Pairing Beer & Food: My Aha Moment

February 27, 2015

Hi! I’m chef Adam Dulye (pronounced “doo-lee”). Welcome to my new blog. I look forward to sharing my observations, opinions, stories, travels and tastes on all things happening in craft beer and the culinary world.

We’re going to be talking quite a bit, so I thought I’d start off by introducing myself. At the simplest level, I am a cook. So how did I get here, blogging about craft beer and food?

I have worked in restaurants since the moment I was old enough (14, to be exact). I went to culinary school at the Culinary Institute of America in New York. I spent some time cooking in France–and got my ass kicked. I have cooked professionally across the western U.S. in Portland, Aspen, Vail, Boulder, Denver and San Francisco.

In the early learning stages of my career, the focus was on wine. Every restaurant was hosting wine dinners, we met vintners, and read huge wine lists (often more like wine books). Then one day, on top of Vail Mountain, I had my first “craft beer and food pairing moment”—a conversion experience that turned me on to pairing food and craft beer. It takes moments like these to bring that internal engine to a grinding halt and change direction.

At Taste of Vail that year there were representatives from more than 30 restaurants and 50 wineries on top of the mountain—as well as one, single, lonely brewery. Being in Vail, I opted for my dish to have a bit of a mountain feel: roasted venison with huckleberry and sweet potato.

There were over 1,000 people walking around, eating and drinking all decked out in snow pants ready to ski…plus the sun was out. At over 10,000 feet elevation, it felt hot. Like sweating-on-a-Saturday-night-service-on-the-line, going-down-in-flames hot.

About halfway through the event, someone handed me a beer—Steamworks BrewingCo. Steam Engine Lager (thanks KO!). It brought out notes of richness and iron in the venison and connected the huckleberry and the potato back to the meat in a way that no wine could have. It cleansed my palate, refreshed my energy and created the moment that spurred a huge change in my career as a chef.

I began doing beer dinners, meeting and working with as many breweries as I could. I learned how beer is made and saw that much of the brewing process can be mimicked in the kitchen. I experimented as much as possible with pairing beer and food, pushing my palate, trying to find complex reactions that the simplest of ingredients could pull forward. I found my palate worked really well for pairing craft beer and food. At the same time, other chefs across the country began having their “craft beer moments” as well. Craft beer lists began popping up in chef-driven restaurants.

Then I met the Brewers Association. Together we created the Farm to Table Pavilion at the Great American Beer Festival. The first year we had six chefs and six breweries participate and we were handing tickets out to anyone in the hall who was willing to come back and see what we were doing. This idea of craft beer and food pairing began to take off. In 2015, we will have 21 chefs and breweries in the pavilion and the back hall has turned into a vibrant room full of amazing craft beer and food pairings.

In 2012 I opened Abbots Cellar in San Francisco, arguably one of the more competitive food cities in America. Abbots opened with a craft beer list of 22 draughts, two cask engines, and over 100 bottles. I changed the menu every day. I wrote a tasting menu paired with craft beer every day. Abbots got reviewed and made it onto the Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants list two years in a row. The restaurant even got a nod from the James Beard Foundation. It was amazing to introduce people to craft beer through pairings, and to watch so many guests have new “aha” pairing moments.

And now here we are in 2015. A new year for craft beer and food. A new year for new pairings and new experiences.

I have the humbling honor of being invited to quite a few craft beer events this year, where I’ll be cooking and continuing my own ongoing craft beer and food pairing education. I will share as many of those stories I can, as well as the stories of other chefs and their craft beer moments.

I look at craft beer from the kitchen side of the glass, and it offers a different point of view. You notice the reactions that happen on the palate—both the ones that don’t work, and the ones that really do. You pick apart the dishes that fail. You savor the feeling of sending the last dish of a five-course dinner out from the line, and you dread the gut-sinking moment when only four of five coolers come down the baggage carousel at Denver International Airport. And of course there’s the moment when you learn that even chefs sometimes look for recipes on Google.

I’ll do my best to translate my experiences into this blog. Should we meet at a restaurant, bar, or craft beer event, I hope to raise a glass with you and hear about your own “craft beer moment”, whether it happened in a Michelin-starred kitchen or in your own backyard.

Cheers,

Chef Adam

Pairing Beer & Food: My Aha Moment was last modified: by

CraftBeer.com is fully dedicated to small and independent U.S. breweries. We are published by the Brewers Association, the not-for-profit trade group dedicated to promoting and protecting America’s small and independent craft brewers. Stories and opinions shared on CraftBeer.com do not imply endorsement by or positions taken by the Brewers Association or its members.