Pairings | Dry cider
Six of the best wine (and other) pairings with chicken pie
Chicken pie - or chicken pot pie - must be one of everyone’s favourite meals but what sort of drink goes with it best? Wine, beer or cider?
What are the best pairings for pancakes?
If you’re planning a Pancake Day celebration for tomorrow and haven’t yet decided what to drink here are few ideas.
Which wines - or beers - pair best with cooked cheese?
Cheese and wine is a notorious minefield but is it any easier when the cheese is cooked? See my suggestions to match Mark Hix's delicious recipes in the Independent today:
The best wine pairings for Caerphilly
Caerphilly - or, to be more precise - Gorwydd Caerphilly which is made by my friends Trethowan Brothers - is probably the cheese I know best. And there’s one absolutely outstanding match for it . . .
Six of the best pairings for roast pork
If you’re wondering which wine to pair with roast pork the good news is it’s a flexible meat that can take a white or a red - or even - given the crackling, a sparkling wine.
What to pair with Coronation chicken?
Coronation chicken is an obvious choice for any Royal occasion but what wine - or beer - should you pair with it?
What to pair with artisanal cheddar?
By artisanal cheddar, I mean cheddar that is mature, full-flavoured, and unpasteurised (learn more in this post: So what makes a great cheddar?). It isn't the easiest cheese to match with wine.
The best wine pairings for cheddar cheese
As with most cheeses the ideal wine pairing for cheddar depends how mature it is. A mild to medium block cheddar is going to be a lot easier to match (and in most cheeselovers’ eyes a lot less interesting) than an aged cloth-bound cheddar of 18 months or more.
The best wine - and other - pairings for leeks
Leeks generally feature in dishes in their own right rather than as a side and have a mild sweet flavour you want to respect.
Some top beer and wine pairings for Cheshire cheese
I’ve recently had the chance to taste through a range of wines and beers with Cheshire - Appleby’s Cheshire to be exact - so the hits and misses are fresh in my mind. As you probably know it’s a British territorial cheese with a crumbly texture and mellow flavour but quite a firm bite.
The best wine - and other drinks - to pair with macaroni cheese
The best wine to pair with macaroni cheese, or mac'n'cheese as our friends across the pond have it, depends how fancy - and how cheesy - your mac and cheese is.
Cheese and cider matching revisited
When you think how well apples go with cheese it’s amazing that cider isn’t the automatic go-to for a cheese board but as we discovered at Cheese School* earlier this month some work better than others with particular styles of cheese.
Cider Find: Angry Orchard Crisp Apple Cider
A departure this week - a cider not a wine - and an American cider at that. I tasted it in Oddbins at the end of a wine tasting and was really blown away by it
A vegetarian harvest supper
Before we finally plunge into winter here's a late autumn supper menu from my book Food, Wine and Friends that combines the best of autumn’s produce with a couple of convenience products.
Seafood pizza and medium-dry cider
The cider revival continues to gather momentum - and this time it’s with food. Of course cider has always been popular in summer but this year there seem to be many more well-made 'craft' ciders around - not just the latest raft of fruit flavoured fizzy drinks.
British cheeses and cider
I suppose I shouldn’t say this coming from the West Country but I often forget about cider when I’m thinking about cheese pairings. Not that I don’t enjoy it but there always seem more complex drinks with a wider range of flavours to experiment with.
Wise Owl Cider
So many bottles arrive at the door (no, I don’t expect you to sympathise) that it sometimes takes me a while to get round to tasting them but this week I finally got to try Wise Owl’s sparkling cider which they’d been patiently nudging me about.
Cider and tapas
Cider isn’t, I admit, the first drink I’d pair with tapas but when I spotted on the menu of newly opened Bar 44 in Bristol that they had Spanish ‘sidra’ on tap - the first, they claimed, in the country - I had to try it.
What to drink with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's veggie recipes
If you’re used to choosing wine - or other drinks - to match with meat or fish you may be flummoxed when it comes to chosing one for vegetarian friends. But as I explain in my Guardian column today it’s a question of finding out how the wine is made - and in particular whether any animal-based products have been used in the fining process.
Fried red gurnard and chips and Devon red cider
It was a bumper week for food pairings last week a number of which I’ll be flagging up elsewhere on the site and my Facebook page but I’ve gone for this very straightforward combination because its so simple to replicate at home
Cider and Camembert
I know we always think in terms of wine and cheese but sometimes other drinks can be just as good, if not better. Like this week’s pairing of medium-dry cidre traditionnel and Camembert I came across at a simple roadside restaurant just north of Domfront in Normandy.
5 good matches for roast pork belly
Pork belly has become one of the most popular main courses on restaurant menus so what should you drink with it? It doesn't have to be wine . . .
What to match with Christmas ham
A fair bit gets written - including by yours truly - about pairing wine with turkey but what type of drinks go best with the Christmas ham?
Mackerel pasty and Gusbourne Blanc de Blancs 2006
This actually wasn't the dish with which I drank this brilliant new sparkling wine at Rocksalt in Folkestone last week - I'd unfortunately finished my glass by then - but it would certainly have been a knockout wine pairing.
White onion and bay leaf soup with Ogleshield and hazelnuts
I ordered this amazing soup at one of my favourite local Bristol restaurants Wallfish (now Wallfish & Wellbourne) and begged the recipe from the chef, Seldon Curry. It's tastes like the sweetest of oniony fondues and is soooo delicious.
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