Koftas with tahini and orange wine

I’ve been enthusiastically cooking from Sami Tamimi’s and Tara Wigley's new book Falastin this past couple of weeks and made their recipe for koftas with tahini, potato and onion over the weekend during a Zoom cooking session with a couple of pals in Bristol.

I picked an orange wine, Bulgarian Heritage from a producer called Via Vinera to pair with it on the basis that middle-eastern lamb dishes generally go well with orange wine but in fact it was the very rich tahini sauce which was spiked with lemon juice and garlic that really made the wine sing.

Sami, as you may or may not know, is Yotam Ottolenghi’s business partner and collaborated with him on the wonderful Jerusalem and Ottolenghi Simple but this is a tribute to his home country of Palestine.

The wine which comes from the 2018 vintage is made from a Bulgarian grape called dimyat and is quite aromatic with a pronounced flavour of dried apricots, quince, and yes, orange. Not at all scary so quite a good bottle to try if you’ve never had orange wine before. Particularly if you’re eating lamb although the Via Vinera website also charmingly suggests it as ‘demanded company’ for seafood salads, gnocchi and pesto, salmon trout baked in salt, grilled pork chops and soft cheeses.

You can buy it from the Wine Society if you’re a member for £51 a case of six (the equivalent of £8.50 a bottle but they’re only doing unsplit cases at the moment) but I’m confident that other orange wines would work too.

Stuffed piquillo peppers with brandade and Hunter Valley Semillon

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been working my way through the older bottles in my cellar* and unearthed a 2014 vintage of Brokenwood Semillon the other day which I visited on my last wine visit to the Hunter Valley.

In fact that’s quite young in Hunter semillon terms - it could really have done with another 2-3 years at least as evidenced by the fact that it tasted even better two days after opening which was when I accidentally paired it with some brandade (salt cod purée) stuffed red piquillo peppers during a Zoom cook-in with a couple of my pals.

We were cooking from Ben Tish’s Moorish from which my friend Fiona Sims (the other half of the 2 fionas!) chose this recipe. It would actually have worked well with many other crisp fruity white wines including sauvignon blanc but the element that really made the semillon sing was the accompanying orange oil which you drizzle over the peppers. (Basically olive oil infused with pared orange peel and thyme.) Often it’s these little touches that really make a match.

You can buy the latest vintage of the Brokenwood Semillon - the 2019 - from Vinvm for £17.30 a bottle - but try not to drink it all straight away! Or, if you want a more mature vintage, Street Wines of Colchester has the 2015 for £20.

For other semillon pairings see The best food matches for semillon and semillon-sauvignon blends

*well, not actually a cellar - the cupboard under the stairs!

Italian spinach and ricotta pie with Soave (or Vermentino)

To tell you the truth this is as much about the story behind the pie as the wine match but that was good too so let’s kick off with that.

The pie was a Torta Pasqualina a traditional Easter pie from Liguria which is filled with ricotta, spinach and whole eggs. As often these days it was a question of trying to find the most suitable match which turned out to be a rather elderly 2015 Bertani Soave which had seen better days but which still had enough character to show off the pie rather nicely.

Vermentino which is local to the region (as you can see from this article) would have been better still but I didn’t have any. Gavi di Gavi or any of those interesting neutral Italian whites, preferably from a more recent vintage, would have done too. As would a glass of Franciacorta.

What was particularly nice about the construction of this pie was that a group of us made it together on Zoom from this recipe by Rachel Roddy. We’d collaborated on the sourcing of the ingredients getting our spinach from a local greengrocer (Hugo’s in Bedminster, Bristol) who also supplied the locally made ricotta from Westcombe Dairy. And it fortunately didn’t require too much flour.

We cooked together, companionably chatting and comparing notes for about an hour then broke off to clear up while the pies were cooking and reconvened (with Rachel, who is a colleague on the Guardian) to have a drink an hour later. A nice thing to do with friends who like to cook - whether you have Soave or not!

Thai green curry and English rosé

Those of you who follow the site closely might have noticed the Match of the Week slot had disappeared. Because I was no longer travelling and eating out I thought what I was drinking with what would be of little interest and that you probably wouldn’t be able to get hold of the bottles I was writing about anyway

How wrong I was!

In fact the limitation of choice has actually sparked a burst of creativity among you all judging by what I’ve seen on Twitter and our own Matching Food and Wine Facebook group* too. And people are digging out many of their most treasured bottles to enjoy with food to match - a tactic for dealing with the lockdown of which I heartily approve

So this week’s pairing is one of those rare partnerships when the wine and the food both rise to greater heights. The dish was a Thai green prawn curry I made with one of the cook-in sauces I’d been sent to try by The Fresh Sauce Co about whom you can read in our 5 reasons slot and the wine an English pinot noir rosé I’d been tasting from Dunleavy vineyards.

Now rosé, I know, is pretty good at handling spice (I also like it with Indian food) but this was a) very dry and b) only 11.5%, too light you would think to stand up to a really punchy green curry sauce. But it not only survived but blossomed, the curry miraculously accentuating its very pretty fruit.

So on the basis of this I’m reckoning most Provence rosés would go with a Thai green curry too but if you want to support English producers you can buy Dunleavy’s rosé for £12.95 with free delivery if you buy 6 or more bottles.

* do join and share what you’re eating and drinking

For other rosé pairings check out The Best Food Pairings for rosé

Image ©iblinova on Adobe Stock cos my late night shot really was tooo dark and blurry and I'd chucked inauthentic broccoli and peas into my curry!