PAIRINGS Food and Wine
	APRIL 2004

by Sara Tamayo
Photos by Brad Shifflett

Each year the Brentwood Schools Education Foundation auctions off places at the table for a dinner at our home. These have sometimes gone for more than $2,500.

Twenty-five hundred bucks is a lot of money to pay for dinner. My goal when I host these events is to strive to create a completely memorable event for all the attendees and provide people with a dining memory that won’t soon be forgotten.

An important aspect for anyone who tries to create such an unforgettable dining experience, is to pair together food and wines that truly complement each other. Offering guests perfectly balanced food and wine selections during each course is the essence of every great meal.

THE ART OF CHOICE 
“Pairings” is the term used for the art of choosing the proper libation that will best suit and complement a given entrée. The operative word in the definition is “art.” And as with art everyone has an opinion.

It is important to understand that pairings, like all the parts comprising a total dining preparation and presentation experience, is a connoisseur-type activity. Selecting the correct drink to go with a given entrée involves a different mindset than when building a brick wall or assembling a backyard play structure. It is impossible simply to assemble the parts of a fine meal by following some rigid set of rules. People sometimes wish that choices for pairings might be more specific. At some level, most of us would like to follow rules in life and know, thereby, that we are doing the right thing. Rules are reassuring. The problem with pairings is that there are no rules; there is only individual taste.

TRYING TO HIT A SHIMMERING TARGET
Of course, there’s a difference between good taste and bad taste, but nobody can set rigid standards to define what is in good taste and what is not. My own ideas of whether a thing tastes good or not is based upon my own opinions and experiences. Some things seem awful to me, but if a person really likes the way something tastes or likes how two things go together, who am I to say his/her choice is wrong?

What people consider to be fine dining has changed so much over the past couple decades that it has become even more difficult to lay down rules for what wines and entrées go together. Very rarely will you now find the 5-7 course meals that formerly provided the traditional fine dining experience, with the possibility of a different wine with each course.

For one thing, cooking styles have changed. Now there is a marriage of many flavors on a single plate. One obvious example is the popular surf-and-turf entrée that so many people like. Everybody knows that you are supposed to serve red wine with meat and white wine with fish. So which do you serve when they are both on the same plate?

In order to respond effectively to the challenge of finding appropriate combinations of food and drink, we must begin with the basics. Let’s start at the very beginning by reviewing the fact that we have taste buds in our mouths that provide four possible taste sensations having to do with preparation and presentation of food:

• sweet
• sour
• bitter
• salty

NOTE: People are able to detect two other tastes, pungent and astringent. However, these tastes are not important in most fine dining menus, though some Indian recipes are deliberately designed to include these, as well.

PUTTING THE TASTES TOGETHER
The pairings challenge is to balance a specific food with an appropriate drink on the basis of the tastes involved on the two sides of the equation. The goal is to achieve a fine complement. We can all relate to the example of balancing a piece of rich chocolate cake brownie with a class of cold milk. The richness of the milk wonderfully cuts the sweetness of the cake.

But pairing chocolate with milk simply implements one solution among a number of solutions. You could also complement the chocolate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

You can become even more adventurous and not serve dairy products of any kind with chocolate cake. Contrary to the great “Got Milk” ads the American Dairy Association constantly bombards us with, you could also balance a serving of rich chocolate with coffee. In that case the bitterness of the coffee cuts, or complements, the sweetness of the chocolate.

You can unlock your creative instincts by focusing on the principles underlying satisfying pairings rather than focusing on the things to be paired themselves. Learn to use the basic principles to create satisfying pairings.

We should learn to recognize which ingredients are capable of producing the four taste sensations. Most of us realize from experience that acids produce a bitter taste. We should also learn, for example, that tannin produces a bitter taste and protein produces sweet. By pairing the taste of food with the taste of a selected drink, we create complementary sensations.