Cherry ripe
Taste Le Tour — Stage 12: Cherry and Beaujolais syrup with almonds
Some foods just go together.
Bacon and eggs, cumin and coriander, fries and aioli.
My match-made-in-heaven combination is cherries and chocolate.
It’s so embedded that I cannot eat cherries without craving chocolate.
This food partnership hails back to Christmases past. Each year my mother would order a large box of cherries from Central Otago. This would provide a seemingly bottomless bowl of cherries to snack from for the duration of my holiday. Alongside the cherries there was the abundance of chocolate that seems to always accumulate at Christmas time.
Thus, it was always chocolate and cherries that I snacked on as I lay in the sun reading whichever book Santa had brought me.
This pairing is as much an emotional one as it is a flavour one, with the combination always transporting me back to my favourite time of the year.
(Just to clarify, while I think chocolate and cherries are great bedfellows, I do not like the cherry ripe chocolate bars — I can’t stand the artificial cherry taste as it reminds me of medicine!)
But Gabriel Gaté has introduced a new threat to my chocolate and cherry partnership.
Wine.
The latest recipe in my Taste Le Tour challenge is the easiest by far: Cherry and Beaujolais Syrup with almonds. Cherries in red wine.
The Beaujolais wine is jazzed up with lemon, orange, cinnamon, vanilla, peppercorns and caster sugar to make it sweeter and fruitier, much like mulled wine.
Once the wine has reduced to a syrup-like consistency, the liquid is strained and pitted cherries are added to simmer for a few minutes.
The whole mixture is chilled before serving, with a sprinkle of toasted almonds and icing sugar.
Simple, sweet, spectacular.
The acidity is removed from the wine, with the fruity, sweet syrup complementing the cherries well. While Beaujolais wine is usually served slightly chilled, I think the dish would be nice if served warm in winter.
This is another winning combination and I fear that from now on I’ll be reaching for the wine next time I eat cherries!