Brats & Beer

I was catching up on some periodical reading this morning, looking through this month’s Playboy. The October issue featured the Big 10 and I came upon a blurb that included a tailgating recipe for a beer sauce for bratwursts inspired by Wisconsin’s love of sausages. The recipe itself comes from Bratwurst Pages, a Wisconsin-centric food website. Their two pieces of advice for enjoying bratwurst to the fullest are 1) use Sheboygan hard rolls, and 2) “never, ever defile them with yellow mustard.”

From the beginning, though, there are three steps to this method — simmering, grilling, and holding. Playboy leaves out the grilling and simmering part, and only lists the sauce recipe, which is referred to as a holding sauce. So first read his specific directions on what to do before the sauce comes into play.

The holding sauce recipe is enough for ten bratwursts and sounds pretty tasty to me. Here is the BratwurstPages Savory Beer Sauce:

For 10 brats, put the following ingredients in a pot:

• 2-14.5 ounce cans stewed tomatoes
• 2 bottles or cans beer
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 green pepper, chopped
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

Mix ingredients and bring to a simmer. Hold grilled brats in sauce until ready to eat. Do not let sauce boil.

Still, my favorite part is the way he ends the instructions. “In Wisconsin, nearly everyone drinks beer while grilling brats. Hey, it’s part of the culinary technique, so just do it.” Now that’s advice I can follow.