The beer and now

Fried beer's the latest culinary offering. What next? Kalhua-soaked kathi kabab?

A nip down to the pub or nearest watering hole for a quick pint after a hard day's work is customary for many of you. For here, there are no surprises, a pint you ask for and a pint you get. But trust chefs with too much imagination and too much time on their hands to make your beer that much more difficult to down, froth and all. A Texan chef, an oxymoron if there ever was one, has decided that sipping the good stuff from a mug is not good enough. So he has actually stuffed beer into a salty pretzel and deep-fried it. The result is apparently that when you bite into the pretzel, you get a squish of warm beer and salty dough, a combination that according to the chef, is fit for the gods.

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We say let the gods have it, give us our daily pint without any such embellishment. Imagine going to so much trouble to wet our beak every day. In the old days, when things were simple and so were we, we just wolfed down the pretzel alongside a nice Guinness or whatever beer caught your fancy. Whatever next? Bordeaux in your seekh kabab? Don't laugh but you might just be enticed to buy a kebab or two on the promise that when you bite into it, you may find a vintage wine dribbling down your chin. As you may have gathered from our columns, we are plain meat and potatoes people. So we don't want any surprises with our food, and please give us our libations in glasses.

A steak should be a steak and no surprises except a bit of blood dribbling out if you fancy it rare. But to see a stream of Chateau Lafite trickling out wouldn't do it for us. But unfortunately, we are in a minority. As gastronomy grows by molecules and unnatural fillings, be sure that many more inventions await you. Perhaps we could do our bit for this ourselves. We could try and honey-coat our editorials so that you could ingest our words of wisdom after you've read them. Meanwhile, we are off to lay our lives down in the line of duty and try a Courvoisier-infused chana bhatura.