Raymond Beauchemin talks with Chef François Pellerin
Chef François Pellerin is his own R&D department.
Under a parasol on the St. Antoine St. terrasse his Old Montreal restaurant, Pellerin took a 1.45-litre bottle of Raftman and decanted the beer into a tulip-shaped glass. He picked up the glass, swirled the caramel-coloured contents around a bit, stuck his nose in the glass (no polite way to describe this), sipped, and swallowed.
That was the research part.
The development part was coming up with new ways to use Raftman – an amber ale from Unibroue made with smoked whisky malt and with 5.5 per cent alcohol content – in the meals he prepares at Fourquet Fourchette. Pellerin is the executive chef at both the restaurant in the Palais des Congrès, which opened last summer, and the original Fourquet Fourchette in Chambly. The restaurants serve only dishes prepared with Unibroue products, and the beers – most of them Belgian in style--take pride of place on the menu.
Pellerin is a go-to guy on marrying beer with food.
Having beer with different portions of one's dinner is not a new concept – Peter McAuslan headlined a Concordia University alumni association beer-tasting dinner in April 2004 and is holding another, in Toronto, in November; some of the top chefs and brewers in the United States pair up for such dinners; and I have promoted the idea in my book Salut! The Quebec Microbrewery Beer Cookbook. But for some reason, the marriage of food and beer has been slow to catch on in Quebec.
Not so in Europe. Pellerin remembered sitting outside a pub called Douze Apôtres opposite the cathedral in Strasbourg, France, last summer with a plate of pork sausage and strong mustard in front of him and a tall glass of a smoked beer to accompany it. "I was in heaven," he said.
This memory launched him into a reverie about Unibroue's 1837, a beer he described as provocative and expressive--a word he used several times to describe his favourite beers. From beer to beer, one finds "an expression, an infusion of spices. It could be anise, clove, coriander, agrûmes, cinnamon." He's hoping to soon make foie gras with 1837.
"Each recipe is different," he said. The trick is finding the right beer for the right dish, "a beer that can marry without crushing" the dish it is prepared with or accompanying.
Pellerin's one rule, if he has any rules, is not to let either the food or the beer overpower the other. Nor to let the beer's natural perfumes escape in the cooking. (I guess that's two rules.) For this reason, he adds beer toward the end of the cooking. "You lose 75 per cent of the beer in the cooking or boiling," he said. A beer's bitterness also might linger if it's cooked too long.
The Fourquet Fourchette menu was designed with these "rules" in mind. One finds French onion soup made with Blanche de Chambly, a cloudy wheat beer with hints of coriander; wild boar prosciutto served with a variety of mustards made with Unibroue beers; deer and blueberry sausage with Quelque Chose, a potent cherry beer; and smoked pork loin with a Maudite mushroom sauce.
At a recent dinner with a pair of friends, we gave Pellerin's menu a good sampling. The dressing for a mesclun salad was made with Blanche de Chambly, while Maudite was used to prepare a smoked salmon and scallop salad. Our salad course was served with Eau Bénite. As main dishes we had venison steak with Saskatoon berries made with Terrible, the brewer's highest alcohol beer at 10.5 per cent; smoked beer flank with a Trois Pistoles peppercorn sauce, and a mushroom risotto made with Eau Bénite. To accompany these dishes, the three of us shared a 1.45-litre bottle of Fin du Monde.
Preparing beer and accompanying food with beer is kind of a no-brainer for a restaurant so closely associated with a major Quebec brewer. But for André Dion, Unibroue's founder who developed Fourquet Fourchette, the relationship goes deeper than that, according to Pellerin. It's a matter of history. Each of Unibroue's beers has a tie to Quebec heritage, whether it's the courreurs de bois in Maudite, or La Bolduc, named in honour of the Gaspésienne singer.
The restaurant's menu reflects that heritage, too. There's a complete Amerindian menu – all made with beer, though historically, Indians here made infusions, not fermented beverages. "Lots of things we're doing today (in the restaurant) were Amerindian. The food is very simple, nutritious, not gastronomic," Pellerin said. "This is part of a heritage we must continue to maintain and develop." So the autochthon dishes are a new twist on an authentic base, like atik-wiiass, a roast of caribou with wild tea and a Raftman sauce.
The rest of the menu relies on game, fish and seafood, and Quebec-grown, naturally fed chicken and beef. The chickens aren't fed animal products and the calves are fed Unibroue's dregs. "The calves want to eat it all the time," Pellerin said, with a laugh, before finishing his Raftman.
Marinated Deer Brochette à la Trois Pistoles
Serves one (5 to 6 ounces of meat per person)
Chef Pellerin's original recipe called for Terrible, another Unibroue beer but less widely available than Trois Pistoles, a dark beer of 9 per cent alcohol.
5 to 6 ounces (150 grams) deer meat, in cubes
½ cup (125 mL) Trois Pistoles
½ cup (125 mL) vegetable oil
1 teaspoon (5 mL) each of fresh thyme, whole peppercorns, rosemary
5 bay leaves
Juice of one lemon
Green and red sweet peppers, onions (in cubes for skewing)
Sea salt
Marinate the meat in beer, oil, spices and lemon juice for at least one hour in the refrigerator.
Skew the meat, peppers and onions (or whatever other vegetables you would like on your brochette), alternating between meat and vegetables. Sprinkle with salt to taste.
Cook on the grill to desired level of doneness.
Serve on a bed of rice and steamed root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, turnips) and roasted squash.
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