Wine and food pairing made easy

White wine with white meat. Red with red meat. Indian wines don't go with European food, and vice versa. The rules keep popping out of thin air.

And true or false, these can never factor in the many variables that could leave you with serious doubts about that 'white' wine you just paired up with that spice-laden Chettinad chicken.

But what better way to make sense of these intricacies of food and wine pairing than to enjoy a few glasses of vino over a lazy lunch in the sun at Olive Bar & Kitchen, Mehrauli, as a leading winemaker and chef talk you through things?

And so it was, when the chief winemaker of Four Seasons, Abhay Kewadkar, and Olive's corporate chef, Sabyasachi 'Saby' Gorai, hosted a pairing, er, masterclass (lately, one can't help but to throw in a Masterchef reference).

"Wine making is a science," declared Kewadkar, "but making great wines is an art." On the whole the red with red and white with white rule is not altogether wrong, explained the vintner. "The only problem is that this rule doesn't factor in cooking methods or the accompanying sauces and spices," he said.

To pair a wine well with food one needs to look at a number of factors, the most important of which are the weight and intensity of both the food and the wine. Heavy foods such as red meats usually go better with a full-bodied wine like a Cabernet Sauvignon. Pair a delicately flavoured fish with the same wine and you'll be courting disaster.

"The best wines to get started off on and to pair with a fair number of Indian dishes would be ones that are neither too sweet nor too dry," Kewadkar said, explaining why he had made the Four Seasons Chenin Blanc and Rose both "off dry".

Chef Saby, who succesfully pulled off a well-paired lunch, gave a little cooking class where he prepared filo-wrapped portobello mushrooms with a side of smoked scarmoza ratatouille and a wild mushroom salsa. A robust and flavoursome dish, it deserved the Four Seasons Barrique Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon.

To accompany a dessert, Kewadkar suggested a good rose in absence of a dessert wine. The desserts - spiced chocolate cake and tiramisu - showed up accompanied by glasses of the Four Seasons Blush. They did work together, though I would have preferred the cake with one of the reds.

But then again, there's only one rule that should matter when you're pairing food and drink. If it works for you, it works for you, so chuck that rule book out of the window.

Curry wars in the UK

Here's a spicy little number I co-wrote for Mail Today.

The original article is here:


Curry war gets spiced up in UK food hubs 

 By Sourish Bhattacharyya and Angad B. Sodhi

 English traders came to India and fought " spice wars" with other imperialist European nations to establish the Raj. Now see how the tables have turned.

 The UK has become the battleground for a curry war between South Asian restaurateurs in Birmingham and Glasgow. Both cities are claiming legal ownership of different types of curry.

 The owners of the Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow"s West End have sought legal recognition for Glasgow as the home of Britain"s favourite dish " chicken tikka masala . The Times of London reported that the campaign launched by the restaurant has the backing of the Glasgow city council and the local MP, Mohammed Sarwar of the Labour Party.

 It was the late Robin Cook who had, about a decade back when he was his country"s foreign secretary, declared the chicken tikka masala as Britain"s " national dish". The present lot of campaigners wants only to ensure that any restaurant offering the dish must refer to Glasgow as the city where it originated.

 The Shish Mahal owners claim the dish was created at their restaurant by Ali Ahmed Aslam after a customer complained that the chicken dish he"d been served was too dry. The chef, who was eating out of a tin of Campbell"s condensed tomato soup, threw the contents of his tin into a pan and added an assortment of spices to prepare a unique chicken curry. The chicken tikka masala was thus born.

 This claim is contested by Monish Gujral, one of the partners running the Moti Mahal chain of restaurants and grandson of the man he claims to have invented the dish in a dhaba in Peshawar before Partition.

 Kundal Lal Gujral, founder of the Moti Mahal restaurant at Daryaganj in the Capital, according to his grandson, invented the dish by adding fresh tomato puree, butter and full- fat cream to chicken tikkas . The invention was necessitated by the fact that leftover chicken tikkas become stringy if they"re not consumed within hours after coming out of the tandoor . Butter chicken has been a Moti Mahal staple for the past 62 years.

 Back in the UK, Sarwar, the Glasgow Central MP, will introduce a motion in the House of Commons to grant legal protection to the dish in a similar way as the smokies " haddock fish smoked in a particular way in Arbroath, Scotland -- are now called Arbroath smokies, or as lamb originating in Wales is known as Welsh lamb under the European Union"s Protected Geographical Indication Scheme.

 " The chicken tikka masala is a favourite dish of mine and I am very proud that it was created in Glasgow at the Shish Mahal," said Sarwar in an interview with The Times . Granting Geographical Indication ( GI) is an accepted practice around the world " at least 90 Indian items, from Basmati rice to Pochampalli saris , have GIs.

 Likewise, Indian whiskies can no longer get away by claiming to be Scotch because they have not originated in Scotland and cannot claim the goodwill, reputation and quality enjoyed by whiskies made there.

 In a similar bid for the ownership of another popular British curry, the Birmingham City Council has launched a campaign seeking legal protection for balti dishes.

 The goal of this campaign, though, is that no dish prepared outside of the Balti Triangle in Birmingham, a city known as the curry capital of the UK, can be called a balti dish. The Balti Triangle, consists of about 50 curry houses in Birmingham.

 According to the local government"s website, balti dishes was brought to the city by Pakistani immigrants in the 1970s.

 But even Asif Ali, manager of Glasgow"s Shish Mahal, doesn"t buy Birmingham"s argument.

 " Balti is like saying our national dish is a burger, it doesn"t mean anything," he said in a media interview, adding: " It ( chicken tikka masala ) is rightfully a Glaswegian thing and we have a far better claim to it than Birmingham has to the balti ." Monish Gujral, who"s also the author of two books on tandoori cuisine, also found the notion absurd. " Balti dishes get their name from the miniature baltis in which they are served," he says. " These baltis must be exported from India or Pakistan, so the GI should rightly belong to us." Meanwhile, Shish Mahal"s claim to the chicken tikka masala has not gone unopposed, with counter- claims coming from London and Birmingham, and from within Glasgow itself.

 The family of the late Glaswegian curry restaurateur Sultan Ahmed Ansari claims that he was the man behind the dish.

 Well, anyone who has ever tasted butter chicken can vouch that this can"t be true. And that Britain"s " national dish" is nothing but India"s favourite curry gone wrong.