Apricot Sweet Chili Sauce : Dry Dock Brewing Collaboration

My lovely friends over at Dry Dock Brewing are preparing for the Super Bowl and they wanted to cook with beer. Luckily for me, they make so many amazing brews so it was easy to find one to incorporate into food: I went with the gold medal winning Apricot Blonde. To come up with a recipe, I figured out what a Dry Dock brewer craves for football munchies and this is what Doug Hyndman had to say:

“I certainly am a football watching fool. Wings and pizza are always a good fit with football. I’m also a big fan of bacon-wrapped jalapeños, and fried cheese curds would be sweet. Bison chile with habaneros…”

Doug, I’m sorry I won’t be cooking everything you want, but you will see some Doug-inspired recipes in the future. For now, I hope this recipe for Apricot Sweet Chili Sauce will suffice.

As for the Super Bowl, I don’t care who wins as long as its not the Patriots.

Ingredients:

2 cans of Apricot Blonde by Dry Dock Brewing Company

2 fresno peppers

4 garlic cloves

2 tbsp corn starch

¼ cup white sugar

¼ tsp powdered ginger

½ tsp very hot crushed red pepper

Directions:

Grab a medium-large pot and set the stove to high. Pour in the cans of Apricot Blonde and bring to a boil. Word of warning: do NOT walk away! When you bring beer to a boil, it tends to get really foamy and overflow. Don’t learn the hard way (like I do almost every single time).

Once the liquid has come to a rolling boil, you can lower the heat and reduce the liquid by about half. A can of beer equals a cup and half of liquid. In the end, you would ideally have less than one and a half cups from both of the cans. It takes somewhere around 25 minutes for this to happen. While the Blonde is reducing, cut the peppers into very small pieces and either mince or press the garlic cloves. Hopefully you’ve finished this about 10 minutes into the boil, so go ahead and toss the ingredients into the pot along with the ginger and crushed red pepper.

Around minute 20 or whenever it looks like you only have 2-5 minutes left, add the sugar and stir.

In a little side dish, combine the corn starch with just enough cold water to dissolve it. If you toss it right into the hot pot, it will clump up and be scary so don’t do that. When the beer is finished reducing and the corn starch is ready to go in, remove the pot from the heat and add the corn starch. Stir just enough to incorporate the corn starch and then allow the apricot-chili sauce to cool enough to work with before coating anything with it.