Ginger and chilli marinated aubergine with Lacryma Christi

Recently I’ve had a bit of a thing about pairing aubergines with orange wine especially if they’re cooked in a middle-Eastern style but it was actually an unusual red that went with this dish at the Uruguayan tasting at 67 Pall Mall the other day.

It was a variety that’s more common in Italy called Lacryma Christi (tear of Christ) and is generally a blend of other grapes such as Piedirosso and Sciascinoso. This version from Uruguay was made by Fiorella Faggiani Bohemian by Fiore using minimal intervention techniques (indigenous yeasts, old oak barrels and left unfined and unfiltered) and was a vibrant, slightly rustic red not dissimilar to a barbera.

It was particularly good with the aubergine which had been marinated in ginger and chilli and topped with a pepper, walnut and watercress salad - so slightly spicy but not excessively so. And relatively modest in alcohol at 13.5%. Sadly I can't find it for sale in the UK but I'm guessing an Italian Lacryma Christi Rosso would also work.

The other pairing that was great at the lunch was a crab risotto with a liine-up of different albarinos but I’m sure you can imagine that ...

I attended the lunch as a guest of Uruguay Wine.

Nduja and a super-Tuscan red

I don’t often get inspiration from chefs when it comes to food and wine pairing - you’d think they’d be into wine but they often aren’t - but Theo Randall’s suggestion of a super-Tuscan red with his dish of roast sausages with borlotti beans and nduja sauce was spot on.

Having posted the recipe, which comes from Theo’s new book, The Italian Deli Cookbook, I finally got round to cooking it over the weekend. Although the key ingredient, nduja, comes from Calabria it was absolutely delicious with a rich, smooth 2019 Grattamacco Bolgheri Rosso from Berry Bros and Rudd, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot and sangiovese. Unfortunately it already seems to be out of stock* at BBR who originally sent it to me but you can find it at Majestic, tannico.co.uk or wineeye.com by the case.

Similar Tuscan reds or rich full-bodied reds from the Maremma would also work or you could go for a southern Italian red like an aglianico, primitivo or nero d’avola. (There’s an interesting post on Calabrian wine here.)

Nduja, if you’re not familiar with it, is a soft Calabrian sausage with quite a spicy chilli kick. You can buy it in many Italian delis. Waitrose now stocks it as part of their Cooks Ingredients range

* a general problem at the moment. Wines seem to be flying as soon as they come in so if you read about something you like the sound of don’t hang around!

Recipe photograph ©Lizzie Mayson

Steak and Trousseau

'Hmmm, steak and red wine - nothing particularly original about that' you might be thinking but bear with, as they say.

Trousseau which comes from the Arbois region of eastern France is a much lighter red wine than those you would probably normally think of pairing with steak and in this case - a 2018 from Domaine des Bodines I was sent as part of the September selection from a new set-up called Oranj - a natural wine to boot.

The steak - a recipe from Sabrina Ghayour’s excellent new book Simply* wasn’t cooked conventionally either but cut into cubes, rolled in a spicy dry rub, seared and served with labneh (soft cheese), pul biber (chilli) butter and crispy onions. So not the kind of steakhouse steak that sets off a cabernet to perfection.

In fact it was the freshness of the wine that worked particularly well with the spicing offset by the smooth creaminess of the labneh. Which goes to show, as I’m always saying, that it’s the way you cook a dish and the flavours you put with your base ingredient that determines the wine match

You can order the September selection from Oranj which contains other natural wines from the French side of the Jura mountains, online at oranj.co.uk. And listen to this track while you're drinking it!

See also The best wine pairings for steak

*Here is one of the other delicious recipes from the book - yoghurt and spice-roasted salmon.

I was sent the wine as a press sample and the book as a review copy.

Spicy Sichuan noodles and sour plum tea

Although I think the difficulty of matching troublesome ingredients with wine is overrated that’s not true in the case of chilli which is an integral part of many Szechuan dishes. The tofu noodle hotpot I had at my local Chilli Daddy in Bristol at the weekend was definitely a case in point.

In fact the heat level was only 2 out of a possible 5 but even then it built quite markedly as the meal went on, one reason, I imagine, why they served a small bowl of (remarkably delicious) pickled beansprouts on the side.

The drink I’d ordered - a sour plum tea or Suan Mei Tang - also proved to be an effective antidote. It was a curious drink I hadn’t come across before - more pruney than plummy and intriguingly smoky.

According to an informative blog post I came across on The Woks of Life it’s made from several ingredients including dried sour plums and hawthorn berries and is commonly served with hotpot and other spicy foods. Wikipedia says the plums are dried before smoking, hence the smoky note.

Although I wasn’t sure I liked the taste at first it was brilliantly refreshing with the noodles and the more I drank it the more I enjoyed it. Definitely a drink to look out for or even make yourself if you like a lot of chilli.