Chef James Simpkins is the author of the book, which is organized into not just regions of the United States but also by varieties of Allagash beer with which to pair each recipe. Simpkins is a professional chef and gastronome living with his wife, Sheli, in San Rafael, Calif. He has professional experience in classical and modern cuisine and holds a graduate degree in food culture and literature. He teamed up with Seacoast photographer and book publisher Brian Smestad with Blue Tree in Portsmouth to create a cookbook that will teach you a bit about beer styles, all while showing off how beer pairs perfectly with our American regional cuisine. Simpkins is keenly interested in our regional cuisines and beer.

“I’m a Ph.D., dropout in American history and I started to see the historical fabric woven through everything American related to food. We occasionally latch on to something from another country like apple pie—that’s German. And Rob Tod (Allagash Brewing Company owner) has been brewing Belgian beer but his beers are very much American.”

It was while at a party on the Seacoast that Simpkins came up with the idea to pair recipes with the great brews of Allagash in Portland, Maine.

“I was at a barn party and the Smuttynose Brewery crew was there. I heard about Brian Smestad and ran into him late at night and we talked about a collaboration. I got in with Allagash and that started it. Rob (Tod) has this funny, good-natured personality. He does what he knows and with humility. It’s the nature of Belgian beer to work well with food. The Belgians used beer in food but I thought about who we were writing for—people who love Allagash beer or any great beer—and who’s going to put that beer in food? It had to be about pairing. Rob’s beers are so good.”

The book begins with a table of contents divided into regions, but each chapter is all about a specific brew, beginning with Allagash’s White, an unfiltered wheat beer, then on to their Dubbel, Tripel, and seven more brews from the Allagash portfolio. It’s easy to create a full tasting dinner right in your home using this book, because one can choose soups, appetizers, entrees and desserts by region, beer or both.

“Regional is the fabric of American eating,” says Simpkins. “I Googled ‘American cuisine’ and I got 400 or 500 hits. I dared myself to go to page 7 and I found it absolutely fascinating. I found a James Beard Foundation survey about what regional cuisine is and I could explore the history of Belgium in American food. The Irish and Italians were hated, but the Belgians got a pass.”

Regions and recipes include New England with dishes like herb roasted leg of lamb paired with Dubbel, Mid-Atlantic with ginger plum cake paired with Victoria, brewed with barley and white wine grapes. Also covered is the South, with dishes like Caribbean grouper with spinach salad paired with Curieux, aged in Bourbon barrels and The Heartland with recipes for cottage pie paired with Interlude and a lemon-balsamic pear salad with Dubbel. The West is included as well with dishes like chicken sausage pizza or pad thai, reflecting the fusion nature of both population and cuisine. Each recipe discusses how the food relates to the beer pairing and a bit of history as well as a profile about the brews.

“It took a lot of work to do the recipes, the thinking and the drinking,” says Simpkins. “I’m not a big drinker so toward the end it was harder! We did a lot of the cooking in the home of Dave Pelletier (local restaurateur and co-owner of Margarita’s restaurants) and then the photo shoots. We had to execute the dishes at both the recipe level to test them but also at the visual level.”

And it’s this visual level that is a striking part of the book. The beautiful photography from Smestad includes not just the dishes themselves, but also the creative beer labels and visually striking glimpses into the brewing process.

“Allagash beers are so good and some are more developed than others for pairing with food. And as Rob says in the intro, he saw food really helping people to understand his beers.””

Review written by RACHEL FORREST
Portsmouth Herald, January 24, 2013

Review written by BEN KEENE
Village Voice, November 21, 2012

Part of the flavor of a beer is brought on from the fermentation process—yeast eating sugars and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide. A pretty simple process, but if combined with a ferociously good brew recipe and professional grade know-how it can produce stunning results, like the Allagash Dubbel. Likewise, grilled meats get their distinctive flavor from the browning of exposed areas, a chemical process known as the Maillard reaction. Essentially, it’s an alchemical dance between proteins and, again, sugars, quite literally creating new flavors on the spot.

So beer and meat both have natural chemical processes involved with the transformation of sugars to make them taste awesome . . . which is awesome.

