Match of the week

Hot smoked salmon, Korean carrots and pinot gris

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on August 17 2015 at 08:35

This is one of those serendipitous pairings you sometimes stumble across when you rustle up a scratch meal and pair it with an open bottle in the fridge.

The hot smoked salmon came from the Co-op, the carrots from a recipe in Olia Hercules marvellous Mamushka which was my book of the month last month and the wine, a G Stepp Pinot Gris 3 from the Pfalz from a selection I was sent by Naked Wines, which is £11.49 to ‘Angels’ (i.e. regular Naked Wines subscribers) £16.99 to the rest of us.

That may frustrate those of you who, like me, aren’t Angels (I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how long it takes me to get to the top of the waiting list. I'm 6105 at the moment) but there are other dry - or dry-ish - pinot gris on the market that would do the job equally well. (New Zealand, as you can see from this post a few months back, is another excellent source.)

The Korean carrots are more like a pickle than a salad so more salty than hot. Well worth making if you have the book.

What this match underlines is that pinot gris (aka grauburgunder) works as well with smoke and pickled flavours as it does with spice, making it a really useful companion for south-east Asian, Scandi and central European food

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