[MUSIC] Welcome back. I've been thinking, after all this talk about wine and food and food and wine and food and wine interactions, I thought of a little exercise I can introduce you to. That will give you some quick feedback on how changing wines or changing foods can affect their relationship with one another. This is a pretty simple exercise that you can set up yourself. You'll find in module four a couple of PDFs that you can download. One shows a place to put four glasses of wine and a place for a bowl of soup. And the other one is a sheet of white paper with circles on it showing where you can position different cups of different types of food. And just to make this really simple, we're going to use the same four wines that we already tasted in module two. And before we jump into this though, I think we should review those module wines, as maybe it's been a few weeks since you've looked at them. But you may recall, we were going to buy two bottles of each. So go ahead and open up that second bottle of each one. I'm looking forward to this. I remember really enjoying these wines. So here we are. Here we have the four wines. Recall these were Marlboro Sauvignon Blanc that had a nice acid backbone. And it had some nice herbaceous vegetal and some tropical fruit notes. The second one was a new world style Chardonnay that was very oaky, buttery. Remember the banana cream pie and the lovely buttery vanillin notes. The third one was a nice very forward fruity Pinot Noir with some strawberry jam and some pencil shaving spice in it. And then the forth one was a fairly bold little Cabernet that had a lot of nice red fruit and black fruit notes, a little pepper as in black pepper, and some nice cookie dough vanillin notes in the background. So I'm just going to give these a quick sniff and a quick taste myself, just to bring their flavor profiles back to mind. And the idea here, before I start bringing food into the picture, is I just want to recall the personality of each of these wines. What's the main element, or what are the main elements that these wines going to be bringing to the party? So just give me a moment. Yeah. That Pinot Noir has a nice smokey char element that I don't remember If I noticed last time I tried it. Any exercise you do with wine involved is always a fun exercise. So let's get started. The idea here, this is an exercise that I do with all of my different wine students. Some of them are young chef students. Some of them are just general wine consumers, but the idea here is to create what chefs call a center of the plate item. In other words, what's the main focus of your course of food that you're serving? And you can use a number of things. I have here a white bean soup, which is very easy to make. Just buy a can of white navy beans and put it in a blender and heat it up. It makes a very, very bland soup. Some might even say a very bland, boring soup, that's okay. That's the idea. We want to have this soup as a carrier medium, and then we're going to decorate it with other flavors that we add to it to make it pair better, we hope, with these various wines. We could also use another form of protein. Sometimes people will poach a chicken breast, maybe just poach it in water, just to cook it thoroughly. And take it out while it's really moist and cut it into thin slices. You could probably do really well just going to a deli and buying a sliced chicken breast, the kind that you might use in a sandwich, and just using a slice of that. Another form of protein you could use as the basis for this exercise is lean roast beef. I've actually put that on my food tray. But you could use a little slice of this meat to use as the fundamental item that you then season to your liking with each of the wines. But today it's going to be just plain white bean soup. And also, as I said, one of the PDFs that you have is a matrix of circles that are labeled with the different food items that you can also prepare. Let me just walk you through that really quickly. The first one on the upper left is just a little cup with different fresh herbs in it. I've got some parsley from my garden and some dill and some fennel, and this is a little sprig of thyme. The second cup is fresh tomato salsa. I wanted some kind of a chunky tomato additive, and I chose a mild salsa. I don't really want to bring any heat into the picture here. The third is chopped green olives with pimento, and I also have some roasted red pepper in it. And then the fourth one, on your PDF it's going to say fruit chutney. In a pinch I just substituted some chopped up fruit cocktail. Of course it doesn't have the seasoning in it that a chutney would have. So this first row is herbs and fresh fruit or veggie kind of items. The second row is, I guess we could call it the dairy row. I've got some sour cream, some shaved cheddar cheese, and this is an aged Parmesan, Pecorino Romano combination that's a hard cheese and very salty. The fourth one is not dairy. It's extra virgin olive oil. Sometimes that's a good