Match of the week
Chilled cucumber and garlic soup and Chenin Blanc
On Saturday, as I mentioned in my blog, I was at a food and wine festival in Constantia, where we wandered round the impossibly beautiful Buitenverwachting estate sipping wine and grazing on upmarket canapés devised by a selection of the area's best local chefs. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon ....
The food was great, not least this chilled cucumber and garlic soup. which had a heck of a lot of raw garlic in it which made it so spicy I suspected it had also been spiked with chilli. (Apparently not but the South Africans certainly like their garlic - we had a white garlic soup the same evening in Cape Town which was equally ferocious.)
So, cucumber, garlic, dill, yoghurt (or sour cream, maybe). What do you drink with it?Something crisp, something cold, something dry . . . Could easily have been Sauvignon Blanc but I actually went for the Chenin Blanc that was conveniently to hand - a fresh-tasting, zesty 2013 Kloof Street Chenin from Mullineux up in the Swartland region which hit the spot perfectly.
Young unoaked South African Chenin pairs with very similar food to Sauvignon Blanc as you can see in this post: Which food to pair with South African Chenin Blanc.
Pumpkin ravioli and a Douro white
You wouldn’t necessarily expect an Italian dish like pumpkin ravioli to pair with a Portuguese white but the match was just perfect.
The wine, Planalto Branco Reserva 2012 was one of those lovely lush whites from the Douro that I think I enjoy even more than the region’s highly respected reds - a blend of the local Viosinho, Malvasia Fina, Gouveio and Códega grapes.
It had the fullness and richness to carry the pumpkin ravioli - a ready-made pasta from the Co-op that had a really authentic sweetness. I served it simply with melted butter - it could have done with a little sage but I don’t think that would have affected the pairing.
The great advantage about rather more obscure wines like this is that they’re priced to encourage people to experiment. At £6.49 if you buy 2 bottles (at Majestic) it’s an absolute steal.
I reckon it would be good with salt cod fritters too - it makes a great aperitif. And if you didn’t have a Portuguese white to hand? I’d go for a chardonnay.
Image © vincenzoangeli - Fotolia.com
Chocolate marmalade slump cake with Tokaji dessert wine
As we have so much freshly made marmalade in the house I thought I’d make some kind of marmalade pudding as my contribution to the lunch we had with friends yesterday and settled on this chocolate marmalade slump cake from Lucas Hollweg’s marvellous Good Things to Eat.
It’s a deeply chocolatey flourless cake (how much more appealing does that sound than ‘gluten-free’?) that tastes a bit like an orangey brownie so the wine that immediately occurred to me to pair with it was a Tokaji.
We happened to have a bottle of the 2002 Kiralyudvar 6 Puttonyos hanging around which was still wonderfully fresh and with its own marmaladey flavour picked up perfectly on the orange notes of the cake. (I wouldn't match it with something like a marmalade steamed pudding though - there wouldn't be enough contrast.)
You wouldn't of course have to find a Tokaji this old for a similar match - a younger Tokaji would do.
(If you’re wondering what the ‘slump’ bit means the cake depends like a soufflé on eggs for rising and falls back once you take it out of the oven.)
You can read more about Kiralyudvar on the US Rare Wine Co's site. For a full review of Good Things to Eat see here.
Carpaccio of venison with Mollydooker The Boxer shiraz
My match of the week is not in fact my match of the week which was some sublime sashimi and koshu at the Japanese embassy but as that pairing has featured before I’m going for my second best this week*.
It was which was one of a number of food and wine matches at the Australia Day tasting devised by chef Roger Jones who is spearheading the new Dine Australia campaign.
The dish was a carpaccio of venison (in other words raw meat) with foie gras toffee and parsnip and date mousse, designed as a pairing for shiraz. Unfortunately I didn’t spot the fact that it included foie gras which I don’t normally eat but the point was that the meat was rare and the accompaniments rich and sweet which is what you want with a full-bodied young shiraz.
The wine should have been Ben Glaetzer’s Bishop but I thought you were supposed to grab any shiraz you could lay your hands on (obviously not having the brightest of afternoons . .) and filled my glass with the 2012 Mollydooker The Boxer shiraz on a stand nearby which actually worked very well.
The other pairing of steak tartare macarons with salted caramel I wasn’t quite so keen on - just too sweet with an already super-ripe wine. So some sweetness but not too much with shiraz is the message.
Grilled tuna tart and Camus Ile de Ré Double Matured Cognac
The idea of matching Cognac with any food other than chocolate is still regarded as unconventional - even more so in the case of fish - but I promise you this pairing, the first course at a lunch at Camus, would have blown you away.
The cognac was an unusual one to start with - the Camus Ile de Ré Double Matured Cognac which is produced from grapes grown on this fashionable small island just off France’s western coast, the most westerly region of the Cognac appellation.
Apparently the grapes have a higher than usual iodine content which accounts for the slighty salty, maritime character of the cognac, which was accentuated by being served frozen. (Which sounds like sacrilege but is très à la mode in the region.)
The dish was also unusual: a crisp pastry base topped with (I think) an anchovy paste, braised fennel, crushed olives and seared tuna with a sea urchin dressing and a cascade of beautifully fresh peppery leaves. Hard to describe but absolutely delicious and the most perfect match with the fragrant iced spirit.
If I come across a more clever or imaginative pairing this year I’ll be lucky.
To find out more about the Cognac pairing event I went to read my blog post.
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