Tonka bean ice cream and Zoco Pacharan

It’s not often I come across a drink I’ve never heard of but Pacharan or Paxtaran, a Basque sloe-flavoured liqueur from Navarra, is one of them.

According to Wikipedia it’s made by soaking sloes, coffee beans and a vanilla pod in anisette, an aniseed flavoured liqueur - the dark colour, which is entirely natural, coming from the sloes. This one, which was served at Bell’s Diner in Bristol is made by the best known producer Zoco. with a selection of home-made ice creams.

Ice-cream is particularly hard to match with wine and much better with a stronger, sweeter liqueur. The Pacharan was particularly good with a Tonka bean ice cream - a vanilla-style ice-cream that obviously picked up on its own vanilla notes but also very good with a pistachio ice-cream and toasted marshmallow ice cream (though less good with a mint one).

Do try it if you get the chance even if you don’t like aniseed, which I confess I generally don’t. The flavour is not too pronounced and the combination is delicious.

You can buy it in the UK from Beers of Europe which sells it for £18.98 for a litre bottle though it seems to be around £23-25 at merchants such as Nicholls & Perks. It would also be worth looking out for in a Spanish duty free.

Prosecco and jelly

Is there a good match for jelly and ice-cream? A dessert wine can seem too heavy - and ice cream can strip out its sweetness - but prosecco is perfect, as I discovered at the weekend.

The jelly in question - a blood orange and Campari jelly at the Seahorse restaurant in Dartmouth - admittedly had a touch of bitterness which helped. And the prosecco, Nino Franco Rustico, like most sparkling wines, had an added ‘dosage’ or sugar solution that prevented it tasting too tart. The slightly sweeter Cartizze might have been even better but what made it work so well was the combination of textures - the frothy bubbles and the gently quivering jelly.

Coincidentally we had been at a friend’s the previous night who had made a rhubarb jelly with prosecco which was equally good - and very pretty. Jelly and prosecco is the way to go for spring and summer entertaining, I reckon. You heard it here first ;-)

10 year old tawny with bitter chocolate and malt tart with salted caramel ice cream

I was hoping for an interesting pairing from the last meal of the year and wasn't disappointed. Like last year we went to a New Year's Eve dinner at Montpelier Basement supper club where we were treated to an amazing 8 course feast which lasted into the early hours of the morning.

There were some other good matches (I could have recommended a creamy cauliflower and Stichelton soup with a 2009 Felton Road Chardonnay) but this one struck me as the outstanding pairing of the night.

Truth to tell I'd hoped a beer would do the job (I had a bottle of the Bristol Beer Factory Glenlivet aged Imperial Stout that went so well with my Stichelton the other week) but it proved too bitter with the salted caramel ice cream. The bottle of rich, nutty Tesco Finest 10 year old tawny we'd taken as a back-up worked much better - as I should have known. Tawny port is very good with both chocolate and caramel.

I also tried a sip of my neighbour's PX sherry which also paired really well with the ice cream - as it does with vanilla.

A good way to start the New Year. Happy 2012!

Image © Mariusz Blach - Fotolia.com

Pedro Ximenez and ice cream

The highlight of last week was undoubtedly the Emilio Hidalgo sherry lunch I attended at the Spanish tapas bar Dehesa. But which of the outstanding pairings to pick?

In the end I’ve gone for the one that’s the easiest to recreate rather than the one I was most impressed by (which was the duck and old amontillado - because not all duck dishes would go with all amontillado sherries. It was a match that depended on clever execution and the brilliance of the accompanying sherry.)

Pedro Ximenez on the other hand is almost always a good match for non-fruity icecreams, particularly vanilla, caramel, brown bread icecream and chocolate. It’s the sweetest of Spanish sherries with an intense raisiny flavour and can simply be poured over ice cream or sipped with it.

This particular PX - as it’s called for short - was drier, and to my palate, more balanced than most and a fantastic foil for the dark chocolate sorbet and muscovado ice cream that was served with it (see the rather blurry picture above). It also tasted great when a cup of espresso coffee was brought into the equation - a three-cornered match that was truly delicious.

For the full write-up of the lunch see here.