I’ve been craving McDonald’s sausage biscuits all week for some reason, but the grocery store is closer than McDonald’s. Buttermilk is a wonderful thing.

Despite the impression you might get from reading this blog, sometimes I don’t feel like cooking. Luckily, I have a lot of options: I can go out or Martha might cook. Or hot dogs.

Hot dogs are not all that exciting, but that is no reason not to try a beer pairing–in fact it’s a great reason to try a beer pairing! Beer is such a great beverage because is that it is fit for the feasts of kings and peasants alike.

A trip to Trader Joe’s yielded the night’s beer: Samuel Smith’s Old Brewery Pale Ale. Since I had just finished the chapter in The Brewmaster’s Table on British beers it was the perfect bottle to try.

Here are Garret Oliver’s notes on this particular brew:

…a copper-colored beer with a big fluffy head. There’s that Yorkshire nose–hay, apples, butterscotch, and hops. The beer hits the palate with a mineral tang, then softens and rounds out to a dry biscuity malt enter. The finish is clean and flinty. This beer is big enough for steak, juicy enough for roast beef, and subtle enough for lamb. I also enjoy it with terrine en croûte, as do the British, though terrine en croûte sounds a lot better than “pork pie.”

Copper color, fluffy head, check.

Pork pie, huh? That’s basically a hot dog. Actually, the hot dogs are all beef, but it sounds like this beer is up for anything. Even harissa? I slathered some on my bun along with  some of the excellent Trader Joe’s Dijon and then sprinkled on some relish and raw onions because, after all, this was a hot dog.

The pairing worked pretty well. The affinity was mostly due to the beer’s carbonation’s ability to break through the spicy harissa. I also thought the smokiness of the hotdogs was pleasant when contrasted with the slight fruitiness of the ale. I was pretty surprised after finishing my hot dog that as I was drinking the last of my beer I noticed a very strong taste of licorice. I’m not sure if it would have helped the hot dog at all but I was excited to be able to actually identify this very specific flavor on the beer.

Whenever I buy and trim a big ol’ beef chuck roast to make stew,  I am left with big ol’ pile of this:

So what to do with all that fat and gristle?  Throw it out? NO! That’s my fat and gristle! I paid for it! And in these troubled economic times, I need every I you can get. No, the only answer to a big pile of beef fat is to render it.

The first step is to chop it into smaller pieces. When I did this I just used a knife to roughly chop the fat as is, but I would suggest a different method: put the meat in the freezer for a half hour or so to stiffen it up and then chop it, preferably with a food processor. The finer you chop the fat, the more liquid fat you’ll be able to render out.

That’s right, liquid fat. The chopped fat goes in a small saucepan with a little bit of water, over low heat. And then you go do something else, enjoying your brilliant economy and the wonderful beefy odors wafting about your house. This is meat potpourri at its finest.

After a few hours, it will start to look like this:

It’s done once the bits of meat are crispy and brown. In the pork fat rendering world these are known as cracklins. You can eat one once they’ve cooled; I am afraid to say that they are pretty delicious and guarantee an almost instant heart attack.

But enough about the crispy bits, what about that sweet golden fat? Strain/filter it to get rid of as many impurities as possible. I first poured the fat through a mesh strainer to remove the big meat chunks then decanted the fat off of the remaining small flecks of beef. The fat will solidify at room temperature or after a few minutes in the fridge.

And there you have it, beef suet! What to do with the stuff? Basically, you can use it like butter or shortening, or any other fat for that matter. I used some of it to brown the beef chunks for my stew (beef browned in its own fat is a beautiful thing) and the rest I cut into pie dough, which I used to make pasties with the leftover beef stew. And thus the circle of life was complete.

Making crackers is frustrating. In fact, making anything with a rolling pin is pretty damn vexing, but crackers especially so. Good crackers require two things: really thin dough and perfectly uniform dough. The thinness helps make crackers crispy, rather than chewy or, worse, brick-like (tooth-shattering). The uniformity of the dough is related: thin crackers will burn to a cinder while their thick brethren are slowly baking into breadish mediocrity. If there’s any saving grace to bad crackers its that you didn’t spend much time making them, but that’s hardly a consolation.

I am fairly experienced with rolling pins since I make a lot of flattened breads, but  I have never liked using them. It seems like my pin is always getting stuck to the dough, tearing it and ruining my shape. I also find it difficult to roll to a consistent thickness, especially when rolling very thin. I know you can buy little rings to attach to the end of your rolling pin that help control thickness but they sound like more trouble than they’re worth. And why use a rolling pin at all, when we have our friend, Signore Norpro:

Pasta has many of the same requirements as crackers in terms of shaping, so a pasta machine is a natural for making crackers. My working dough recipe is the Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, consisting of:

• 6 3/4 oz AP Flour
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 t instant yeast
• 1 T honey (I am just reporting this for accuracy’s sake; I omitted the honey)
• 1 T veg oil
• 3-4 oz water

Very simple. After all, it’s just bread! To make the dough, you proceed as you might imagine, mixing all the ingredients and kneading until the texture is right. Then let the dough rest so the gluten can relax. And you can relax too.

After an hour or less of resting I used my handy-dandy pasta machine to lay down a silkysmooth sheet.

I then divided each sheet into large rectangles then covered them with toppings before sliding them onto my pizza stone in a 400° oven. A lesson I learned with the first batch was that you have to remember to dock the dough (prick it all over with a fork), lest you get this:

Not that puffy crackers are a bad thing, but a one-ply cracker is almost too thin. For the next batches I almost always remembered to dock, whick gave a much more uniformly flat look.

Still pretty big sheets. To actually eat them, I used a knife to break the crackers into chaotic shards. I ended up with quite a few varieties. Here’s a family photo:

Top row from left to right: Vindaloo, Sea Salt, Chili Powder, Aleppo Pepper. Bottom row: seeds,  sesame-soy, garlic-dill.

Besides the lesson about docking above, I learned two things about dealing with toppings. For these crackers I rolled out the dough unflavored and then sprinkled the toppings on before baking. This resulted in toppings that weren’t very well integrated into the dough. In the case of the seeded cracker this meant my carefully placed caraway, poppy, nigella, and sesame seeds almost all rolled off the cracker during the cracking process, never to be tasted and enjoyed. Next time I will try to integrate the flavorings into the dough before rolling.

The other lesson is one about salt: you need a lot of it. Salt is the reason we can taste other flavors; in this batch of crackers the most flavorful ones were dill-garlic, loaded with garlic salt, and the soy sesame, soy sauce having plenty of sodium. The vindaloo and chili-pepper crackers had very subtle flavors since I failed to add salt with the spices.

I am excited to make crackers again. The pasta machine really took the effort out of rolling them, and they can be thrown together very quickly as a result of not really needing to rise. I have a lot of ideas for other flavorings to try, especially if the flavorings can be integrated into the dough. I also want to play with other flours and incorporate some whole grains.