Beef stew and oloroso sherry

Last week I was at the Copa Jerez, an international wine and food competition where teams pair a 3 course menu with sherry.

(I judged the UK competition last year which was won by Gail Ge’er Li and Jaichen Lu of Dinings SW3 whose pairing of braised beef tongue and oloroso sherry I wrote about here.)

The ultimate trophy this year was won by Parsley Salon of Copenhagen in Denmark who also presented an oloroso as their main course pairing.

We enjoyed oloroso a couple of other times during the three days we were in Jerez, in both cases with a beef stew. As a ‘racion’ (more substantial tapa) at Valdespino and as the main course of beef cheek at an utterly splendid dinner at Lustau where they paired it with their Colleción Almacenista Garcia Jacana Oloroso Pata Gallina which you can buy from Waitrose Cellar for £22.99 a 50cl bottle.

Most of us obviously think of drinking red with a dish like that but if there were just the two of you - and you were both sherry fans - a glass of oloroso would be the perfect accompaniment. (Many supermarkets do excellent half bottles for less than this, quite often made by Lustau. Morrisons has one for £6.50 for example)

I attended Copa Jerez as a guest of the organisers

Roast chicken and champagne

There are so many good things to drink with chicken you might wonder why champagne needs to be among them, particularly if you regard it as a wine you drink with canapés rather than with a meal

But I was reminded this week at Bob Bob Ricard’s new offshoot Bébé Bob just how good it can be.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it BBR is a fabulously bling Soho restaurant which serves caviar, beef Wellington and other old school dishes with extravagant wines such as champagne*

Bébé majors on rotisserie chicken and chips though you can still precede it with caviar if you want.

We drank Bollinger which was obviously wildly indulgent but actually if you were fine tuning the experience you might want to go for an all-chardonnay blanc de blancs which would suit the wonderfully buttery chicken gravy better. But almost certainly be more expensive.

Why does it work? Because chicken skin is one of those foods that are rich in umami and so is champagne, particularly vintage champagne which would also be a good call if you can run to it. Waitrose does a good one under its own label on which you can currently get 25% off if you buy any 6 bottles which makes it £26.99 rather than £35.99. (Used to be cheaper but they seem to have upgraded it to the no 1 range and bumped up the price.)

Or you could drink cava which would have much the same effect.

*although, to be fair, their margins are reasonable.

See also 8 great wine (and other) matches for roast chicken

I ate at Bébé Bob as a guest of the restaurant

Photograph © Miredi at fotolia.com

Cider and cheddar

Cider and cheese are natural bedfellows.

You may have had a pint of cider with a ploughman’s but if you want to elevate the combination to another level try this.

It’s a collaboration between one of our best cider makers, Tom Oliver and Sam Wilkin aka Cellarman Sam who came up with the idea of crafting a cider to go specifically with cheddar - called, appropriately, Cheddar on my Mind.

It’s a rich fruity cider that tastes almost like a tarte tatin and is just perfect with a mature farmhouse cheddar such as Montgomery’s, Keen’s or Pitchfork - and with other cheeses as I discovered to my cost.

Tom paired it with a Teifi gouda style cheese in the second round of our Battle of the Beverages at the Abergavenny Food Festival (me on wine, Tom on cider and Pete Brown on beer) and it won hands down despite my fielding a really good Ribera del Duero, the 2108 Pradorey Crianza from Finca Valdelayegua.

He also showed it at a 'cheese and cider summit' last week - an initiative to link cider with cheese in people’s minds. I certainly don’t have a problem with that!

For other cheddar pairings click here and for other food pairings with cider here 

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.