Sausage and sweet wine

Toward the end of the year and when all the vegetables are gone, I clean up the vegetable garden. I make compost in the vegetable garden during winter to prepare for spring so the once lively garden is now a pile of dirt.

The garden looks empty but herbs are still there. I consulted with one of my favorite savory baking books, “All Day Baking” by Pippa and Michael James, and chose to make Pork, Sage and Onion Sausage Rolls.

All three herbs called for in this recipe, rosemary, sage and thyme, were in the garden. I must have been destined to bake this pie. I used shortcrust pastry instead of Puff pastry so it was quick and easy, but the pie was still so delicious.

We had this pie with Hans Lang Riesling Auslese Rheingau 2002

Auslese is a wine category in Germany. It indicates that the wine is made with very ripe grapes which have the high sugar content therefore the resulting wine is often sweet.

So, this wine was sweet but not too sweet. The sweetness was embraced with the minerality and fresh fruits, and together they created the depth of the flavor which was a good combination with the savory flavor of the sausage.

Some people say that they don’t like Riesling because it’s too sweet. Many of them had an unpleasant experience with the once popular cheap sweet Riesling.

Riesling is not always sweet (or cheap). Especially with the global trend for the drier wine you can easily find the dry Riesling wine from anywhere. To make it easier, the wines from Alsace carry the sweetness level guide on the label so that you can make sure that you are purchasing the dry wine.

And the well made sweet Riesling is far from the boring sweet alcoholic juice. The sweetness is perfectly balanced with the bright acidity, and with the rich flavors of fruits and herbs which are developed during the long growing season under the ideal condition for this variety, this sweet liquid becomes the wine with the depth and complexity, just like this bottle of Riesling.

I didn’t choose this wine to pair with this pie. The wine was happened to be open the day and I just tried them together without high expectations, and the outcome was surprisingly pleasing. I love when the food and wine pairing gives me the delicious surprise.

Finally fall baking

One of the things I feel lucky to live in the Bay Area is that the summer is relatively cool. However, with the global warming even the summer here is becoming hotter and makes me to hesitate to turn on the oven. Now it’s finally starting to cool down. It means, it’s time to bake.

The first pie to bake for the fall of 2025 is my favorite - Cornish pasties.

The pie dough was shortcrust pastry - as usual I substituted the half of the flour with the spelt flour. And the filling was almost vegetarian: onion, spinach, potato, Swiss cheese and shio-koji.

When it was done, I grabbed them and headed to the neighborhood wine bar where I could bring the outside food to find a glass of wine to pair with.

Finding good pairing was not as easy as I thought. I tried several glasses of white wine and found most of them made the pasties bitter. After a few attempts I finally found nice pairing.

Domaine Jérôme Gradassi  Châteauneuf-du-Pape Blanc 2019

Organic white wine from a small estate in Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The variety is 100 % Clairette Rose.

Pleasant aromas of herb, jasmine, ripe citrus like lime. Fresh acidity is wrapped in the roundness of the texture.

This wine was fun to drink by itself, and brought out the umami flavor of the vegetables when I had it with the pasties. 

Baking with Gluten-Free Flour

During the shelter in place order I did a lot of baking.
As I looked for new recipes I also looked into using different kinds of flours such as oat flour, spelt flour or chickpea flour.

One of them was gluten-free flour.

It usually consists of almond flour, rice flour, potato starch, etc..., depending on the producer. 
I assume this flour was developed for people with gluten allergy but I thought that I could probably use this for recipes which I wanted to avoid developing gluten.

To compare with regular flour I chose to make Cornish pasties which I’d been making often recently.

The flour I used is King Arthur Measure for Measure Flour.

With this flour I made the shortcrust pastry dough with flour (mixed the gluten-free flour and pastry flour with 3:1 ratio), butter, salt and cold water.

The dough was hard to come together so I had to mix a lot. I didn’t need to worry about developing gluten but still tried to work quick because I didn’t want the butter to melt.

Folding the dough into the Cornish pasties shape was the hardest part.

The dough was very crumbly and kept breaking every time I tried to fold.

I somehow managed to shape them and finished baking.

From the look it was just like the Cornish pastry I usually make.
And the flavor was like my usual Cornish pasties, too.
The texture was flaky, also almost same as the dough made with regular flour, maybe with a little bit of powdery feel.

The pastry stayed flaky even after I kneaded longer than for regular pastry dough and tasted good. 

It was just so crumbly that I don't know if I want to use this for the pastry dough again.


After working hard, I needed to treat myself with nice pairing with wine.

