Steak with an Old Fashioned

Red wine is such an established go to with steak that it’s hard to consider anything else as a pairing but it struck me this week after a few days tasting rum with Philippines producer Don Papa (yes, it’s a hard life … ) that dark rum might also be an interesting match.

Don Papa is a rich dark small batch rum that I thought would go well with the caramelised surface of a grilled steak - and so it proved when we tried it at Elbert’s Steak Room in Makati - the upmarket CBD of Manila. It was especially good on the rocks but I reckon an even better pairing would be an Old Fashioned cocktail made with the same 7 year old rum.

Would you actually order it at a steak restaurant though? I don’t see why not if it’s a drink you enjoy. If you didn’t feel like having it during a meal it would also be good with a bar snack of a couple of sliders, a burger or a steak sandwich

*If you want to run up the cocktail yourself the Don Papa team call it the Don Fashioned and it’s 50ml (2 shots) of Don Papa, 1/2 a bar spoon or teaspoon of agave syrup and 2 dashes of Angostura bitters. Pour the ingredients into a tumbler filled with ice, stir and garnish with an orange twist - and a maraschino cherry, if you fancy it though the version I tried was excellent without one.

My 5 top wine and steak pairing tips

I visited the Philippines as a guest of Don Papa rum.

Slow roast pork belly with a ‘Gardener’s Old Fashioned’

Pork and apple is, of course, a match made in heaven but the pairing was taken to new heights for me by mixologist Jack Adair Bevan of The Ethicurean who invented an Old Fashioned cocktail with a twist to go with a dish of slow roast pork.

The recipe had a few clever bells and whistles of its own. The Saddleback pork had been roasted for 12 hours to a fall-apart texture and was accompanied by pickled shitake, apple and chipotle crackling salt (pulverised pork crackling, seasoned with chipotle)

But the drink was something else - an Old Fashioned made with 3 y.o. Somerset cider brandy infused with toasted oak chips, and stirred with toffee apple syrup left over from the restaurant’s signature toffee apple cake, vanilla (to make the brandy taste more like a bourbon), Angostura and orange bitters and a chipotle tincture - served with an apple and chipotle tuile. Rich, appley, spicy and utterly delicious

Normally I’m not mad about cocktail dinners - too much alcohol, too much sweetness - but where the cocktails are made from ingredients produced in the same kitchen as the food and designed to go with a particular dish it just seems a seamless extension of the menu.

Jack and his colleagues chefs Matthew and Iain Pennington have a really lovely book coming out next month called The Ethicurean Cookbook where you can find most of their recipes (except the pork and the toffee apple cake - drat!) and a lot about their preserving, curing and smoking techniques. There's a really nice video which explains their philosophy on YouTube.