First Friday Food Pairing: Campfire Hero
Summers in Colorado have a lot to offer; hiking, music festivals, beer festivals, farmers markets, road trips, and (my personal favorite) camping! There’s something great about getting away from the city and roughing it outside for a few days. Just because you’re “roughing it” doesn’t mean you have to skimp out on the food and beverage portion of the experience (assuming you’re not backpacking). With camping, if you’re going to make anything fancy I find it best to prep as much of it as you can ahead of time so you can spend more time tending the fire and enjoying where you are instead of chopping, mixing and marinating. I have a few other campfire recipes I’ll put up this summer but we’re going to start off super simple and super delicious.
S’mores are a campfire staple! Warm, toasted gram cracker outside with a gooey marshmallow core topped with melted chocolate, or melted Reese’s™ cups if you’re part of the epic s’mores club (you know who you are). But what if you want all those delicious flavors without lugging around so many pesky ingredients? Enter the S’moreo. Essentially a campfire-roasted to perfection, gooey and delicious Oreo™ cookie. Think that sounds too simple to be amazing? You’d be wrong.
The Pairing
The Oreo™ brings a lot to the table. Aside from being amazingly delicious, Oreos™ are 100% vegan which means they’re essentially a health food (#oreodiet2017). They’re simple and have a great balance of textures and flavors with a crunchy chocolate cookie and a creamy sweet filling. What better beer to pair with this than our Chai Milk Stout? A crisp and chocolate forward malt profile with a healthy dose of lactose that adds a rich and creamy mouth feel. Both the chocolate and creamy characteristics complement each other perfectly with a kick of chai spices to cut through the cream and finish it all off.
The Recipe
Most of the time when I cook it tends to be a little bit complicated. Not today. You will need one piece of equipment however. A camping cooking iron (aka pie iron). This is essentially a cast iron, campfire panini press on the end of a stick. You can make tons of awesome campfire foods in this, from burgers to grilled cheese to Nutella™ strawberry desert pies (keep an eye out for the August pairing!) Well worth the $17 investment.
What you need:
- Get a nice healthy fire going. With campfire cooking its best to get a really solid coal bed built up before you start cooking. Spend at least 15-30 min burning your fire to build up these coals. Flames will char, burn and cook un-evenly. Coals will cook quickly and evenly and burn hotter.
- Once you have your coal bed set, throw 4 Oreos™ on your cooking iron. You only need half of the iron clamshell for this. If you wanted to go wild you could dual wield irons and cook 8 at a time!
- Hold the iron over the fire and keep it moving around so that all 4 Oreos™ get even heat.
- Once your Oreos™ are hot and toasty with a gooey cream filling (see picture below) you’re done! (You should be able to hold the Oreo™ between your fingers and slide the cookies around)
- Pour yourself a glass of Chai Milk stout and try not to eat the entire package in one night!