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Cooking with Gose: Fruit Salad with Goat Cheese

A splash of traditional Leipziger-style gose adds a bright yet earthy quality to this simple preparation for a refreshing, sweet-and-salty fruit salad. Why put the fruit in the beer when you can put the beer in the fruit?

Photo: Christopher Cina
Photo: Christopher Cina

Gose Fruit Salad with Goat Cheese

Serves: 4

  • 1 cup (237 ml) seedless red grapes, halved
  • 1 cup (237 ml) strawberries, quartered
  • 1 cup (237 ml) blueberries
  • 2 cup (473 ml) watermelon, seeded and diced
  • ¼ cup (59 ml) gose
  • 2 Tbs (30 ml) toasted sliced almonds
  • 1 oz (28 g) goat cheese, crumbled
  • About 12 fresh tarragon leaves
  • Pinch sea salt

Combine the grapes, strawberries, blueberries, watermelon, and beer in a large bowl and toss well. Allow to marinate in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

Remove from the refrigerator and pour into a serving bowl. Garnish with the almonds, goat cheese, and tarragon and season with salt. Serve immediately.

Beer Tasting Notes: An excellent, balanced gose is greater than the sum of its parts—softly tart, never sour; an edge of compelling salinity, but never salty; and a subtle herbal accent that melds with the rest, unassuming. A great one quenches without raising any questions about the ingredients that went into it. Likewise, as the beer itself becomes an ingredient here, it’s a role player that helps to pull juicy, salty, nutty, and herbal elements together into a cohesive gestalt.

Beer Suggestions: Original Ritterguts Gose (Chemnitz, Germany), Bayerischer Bahnhof Original Leipziger Gose (Leipzig, Germany), Westbrook Gose (Mount Pleasant, South Carolina), or Anderson Valley the Kimmie, the Yink & the Holy Gose (Boonville, California).

Best in Beer 2022 (December-January 2023)
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