Andrew Dornenburg - What to drink with what you eat

Copyright 2006 by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page

Photography by Michael Sofronski

All rights reserved. Except as permited under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Bulfinch Press

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First eBook Edition: July 2009

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ISBN: 978-0-316-07797-2

Contents

A LSO BY T HE A UTHORS Becoming a Chef Culinary Artistry Dining Out Chefs Night Out The New American Chef The Flavor Bible

F OR S USAN B ULKELEY B UTLER , AUTHOR OF THE WONDERFUL BOOK

B ECOME THE CEO OF Y OU , I NC ., FOR HER INSPIRING MOTTO

The flavor of a food almost always reveals the quality of a wine and exalts it. In turn, the quality of a wine complements the pleasure of a food and spiritualizes it.

LUIGI GINO VERONELLI, wine critic (19262004)

The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. L INUS P AULING Life is the sum of all your choices. A LBERT C AMUS

We researched and wrote this book for two simple reasons: 1) to serve as an idea-starter to help you consider a lot of ideas regarding what to drink with what you eat; and 2) to guide you to make even better choices when selecting a beverage, so that you have the potential to enjoy a peak experience every time!

To paraphrase Linus Pauling, we firmly believe that the more ideas you take into account, the more likely you are to have some good (or even great) ones from which to choose. And we agree with Albert Camus that the better your choices, the better your life. We hope that this book will improve your ideas and your choices and, ultimately, your life.

In fact, What to Drink with What You Eat has the potential to be the most important book you read this year. After all, what other title can promise the opportunity to bring more pleasure into your life through something you already do three times a day? Our hope is to help you extend the realm of gastronomy at play in your daily life by encouraging you to explore a whole new world of offerings of wine, beer, cocktails, coffee, tea, and even water.

After considering a lot of different beverage ideas, whats the best way to winnow down your final choices? To maximize your pleasure (and that of your guests), youll want to consider such factors as your (and their) personal beverage preferences, which well explore in .

This book represents the better parts of two lifetimes of research. Weve been collecting these guidelines and recommendations and taste-testing as many of them as humanly possible for more than two decades. Some have proven tried-and-true from our own personal experiences, as weve researched classic food and beverage pairings extensively from oysters and Sancerre, to chocolate and tawny port and put them to the test against our own palates. Others we discovered during the course of our travels and restaurant visits, often by putting ourselves into the hands of top sommeliers and chefs. (Who knew pan-seared venison with Arizona Zinfandel could be such a delicious match, as we learned at Janos in Tucson?) Still others were amassed over the years for our previous books through interviews with a virtual Whos Who of the food and beverage world. In fact, we started this research on compatible flavors in earnest when setting out to write our book Culinary Artistry over a decade ago, but space constraints precluded the inclusion of most beverages in that 400-plus-page reference.

However, the majority of the recommendations that comprise the more than fifteen hundred entries youll find in the pages that follow came from the dozens of experts including many of Americas best sommeliers we interviewed over the past few years. Collectively, these recommendations make up a virtual thesaurus of food and beverage pairing ideas.

Over the course of researching this book, weve had our eyes opened in delicious ways:

• While we received enormous pleasure from a hundred-year-old Sauternes served to us with sauted foie gras by the late chef Jean-Louis Palladin, weve also learned the joys of a simple bottle of Beaujolais on a summer afternoon picnic!
• Chef Marcus Samuelssons New York restaurant, Riingo, surprised us with a delicious course that disproved the notion that red meat requires red wine, in the form of a trio of tartares (including beef ) served with a glass of German Riesling.
• We tasted how well a French ros played off pastrami from Katzs Delicatessen during the appetizer course of one of the most memorable wine tasting dinners weve ever attended, at Amy Saccos restaurant, Bette, in New York.
• When we celebrated Valentines Day over dinner with friends at Gilt this year, sommelier Jason Ferris delighted our table with a rare Tasmanian Pinot Noir that managed to pair beautifully with chef Paul Liebrandts duck and steak dishes.

But our food and beverage pairing compulsions started long before these instances in Karens case, in childhood. She remembers:

Some kids are picky eaters. Not me I was an omnivore who would try anything once, from anchovies to chocolate-covered ants to duck blood soup.I, on the other hand, was a picky drinker. Many kids would prefer to drink chocolate milk, hands-down, over regular milk. But I thought chocolate milk with a sandwich was gross and found I could only drink it by itself or with the simplest of cookies, such as vanilla wafers.On beautiful fall Sundays after church, my family would sometimes go for a drive to Yates Cider Mill in Rochester, Michigan, which is where I learned that nothing tastes better with freshly made doughnuts than just-as-fresh apple cider. Later, after getting to eat my share of ice cream as a waitress at an ice cream parlor, I discovered that the perfect palate refresher for a sundae was a glass of ice-cold water.I first got to know wine, and especially Italian wine, while waitressing during college at Daves Italian Kitchen in Evanston, where the restaurants then-BYOB policy had me uncorking and serving countless bottles of Chianti Classico with chef Dave Glatts pizza, and Soave Bolla to accompany his spaghetti with white clam sauce.And I learned more about beer than most people who find themselves allergic to hops: My college boyfriend Larry was a fan of boutique beers who seriously considered opening his own brewery, so I not only tasted lots of Larrys home brews (made in a hallway closet), but also traveled with him to visit microbreweries from Maine to California. We even hosted British beer authority Michael Jackson in our apartment when he visited Chicago, so I found myself sampling and falling for my first lambic fruit beers (which I especially loved with, or instead of, dessert) in rather distinguished company.A few years ago, over a casual lunch at Amys Bread in New York City, I was so enamored with how my turkey sandwich was enhanced by the delicious sparkling cranberry juice called Fizzy Lizzy served there that I went home and wrote a fan email to founder Liz Marlin at the address on the label. I subsequently learned that her sparkling fruit juices were also served in top restaurants like Blue Hill at Stone Barns, spurring our interest in the matching of food with so-called adult sodas. Through my life-long passion for discovering new flavor marriages, I developed a special place in my heart for certain synergistic pairings, including:Next page