additive. The third row is kind of of the savory food theme row. The first cup has some homemade pesto, which is primarily basil but also involving olive oil and walnuts and some aged Parmesan. The second one is marinated mushrooms chopped up. The third one is French fried onions, and the fourth is chopped up bacon. Bear in mind that in going through this food tray you can use whatever you want. These are the items that I chose, but you can design your own food tray. And you can leave out foods that are not foods that you care for or not foods that are in your own personal diet. Or particularly, if you have any food allergies, [LAUGH] you'd want to leave those out. On the bottom row I have this lean roast beef, which we may or may not actually use since our center of the plate protein item today is going to be our bean soup. And, then I have my seasoning cups. I have salt. I have fresh ground black pepper. I have sugar, and I have acid. Wait a minute. That's not acid, yes, it is. Those are lemons. [LAUGH] So I can squeeze a little bit of lemon juice on anything that I'm making and increase the acidity by doing so. I'm not going to take you through this entire exercise because to do it right would take and hour or two. And what I'm going to do is sort of start you out and show you how you would approach this exercise. And then once you're set up, you can and you will thoroughly enjoy it and take as long as you want. So the first thing we're going to do is start with wine number one, and I'm going to take another sip of wine number one. And then I'm going to take a bite of soup. And I'm going to be thinking as I taste this soup, how has this been affected by residual flavor of wine that's on my palate? Well, it's indeed [LAUGH] pretty bland and pretty boring. But now let me go back to my wine and see if the soup affects the wine. The main effect on the wine is that it just kind of dumbs the wine down. It makes it simple and kind of boring. This bean soup is bland in flavor, but it's kind of heavy on the palate. And it just kind of blankets the flavors that are in that wine. But there's gotta be a way that we can pick that up. So what were the features of this Sauvignon Blanc, as you recall? Well, there were some vegetal characteristics. And the other feature was that it was pretty high acid. Remember that when we tasted it before. So I'm going to go ahead, and I'm going to take a little tiny bit of my dill. And I'm just going to put it on the corner of my soup, maybe even a little parsley as well. Okay, and then I'm going to take my slice of lemon and squeeze a couple drops of lemon juice right on the surface of the soup. That's going to add acid to the flavor of my soup, add acidity to the flavor of my soup. Then I'm going to scoop that all up on my spoon. That's amazing. All of a sudden I have kind of an interesting tasting soup. It was pretty bland before, but now I have some herbaceousness there and some acidity that really perks up the flavor of the soup. Now, let me go back to the wine again. [SOUND] The wine really comes alive. Just picking up the acidity on the food side helped my palate recognize the acidity on the wine side. And the two are actually working together really, really, really well at this point. Let me do one more little exercise before moving on. I seem to recall that there was some good fruitiness in this wine, some stone fruit or maybe even a little bit of pineapple. So I'm going to make the same mixture again. I'm going to put a little bit of dill on the soup. I don't want to forget the acid because that worked really well. Okay, and now I'm going to, Pull maybe a little piece of pineapple and a little piece of peach out of my fruit cocktail mix. And taste that with the wine. Well that does taste a little bit odd. [LAUGH] I normally don't expect to find chunks of fruit in my soup. But the idea here is to see if the fruitiness or the flavor of soup with that fruit in the background has any effect on the wine. Well it did perk up the wine a little bit. Once I got that liquid in my mouth, I think what it did is it solubilized the remnants of that fruit that was still in my mouth. And my mouth turned into a sort of a fruity, winy mixture. And that's interesting thing. When we taste food with wine and we taste wine with food, we don't put it all in our mouth at the same time and then try to spill some wine in there and see how its all marries together all the same time in our mouth. We do it sequentially, which is why we earlier discussed sip by sip. There's that interaction of time when the wine is residual on our palate. And then we introduce some food. And then there's that brief window where the remaining wine acts with the oncoming food flavors. And then likewise after we finish chewing and we swallow, there's a residual food film or flavor in our mouth together with its spiciness or herbaceousness and seasoning and what have you, that is still on our palate when we take that next sip of wine. And it interacts with that next sip of wine.
