Press About
Santa Rosa Press Democrat, April 13, 2010
Perfect Pairings
Some people take their food and wine pairings very seriously. Others liken it to an evil conspiracy to make wine more complicated than it needs to be. Napa food writer, recipe developer and culinary instructor Jill Silverman Hough falls somewhere in between.
The author of a new book, “100 Perfect Pairings: Small Plates to Enjoy with Wines you Love,” Hough offers a practical approach for pairing wines with a host of small dishes that can blithely be whipped up at home.
“This might possibly be the first-ever food and wine pairing book decidedly not written for food and wine geeks,” Hough said. “It’s for everyday wine drinkers, regular folks who like a glass of wine with a meal or with friends, or both, and who also like to eat good food and have that food complement the wine, and vice versa.”
Hough says that it drives her crazy when she reads food and wine pairing books that focus relentlessly on wines that most people have never heard of or would have trouble finding — or affording.
So instead she breaks her book into chapters, each covering one of the 12 most basic varietals — cabernet sauvignon, syrah, zinfandel, merlot, pinot noir, rosé, gewürztraminer, riesling, viognier, chardonnay, pinot grigio and sauvignon blanc.
She sets the bar at the kinds of wines people can find both at wine stores and in supermarkets, at all price pointsbut with a nod to wines priced between $7 and $15 — what the majority of wine drinkers tend to buy.
“One of the great things about wine is that it’s made in every style and for every budget,” Hough said. “There’s room for everyone at the table.”
From there, Hough provides recipes in each chapter that will go with every bottle of that varietal.
“Some recipes might work better with certain styles of, for example, chardonnay, but they’ll all work with chardonnay,” she further explained. “If you know that your particular bottle of chardonnay is buttery or that it’s crisp, great. If not, don’t worry about it.”
Hough, who has taught cooking classes at the now-defunct Copia in Napa and Ramekins Culinary School in Sonoma, where she’ll lead a class in perfect pairings later this week, believes a perfect pairing is a matter of individual taste.
“You put food and wine together in your mouth and you either like it or you don’t,” she said. “Think of perfect pairings as an arena to play in.”
Through her own explorations, Hough, who “hung out” exclusively with one varietal at a time for several weeks as she worked on recipes, learned a lot about each type’s strengths and weaknesses when it came to enjoying them with food.
She found chardonnay and merlot the most versatile and viognier the most challenging, with cabernet sauvignon a close second.
“The list of foods that pair with cab isn’t long,” she said. “People tend to think that the most elegant, impressive, fancy wine they can plop on the table for a meal is a cab, but the reality is that it’s only rarely the best wine for the food. So say I, at least.”
Why? The reason, she offers, is that cabernet tends to be austere — sharp and severe and intense — and you have to account for that in the foods you pair with it.
Through her trials and errors Hough found that adding Dijon mustard where she could to recipes for pairable dishes helped, as the sharp severity of the mustard married well with similar qualities in the wine. Also good with cab? Fatty meat.
She found a similar match made in heaven with balsamic vinegar and merlot, though she ended up cutting a recipe for Lamb Chops with Fig and Orange Tapenade because she simply, frustratingly couldn’t get it to taste right — despite the tablespoon of balsamic — with the wine.
Though Hough is sticking to a proletarian approach, she admits that sublime food and wine pairings are indeed possible, citing a magical match between smoked sea bass and a bottle of riesling that she experienced while dining with her husband in San Francisco.
“I wish I could remember what riesling it was,” she said with regret, “so I could reproduce that perfect pairing again and again. But I still enjoy smoked sea bass with all kinds of riesling.”
Sidebar:
CLASS IS IN
What: Food and Wine Pairing 101: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Pairing Wine and Food, But Were Afraid to Ask, a food demo with Jill Silverman Hough
When: Friday, April 16, 6:30 p.m.
Where: Ramekins Culinary School and Inn, 450 West Spain St., Sonoma, 933-0450, www.ramekins.com
Cost: $65
Dishes to include: Baked brie and roasted garlic in phyllo paired with chardonnay; Serrano shrimp paired with pinot noir; steak, porcini and parmesan risotto paired with cabernet sauvignon; and bittersweet chocolate brownies paired with ruby port.
Sidebar:
PAIRING RULES
While the possibilities are endless, here are Hough’s basic, commonsense rules for easy pairing of foods with wines:
Pair sweet foods with sweet wines
Pair acidic foods with acidic wines
Pair rich/meaty/heavy, acidic or slightly bitter foods with tannic wines
Pair light foods with light wines and heavy foods with heavy wines
Pair intense foods with intense wines
When considering a dish, consider its most expressive components and pair with them
Recipes from “100 Perfect Pairings: Small Plates to Enjoy with Wines You Love” accompanied this article – Chicken and Endive Salad Sandwichettes, Spring Vegetable and Prosciutto Tart, and Lamb Meatballs with Mint, Pint Nuts and Tahini Sauce.
