Brew and brie | Eat | Life | London Free Press

There?s a growing school of thought that beer is more suited to pairing with food than is wine.

Now, don?t me wrong. I?m not saying that you should avoid pairing wine with food. There are some places where wine seems to be irreplaceable. Personally, if I?m going to be eating a pasta dish with a tomato gravy, I definitely want a big Italian red to go with it. It?s just that there are situations where beer seems to be a better choice.

Take the wine and cheese parties that you?ve been invited to over the years. You?re sitting there with a piece of reasonably priced brie and a glass of chardonnay, trying to figure out how these things go together. Well, the chardonnay has a buttery character, and so does the soft cheese. The question is whether that?s enough to make a good pairing. The problem is that wine has no carbonation and no bitterness to play off the fat content of the brie. The chardonnay might match with the flavour, but it doesn?t do much to refresh the palate between bites. The small amount of bitterness and the comparatively heavy carbonation of a wheat beer might be a better match.

The three main concepts in pairing beer with food are to cut, contrast or complement the dish that you?re pairing the beer with. Ideally, if the dish that you?re eating is rich and creamy, you?ll want something that?s light but relatively hoppy in order to remove the fatty unctuousness from your palate. If you have a strongly flavoured dish, you might want to contrast it with something that?s equally strongly flavoured, but in a different way. Finally, there?s always the possibility of simply matching the flavours in the food and beer pairing so that they complement and enhance each other.

On Tuesday, I was at the second beer dinner organized by Greg Clow of Canadian Beer News. It was at L.A.B. restaurant in Toronto's Little Italy and featured the food of chef Howard Dubrovsky and beers from the local Great Lakes Brewery. It?s infrequent during a beer dinner that I see a chef attempt to go for all three pairing concepts over the course of a menu, so I will use them here as illustrative examples.

The first course of the evening was a seafood chowder with mussels and shrimp. The chowder itself was almost impossibly creamy, with a faint hint of bacony smokiness. The question with a dish of this nature is ?how do you avoid succumbing to palate fatigue?? With each bite, it loses some of its impact. The answer was to pair it with Great Lakes? No Chance With Miranda Saison. Because Saison naturally has a wealth of carbonation, it cut the creamy texture from the palate, in addition to providing tart notes from the Belgian yeast which refreshed the senses between spoonfuls.

The main course was a chinotto-braised beef short rib (chinotto is the Brio soft drink) on a bed of ancient grains with an orange espuma (foam) over the top. That?s a wide variety of fairly intense flavours, but Dubrovsky is talented enough that they were never busy. It was contrasted with a pairing of Great Lakes? Kama Stoutra, an Indian Imperial Stout which was designed by Zack Weinberg, who had won the right to brew it at Great Lakes in a home-brewing contest. It contained curry, of all things. I do not know that I would drink a lot of it by itself, but when paired with the short rib, it contrasted the intense flavours and demonstrated a different way the dish could have gone, had the chef made different choices.

Finally, there was a pot au chocolate paired served with Great Lakes? Dude Where?s My Czar Imperial Stout. The dessert was topped with a ganache that incorporated the beer, which had been flavoured with bourbon-soaked vanilla beans. Not only was it an exemplary complement because the vanilla in the beer enhanced the chocolate, it was fun to eat. I have to admit to my attempt at combining the beer and dessert together in the bottom of a glass as an impromptu beer float.

Social faux pas like these are probably the reason I?m not a restaurant critic.

Jordan St.John writes about beer in its many guises at saintjohnswort.ca

Source: http://www.lfpress.com/life/eat/2012/02/24/19423136.html

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