Waffles, bacon and champagne

Champagne for breakfast always seems particularly decadent but it works brilliantly especially with waffles as I discovered at a pop-up in London last week to celebrate Veuve Clicquot’s 250th anniversary.

They took over some premises in Soho’s Greek Street for the week to run what they called the Sunny Side Up Café serving all day breakfast. We hit it at about 5.30pm before going out to dinner so didn’t really do the menu justice but shared a plate of chef Andi Oliver’s breakfast waffles which were served with spiced maple syrup, bacon, egg and ‘confit’ (roast, I think) cherry tomatoes

I was wondering how the champagne, (the Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label), would handle the maple syrup but because the big name champagnes tend to be slightly sweeter than grower champagnes it worked a treat. The syrup was offset by the waffle, bacon and slight sharpness and sweetness of the tomato.

Definitely one to try at home!

I visited the cafe as a guest of Veuve Clicquot

Glazed bacon ribs and Meursault

What do you pair with a classic Irish dish of bacon and cabbage? Guinness might the traditional answer but when the bacon is celebrated northern Ireland butcher Peter Hannan’s amazing French trimmed dry cured bacon rack, glazed and cooked on the barbecue and served with an outrageously creamy parsley sauce then something a little more extravagant is called for.

But Meursault? How does that work? Well pork goes at least as well with white wine as red but it’s really all about the sauce. Cream absolutely loves chardonnay and with a sauce of this richness a classy burgundy like the 2012 Vincent Sauvestre Meursault Clos des Tessons we drank with it* is the answer. It was just stunning.

Two other matches that worked well were a deliciously refreshing medium dry 4.5% Meadow Farm Irish craft cider and - more unexpectedly - a dark, exotic blend of nero d’avola and nerello mascalese from Cantina Cellaro in Sicily which had an unusual taste of cloves which were of course the link to the ham. Would any nero d’avola work as well? I’m not sure it would but it would certainly be worth a try.

*From Robb Brothers in Portadown

Duck liver, bacon and onions with orange wine

There’s still a lot of suspicion about orange wine with many in the wine industry taking the view that it’s faulty rather than, what it actually is, a different style of wine.

Basically it’s a white wine which has been left on and picked up colour from the grape skins in a similar way to a red. That gives it more tannin and body than the average white.

Becky the co-owner of our favourite local restaurants Birch is a great fan and produced this wine off the list for us to try: a Bianco Testalonga from Antonio Perrino in Liguria which is made from Vermentino grapes. It was very dry but refreshing and had that lovely quince character that makes orange wine so interesting with food.

I thought it paired well with several of the dishes we ate including a ‘snack’ of rye crispbread and smoked pollock’s roe and a caramelised onion tart but was particularly good with a starter of duck liver, home-cured bacon and onions cooked in cider (no cheap jibes about orange wine tasting like cider anyway please . . . )

You need to think of orange wine as another option on the wine list like rosé - and arguably better suited to this time of year than many crisp fresh whites depending on the food you're eating. (It's not so good with seafood, IMO.)

For other suggestions as to what to eat with orange wine see Donald Edwards post here.

Sweetcorn, feta and green chilli waffles and pink grapefruit juice

Soft drinks don’t often feature in my weekly pairings but this combination of an inventive savoury breakfast waffle and some lovely fresh pink grapefruit juice at The Modern Pantry last week was spot on.

The waffle, which contained sweetcorn, feta, green chilli and curry leaf and was topped with crisp maple-cured (I think) bacon had that sweet/sour/spicy character that features in so many of chef Anna Hansen’s dishes and the pink grapefruit juice with its own sweet/sharp notes was the ideal match.

I think pink grapefruit juice is perhaps the easiest citrus to pair without the tartness of lemon and lime which frequently needs a correcting dose of sugar but fresher and less filling than orange juice. (Incidentally it was interesting that they’d filtered out the ‘bits’ or shreds of fruit pulp that so many people dislike)

It was also great with the sugar prawn omelette that my breakfast companion Signe Johansen ordered, one of the signature dishes at the restaurant.