Cooking with beer: Shepherd’s Pie with London Porter

I’ve spent the summer blinkered by beer and food, whether it’s trying to come up with great combinations or using beer as an ingredient in different recipes. So when I get an email from Sainsbury’s seeing if I’d like to shoot a YouTube video for them, I thought I’d have a go at taking one of their Live Well for Less recipes and giving it my own beer tweak.

I cooked up a classic, simple Shepherd’s Pie and included some Fuller’s London Porter in the lamb mix. The beer is perfect for this: roasted, a little sweet, a bit chocolatey and there’s something wonderfully savoury about it when it gets cooked with meat and tomatoes. It gave a delicious extra depth into the dish and worked really well. Reunite the beer and pie and pour the Porter when you eat – it’s a great match.

For the recipe, go to the Sainsbury’s website. The only tweak I made was to forget the mint sauce and add about 200ml of porter, plus a teaspoon of sugar to balance any beer bitterness - this is a useful tip whenever you're cooking with beer and just a little bit of something sweet can help a lot.

Thanks to Nathan Nolan who shot the video and edited it (and let me wear his shirt because my grey jumper made me blend into the background!). He’s cool so you should check out his website, Mr Drink ‘N’ Eat.