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Beer and food matching with Raymond Blanc

Yesterday was my first serious food and drink tasting of the year and it could be a portent of what is to come in 2007 that it was beer we were pairing, not wine.

Raymond Blanc is one of a handful of UK-based chefs who are playing around with beer and food, in his case with characteristic energy and enthusiasm. With the help of his equally beer-smitten sommelier Xavier Rousset, he’s just introduced a beer list of 10 beers from round the world at his Oxfordshire restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. It includes a deliciously fruity Italian lager I hadn’t tasted before - the Menabrea 1846, 3 American beers (Anchor Liberty, Goose Island IPA, and Celis White), 2 Germans (Schneider Weisse and Aventinus), 3 Belgians (Bosteels Tripel Karmeliet, Liefmans Frambozen and Westmalle Dubbel) and a solitary representative from the UK, Worthington White Shield. (M. Blanc intends to remedy that by adding some beers from local breweries)

I was also given a run through some of the pairings that he and his head chef Gary Jones have come up with, with Blanc periodically leaping from the table or issuing instructions for recipes to be tweaked.

  • First was a crab salad with grapefruit and ginger jelly with oscietra caviar partnered with Schneider Weisse wheatbeer. There was also a rather wonderful orange-flavoured crostino alongside topped with pink grapefruit and mango and a touch of mango puree under the crab. All very clever I thought (although the caviar was rather wasted) but Blanc despatched it back to the kitchen to rachet up the spicing and include more brown crab meat which brought out the banana and coriander flavours of the beer even more clearly.
  • Next, a warm confit of organic salmon with a mouli and cucumber salad and a (not very hot) horseradish sauce. The salmon which had been poached in olive oil for 20 minutes at 40 C had a fantastic, fall-apart texture. (You can find the recipe in the food section of the BBC website, www.bbc.co.uk). Rousset had partnered this dish with the Goose Island IPA which was spot on but M. Blanc wanted a touch more smoke in the salmon
  • The main course was a daube of Shropshire beef cheek served with a cauliflower puree and winter vegetables. Blanc had wanted to cook this in beer but found his favoured cooking method (cooking for 36 hours at 70 degrees Celsius) just didn’t work so had had to serve it braised in wine instead. Rousset paired the dish with the big peachy Schneider Aventinus which was a really great match and the Westmalle Dubbel which we had both anticipated would be the better of the two pairings but was overwhelmed by the richness of the stew. It also went well with a dark clovey Duchy Originals Winter Ale from the local Wychwood Brewery that Rousset was considering for the list - a much more classically English, less exotic combination but with a refreshing dryness.
  • Blanc then sneaked in a cheese course - a fine slice of toasted sourdough baguette topped with warm Vacherin Mont d’Or and finely sliced truffles served with a small salad. A white wine dish if ever there was one, you’d have thought, but it went surprisingly well with the rich, full, sweet Tripel Karmeliet.
  • Finally a classic beer match - Liefman’s Frambozen with an ultra smooth dark chocolate fondant tart, chocolate ice cream and a confit of raspberries. Rousset wasn’t sure whether the raspberries were needed but after tasting the dessert we concluded they helped to build a bridge to the raspberry flavours of the beer and counteract the richness and bitterness of the tart. (The slightly lighter milk chocolate flavours of the ice cream were easier to match)
Overall impression? That beer can do just as good a job as wine with fine food if the dishes are carefully chosen and seasoned, incorporating tastes and flavours (salty, bitter, spicy, smokey) that are beer-friendly. I’ll be writing more about this shortly.

Blanc and Rousset plan to do more development work on dishes to pair with their listed beers and will be holding their first beer dinner on September 18th with leading UK beer writer Roger Protz. For more information check out www.manoir.com


Have you ever tried putting on a beer dinner? If you have do share the menu with the forum.

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