Oct

Slow-Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb

Sean Sellers in Red Wines, Blow the Bank, Meat & Poultry, Gamay Noir 2006, France, Georges Duboeuf

InterWined Food
Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results, along with the recipe!

It used to be that InterWined prepared its dish following the instructions of one of the Internet’s best food blogs. But, for the last several weeks, it’s blazed its own trail and almost forgotten that the idea was to pair a wine that exceeded the normal £10 ($20) threshold Jacob set for InterWined when he started the site about 200 years ago…

So this week, ‘Blow the Bank’ comes in the form of a good old-fashioned recipe — not from a blog, but from a book (an actual cookbook) — in the form of Slow Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb from Greg and Lucy Malouf’s excellently exotic ode to Lebanese and Syrian cooking Saha.

As readers will know, the vast majority of ‘Blow the Bank’ dishes come courtesy of chefs and bloggers from other Web sites who give ‘Blow the Bank’ scribe Sean permission to publish their recipes. So what should he do with a recipe from a cookbook that retails for £19.50?

Well, here’s the answer…write the author a letter and wait for a reply.

A copy of the letter follows, along with pictures of the cooked dish and a review of the wine. (Note: Sean replaced the pearl onions listed in the recipe with 8 shallots and the lamb chops with lamb rump steaks.)

Dear Mr. Malouf,

My name is Sean Sellers and about a year ago, my wife Steph gave me a copy of your excellent cookbook as a gift. I thoroughly enjoyed and particularly like your lamb recipes. (Lamb is Steph’s favourite meat and the first thing I ever cooked for her.)

I’m not a chef, but I do like to cook. And each week, I pair a wine and a meal for a Web site called InterWined.com, written by a well-known international wine journalist and sometime actor. In the past several months, I’ve cooked recipes from Internet chefs around the world alongside a few of my own.

Before posting the pairing on the site, I seek the chef’s permission to publish the recipe with photos of the finished dished and a review of the wine with which it was paired. This week, I prepared your fantastic Slow-Cooked Sweet & Sour Lamb (it’s a firm favourite) with a few minor alterations. Namely, I replaced your pearl onions with shallots. But, since the recipe came from your cookbook and I didn’t have your permission, I thought it unwise and inappropriate to publish your recipe without seeking your permission first.

So, instead, I’ve published the post with pictures of the dish and this letter.

The 2006 Georges Duboeuf Brouilly from Beaujolais is as rich, grapey, and full of vibrant red fruit flavour as it was last year and probably the year before that, if not the year before that…after all, M. Duboeuf was fined €30000 in 2005 for blending grapes to make up for a poor 2004. Yet the wine’s consistency in flavour is probably down to a combination of cultivation practices and M. Duboeuf’s 55 years making Beaujolais more than anything else. And there’s something nice about knowing exactly what one is going to get from a bottle of Georges Duboeuf. (Remember; this is the man that invented the annual Beaujolais Nouveau craze. He knows what he’s doing.)

The 2006 Bruilly is a superb match for the thick tomato sauce of Greg Malouf’s sweet & sour lamb, the fruitiness of the wine balancing nicely the tinge of sweet and sour flavour of the vinegar and, in the case of InterWined’s version, the sweetness of the shallots. 8.5: predicable, yet perfectly on the money — all €30000 of it.

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Tasting Notes