa and serve.

Tasting Notes

I think cooking fish in beer is a great idea. If I had given the fish time to marinate first, it would have been even a little more impressive. But if you have a good fresh filet, I do like the idea of a subtle flavoring coming from the beer. So this really worked out well. The spirit of the beer was in this dish, but in cooking the beer, the apricot flavor was mostly lost. That being said, you could easily and successfully adapt this recipe to any other lighter beer. I would definitely recommend sticking with the wheat beer family. Even something as fancy as a kölsch could work out very nicely with just about any fish filet. With the mango-ginger-habanero salsa garnish, it was just right. All the flavors mingle nicely and this particular batch of salsa didn't get carried away and make me forget about the snapper. 8 out 10 for me.