The role that sugars play in the art and science of flavor may also have something to do with why the hands-down favorite Dubbel pairing for the book’s creative team was the Chocolate Spice Cookies. Rich chocolate and cocoa, a slight spice note, and just the right amount of sugar all hand us reaching for a third cookie . . . or was it a fifth?

A quick look at how sugars work in developing flavors also lends itself to understanding the wide-ranging options for beer pairings that are possible with great foods. Grilled meats, chocolate cookies, and beer sound incredibly different, but a closer look allows us to appreciate how flexible craft beer is around the table. I recommend “Dubbel”-ing your next recipe.

Allagash Brewing Company wanted to offer another style of beer which would complement the White. Rob Tod stayed true to traditional Belgian styles and the brewery developed their own dubbel. The result was a rich, luscious, hazy dark red with an extremely long and well-balanced finish. You will find an unusual cacao-chocolate luster in the background of this complex flavor palate, featuring malt, caramel and toasted nuts. The hop content and 7% ABV help create a clean, dry finish that adds to the allure of the beer.

Philadelphia. Pub & Kitchen . www.thepubandkitchen.com

Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 7:00 to 9:00 PM
1946 Lombard Street Philadelphia, PA 19146

Washington DC. ChurchKey . www.churchkeydc.com

Wednesday, November 14, 2012, 6:30 to 8:30 PM
1337 14th Street NW, Washington, District of Columbia 20005

A couple of years later, in the midst of a career crisis, I decided that I should brew beer at Allagash. I called up and asked if they were hiring. The woman I spoke with said no, but I should come in and fill out an application “just in case”. I did, and long story short, within a month I was learning to brew Allagash White.

I have been at Allagash for over nine years now and have had a few different jobs here. My current job is communications/marketing manager. It is one of my duties to review projects and ideas that come to us from various sources. When Brian from Blue Tree pitched this cookbook project, I was really excited about it. All of us at Allagash are passionate about beer and food, Brian and James (the chef) really seem to get that. The finished product is something I am really proud of.

As James was working on the recipes, it came up that he was including a flatbread pizza. Beer and pizza. I think that will be the first thing I make.

Allagash Black, a stout created to mimic the drier Belgian version, originated from the mind of brewer Dee Dee Germain. At the time, Germain was going through a stout/dark beer phase and wanted to create a Belgian style stout; but “that didn’t seem to be a real thing” as they were remarkably difficult to find. After discovering a Belgian specimen at a local beer store, Germain convinced the Allagash team that they needed to attempt it. They produced a recipe that was deemed worthy and it has been a popular “go to” beer in the Allagash line ever since.

A Note on the History of Stout Beers

A stout falls into the warm-fermented category of beer, characterized by a dark color (usually deep brown-black) and a deep roasted character. It is often described as reminiscent of dark chocolate or coffee. These flavors come about through the use of roasted grains and usually overshadow any presence of hops. American versions, however, can have a more pronounced hop character than their English cousins and originators of the style.

Stouts have been around since the seventeenth century, growing up alongside and intertwined with the porter, however, a “stout” was not always a dark beer, but rather a strong one, the association of the darker color not becoming de rigeur until the nineteenth century. As the stout began to be popular in other locales, different interpretations emerged, such as Belgian-style stouts, which are produced in either a sweeter or drier style with an ABV range of 4–8%.

View GABF Floorplan

Book Signing Schedule

The book signings take place in the event bookstore and the times for Allagash: The Cookbook are:

Thursday

October 11, 2012, 6:00-7:00
James Simpkins, Rob Tod, and Brian Smestad

Friday

October 12, 2012, 7:00-8:00
James Simpkins, Rob Tod, and Brian Smestad

Saturday

October 13, 2012 (two signings)
1:30-2:30
James Simpkins, Rob Tod, and Brian Smestad

6:00-7:00
James Simpkins and Brian Smestad

Allagash: The Cookbook is being created by Blue Tree and The Branch Creative with Brian Smestad, CEO of Blue Tree, as the photographer. The original seed for the book was planted when Simpkins was in Portland, going to bars and drinking some Allagash beer while checking out the local food culture. He decided he wanted to do a beer dinner with Allagash beers, so he gave the brewer a call. “That led to a really funny exchange,” Simpkins said. “I wanted to invite the Allagash workers over for a dinner, and they said, ‘So you want to buy some beer?’ And I said, ‘No, I want you to give me the beer.’” Eventually, he was transferred to Dee Dee Germain, communications director at Allagash, and they started putting the dinner together—although a change in direction at the Quimby Colony meant the dinner never took place.

