Hops are not just for beer. They are for cooking, too! If you like bitter flavors, here's how you can bring the aroma and bitter kick of hops to make even a cheap box of Mac & Cheese worth eating!

See that yellow right in the center hop cone? That's what hops are all about!That sticky resin that has heady aromas. It's bitter! But treated right, it adds a great kick to many foods!

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Hops Produce a Lot!

I grow a few hop plants. They produce a lot of hops! You can find a good tutorial on how to harvest and store hops right here on Steemit, in one of my earliest posts. I love the sound of hop cones tumbling into a basket! Gifs don't have sound, so watch my hop harvest video to hear that sweet swoosh!

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Using Hops

After my harvest, I have a lot of hops! I store them in one of my big chest freezers, packed into jars. That keeps the light, oxygen, and heat from breaking down the aromatics in the hops. These hops are great as a "dual-use whole-leaf hops" for homebrewing beer. But they are good in a lot of other ways, too. I'll be posting some of them as we go into hop harvest season, so stay tuned!

Hops are really bitter, but some have great flavors, too, like citrus or pine resin. In cooking with hops, the aim is to get those aromatics into the food, without overwhelming it with bitterness. The results will be bitter -- I'm not going to shy away from that. You can figure out whether you might like cooking with hops by comparing your food preferences in my post Bitter Flavors In Wild Plants - How Much Is Too Much?

Those flavors can make even cheap food taste good! My example here is a really cheap box of Macaroni and Cheese. I got it for 30 cents! I could show how to make Hop Mac & Cheese with some really good pasta and wonderful cheese - hops makes that good cooking even better. But my point is that hops can make this box mac & cheese really good, too!

You can see there's a lot of hops packed into that jar! Just a few plants can produce a lot of hops to use all year long! Making a simple box of mac & cheese is an easy way to try cooking with hops.

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Making Hop Mac & Cheese

It may seem like a natural way to use hops would be to toss them in the water in boiling the noodles. But boiling hops extracts all their bitter components. That's what the beer brewers do to counteract the sweet flavors of the malted grains. It makes for terrible, inedible noodles!

The trick is to steep the hops in oils or fats. In this case, it's the milk and butter for the mac & cheese sauce. I just use the amount of butter and milk it says on the box. But then I add 1 Tablespoon of my hops. I heat it on the stove, without boiling, just to melt the butter. Then I let it sit for 10 minutes. That's important! It gives time for the flavors to come out of the hops and mellows out the bitterness.

In the bottom row, compare the color of the hops before being heated (left) -- and after it all has been heated and left to sit for 10 minutes (right). That's the time to cook the noodles from the mac & cheese box.

After the flavors have transferred from the hops to the milk and butter, the hops need to be strained out. Now you can taste that liquid to get an idea of how bitter it is. Because homegrown hops can vary so much from plant to plant or year to year, cooking with hops requires tasting and adjustment. By adjusting how much liquid you add to the pink-orange mac & cheese flavor packet and cooked noodles, you can control the final flavor and bitterness to suit your tastes.

This macaroni and cheese doesn't look any different, but it sure packs a bitter kick, with fruity flavors from my homegrown hops! It really perks up the taste of this mac & cheese!

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Serving Up Hop Mac & Cheese with a Wild Salad

If you are someone who can eat too much mac & cheese, this hop mac & cheese is great - because the hop bitterness is wonderful in small doses, not an endless supply. Hop mac & cheese is a side dish, not a main dish. So I made a nice free homestead wild salad while my hops were steeping.

Can you tell what plants I have in my salad? Check the plant list at the end of this post to see which plants go with each number.

Hop mac & cheese is adult mac & cheese. Most kids are not going to like it! And you may not like it, either, if you don't like bitter flavors. Check this post to find out if you like Bitter Flavors In Wild Plants - How Much Is Too Much?. But if you like bitter greens, IPA beer, strong coffee, or dark chocolate, I bet you would like this hop mac & cheese.

That's a good meal! Wild salad, hop mac & cheese, homegrown tomatoes, and homegrown peach sorbet. Thank you, homestead -- and cheap box of mac & cheese!

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Plant List

1. Rose of Sharon - Hibiscus syriacus - flower petals
2. Chickweed - Stellaria media
3. Common Mallow - Malva neglecta - tender leaves
4. Borage - Borago officinalis - flowers
5. Lambs Quarter - Chenopodium album - leaves
6. Wood Sorrel - Oxalis spp. - leaves and flowers
7. Wild Field Mustard - Brassica rapa - flowers
8. Wild Armenian Blackberries - Rubus discolor - ripe berries
9. Redroot Pigweed Amaranth - Amaranthus retroflexus - young leaves

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What Do You Think?

• Have you ever eaten hops in food?
• Do you like the taste of hops in beer?
• Have you ever cooked with hops?
• Which would you like to see next -- Hop Tea or Hop Hot Chocolate?

Thanks for your support. I do try hard to make quality content for Steemit -- and you!

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** Haphazard Homestead **

*** foraging, gardening, nature, simple living close to the land ***

All content is 100% Haphazard Homestead! My YouTube channel: Haphazard Homestead