Leerdammer and black coffee

Cheese is so inextricably linked in my mind with beer and wine I sometimes forget there are other delicious pairings out there but coffee? Well, actually yes.

The idea first clicked 18 months or so ago on a trip to Sweden. We visited a cheesemaker who served us black coffee with her cheeses and it set them off beautifully. I shouldn’t have been surprised because of course the standard breakfast throughout northern Europe includes cheese and cold meats.

As I’ve been researching coffee for a feature I’m writing I had to borrow a neighbour’s coffee grinder so we had an impromptu Dutch-style breakfast while we were comparing beans. The cheese we bought was Leerdammer but you could use any mild, smooth sliceable nutty cheese. Some very good smoked ham and crispbread completed the feast.

We drank our coffee black and without sugar which wouldn't be to everyone's taste but I think works better than, say, a flat white or a cappucino would. It's the savoury bitterness of the coffee that goes so well with the smooth mild nutty cheese.

It put me in mind of a cheese I tasted in the states a few years ago called Barely Buzzed which is rubbed with ground coffee and lavender (much nicer than it sounds!) There are some more great ideas for coffee and cheese pairings in this feature on the Culture cheese magazine website

For more creative cheese pairings download my ebook 101 Great Ways to Enjoy Cheese & Wine (and other delicious drinks!)

Photo ©elen09 at fotolia.com

Txakoli and practically everything on the Palomar menu

I think Txakoli may be my new favourite restaurant wine - or at least it is this summer. It’s a unique, sharp, very slightly fizzy white wine from the Basque region of Spain. The one we were drinking - at the Palomar in Soho - was the Agerra Txakoli which comes from the designated origin of Getariako

It went quite brilliantly with The Palomar’s food which I guess can best be described as modern Israeli but to which they give their own unique twist. It’s full of vivid and delicious flavours but the element that I think went best was the dairy one - dishes like the burnt courgette tzatziki, and beetroot carpaccio with burnt goat’s cheese (needless to say, fashionably singed not burnt to a cinder).

It was also great with the Kubaneh (Yemeni pot baked bread served with tahini & ‘velvet tomatoes’ a luxuriant fresh tomato dip that tasted a bit like gazpacho. Oh and the mysteriously but seductively spiced fish felafel

You can buy the Agerra for £13.95 from Whitmore and White in the Wirral, Cheshire. I also very much like the Flysch txacoli I recommended in my Guardian column this week.

Chicken liver paté and cherry beer

I often feel I don’t get - or make - enough opportunities to try beer with food so was especially pleased to be invited to a Dea Latis beer dinner at The Albion in Bristol last week

Dea Latis is a group which was set up to encourage women to drink beer (not much persuasion needed in my case) and invites along women who work in the beer industry or, in my case, write about it.

We had a five course meal with matching beers the highlight of which for me was a rich, soft chicken liver paté with Liefman’s Kriek Brut, a more intense version of their widely available Fruitesse.

According to the Liefman's website it’s based on an Old Bruin beer blended with a pale beer, aged on cherries then aged for 18 months and has a gloriously rich, slightly tart cherry flavour. You can buy it for £3 a bottle from Prestige Drinks in the UK

Although I’ve paired kriek with cheese (especially brie) and desserts like chocolate roulade very successfully before I was surprised just how brilliantly well it went with the paté - possibly because it was served with a slightly sweet tomato chutney. It would be good I suspect with a game paté too.

Coffee and maple syrup-brined pork with Saint Joseph

Occasionally a wine pairing comes along that you simply don’t expect. Invited to a barbecue at the weekend, I took along some reds I’d been tasting which I frankly wasn’t sure would go with the sweet marinades you generally encounter at a BBQ.

I had highest hopes of a soft ripe unoaked Douro red that I thought would hit the spot and the lowest expectations of a classy 2014 Domaine du Monteilet Cuvée du Papy Saint Joseph but it was so delicious I wanted to share it anyway.

It turned out that the centrepiece of a barbecue was a joint of pork which had been brined by our host food writer Genevieve Taylor in a mixture of coffee and maple syrup and therefore had a touch of bitterness that chimed in perfectly with the peppery syrah. (There was also a creamy side dish of butter beans and courgettes instead of sharply dressed salads which helped.) The Douro red tasted flabby by comparison.

It goes to show that with barbecues - as with any other type of cooking - it’s the flavours you put with your base ingredient that tend to determine the success of the pairing. And - hooray! - that you needn't wait for a dinner party to consume your favourite wines.

Incidentally you can buy the wine for £22.59 from D Byrne of Clitheroe and £22.99 at allaboutwine.co.uk

See also

What's the best type of wine for a barbecue