This month’s round of TGRWT is hosted by John Sconzo over at Docsconz, and the foods to pair this time are pumpkin and cooked chicken.* As always you can find instructions on how to participate in the announcement post. If you are new to TGRWT (which stands for They Go Really Well Together), check out the round-ups of the previous 19 rounds!

* In case you wondered why the link to the announcement posts includes lemon grass: There was some confusion regarding how to read the charts at the foodpairing website. The initial suggestion was to use pumpkin and lemon grass, but his has now been changed to pumpkin and cooked chicken.

Just a short note to let you know that there were 30 submissions to the last round of They Go Really Well Together (TGRWT #18) which featured plum and blue cheese. Aidan Brooks summed it all up in a round-up which was fun to read And in case you didn’t notice, there is a TGRWT tab in the menu bar – click it and you’ll see links to all the previous announcements and round-ups.

This month’s round of TGRWT is hosted by Pablo over at Medellitin, and the foods to pair this time are tomato and black tea. As always you can find instructions on how to participate in the announcement post. If you are new to TGRWT (which stands for They Go Really Well Together), check out the round-ups of the previous 18 rounds! And if you are chemically inclined, you may want to read on to learn more about the compounds behind this months pairing.
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For TGRWT #18 hosted by Aidan Brooks I decided to use puff pastry dough and laminate some Norwegian blue cheese, “Norzola” (made to mimic Gorgonzola) between two layers and roll them out. To accompany this I made a plum reduction with my two favorite spices, star anis and ginger. I should also mention that I tried the very simplest combination of plum and gorgonzola as well: a simple slice of bread with some Gorgonzola and a thick slice of a blue plum. This was very delicious – and takes absolutely no time to prepare.
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Finally it’s time for a new round of TGRWT. It’s the 18th round and the host this time is Aidan Brooks, a trainee chef who works in Spain. In his blog he’s touched upon flavor pairing several times and also wrote a blog post on the same topic for “Word of mouth”, the food blog of The Guardian. The foods to pair this time are plum and blue cheese, and as usual you can read more about how to participate in the announcement post. The deadline for submissions is September 1st.

TGRWT is not a competition, but Aidan wanted to add a little competitive element to round of the meal. (more…)

The Canadian sommerlier François Chartier (he has an extensive website featuring several blogs, including a section named Sommellerie moléculaire) is out with a new book on food and wine pairing. It’s not just another (superfluous) book on the subject. As the title Papilles et molécules (= Tastebuds and Molecules, unfortunately not available in English) suggests there is some science involved. It turns out in fact that he has applied the principles of flavor pairing to food and wine. With help from Richard Béliveau from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Martin Loignon from PerkinElmer he has analyzed wines and food and comes up with the following suggestions for lamb, as described in the article “Chemistry-set wine pairing”:
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As I mentioned in the previous post I put the leftover rose froam from TGRWT #16 in the freezer and was surprised by the result. Inspired by this I thought I would extend this and substitute apple juice for water for TGRWT #17. As apple juice is quite sweet I started off with 20 g sugar, but once frozen it lacked sweetness and even was a litte icy, so I upped the amount to 40 g. The picture above may suggest that the foam could be served for dessert, but read the verdict before you make huge amounts of the foam.

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Rose foam at room temperature

Just a small reminder that the deadline for the current round of TGRWT #17 is a little later than usual: May 8th. I took the picture above for last month’s TGRWT (where it was combined with chicken) and came to think that it actually qualifies for this month’s TGRWT as well. It’s rose foam on a spoon with apple, celery and almonds, and the foam is sprinkled with a little pepper.

As an experiment I tried to freeze the leftover rose foam and was quite surprised by the resulting texture. (more…)

It’s time for a new round of “They go really well together”. For TGRWT #17 the challenge is to pair apple with rose, in particular Cox Orange or Elstar apples in combination with Damask (Rosa × damascena). The hosts this time are Malin and
Lisa, and Malin explains explains a litte about the chemistry behind the pairing both in English and Swedish. The deadline is May 8th so you get a little extra time for this round. By coincidence rose appears in TGRWT twice in a row, but I can assure you that the hosts of the March and April round did not know about each others choices when they were made. If you bought a bottle of rose water for last round I’m sure there’s a little left. You might even be lucky to get hold of fresh rose leaves now that summer is approaching. For inspiration on how rose combines with chicken, do check out the round up of TGRWT #16 over at Supernova Condensate.

For this month’s “They go really well together” event (TGRWT #16) hosted by Supernova Condensate I decided to leave the chicken untouched and focus on the rose component. I had long wanted to try Chad’s Lemon whip (which I’ve included in Texture) where lemon juice is thickened with xanthan and then whipped to a thick foam after addition of methyl cellulose. I started with water, a little sugar and about 10 g of rose water. Having added xanthan and methyl cellulose I tasted it and decided to double the amount of rose water, add some more sugar and add a little lemon juice for acidity. I can imagine that rose water comes in differents strengths so it’s advisable not to add all from the start.
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The next TGRWT challenge has been announced: chicken and rose! Head over to astrophysics blog Supernova Condensate and read more on how to participate in round 16. And do check out the excellent summary of the dark chocolate and smoked salmon contributions from TGRWT #15 over at Mex Mix.

The TGRWT #15 challenge was to pair smoked salmon with dark chocolate. I decided to encase a piece of hot-smoked salmon in a cocoa gel and serve it with sugared slices of lime. But as you can see from the pictures quite a lot went wrong… But it tasted quite nice!
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This month’s round of “They go really well together” (TGRWT #15) is hosted by Mexmix and foods to pair this time are dark chocolate and smoked salmon. As usual you can find instructions on how to participate in the announcement post. Don’t forget to check out Rob’s summary of the malt and soy sauce round.

As malt was one of the foods to pair for this month’s TGRWT I decided to do something with beer. I first considered making a beer gel since the Alinea book has a nice recipe (with potassium citrate and kappa carrageenan – I included the recipe in the hydrocolloid recipe collection), but since I didn’t have carrageenan at hand I decided to try a sorbet. A quick search gave me 4 recipes (links in the table below) and in order to compare these I decided to calculate sugar/beer and sugar/liquid ratios as these are quite crucial in order to obtain the desired consistency of a sorbet. The results are shown in the table below. (more…)

This month’s round of the food blogging event They go really well together (TGRWT) will be hosted by Rob over at The Curious Blogquat. We’ve now come to TGRWT #14 and the foods to pair this time are malt and soy sauce (soya sauce). Regarding the malt you are free to choose whatever form you like – you can use malt extract, powdered malt, grains or even beer if you like. As usual you can cook from an existing recipe or come up with your own. The deadline for submissions is February 1st and you can find more information on how to participate in the announcement post.

And do not forget to check out the roundup of the delicious cocoa and caraway recipes from TGRWT #13.

BTW: Tomorrow I’m heading of for the flavor pairing seminar “The Flemish Primitives” in Bruges, Belgium. I’m really excited about that and I promise I’ll return with an extensive report! From the homepage I see that Sang-Hoon Degeimbre has chosen Leffe (a Belgian beer) and who knows – maybe he’ll combine it with soy sauce