Jul

Canederli allo Speck

Sean Sellers in White Wines, Semillon, Blow the Bank, Meat & Poultry 2001, Australia, Hunter Valley, McWilliams Estate, Mount Pleasant, Recipe

InterWined Food
A great meal deserves a great wine…

And, while InterWined.com prides itself on discovering great wines that don’t cost a great deal, sometimes it’s nice to ‘Blow the Bank’ on something special.

So every Friday, InterWined will pair one great wine that exceeds its normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal. And if it inspires you to do the same, leave a comment and share it.

This week, InterWined.com wanted a quick dish for a Friday night — date food, ideally — something simple but impressive. Thus, InterWined turned to Rubber Slippers in Italy and Rowena’s fantastic-looking Canederli allo Speck (Italian bread balls with bacon — more or less).

No matter how experienced the sommelier or posh the restaurant, paring food with wine remains a skill most often complimented by a measure of inspiration and a dollop of simple, dumb luck. External factors such as the differences in years and yields, vintages and winemakers, the quality of produce and ingredients, cooking times, and countless other little things will always make certain the inexactness of food & wine pairing. Simply put: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. And, while some wines compliment some foods better than others, there are remarkably few real rules that govern the relationship between food and wine. Essentially, it’s a matter of taste — both in terms of personal preference and the tongue.

As schoolchildren across the world can attest, there are five sensations that inform our sense of taste: sweet, sour, bitter, savoury, and salty. All serve to describe the flavours associated with wine, bar one. Wine can do many things (inspire poets, help the heart, and so on) but it cannot do salty.

So, when pairing wine with salty foods, like the speck featured in Rowena’s recipe, it’s important to try and find a wine that will enhance or compliment some of the more subtle flavours on offer in the food.

Fortunately, the 2001 Mount Pleasant Elizabeth Semillon from Hunter Valley in Australia, £13.99 from Philgas & Swiggot, managed superbly. Semillon is a wine grape with poor reputation that rarely gets much press. Most is blended with Sauvignon Blanc or else exposed to noble rot and found principally in Bordeaux and Sauternes in France and the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

The McWilliams’ Estate’s Mount Pleasant is kind of a wonderful exception. Like several Hunter Valley Semillons, the Mount Pleasant is oak-matured. The 2001 Elizabeth’s toasty flavour and subtle sweetness made a perfect partner to the sautéed onion, sage butter, and bread. The toasted quality of this particular Semillon also surprisingly helped to compliment the smoky flavour found in the speck, making the wine an all around match for the entire dish: 8.9.

This wine’s price might not technically ‘Blow the Bank’ but it might well prove difficult to find for readers. In which case, InterWined would recommend looking to winemaker McWilliams’ other wine labels, of which there are a great many (some such as their Semillon Chardonnays available in the US from Wine Chateau), or to another Hunter Valley oak-aged Semillon.

Rowena’s recipe in full:
Canederli allo Speck served with Sage brown butter, courtesy of Rubber Slippers in Italy.
Serves 2

INGREDIENTS:
2-3 slices or 1 thick chunk of firm, stale white bread, broken into small pieces
2 oz. speck or smoked bacon, finely diced
olive oil
1/4 cup onion, small diced
1 egg
1 cup milk
2 Tbsp. parsley, minced
2 Tbsp. parmigiano, grated
pinch of nutmeg
1 Tbsp. flour
salt and pepper, to taste
2 Tbsp. butter
4 large sage leaves, chopped

1. Combine the bread and speck in a large bowl. Sauté the onion in a little olive oil until soft (if using raw bacon, cook them now with the onions). In a separate bowl, whisk the egg with 1/2 of the milk. Add the egg mixture, sautéed onions, parsley, parmigiano, nutmeg, and flour to the bread mixture. Salt and pepper to taste; stir to combine well. Let rest 20-30 minutes.

2. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt lightly.

3. Check the bread mixture and add a little more milk if it is too dry. It should hold together but not be overly soft or wet. Dampen your hands and shape the mixture into 6-8 balls. Simmer the canederli in the water for about 10 minutes; they’ll eventually float to the top. In the meantime, sauté the sage leaves with the butter until lightly browned.

4. Remove the canederli with a slotted spoon and transfer to individual serving bowls, drizzle with sage brown butter and grated parmigiano on top.

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Tasting Notes