Bodegas Vegalfaro La Grava 2018
Spanish red wine made with 85% Bobal and 15% Macabeo.

Ripe red fruits of wine and sweetness of pork were good together.


I used this flour for other baking to experiment further.
It didn’t make good sablé (shortbread cookies). The texture was wrong - it was almost mushy.
But I found the satisfying result with granola cookies and cake salé.

Cornish pasties with Asian twist

It’s good to have an herb garden in a backyard.

When you need a little bit of herbs you can snitch a tip of herbs in a garden instead of buying a bunch from a store.

It would also entertain you with ideas of playing with the herbs in a kitchen.

 
I amended the soil a lot because my backyard has heavy clay soils.

My hard work paid off and now I have cilantro growing huge! It’s time to enjoy the harvest from the garden.

There are so many things you can do with cilantro and I decided to incorporate it into Cornish pasties.


Here’s my Cornish pasties with Asian twist:

6 oz ground pork
Half onion, chopped
Cilantro, chopped
Garlic, grated
1 tsp oyster sauce

Half tsp sugar  
Salt
Shortcrust pastry dough


Mix all ingredients except the dough in a bowl.

Roll out shortcrust pastry dough and cut with a big cookie cutter.

Place the filling in the center of the each dough and fold in half.
Heat the oven to 350°F and bake them for 40 minutes

Delicious! With this small size pie, I can enjoy the combination of the flakiness of the pastry and juiciness of the filling in one bite.  

I kept it low in salt so l can really taste umami flavor of meat with a hint of cilantro which was good with round acidity and fruitiness of this light bodied sparkling wine.

Hammerling Wines Wind, Sand & Stars Sparkling Gamay Noir 2020

Sparkling Gamay from Sierra Foothills, with aromas of violet and raspberries.

Christmas Baking

There is one Christmas Day ritual which JC has to follow: eating panettone for breakfast.
To fulfill this duty I made Mataloc this year.

Mataloc is a panettone-like bread from the lake Como area in northern Italy.
I used a recipe from "The Italian Baker" by Carol Field. Comparing with the panettone recipe in the same book, they are very similar with maybe little less butter for Mataloc.

I didn’t have a panettone pan so used a cake pan. 

The outcome was ... colossal!

The texture could be similar to brioche than airy panettone but it tasted just like panettone.

I have never had Mataloc. I’ve never even seen it therefore I don’t know if the Mataloc I made had even the slightest resemblance to the original bread, but JC loved it and that’s all that matters, at least for this mission.

For the dessert I made the Black Forest cake.
It is the traditional German cake with Kirschwasser flavor.
Since the Black Forest cake uses whipped cream, not butter cream, it is of course sweet but there is some lightness in its sweetness rather than being heavy or rich.

The sponge cake was soaked with the Kirschwasser syrup and cream was whipped with Kirschwasser, so we had this cake with Kirschwasser.

Cleanliness of the spirit together with the light sweetness of the cake created smooth pairing.

Next day we had this cake with the sparkling wine.

Domaine Collin Crémant de Limoux
This is a rosé sparkling wine from southern France made with a traditional method.
Fresh aromas and flavors of apple, plum and cherry with bitterness of apple skin.

I thought that the bitterness of the wine would collide with the cake but, in fact, with the cake the bitterness disappeared and the wine went good with the cake, especially with the cherry and surprisingly very good with the cream！

Thanksgiving Lamb Dinner

The turkey is a staple of the Thanksgiving dinner table.

However, since we are not a big fan of the turkey meat our Thanksgiving dinner menu rarely includes a turkey.

This year was not an exception: we had Lamb Wellington for the Thanksgiving dinner.

I made the puff pastry the day before and JC made the lamb Wellington with it.

We opened red Bordeaux wine for this dinner.

Les Pagodes de Cos Saint-Estephe 2014

The full-bodied red wine from the left bank.

The first impression was the abundance of fruits like ripe red and black fruits or fruit syrup, then herbs and cigar gradually appeared.

Soft tannin and the fruitiness made this wine very approachable.

And the pairing of lamb and red Bordeaux was of course success.

Cake salé

Baking a lot means eating sweets a lot.
Even I, who’s got quite a sweet tooth, started to feel like that I was taking too much sugar.

I wanted to keep baking but reduce sugar intake, so I chose Cake salé as my next baking project.

Cake salé means savory cake in French.
Ingredients are just like a cake: flour, egg, fat, but without sugar.
Fillings I used were olives, dried tomatoes, caramelized onion, corned beef and cheese.
I also needed to add white wine so asked JC to get some.

