Beer & Food Pairing: BBQ Beef Pizza

Beer and pizza. One of life’s great food pleasures.

Yes you can pick up the phone and have it delivered, or dig out that pepperoni pizza that’s been lying in the freezer for weeks, but we prefer to take the time to make our own creation. It’s not as much work as you might think, tastes great and you get that sense of achievement when you take it out of the oven.

This recipe is perfect for using left over beef from a Sunday roast, and is great with any red meat. If you are using left overs from the roast beef keep 100ml of the cooking juices, more on that later.

The sweetness of the sauce and caramelized onions means it pairs amazingly well with our PASSifyoucan Pale Ale.

Pizza Dough

It all starts with the dough and there are lots of recipes out there which pretty much have all the same ingredients and method. Check out out our Handsome Jack pizza dough recipe for a dough with a little bit of hoppy goodness!

BBQ Sauce 

We’re going with a BBQ sauce rather than the classic tomato sauce as it works so well with the toppings and is a far cry from the overly sweet BBQs sauces that comes with take-out pizzas. We got this recipe from the Saturday Pizzas book from the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

Ingredients (Makes 240 ml)

220ml tomato ketchup

100ml water (Tip: Keep the beef cooking juices and use instead of the water for extra flavour!)

1 tbsp dark brown sugar

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tsp red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp paprika

1/4 tsp mustard powder / dijon mustard

Pinch of salt & pepper

Method

Put all the ingredients into a small saucepan and bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and allow to cool. That’s it!

Toppings

1 bag Mozzarella

120g Sun-dried tomatoes

120g Shredded spinach

2 red onions for the caramelized onions

Shredded beef

Method

Slice the onions. Heat a pan on medium high heat, add a little butter. Add the sliced onions and stir to coat them with the melted butter. Reduce the heat to low, cover and cook slowly for a minimum of 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

When the pizza bases are rolled out and ready use a ladle or a big spoon to pour the BBQ sauce onto the middle of the base and spread it around with the back of the ladle or spoon. You only want a thin layer of sauce!

Spread a big handful of the mozzarella evenly on top of the base. Scatter the shredded beef, shredded spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and caramelized onions on top.

Put the pizzas into a preheated oven, 150 degrees/ gas mark 2 and cook for 7 to 10 minutes. The bottom and crust should be cooked through.

Take out of the oven, let rest for a minute, slice up and enjoy!