Beer Snacks - Pairing Beer and Food with Dinner By Ben

Originally published in Ferment issue 116 — Balkans

I can’t remember the last time I didn’t use a Ben Lippett cookery tip in the kitchen. Since he started Dinner By Ben, his cookery Instagram account that now has more than 570,000 followers, his recipes have become internet lore — his steak frites video that features his own take on that green L’Entrecote sauce is the stuff of home cookery legend. It’s his newsletter How I Cook that really captured my attention though, thanks to a series of recipes he catchily named “Beer Snacks”. Now that’s something I can get behind.

What makes a good beer snack? There’s something sneakily decadent about cooking up something specifically to nibble on while you sip your beer, and if you’re feeling nimble-fingered, Ben’s got some stuffed and breaded olives that are peng in the extreme. However, sometimes it’s more about the beer than the food. Sometimes you’ve got to let that lager sing.

“When I started the series I was always cooking things that I like to eat on holiday, because you know what they say, the best beer you can drink is your first beer on holiday,” Ben says. “I firmly believe that’s the best beer you can have — and I think my beer snacks are mostly Spanish-leaning as a result, if I look at them all lined up.”

The sunny side of Ben’s Beer Snacks kitchen appears often, in ingredients like anchovies, tomatoes, and bright green herbs. Some of the recipes might require a trip to Budgens rather than bossman’s corner shop, but he insists there doesn’t need to be anything complex about pairing beer with food.

“I don’t go into food pairing that hard,” he admits. “If you’re drinking and eating it’s a social activity, you’re not really sitting there analysing the notes of the beer and the specific 14 herbs and spices in the fried chicken, you know what I mean?”

“I’m looking for the basic instinct I guess — salty, fatty, and a little unbalanced so I need the beer to be the last piece of the puzzle… that kind-of crisp, refreshing, cleansing element.”

Ben Lippett’s career in the kitchen has taken him all over the world, cheffing at Cin Cin and 64 Degrees in Brighton, Marion Wine Bar in Melbourne, Donna Brooklyn, and Michelin-starred Orasay in London (now relaunched by chef-owner Jackson Boxer as Dove.) If you’ve noticed how swiftly he can butcher a chicken carcass, that’s probably owing to his stint as an actual butcher during lockdown.

“It’s a fascinating thing to do,” he says, “But it got a bit repetitive and honestly, I wanted to go back to cooking.” So that’s what he did, founding his own food company, Dr. Sting’s Hot Honey, launching his Instagram account in earnest, and joining MOB Kitchen, the online recipe archive and content creation company, until leaving to become a freewheeling online chef in his own right.

Many of Ben’s recipes feature pickles, ferments and stocks he’s made himself, and his ubiquitous hot honey. He loves bold flavours with cheffy touches, and tries to bring that to every beer snack he makes.

“I like things that are quite spicy, I made some fish sauce wings that were red hot and they were absolutely delicious.”

“You really aren’t after something like a little poached langoustine in a broth — I want something fried and I want it now, and I want it covered in something sharp and spicy and delicious.”

As a beer fan, it probably comes as no surprise that Ben has collaborated with a brewery to make his own beer. Hand Brewery’s Wiener Dawg Vienna Lager is exactly the beer you’d expect him to brew — a crisp, easy to drink lager made for sunny days and back garden barbecues.

“I had a real funky beer phase when I was in university,” he says, “And I have more of a simple taste now for a really kind-of clean, clear, crisp, classic style of lager.”

Would he brew another lager given the chance?

“It’s a bit ‘man in London enjoys pale ale’ but I really do love them, so I’d probably do one of those. And I love using fruit in beer, it’s utterly delicious.”

“My beer of 2024 was a fruit sour made by Arundel Brewery, a sour called Chef’s Tears made in collaboration with one of my old head chefs, Michael Notman-Watt, who shed a little tear on Masterchef: The Professionals last year,” he says. “It’s 6%, it’s a plum and blackberry sour full of windfall plums he collected. It’s rich and it has an amazing texture but it has this sour, sharp character. I bought loads of them.”

Part of what makes Ben’s recipes so appealing is his practical attitude towards cookery. In a world of TV chefs trying to show you how easy and quick cooking can be by using shortcuts, Ben’s attitude is that once you learn a skill, it’s quicker to use it than avoid it. He often goes back to basics without making a big deal about it, showing how to perfectly sear a steak or dice an onion in-between talking about flavours and discussing how to make a good sauce. I’ve said many times that I’ve lost count of how many of his recipes I’ve successfully passed off as my own to friends around the dinner table, and that’s the beauty of his dishes and snacks — they really do feel like home cooking, but elevated.

“It’s all about levelling up your home cooking and broadening your horizons,” he says. “I like to focus on technique-driven cookery, and understanding the hows and whys of the kitchen and ingredients. So sure, you can learn how to make a great bowl of pasta, but from that you also know how to make a great ragu, and then take those skills and apply them to different recipes.”

“Hopefully it leaves people with a greater understanding of their kitchen and their potential and just boosts their confidence.”

A great example of this sort of instructional/educational/entertaining content is his most popular recipe, a short ribs and polenta dish. Packed with technique but somehow still managing to appear easy to recreate at home, I admit I’ve watched it more than once.

“It’s just very simple, glazed short rib seared then poached in red wine. The sauce is reduced with balsamic vinegar and prunes so it becomes this amazing sticky glaze, and then you coat the ribs and add pickled shallots and a horseradish salsa verde. It’s just packed with a bunch of little cheffy moves that are actually like dead easy to do at home. And people are still cooking it, every now and again I get a little picture through which always makes me smile.”

As much as Ben enjoys creating his own beer snacks, there aren’t many places out there doing beer and food pairing well — and it’s a trend we’ve been claiming would come around every year since 2010. Why aren’t pubs and restaurants jumping on board?

“It’s something that’s so rare but has so much potential,” he says. “There’s a real gap in the market. Maybe some people are waiting for me to fill it — I’m not! I’m not in the restaurant game anymore.”

“But I mean, if a pub offers a really good scotch egg, you’re already halfway there. And show me a packet of scampi fries that didn’t automatically go with a beer.”

Ben’s ultimate beer snack might be easier to find though, especially if you’re partial to the odd tap room food truck.

“The ultimate beer snack — it changes all the time, but right now, I’ll just say a street taco. It’s quick, it’s cheap, it’s achingly simple. It’s a corn tortilla topped with some kind of meat, diced onions, coriander, salsa; you eat it in two bites, you sip your beer; it’s pretty perfect. And you know, they come in all shapes and sizes but you can put them all under this comfy umbrella of street tacos.”

And what do you pair a taco with?

“A Michelada is just pretty much a perfect pint isn’t it? Jesus. It’s SO GOOD. It’s about the only time you can get away with filling a glass with ice then pouring beer in it. Amazing. Micheladas are great.”

Find Ben Lippett’s newsletter How I Cook on Substack.

Ben’s first book “How I Cook” is out in September.