He brought Giacomelli Azienda Agricola Giardino dei Vescovi Colli di Luni Vermentino 2017
White wine from Liguria, Italy, with the beautiful golden color and the aromas of orange blossoms and a hint of hazelnut.

He chose this because the savory quality and the rich texture of the wine would be good with the cake.

Without sugar the cake didn’t rise like sweet cakes but the taste was good.
The texture of the cake gives faint perception of sweetness which makes saltiness of fillings round.
As a rule of thumb, wine used in cooking was good to pair with the food.

19th Century Beef Pudding

Since I mostly stay home due to the pandemic I bake more often. 

To bake often it would be more fun to do it with some project in mind.

British baking is always intriguing to me. I’ve been fascinated by English pies and puddings in story books and pictures from when I was a kid.

One thing always puzzles me in the British baking is suet.
Suet is the fat of cows and mutton, and I couldn’t really imagine how it would be integrated in pastries - it seems to be a good time to challenge baking with suet!

Shredded suet

I used a recipe of 19th century beef pudding from Regula Ysewijn’s Pride and Pudding.

Suet for baking can’t be any fat. It has to be the specific hard fat found around kidneys and its higher melting point of between 113 and 122F makes it ideal for cooking, creating a light texture without burning quickly.
Fortunately the butcher we contacted knew exactly what we were looking for.

To make the suet dough mix suet and dry ingredients well then add liquid. 

Roll out the dough then place it in the mold. 

Add the beef filling, pour the beer and cover with the leftover dough.

JC was excited with this project too and made the filling with beef, vegetables and herbs.
Steam for one hour. 

I thought the dough would be very greasy since it was made with beef fat, and didn’t grease the mold thinking the fatty dough would be easy to be removed from the mold. Mistake. 

The dough wasn’t greasy and it stuck inside the mold.
It took a big crack on the pudding to take it out from the mold but the flavor was surprisingly good.

The combination of the beef filling and the dough tasted ... like Chinese buns (and I love Chinese buns)!

JC opened Producteurs Plaimont Saint Mont 2016
He bought this Tannat-based red blend wine from southwest France at Costco. It’s not easy to find affordable Tannat here.

It was full-bodied wine with fruits somehow overshadowed by the strong structure. 

It wouldn’t be a kind of wine to enjoy by itself but was good with the strong flavor of the pudding.

I'm overall satisfied with the suet in savory pudding project.
Next time I’d like to try making sweet pudding with suet.

Tomato Tarte Tatin

This time of the year we are gifted with the abundance of tomatoes in the garden.

I usually make tomato sauce but this year I wanted to try something different and found an interesting recipe: Cherry Tomato Tarte Tatin !

The recipe is from the book The Art of The Tart by Tamasin Day-Lewis.
It’s a real tarte tatin, not just the name. 

The filling is simply cherry tomatoes with caramelized balsamic vinegar and baked under the puff pastry.

It’s very simple recipe - after making the pastry dough there was nothing really left to do - therefore I didn’t have too much expectation but it was really tasty!

The picture in the book shows bright red color of tomatoes but my tomatoes were baked much longer (I used a bigger pan) and lost the beautiful color.
It’s less appealing but for the taste, well-baked tomatoes were sweeter and suited for this dish, I guess.

The wine we had with was Kirkland Rioja Reserva 2015

Very good wine with lots of fruits and soft tannin, especially for its price ($7.99!).
Its concentrated red fruits went very good with sweet and sour baked cherry tomatoes.

Oven Efficient Dinner

The Shelter in place order is still in effect but stores have been gradually opening with restrictions.

The other day I was walking neighborhood and saw an antique shop with the display outside the store. There I found a cute orange Pyrex with a lid which I fell in love with instantly and brought back home.

This is a perfect size for the Basque cheesecake I wanted to make.

Basque cheesecake is baked at very high temperature to create its distinct burned surface. It is the same temperature as baking bread so I planned to bake baguette at the same time. Then JC decided to cook the lamb for dinner in the oven too.

He seared the lamb then finished cooking in the oven.

We had two wines for this dinner:

Clos Cibonne Côtes de Provence Tibouren 2018

Castelli Green Valley of Russian River Valley Nebbiolo 2014

Refreshing rose wine with a hint of citrus peel-like bitterness cut grease of the dish, and the Nebbiolo with high, soft tannin was a good companion to the flavorful lamb.

Dessert was the cheesecake ... well, it had to be rested overnight so we had the dessert next day.

For this Basque cheesecake, we had Primator Double Bock. 

This is a dark colored beer from Czech Republic; It’s rich with fruit, even tastes sweet, but light in body.

Pairing was great. It tasted like bitter sweet coffee.