Hot smoked salmon, Korean carrots and pinot gris

This is one of those serendipitous pairings you sometimes stumble across when you rustle up a scratch meal and pair it with an open bottle in the fridge.

The hot smoked salmon came from the Co-op, the carrots from a recipe in Olia Hercules marvellous Mamushka which was my book of the month last month and the wine, a G Stepp Pinot Gris 3 from the Pfalz from a selection I was sent by Naked Wines, which is £11.49 to ‘Angels’ (i.e. regular Naked Wines subscribers) £16.99 to the rest of us.

That may frustrate those of you who, like me, aren’t Angels (I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how long it takes me to get to the top of the waiting list. I'm 6105 at the moment) but there are other dry - or dry-ish - pinot gris on the market that would do the job equally well. (New Zealand, as you can see from this post a few months back, is another excellent source.)

The Korean carrots are more like a pickle than a salad so more salty than hot. Well worth making if you have the book.

What this match underlines is that pinot gris (aka grauburgunder) works as well with smoke and pickled flavours as it does with spice, making it a really useful companion for south-east Asian, Scandi and central European food

Burrata and watermelon with Montej rosé

It’s not often that you come across a wine match that’s as successful as it’s unexpected but sommelier Ruth Spivey’s pairing of a fruity Monferrato chiaretto rosato (aka rosé) from Piedmont with a dish of burrata, pressed watermelon and pickled fennel at Arbutus the other night was spot on - and all the more impressive given that she hadn’t had a chance to taste the combination beforehand.

I’ve written about the evening - the first in a series of ‘wine wars’ where leading london sommeliers are invited to pit their wits against the restaurant’s co-owner and wine buyer Will Smith - in the wine pros section but I’ve tasted nothing better all week. The rosé perfectly echoed the fresh fruity flavour of the watermelon. It was like having liquid watermelon on the side!

I can’t find it listed by any UK retail stockist but it’s apparently imported by fortyfive10.com.

Prawn curry and saffron lassi

I’m always on the lookout for interesting alcohol-free drinks to pair with food so was pleased to see that Asma Khan had listed some really interesting options at her Darjeeling Express residency at The Sun and 13 Cantons pub in Soho the other day.

We kicked off with her homemade lemonade which was great with some fresh crunchy ‘puchkas’ filled with tamarind water but I then spotted a saffron lassi which I thought would be a cooling counterpoint to our main course dishes.

I’m not normally that keen on lassis, finding many too sweet but this had just a hint of saffron which took it more in a savoury direction. (Apparently she only uses 3 strands of saffron which she infuses in a tablespoon of warm milk and leaves overnight in the fridge - or for a minimum of 4 hours. See full method below.)

It was a perfect match with the spicy prawn curry we'd ordered - maybe partly because we didn't have a raita and it did the same job of cooling the palate between bites. But it’s a great drink in its own right.

Darjeeling Express is open until March 2016 for lunch, early supper and snacks throughout the day and the menu changes every week. For full details of the times and the venue check out Asma’s website.

How to make saffron lassi

Asma writes: Add the saffron infused milk to 175ml yogurt and sugar*, add a bit of water and whip it together till the sugar dissolves. The quantity of water depends on the yogurt you use - bio/low fat yogurt will not require a lot of water. I use Greek/Turkish yogurt which is thicker and needs a bit more.

I only buy Persian saffron. I look for the kind with long strands - they are always better quality then the shorter strands. Sadly the quality of saffron can be inconsistent - the only way to buy saffron is by looking at the strands. The brand name is not important.

The lassi should not be too sweet or you will overwhelm the floral delicate taste of the saffron

Mature Savennières with chargrilled carrots, burnt aubergine, miso and walnut pesto

OK, this pairing at Jason Atherton’s new Social Wine and Tapas isn’t exactly easy to reproduce at home but it was certainly the highlight of my food and wine matches last week.

The dish was a clever and complicated one from the vegetable section of the tapas menu (defining tapas pretty loosely, admittedly) and one of the best vegetarian dishes I’ve had in London. There were powerful smoky notes from the charred carrot and aubergine, a rich umami taste from the miso and a generous dollop of nutty pesto - quite a lot for any wine to contend with.

It was paired on the advice of the sommelier Stefan with a flight of Savennières which he’d been instrumental in putting together because one of the wines - a 1992 Roche aux Moines from Domaine aux Moines - was his birth year (gah!). It was somewhat less youthful than Stefan but hugely interesting to try. The wine of the flight that worked best was the gorgeously honeyed, peachy 2011 Les Genets from Domaine Laureau with great acidity which held its own magnificently with the different elements of the dish.

The wine flights are definitely the way to go at Social Wine & Tapas. They offer you a chance to try some really interesting wines - served in appropriate glasses or stemware. My Savennières flight was £21 which is not cheap for 225ml of wine,, but I didn’t want to drink more than that and a bottle of the Genet would have cost £35. You can buy the wines to take away, if you like them, in the small retail shop on the ground floor.