Need help! Cooking with mead

[Yenren]

Hi everyone, so I have a presentation on Wednesday morning that if successful will allow me to open a catering van in the car park of a busy highend shop. I need to tweek our menu to highlight local foods. Honey being a local food and I thought that bringing mead into the equation might bring a nice shine to the presentation. Here are some of the locally produced foods available to me beef, lamb, pork, fish as we are on the coast. I know substuting mead for wine is the main way to go but I would like to here some of your recipes, the simpler the better. Oh and desserts too,
Thanks

 

[Dadux]

Not an expert cook or anything but will throw some ideas.
You can do some mean desserts using fruit a microwave and some mead. You know the recipe wine-poached pears? very easy with mead. Also you can substitute pears with apples or do baked apples (I dont know how its called in english, sorry, im spanish) which is a recipe where you just take out the apples heart and put them in the oven with some whiskey/bourbon/coentrau and some sugar and cook them. Just substitute the liquor with mead, preferably a spiced one maybe a cinnamon one.
Apart from that, you mainly substitute wine for mead yes. You can use it in stews or stuff like that
You can also use honey and just to list some recipes the fried apples with honey (this is found in chinese restaurants mostly) or basically anything that uses french sauce (honey-mustard at a ratio between 1-1 to 1-2). I use it to do some nice burritos with some chicken and slow-fried onion, but i have seen it with french omelette in sandwiches and in other places. Honey and onions are always a win.
Think about different styles of mead. sweet vanilla or cinnamon (or even marshmallow if you ever done that, its delicious) mead can go great with desserts while some braggot/raisin or prune dry-ish melomel can go great with meat stews. Dry trads can go better with some other stuff such as any nearly dish with mushrooms or anywhere you would use white wine. And bochets can have a place too somewhere.
Edit: PS; The french sauce burrito is highly adaptable, you can change the chicken for pork or lamb and its usually a hit whenever and wherever i do it. If you are interested in a full recipe i can write it. Its also really simple and fast. But i dont know what type of foods you will be serving. You can substitute the burrito for a sandwich or any other bread. The desserts are usually done by other people with my mead but i can get you a full detailed recipe too if you want it. Altough those can be easily found in the internet i believe

 

[Yenren]

Thanks dadux that kick started the mind.

 

[caduseus]

Hi everyone, so I have a presentation on Wednesday morning that if successful will allow me to open a catering van in the car park of a busy highend shop. I need to tweek our menu to highlight local foods. Honey being a local food and I thought that bringing mead into the equation might bring a nice shine to the presentation. Here are some of the locally produced foods available to me beef, lamb, pork, fish as we are on the coast. I know substuting mead for wine is the main way to go but I would like to here some of your recipes, the simpler the better. Oh and desserts too,
Thanks

A few points:
1) use the Flavor Bible for combining flavors. For simple meads it is only what is compatible with honey but with melomels you want what is compatible with those fruits. Methyglyns have herbs so a great source for cooking. I made a methyglyn for a friend to use for the holidays.
2) Bochet has a caramel-like flavor that is great to have
3) On one of the gotmead podcasts they interviewed a meadmaker who is coming out with a book for pairing meads with certain foods. It was in the last 6months if you search the gotmead podcasts.

 

[Swn Gwyrdd]

I made some BBQ sauce by replacing vinegar in my recipe with mead. It turned out pretty decent to be fair, but it would've worked better with a sweeter mead to have a bit more of a honey flavour to it.

 

[Yenren]

Putting the final touches on the menus ideas here, mead has made a couple of appearances in the form of a house dressing, sweet gorse flower mead and mustard and a pork burger with star anais apple mead (cyser to you and me) sautéed apples. Now if I can find local honey we will be doing well, we had a very bad year here last year.
Wish me luck lads. I will let ye know tomorrow how I got on.

 

[Dadux]

Putting the final touches on the menus ideas here, mead has made a couple of appearances in the form of a house dressing, sweet gorse flower mead and mustard and a pork burger with star anais apple mead (cyser to you and me) sautéed apples. Now if I can find local honey we will be doing well, we had a very bad year here last year.
Wish me luck lads. I will let ye know tomorrow how I got on.

Sounds tasty! Good luck with the presentation

 

[Yenren]

So the meeting went well, that's the first hurdle over.

 

[GothDan]

It's really nice to add mead for barbecue , it's good to have a small shot when you have throat problem- don't drink too much. You can use it for any kind of meat. Really good stuff.

 

[stoneslab]

I made some BBQ sauce by replacing vinegar in my recipe with mead. It turned out pretty decent to be fair, but it would've worked better with a sweeter mead to have a bit more of a honey flavour to it.

that would be a nice idea, replacing the vinegar with mead. I'm gonna try this one