We don’t pretend to fully understand all the technical details, but the latest issue of Scientific Reports (a division of Nature) includes a somewhat mind-bending study that takes all the recipes from Epicurious, Allrecipes.com and Menupan (a Korean site), and throws them in a blender with a computational model of food chemistry (don’t ask) to arrive at (something like) the fundamental difference between North American cuisine and East Asian cuisine. Whereas North American cooking tends to pair ingredients that share a lot of flavour compounds (like butter and vanilla), Asian cooking tends to do the opposite, pairing ingredients that don’t taste a whole lot like one another (like soy sauce and scallion). Confused? The paper has all sorts of fancy visualizations to explain things. Read the entire story [Scientific Reports] »
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The Black Hoof Cocktail Bar to kick off its guest chef series next Wednesday with Colin Tooke
The former Hoof Café is now home to the Black Hoof Cocktail Bar (Image: Karon Liu)
The Black Hoof has seen a whirlwind of changes in recent months (culminating of course in co-founder and chef Grant van Gameren’s recent departure). Come September 14, Hoof owner Jen Agg tells us, there’ll be another change, this time at the month-old Black Hoof Cocktail Bar: a new guest chef series.
Attention food science nerds: Foodpairing.com’s Bernard Lahousse brings taste into the lab in two talks this week
Lahousse in the lab (Image: Sense of Taste)
Chefs often speak of perfect pairings, particularly in food and wine. While most accept that certain flavour combinations just work, a team from Belgium has developed a popular tool based on the principle that foods combine well with one another when they share major flavour components (the working philosophy of The Fat Duck’s Heston Blumenthal). The Foodpairing database features 1,000 ingredients, along with their corresponding flavour profiles, and is beloved by food science nerds the world over. We spoke to Bernard Lahousse, science research director at parent company Sense for Taste (who was in town this week to present at the Pangborn Sensory Science Symposium) about how these innovative tools are used by professional chefs, home cooks and, increasingly, bartenders and mixologists.
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The sipper club: meet the city’s competitive cabal of top sommeliers
Will Predhomme belongs to a competitive cabal of top sommeliers who sniff, sip and spit their way through hundreds of bottles a week. They do this to help you decide what to drink with your dinner, while making you think it was your idea all along
One hundred and fifty-one people have reservations at Canoe tonight. Among these are many Bay Streeters, a couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, dozens of people on dates, including the bar manager from Crush, and a young woman who plans to propose to her boyfriend over dinner. The two private dining rooms are fully booked.
Canoe, part of the ever-expanding Oliver and Bonacini empire, is routinely considered one of the finest restaurants in the city. Last summer, in a rigorous competition held by the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers, known as CAPS, Canoe’s head sommelier, Will Predhomme, was proclaimed Ontario’s best. Predhomme has devoted a third of his life—he’s 29—to wine scholarship. He now knows more about wine than almost anyone in Toronto.
Just after 5 p.m., the bar area begins to fill up with commuters sipping cocktails as they wait for the traffic on the clogged Gardiner, 54 floors below, to dissipate. One of the restaurant’s first guests, a retired trial lawyer, arrives. As a young female host escorts him to his large corner table, he puts an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t like to pay bills,” he says. “I want a fucking account. Last time I was here, I offered those ladies”—referring to the hosts who greeted him at his last visit—“$300 and told them to set up an account for me. And I still don’t have one.” He and his three dining companions, Canoe regulars, have brought in several bottles of their own wine, including a cabernet franc from the ex-lawyer’s private vineyard in Tuscany. When Predhomme arrives at the table to discuss the wine, the ex-lawyer, captivatingly bratty in a way that only the rich and sort-of-powerful can be, repeats his complaint. “Look, I spend about $50,000 a year at Bymark, and I’d do the same here if I had a fucking account.” Predhomme is unmoved, but gracious. “If you give me your contact information,” he says, “I’ll make sure that it gets to the right people.”
“You’ll get me an account?”
“I’ll look into it.”