The idea behind the book is to create five different recipes for 10 different Allagash beers. Each recipe is based on what Simpkins admits is an arbitrary description of five different regions of the country: New England, the mid-Atlantic, the South, the Heartland and the West Coast, which includes the Southwest. “Because the country is so large, it helps to break it down into regions,” Simpkins said. The first challenge of the book was to taste all of the beers—usually with a friend—and write down what he thought the flavors were in each beer, and then compare his notes with the descriptions he found on the Allagash website. “There was a lot of agreement, probably about 90 percent,” he said. Simpkins said some of the recipes are traditional, and some buck the tradition. He tries to match the flavors of the beer and the food in some recipes, while in others, he tries to contrast the flavors of the beer and the food.

“One of my favorite recipes is the lobster roll, very traditional here in New England,” he said. “Everyone was considering how we could pair this with the Allagash Tripel.” The Tripel is a long-finishing beer with flavors of banana, toasted walnuts and some tropical fruit. Everyone agreed right away that the lobster roll should be made with mayonnaise rather than butter, and Simpkins started to think of passion fruit, which is hard to get, so he switched to mangos, which are easier to find. “So we ended up making a tropical lobster roll with mangos that blended right in with the Tripel,” he said.

For the Allagash White, Simpkins created some New England crab cakes with spicy note that brought out the coriander flavor present in the beer. With Victoria, a beer made with an addition of white wine, Simpkins went with a contrast for one region—spicy smoked pork with grits. “It’s yin and yang, but it works,” he said. “The beer is fairly light, but it stands up to the spicy and hearty foods. The quality of the Allagash beer allows us to do a lot of different things with it.” Simpkins said a lot of the dishes are fairly simple because they wanted them to be dishes that people could make at the end of a busy day and have a good beer to go with them.

In announcing the cookbook, Tod said, “Creating this cookbook allows us to take our passion for beer and food to the next level. Our hope for this project is that it not only exposes the infinite possibilities for pairing beer and food, but also allows us to expand our own vision of what that is and to share it.” Simpkins said he thinks about food the same way Tod thinks about beer, and that allowed them to work well together. “It is really a marriage of our ideas about food and culture,” Simpkins said.”

Interview written by TOM ATWELL
Portland Press Herald, May 2, 2012

I don’t think about what I do as “being a chef”, however. To me that always refers to the person in charge of a restaurant. Closer to the truth, I design and produce experience with food, much like a playwright crafts their show. There’s a point to it, it isn’t mindless. And it’s endlessly fascinating to me to see that if the context of the experience changes (i.e., the type of event, or time of day) the experience of the food changes as a result. It’s humbling, beautiful, and puts the pressure on. No one likes crappy food, especially if they’re paying to have you make it for them or putting your name on their cookbook.

To sum up: It’s a HUGE deal to cook for someone and that’s why I place a high value on cooking. It’s high pressure, intimate, personal, and the risk-reward is really high; as happy as people are when they’re eating  great food, they’re bummed when it’s not up to their expectations. And that’s my job—meet and exceed my clients’ expectations.

I think that as soon as cooking isn’t about service, it’s just arbitrary, ephemeral art, like a play performed in an empty theater. Interesting, perhaps, but never great.

Allagash: The Cookbook by Chef James B. Simpkins

For the last decade, Allagash Brewing Company has sponsored a cooking contest at ICE as a way to further an awareness of both pairing and cooking fine food with specialty brews like those from Allagash. The winning recipe is awarded a scholarship by Allagash owner, Rob Tod, which assists students with their culinary education and training.