Cooking with Beer: Spinach & Artichoke Dip

For this post on cooking with beer I will go over a spinach and artichoke dip made with Bell’s Amber Ale. The recipe we followed was based off of this recipe from The Global Gourmet.

The ingredients listed were supposed to make 4 cups of dip, but since there were only two of us we decided to halve the recipe:

6 14-ounce cans, drained, artichoke hearts
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 tablespoon minced lemon zest
1/2 tablespoon cracked black pepper
Several drops hot pepper sauce
4 ounces light cream cheese (neufchatel)
1 egg white
1/4 cup plain bread crumbs (we used Panko)
1/2 cup amber ale (we used a tasty Bell’s Amber)
1/2 cup frozen spinach, thawed and drained
Preheat the over to 350F

Now I was skeptical looking at the recipe that it would only make 2 cups of dip, but proceeded anyway. The next step was to add everything to a food processor and mix until combined. Well, we tried that, but it wouldn’t all fit into the food processor.

Now we knew this was going to make way too much dip, but forged on anyway. We had to blend this portion of the ingredients in order to make room for the rest, but we eventually able to get everything combined and into a dip-like consistency. Next we filled a 9-inch pie plate and baked it for 30 minutes like the directions said but this was clearly not long enough so we kept adding time (it ended up being close to an hour) until it was bubbling and slightly brown on the top.

Once the dip cooled we tried it with some tortilla chips, and it was good, but not great. The spinach was a great addition and the dip had a wonderful artichoke flavor, but the cheese did not shine through and there was no hints of the beer. If I were to try this again I would decrease the amounts of ingredients even more and probably add more cheese, something stringy-maybe mozzarella.