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Mixed marriages: nine excellent blended wines
White blends are red hot
(Image: Brian Rea)
Before buying a bottle, we all want some idea of what it holds in store, and we often look to the grape variety for clues: chardonnay will likely be creamy and rich, sauvignon blanc crisp and herbal, viognier will bloom with exotic fragrance. The latest white wine trend—blending three or more grape varieties—makes it much harder to predict taste, especially when the wines are given such enigmatic names as Conundrum, Twisted and just plain White. (What exactly does a conundrum taste like?) The new white blends may seem mysterious (and some wineries even market that mystery), but a few rules of thumb still apply. They tend to be floral because they usually contain muscat, gewürztraminer or viognier—grapes with stridently perfumed aromas. Most also feature sauvignon blanc or riesling, as the acidity of these grapes balances the sweeter, fruity notes of the aromatic varieties. And many have background oak spice when chardonnay is mixed in.
The art of scotch pairing, the messiah of coffee comes to Toronto, Martha Stewart’s vegetarian Thanksgiving
Food friendly (Photo by Eric Kilby)
• According to the Globe and Mail, scotch’s “vast array of sweet toffee, smoky mineral, spiced citrus, dried fruit and delicate floral notes” are finding a greater audience among epicures who want to pair their roasted duck breast with something other than chianti. The powerful drink finds its best pairings with bold food, such as a “dark-chocolate macaroon sandwiched with pear ganache and sliced foie gras” but weds poorly with spice—“anything that bites the tongue will exaggerate the burn.” Not everyone is sold on scotch with their meal, though: “That’s the place of a red wine,” says Jamie Kennedy. “Why ruin an amazing thing?” [Globe and Mail]
• When the self-proclaimed messiah of coffee, Duane Sorenson, descended on the doorstep of the Star’s Corey Mintz, he was flanked by disciples Matthew and Andrew and came with an offering: earth-jarring java made using single-origin beans and a Chemex coffee maker. Sorenson travels the world in search of the best brew, educating growers about how to properly dry their beans and vetting prospective vendors of his products. Where to try some in Toronto? Lit Espresso Bar. [Toronto Star]
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The digital drinker: Natalie MacLean’s food-and-wine matcher is now available on phones
Foodie apps for iPhones and BlackBerrys are all the rage of late (PC Magazine recently did a roundup of their favourites), and leading the charge in Toronto is sommelier and “unapologetically tipsy” wine lass Natalie MacLean. She recently launched a downloadable widget for her popular on-line drinks matcher, offering roadside assistance for LCBO-goers moored hopelessly between the Argentina and Vintages racks. The portable version allows users to pair food and drink from anywhere using a smart phone, then share the results via Facebook, MySpace, e-mail or Friendster. The app is downloadable from MacLean’s site, Nat Decants, and provides access to the 50,000 wine reviews she’s compiled over six years. That’s a lot of tipsy.
Updated daily, MacLean’s tool exists in two sizes and provides access to thousands of pairings. Users can match food to drink—or vice versa—by first selecting a broad category (“veal,” “white wine”) followed by a specific one (“wiener schnitzel,” “pinot blanc”), and then reading up on the recommended drink. The pairer can account for even the most unusual suspects, should provisions in the liquor cabinet or pantry run low. Among MacLean’s top 10 classic combos are lamb stew with Irish stout, macaroni and cheese with Argentine malbec, chocolate cake with Kentucky bourbon and (our personal favourite, for cast iron stomachs) spaghetti and meatballs with a bloody Mary.
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Beer: The new wine
Beer: it's what's for dinner (Photo by Tambako the Jaguar)
Forget the chardonnay—beer is Toronto’s new dining partner. We’ve been watching the beer-pairing trend since it popped up over a year ago, with aficionados telling the world that hoppy brews are complex enough to replace wine at meals. Beer’s appeal got a serious boost from the downturn, when pint pairing suddenly made good economic sense. Now, with patio season just around the corner, we took part in a pairing seminar to get the skinny on the craze. Here, some expert tips for the ale sommelier in training.
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