Smoked jollof rice and pu’erh tea

I not only had one of the best meals I’ve had this year at Ikoyi last week but some of the most fascinating drinks pairings.

Two were with tea - a dish of turbot, crab salad and tonnato which went brilliantly with the Ali Shan, High Mountain Oolong from Taiwan and - better still - a dish with smoked jollof rice with an 8582 raw Pu Erh from Yunnan in China.

Both elements probably need explaining.

Jollof rice is a classic West African dish of spiced rice with tomatoes and peppers. (There’s a classic recipe by Yewande Komolafe in the New York Times which points out that it’s often prepared over an open fire so the smokiness in the Ikoyi version makes sense

Obviously it’s much more elaborate:

“We first barbeque vegetables covered in spices then we make a tea from this that we use to cook the rice” explains chef Jeremy Chan. “Then we fry it in a pan together with garlic, ginger and spring onion and top it with a lobster & scotch bonnet custard. It is then smoked with hickory and opened at the table.”

“There are layers of different types of heat to this dish, the intense spices in the tea that cooks the rice, the ginger the rice is fried with and the scotch bonnets used in the lobster custard. This leads to a crescendo of flavours and spices that while extremely spicy, has a certain comfort.”

Pu-erh is an aged fermented tea with an intensely earthy taste which in this case almost felt like smelling a forest floor after a rainstorm. That might not sound that appealing but it’s one of the headiest teas I’ve ever tasted and went stunningly well with the rice (though interestingly not quite as well with the beef rib that it accompanied which was better with a more conventional Julien Cecillon Saint-Pierre Cornas).

(8582 refers to the recipe, leaf size and factory the tea comes from.  All pu’erh comes from Yunnan. There’s an interesting piece about it on Serious Eats.)

With a tasting menu at £350* Ikoyi is pretty well as expensive as restaurants get in London (though I was lucky enough to be taken there) but given its totally original menu and two Michelin stars (I reckon it should have three) it’s a restaurant right at the top of its game. 

STOP PRESS: Ikoyi won the Highest Climber award in the World’s 50 Best awards this week coming in at no 15.

*there’s a shorter lunch menu for £150.

Apologies for rubbish photograph. We were in a relatively dark room under overhead lights. At least that’s my excuse.

Cold roast beef and a light Loire red

If you see the words roast beef you might automatically think of a full-bodied red - a Bordeaux or cabernet sauvignon, for instance - but there are times, as last week, when a light red will work just as well.

We were in a modern bistro in Paris called Collier de la Reine which serves small plates, as almost all restaurants do these days, one of which was a dish they described as ‘roast beef, potatoes, horseradish’.

It seemed a bit bizarre to order such a very English dish in the French capital but I was intrigued and in fact it was served in a very Parisian way - rare, bordering on raw and tiède as the French put it. Meaning at ambient temperature. Not quite cold but not exactly warm either.

With it I ordered a glass of A Contre Courant a natural wine from the Loire made from Pinot Meunier, Gamay, Cabernet Franc and Cot - interestingly a 2020 vintage although it still tasted remarkably fresh and was perfect with the rare meat.

Unfortunately that vintage only seems to be available in Japan although you can buy the 2018 vintage for £28 from Dynamic Vines whose website carries a good description of the background to the wine.

Other similar light Loire reds should work too.

See also Which Wine - or Beer - to Pair with Roast Beef 

The Best Food Pairings for Cabernet Franc

Lobster loaded fries and champagne

You may have noticed there was a slight hiatus last month when match of the week went missing. (May is peak wine tasting season and always crazy busy)

So I forgot to flag up this rather brilliant pairing with a splendidly indulgent dish I had at Burger and Lobster - their lobster loaded fries which consists of a couple of lobsters, a mountain of fries, melted cheese and - oooofff - a lemon and garlic butter sauce. 

Craftily they put it on the radar of ‘influencers’ before they actually put it on the menu so that we (I say ‘we’ but don’t really regard myself as an influencer) all got madly excited about it but it is on the menu now.

At £75 it’s not cheap but as you can see it’s definitely designed more as a main than a side and a sharing one at that. Even with two of us we couldn’t finish it!

What do you drink with it? Well normally I go for a rich chardonnay with lobster but with the fries it struck me that a glass of champagne would be a better bet - and so it proved.

In fact if you’re going for an extra I’d go for a glass of champagne rather than caviar which gets rather lost amidst all the fries and gooey cheese. (Their house champagne is Taittinger.)

Maybe it’s a bit over the top in these straitened times but it would make a great dish for a date night.

For other pairings with lobster see Wine with Lobster: six of the best pairings

I ate at Burger & Lobster as a guest of the restaurant.

Smoked trout and char with horseradish and Gemischter Satz

Last week I was in Berlin though the city seems to be more in love with Austrian than German wines these days.

This combination was one I tried at a winemakers evening at the Austrian wine bar Freundschaft which showcased wines from Weininger and Hajszan Neumann.

The fish was lightly smoked (I’d guess) and served as an open sandwich topped with dill, pickled radishes and horseradish - a particularly popular condiment in Berlin. (A delicious combination it wouldn’t be too hard to replicate)

It went well with the three or four wines we tried with it but the standout combination was a 2023 Weininger Ried Ulm Nussberg Wiener Gemischter Satz,

Normally Gemischter Satz, a Viennese field blend made from several different grape varieties, is a light wine you’d drink in a heurige (the local bars that ring Vienna) but this was a serious example from a single vineyard that could easily have passed for a white burgundy.

The vineyard is cultivated biodynamically and planted with Pinot Blanc, Neuburger, Welschriesling, Grüner Veltliner, Sylvaner, Zierfandler, Rotgipfler,Traminer and Riesling - which were picked by hand and vinified together.

You can buy the 2022 vintage in the UK for £30 from London End Wines.

See also this previous match of the week of sauerkraut and orange wine and this post on the best pairings with grüner veltliner.