snacks:
ice cream float
Sweet corn ice cream with cheddar beer. Yep, that's right: cheddar beer. It's better than I expected and it keeps getting better with age. The real gem here is finding a use for chive flower stems– their rigid cellulosity renders them inedible, but makes for fantastic straws.
corn krispies treat
Ethereally light and crisp freeze-dried corn kernels and chives, bound with buttery isomalt syrup. More like a sweet/savory popcorn ball. Eminently addictive.
funyun
OK, so it's really an onion ring. But it's kinda fun, and definitely 'yuniony' courtesy of chive blossoms, thinly sliced Vidalia onions and ground, dehydrated onions in the tempura batter. The batter gets an extra boost from cheddar beer. I thought of making an onion beer for this but even I wouldn't go there.
pixy stix
Remember these? The sweet/tart powdered candy-in-a-straw goes savory with freeze-dried corn, chive, and cheddar powders. The straw (cheddar water with Ultratex) is edible, too. Break it open, use it as a dry dip, sprinkle it on the float–or better yet–directly on the tongue.
Download recipe: Cheddar corn chive snacks
Playing with Fire and Water 
Very interesting… Except for the blossoms, these would make a great superbowl party.
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Very cool and sounds tasty too.
Sooo… would it be blatantly uncool to borrow this beer technique for my own evil purposes? ‘Cause I can think of a lot of uses for it.
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Good god Linda, this is spectacular. The beer method is definitely an eye opener, as is the gel->dehydrate method for making the pixy stix. I love the way you’ve recombined the same elements in different ways. Dang.
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I have a quick question if you don’t mind. When you make your beers (this one, the spruce and the peach leaf for example) is there a residual sweetness or does it all disappear during fermentation? I have a few ideas I’d like to try and some of them would be better on the sweet side. I suppose lactose would be an option if necessary.
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evil purposes?…I’m intrigued.
There is some residual sweetness from the added sugar, though most of it is consumed by the yeast to make carbon dioxide. You could increase the sugar but keep the gases in check by releasing them at least once a day.
Have fun with it and let me know how it turns out.
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Your kids must love you.
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So I did my first round of playing with your recipe. I’m dubbing it “chocolate stout”. I made a chocolate stock by heating chocolate, cocoa, vanilla bean and water, filtered it, dissolved in some sugar and a bit of salt, dumped it in a plastic bottle with the yeast and fermented it. It could use a bit of refining but it turned out much better than I actually expected so I’ll definitely play with it some more.
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I also made a chocolate beer– with Hersheys syrup and completely agree with your results.
Thanks for reporting back!
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