Did you try Friday’s buffalo wing recipe? Well, I did, but without the benefit of the suggested wine. Simply put, InterWined’s recipe inspired me to experiment.
In this case, the gamble was with the widespread 2006 Jacob’s Creek ‘Three Vines’ white, £7 from Costcutter. The Three Vines offerings by Jacob’s Creek are nothing short of the […]

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week, ‘Blow the Bank’ brings you savoury dinner that doubles as a nice mid-afternoon snack or late-night dessert courtesy of InterWined’s Own Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas.

InterWined could bore you with stories of the history of the samosa and it’s journey from the middle-east to India or somesuch, but that would be boring. See, you’re already yawning. It would also be misleading, because these samosas are samosas in name only and inspired by a bit of late night food television viewing and a recipe for what was by all accounts an apple turnover that the chef chose to rename an apple samosa. I might have been tired, and it might have been late, and I might not remember the name of the programme, but the simple samosa recipe stuck in my head.

And now, I’m sticking it in yours.

Making your own dough can be daunting; it certainly is for InterWined. In fact, I’ve yet to follow a recipe for making dough and get the appropriate results, from the stated measures of ingredients. I’m forever having to adjust the flour or the water or the milk or whatever to make the mixture wetter or dryer and easier to knead into dough. And, even though, I vow each never to make my own dough again…I always do and almost always get the same mixed results.

Not this time. This time, I followed a simple formula of 2 parts flour to just less than 1 part water. And it worked.

Now what about those samosas?

Citrus fruit and ricotta are classic pairing partners and regularly feature in numerous Italian recipes, such as those for cannoli. While InterWined recipe for Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas doesn’t include citrus and isn’t Italian, the same classic thinking prevails with pairing them with a wine.

The 2005 Château Saransot Dupré Blanc Sec (12.5%) Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon (60/40 blend from Bordeaux, currently available from Cadman Fine Wines for £8.99, brings with it a zippy acidity that pairs well with the peppery ricotta of the somosa, the Sauvignon Blanc helping the wine to find balance with the creamy flavour of the ricotta cheese.

It’s the salt, found of the sun-dried tomato, that proves the most challenging aspect in this pairing and, as mentioned in previous ‘Blow the Bank’ posts, countless others. However, the creaminess of the ricotta mixed with pepper and the Semillon in the wine do a nice job of taming it and preventing the wine’s overall acidity from clashing with the saltiness of the sun-dried tomatoes and leaving a pucker on the lips and a grimace on the face.

On the nose, the Château Saransot Dupré gives a good mix of mild honey and hay that translates as pretty well to the mouth where the honey clearly dominates before finishing with a slightly sharp zip of lemon and acid.

Personally, hay is one of those strange terms that sometimes appears in tasting notes that, while entirely accurate, is kind of meaningless to anyone who didn’t grow up near horses, under a thatched roof, or chewing it while pretending to be Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, a gunslinger from a 1950s’ Western. It’s like gooseberry…only people that have had the occasion to eat enough gooseberry so as to create a sense of it in their minds, noses, and palates should ever be allowed to use that tasting note — especially when describing Sauvignon Blanc. Why would such a common wine smell of such an uncommon fruit? No one ever says the reverse, “This gooseberry smells exactly like a 2004 Sancerre from Château Pretentious Tasting Note”. Do they?

Well, I am not one of those gooseberry gobblers. But, I do know what hay tastes like, since I did grow up doing one of those things (any guesses?) and, thus, feel pretty OK using it to describe the wine. It’s a bit…hay.

And, for those worried about their salt intake, the current unpopularity of sun-dried tomatoes, hay-tasting, or the availability of the Château Saransot Dupré Blanc Sec, a great alternative would be to replace the sun-dried tomatoes with freshly chopped pomordorinos, as fresh tomatoes tend to be fairly acidic, and pair the dish with the equally well-suited Ronco del Gnemiz Sauvignon twice reviewed by InterWined in recent weeks. (They make quite a bit of ricotta in Friuli, don’t you know.)

InterWined’s Own Recipe in Full

Ricotta & Sun-dried Tomato Samosas

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’.

This week ‘Blow the Bank’ returns to Beatrice Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande, and her Versatility in a Spinach and Sweet Potato Cake to bring you Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffins.

For many eaters, muffins are synonymous with one meal — breakfast. But, long before the humble blueberry muffin appeared in a powder from Betty Crocker or its low fat oat cranberry cousin went on sale at Starbucks, the muffin was a tea cake and before that a bread.

So while Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin makes an excellent breakfast muffin — and it does to be sure — it also makes a superb dessert cake and, even, a superior alternative to the more common apple sauce and potato found served alongside a nice pork loin or chop. (Don’t believe me, try it and you’ll see.)

On this occasion, InterWined chose to serve it as a dessert or pudding, as some people might prefer.

The 2006 Peter Lehmann Botrytis Semillon (12.5%), £7.99 from Oddbins for a half bottle and widely available in the US for approximately $18-$20, made for an almost perfect match. Why almost perfect? The wine is just a tad too sugary sweet. Peter Lehmann’s chief winemaker confidently proclaims the 2006 vintage its finest ever produced, and InterWined is hard pressed to disagree. This wine is fresh and, mostly, easy-to-drink. The colour is a honeyed gold, with the slight sense of honey continuing on the nose before really hitting the palate with a burst of honeyed fruit. This is wine made from bees, if ever there was one.

But, for InterWined, it all comes back to the sensation that there is just a tad too much sweetness in the wine. Normally, if one finds a dessert wine too sweet it would indicate an imbalance. Yet, in all honesty, I don’t think that there is one. The slightness of it all could equally suggest that my complaint is simply one of personal preference. (Maybe I just don’t like wine made of noble rot, as much as I thought I did.)

In terms of the pairing, what might have made this a more prefect match and probably helped to overcome any nagging sense of sweetness would have been to increase the amount of sweet potato and cheese by a few millimetres and sprinkle into the mixture a few more twists of pepper mill. But be careful when doing so, too much grated potato or cheese and the muffin will loose its very appealing lightness and become quite stodgy.

In the end, Mostly InterWined’s Own Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin with Peter Lehmann’s Botrytis Semillon: 8.something rather impressive but equally probably rather meaningless, something Robert Parker Scale-esque like 86/100. Whatever that means.

Mostly InterWined’s Own Recipe In Full

Apple & Cinnamon Sweet Potato Muffin
(Makes six muffins)

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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

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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