Hi, I’m Marty Richardson from chefmartyrich.com. Welcome back to our daily tip series.

A Chef Without A Kitchen

As you can see, I am not in the kitchen, and I am not very happy! I went to the Civic Center today to use the kitchen and they are having some kind of function there and it was just too loud for me to tape. Home again, home again, jigitty gig. I’m on the back porch and as I was coming into the driveway I picked up the mail today and lo and behold there is my Costco Connection magazine with Al Gore on the front, talking about energy.

Costco Connections

There are two articles in the magazine that I thought were pretty interesting and I wanted to share them with you. One was on pairing wine and cheese. And the other one was buying smart: nuts. Is it a coincidence that these are the topics that we are scheduled to talk about this week? You might have thought the topics a little strange but, apparently, I’m on the right track!

Wine and Cheese

This article is by Natalie MacLean, and the very first sentence is ‘One of the lingering myths about matching food and wine is that cheese should be paired only with red wine”. Then she goes on for the balance of the article to talk about all kinds of white wines that pair very well with cheese. The first thing she talks about here is “luckily a few simple rules can help. The first is that the milder the cheese the easier to match”. So the point here is, as I told you before, you don’t want he food to overpower the wine and you don’t want the wine to overpower the food. So if you have a mellow cheese you are looking for a mellow wine. Something with a low alcohol content of 12% or less. Several examples are Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewurztraminer, and Pinot Gris.

Playing Favorites

Then, she says her favorite cheese is goat cheese or chevre. This has a chalky hard grassy flavor and it pairs well with a zingy Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand or South Africa, or a flinty unoaked Chardonnay from California. So now she is comparing and contrasting rather than trying to match. The third example she talks about is soft cheeses. She can’t resist “a thick rich Brie slightly warmed with its white savory lava oozing onto a baguette”. Yum, just thinking about it makes me hungry. There is a complication with soft cheeses. They are “tougher to match because their opulent texture they can overpower the wine”. She suggests a robust white oaked aged Chardonnay from California. There is a lot of balance and thought involved, but hopefully some of these examples will help guide you.

More Wine and Cheese Tips

Another good point in the article was “the longer a cheese ripens the higher its fat content and the stronger its flavors so it can hold its own against a robust red”. Like a Bordeaux. And then she ends this particular part of the article talking about port. Port is a fortified red wine usually served with dessert as a match for blue cheeses like Roquefort. Ms. MacLean also discusses appetizers and wines.

Wines and Appetizers

She has three tips in this section. “Peanuts, walnuts, pecans, almonds, and other nuts all have an oily, salty taste and need a wine with an acidic backbone as Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc to balance their taste”. Then her second point, I covered, which is “spicy Asian and Thai foods need some sweetness to temper their heat. A late-harvest Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling compliment these foods without getting clobbered”. The last tip is something I didn’t know, but I think is pretty important because we are going to cover this later in our appetizer section. “Fishy snacks” (interesting description) “such as oysters, shrimp and salmon are too briny for red wines and make the wine taste acidic” So she suggests a sparkling wine like champagne to cleanse the pallet. So I thought that is an interesting match.

Again, her name is Natalie MacLean. She is the author of Red, White and Drunk All Over (which is a great title). She offers online food and wine matching at www.natliemaclean.com . So there is a reference for you. If this has been confusing, you can go to her website and she can match your food with a particular wine.

The other article was about nuts, so I am going to introduce that in the next video. I am going to shoot that right now and then we will probably post these videos back to back. I am trying to keep moving forward. Thanks for watching and we are going to get to serving spiced nuts as an appetizer straight away.