Steak tartare and Provence rosé

It’s back to the usual drizzly grey grot this Monday morning but the past week has been glorious.

Definitely rosé weather which prompted my friend Andy Clarke* and I to crack open a bottle of Provence rosé at one of my favourite Bristol restaurants, Little French, the other day.

You might think that was odd as we’d both opted for steak. Andy, an onglet, in my case a steak tartare. But actually the wine - the By.Ott from Domaine Ott worked with both

In my previous post on steak tartare I wrote “Not the very pale Provence type but a Bandol rosé would be lovely.” I take that back - a good quality pale Provence rose is spot on too, especially with a fresh crunchy salad on the side. (And chips, obviously!)

You can buy By.Ott from various Indies in the UK, normally for around £25 but a wine merchant called De Burgh has the 2022 for £19.99 though I'm guessing they'll move on to the 2023 if that sells through quickly

* BTW Andy has a new book on gin coming out if you’re keen on cocktails and although I’m not much of a mixologist myself I’ve had great success with his recipes.

Steak and sake

As with most ingredients the best pairing for steak is going to depend on the way it’s cooked. For the most part you're probably going to reach for a red wine but we were in Japan and so the automatic go to was sake.

The accompaniments were more important than the steak itself though that was a couple of magnificent cuts of heavily marbled Kobe beef which we were lucky enough to enjoy twice - at Medium Rare at the Hotel Oriental in Kobe and Biftek Kawamura in Akashi

There were two elements of the dish that particularly kicked in with the sake we were drinking, both umami-rich: fried garlic chips and soy sauce. On both occasions the steak was followed by fried rice.

The style that worked best was Akashi Tai’s Honjozo Genshu Tokubetsu* a full-flavoured sake with, at 19%, a higher alcohol content than some lighter more delicate sakes. (Honjozo generally indicates a higher degree of alcohol, genshu that no water has been added and tokubetsu that it’s a premium sake where the rice has been polished to 60% of its original size. It can be served cool (which is how we had it with the steak) or warm.

Serving steak this way is actually a great way to enjoy it as the garlic and soy enhances the Maillard reaction you get from grilling meat and umami-rich sake amplifies that. 

*there’s a good explanation of the style in Sake Times 

For wine matches see The best wine pairing for steak.

I travelled to Japan as a guest of the Akashi sake brewery.

Spicy beef and Barbera d'Asti

Barbera wouldn’t have been the wine I’d have generally turned to with a beef dish that came accompanied by a spicy Thai relish but it worked surprisingly well.

The dish, you might be suprised to learn, was not in Shoreditch or Hackney but at a pub called The Black Bull in a picturesque small town called Sedbergh on the edge of the Lake district and the Yorkshire dales.

The kitchen is run by Nina Matsunaga who was born to Japanese parents but brings influences from all over Asia into her cooking. Intriguingly much of this is based on local native cattle breeds

The beef in this dish was Hereford beef sirloin from Howgill and had a rich flavour of its own but came with a spicy nam prik noom, a roasted green chilli dip from northern Thailand.

Nina's husband James, who is responsible for the really excellent wine list, suggested a vivid, juicy 2018 Barbera d’Asti called Bandita* from a natural Piedmontese producer called Cascina Tavijn. It was absolutely delicious - great with the beef and able to stand up to the spicy relish (though Nina had cleverly offset that with soy beans which did a similar job to rice in mitigating the heat.

Unfortunately it seems to be sold out in the UK but you could try a similar unoaked barbera or an orange wine which I think would also work well.

For other barbera matches see Top food pairings with barbera

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of the Black Bull.

Steak and Trousseau

'Hmmm, steak and red wine - nothing particularly original about that' you might be thinking but bear with, as they say.

Trousseau which comes from the Arbois region of eastern France is a much lighter red wine than those you would probably normally think of pairing with steak and in this case - a 2018 from Domaine des Bodines I was sent as part of the September selection from a new set-up called Oranj - a natural wine to boot.

The steak - a recipe from Sabrina Ghayour’s excellent new book Simply* wasn’t cooked conventionally either but cut into cubes, rolled in a spicy dry rub, seared and served with labneh (soft cheese), pul biber (chilli) butter and crispy onions. So not the kind of steakhouse steak that sets off a cabernet to perfection.

In fact it was the freshness of the wine that worked particularly well with the spicing offset by the smooth creaminess of the labneh. Which goes to show, as I’m always saying, that it’s the way you cook a dish and the flavours you put with your base ingredient that determines the wine match

You can order the September selection from Oranj which contains other natural wines from the French side of the Jura mountains, online at oranj.co.uk. And listen to this track while you're drinking it!

See also The best wine pairings for steak

*Here is one of the other delicious recipes from the book - yoghurt and spice-roasted salmon.

I was sent the wine as a press sample and the book as a review copy.