Foodpairing Friday: Lobsterfest—A Crustacean Occasion

Yesterday I promised you a party. A lobster party—to celebrate the launch of Rosina’s WineWeek and our first FoodPairing Friday.

Well, you can count on me to deliver. (No. Not like that. You’re on your own for pizza or whatever.) A few days ago, my best friend Christina and I put together a tour-de-force lobster dinner with enough twists and turns to put the Tour de France to shame.

First, I “adopted” a pair of fresh, live, tail-snapping lobsters from the nearby full-service Asian market. www.99ranch.com (Chef Gordon Ramsay’s pig-turkey-etc. home ranch notwithstanding, my personal critter criterion is that if you don’t give the beast a name, it’s OK to cook and enjoy it.)

They weighed six pounds total. Fifteen minutes in the steamer, a little twisting, snapping and cracking into manageable bits, and a brief sauté/bath in a sauce we collaborated on that helps bring out the lobsters’ full flavor and sweetness. Fold in the white stuff from inside the shell, the creamy green tomalley (I’m told it’s the liver/pancreas), and any chunks of red roe if you have a female, while gently stirring the mix to rewarm the lobster meat.

The sauce starts with basic drawn butter; add olive oil if you want to dilute the cholesterol. Over low heat, stir in some chopped or pressed fresh ginger (I like inch-long matchsticks). You can splash in some wine if you like (any dry white is fine) and reduce it to cook off the buzz.

Now comes Christina’s secret ingredient: saffron. Yes, it’s pricey, but you don’t need much. After all, it’s lobster we’re dealing with here. (And this method also works well with shrimp/prawns, probably even chicken, BTW.) Let it simmer a few minutes to draw out the flavors. Add some chicken or fish stock if you want a thinner sauce. Then spoon the lobster and sauce into wide soup bowls, bring out lots of napkins and a bowl for shells, and dig in.

So, what did we drink? Well, with a rich main ingredient such as lobster, I’m always torn between a wine with a similar mouth-feel and weight, such as a big, barrel-fermented Chardonnay, and something that cuts through all the richness, like a high-acid sparkling wine.

So I opened both. And to push the envelope, I chose a Chard from the cellar that was around ten years old. It was the color of honey, with lovely caramelized aromatics and flavors such as vanilla, butterscotch, roasted nuts and toasted wood, but with no actual sweetness. The bubbly was Segura Viudas, www.seguraviudas.com a nice crisp Spanish cava, one of my usual buy-it-by-the-case-and-serve-it-whenever favorites. (We'll visit the winery soon, in a "Passport Tasting" look at Catalonia and the other wine regions of Spain.)

Both wines worked great with the lobster, but for different reasons. The rich, creamy Chard and the rich, creamy lobster were so similar that it was hard to say where one picked up and the other left off.

The sparkler did the exact opposite. High in acid (from early harvesting), it sliced through all the unctuousness like a blast of lemon juice from a squirt gun. The bubbly served as a—well, the term you usually see is “foil”—for the big, rich lobster.

This kind of comparison is a great way to test how different wines work with, and potentially improve (and/or are improved by!) the same dish. And I only tried two this time. You could experiment with a Sauvignon Blanc, a Pinot Grigio, an Albarino (check out Chef Mark’s ReMARKable Palate #87), a dry rosé, or whatever suits your fancy. They might all work well, each in its own way.

Now for the fun twists. While the lobsters were cooking, Christina and I indulged in some lovely fresh ahi sashimi. She opted to move straight to the Chardonnay. But since the wine was so mature and “brown,” it just didn’t work with the ultra-lean raw tuna. So she poured some bubbly into her Chardonnay.

Voila! (Or, as a musician friend of mine says in jest, “Viola!”) Instant fix.

I kept this in mind the following evening, when the lone lobster half-tail and hunk of claw meat I had saved, with its splotch of sauce, seemed just too rich for the glass of bubbly that still remained. So I flipped the technique Christina had used, and added a tad of the ten-year-old Chardonnay to my sparkler. Then I threw I a thin slice of fresh raw ginger. Perfect!

Join me again, any Friday, to see what I’ve been cooking up and what kind of corks I’m popping. We’ll also swing by the occasional winery or restaurant to see how they’re handling the “what goes with what” question.

Tomorrow, in our first “Winemeisters Weekend” post, I’ll introduce you to Anthony Dias Blue, the Executive Director of the San Francisco International Wine Competition. In a few hours, I’ll be jumping into the ‘vertible and heading across the Golden Gate Bridge (I’ll try to snap a few pics if traffic permits) to serve as a judge at the event. Next week, I’ll bring you an insider’s view of America’s biggest wine competition. And I’ll also share some more lobster lore, with a few more wine pairing ideas.

Cheers for now,
Rosina
gilded fork, wine, wine writing, Welcome to Wine Country, Rosina Tinari Wilson