Moqueca and Caiprinhas

Last week our local tapas bar, Ocean, held a Brazilian evening with a talented local Bristol singer Frances Butt who is really into Latin music. (So much so that she has issued an album called The Girl from Wolverhampton - where she grew up though obviously not where her soul lies . . .)

The chef, Stuart Seth, cooked up a simple supper of two dishes a feijoada (pork, beef and black bean stew) and moqueca (seafood stew) which were served with caipirinhas, the addictively good Brazilian cocktail of cachaça and lime. Cachaça is the Brazilian equivalent to rum.

It wasn't particularly good with the feijoada - I doubt if it was intended to be - but brilliant with the moqueca which was flavoured with tomato, coriander and hot pepper (though it wasn't overly hot). I don't know if it's authentic to pair the two (perhaps our Brazilian members will tip me off?) but it was certainly stupendously good. Wine, I suspect, wouldn't have worked as well though a crisp Sauvignon Blanc would have probably been a reasonable pairing

A really nice idea for an informal supper. With music, of course . . .

Lemon and poppy seed cake with Tippy Yunan tea with ginger root

There’s an improbably good tea shop and café near where I live which is as good as any I’ve been to. I say improbable not because it’s in Bristol but because it’s in a far-from-smart shopping parade in one of the less cultish areas of the city. It also has a brilliantly clever name - ATTIC - which stands for All The Tea In China.

They have a great range of teas but also some great kit to serve them in. A glass infuser (see right and here on their website) which opens up once placed on top of a co-ordinated glass mug and lets the strained tea in.

They chalk the specials up on the blackboard - the one I tried was called Autumn Glow, a blend of Tippy Yunnan black tea and dried ginger root, a spicy, fragrant brew that went brilliantly well with a wedge of lemon and poppy seed cake I’d been unable to resist. Thank goodness we’re moving to the other side of town otherwise I'd be in there all the time though I suspect we’ll find reasons to get back over there. Like buying all our friends and relatives tea-infusers for Christmas.

They also offer a mail order service for those of you who live even further away and will apparently start supplying other tea shops and cafs shortly with a range of their teas called 'One leaf, many lives'. Look out for them.

Chilli con carne and American brown ale

If you’re lighting a few fireworks for the kids (or yourselves, of course . . . ) tonight and hanging round in the cold you’ll need some warming food and a good chilli hits the spot perfectly

You can drink wine with it (I always think Zinfandel goes pretty well) but for me it’s a dish that’s much better with beer.

Ideally I’d be looking for an American brown ale but they’re hard to get hold of in the UK and a Belgian brune such as Leffe’s would work perfectly well. (The classic English brown ale like Mann’s is too light and too sweet in my opinion, and Newcastle Brown slightly too bitter)

Smoked, caramelised salmon with Disznókö Tokaji 6 puttonyos 1993

This week’s match is not mine but fellow wine writer Margaret Rand’s who also writes for Decanter. She recently went to Hungary at the invitation of AXA Millésimes who ownes the Tokaji producer Disznókö - as well as Château Suiduiraut - for what must be the most extraordinary wine dinner ever conceived: a Chinese meal, paired with sweet wine cooked by two Bordeaux-based chefs Tommy and Andy Shan of Au Bonheur du Palais, (which happens to be AXA proprietor Christian Seely’s favourite restaurant in the city).

Subscribers can read Margaret’s full account of the experience tomorrow including the Shans’ highly unusual philosophy of food and wine pairing but here’s what for her was the highlight of the meal.

The dish was described as smoked salmon in red pepper oil - ”not smoked salmon in the Scottish sense” explains Rand, but “a cube of salmon that had been smoked and caramelised on one side” The wine, being categorised as 6 puttonyos was the second sweetest in the Disznókö range (puttonyos are the baskets or hods of botrytised grape paste that are added to the base wine) and came from an exceptional vintage. Already 15 years old it had gone beyond the stage of mere sweetness to gain an extraordinary complexity evoking, according to Disznókö's own tasting notes, dried apricots, plum, dates and spice. Flavours that you can actually imagine working with salmon.

According to Rand the match was ‘sensationally good’ a perfect marriage with the ‘soft, melting’ texture of the salmon. “It was the star of the evening:- adventurous, imaginative and spot-on”

I suspect it took great skill to bring it off and may well be a case of ‘don’t try this at home’ but it does make one think differently about the roles that sweet wines might play beyond the dessert course. For more come back tomorrow . . .