Cornish Pasties



Hey y'all it's Madeleine I want to explain the basics behind food and so you can create pairings on your own. In order to do so, I'm using an infographic poster called the food and wine pairing chart that I created for Wine Folly, so we can sort of vet some pairings together. But before we get into all of that, let's understand the basics, the fundamentals of flavor pairing.
The process of involves balancing tastes with one another. There are essentially five building blocks of taste to construct flavor pairings: bitter, sweet, salt, fat and acid.

So let's say you have this dish with kale and kale has some in it. You might want to that bitterness with fat, salt and some to help balance out the dish. It's useful to note that the more intense the taste, the more intense the balancing taste should be. So if I had radicchio in the last example, which is a lot more bitter, I might opt for something like and blue cheese to really the flavors.

The topic of flavor pairing goes pretty deep. There are now other flavors we've learned and understood that go beyond just the five fundamental tastes, including or or which means , so you can go crazy if you want to, but I like to keep things simple not only because you're learning, but as soon as you add wine it gets more complicated.
When I'm thinking about pairing wines with food, I like to think of the wine more as an ingredient with attributes than as just wine itself. Wine as an ingredient is a with a lower pH which means fundamentally it's on the of the spectrum.

Next some wines are sweet and some are dry as in not sweet and finally if you're working with a red wine, you will have an element of bitterness in the form of pigment and aka . Now that we see wine as an ingredient, we will choose the role it plays with the food. It will either be a pairing where the flavors go together, or a pairing where they contrast one another.

A good example of a congruent pairing would be a Sauvignon Blanc paired with chilled cucumber soup. In this pairing, the sharp and flavors that Sauvignon Blanc highlight the freshness of the cucumbers in the soup which is texturally very creamy.
A good example of a complementary pairing would be the classic pairing of steak and Cabernet Sauvignon. In this pairing, the acids and tannins in the wine work opposite the rich fatty flavors and umani in the meat.

When you have a good understanding of the fundamental tastes in the different styles of wines, it's actually pretty easy to come up with food and wine pairings on your own in your head. However, if you're just getting started, I totally understand, we created this chart I'm gonna link it here, up there, maybe down there, so you can take a look at it on your own and start practicing pairings, all right! Here's how the chart works: on the there are nine styles of wine, on the there are food ingredients which are organized by type. You'll see the recommended pairings for these ingredients as you go across the x-axis. Dots indicate a pairing and large dots indicate an excellent pairing. So if you want to create your own pairing, identify the major ingredients in your dish, the sort of the , and then use the chart to find recommended wines.

So for example, let's say I want to pair a BLT sandwich on wheat bread. I would then identify the major ingredients. Well, bacon is definitely a major ingredient, there's lettuce but it's more of a textural thing, tomato is an ingredient and so is the bread. So those three ingredients I will find on the chart, there's bacon, bacon seems to go well with a light red wine and a sweet red wine, then there's tomato, tomato will go with a red wine but it'll also pair with a sweet wine, and then finally we have the wheat bread which goes with several different wine styles, and it looks like it will also go with a sweet white wine too. I might be picking a sweet white wine to go with my BLT and as it happens Riesling, an off dry Riesling is an excellent pairing with a BLT sandwich.
Alright I hope you enjoyed this little wine and food pairing demo and have fun making wonderful pairings.