Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Cépage et Cuisine, Mary’s
and Brian’s wine and food blog. Work and
travel have kept us from blogging over the past few weeks, but we’re back with
more wine and food adventures. Today,
we’re describing a dish we prepared recently with an emphasis on the sauce, lemon caper beurre blanc.
I love a great sauce on fish and poultry. It makes a simple dish much more exciting and
creates lots of delicious wine pairing opportunities. Beurre blanc is versatile and works well on
almost any fish (ok, I probably wouldn’t use it on fried catfish). I’ve watched Mary make it several times and
there is a bit of a ballet involved. Things
need to be added in the correct order, at the right time. She is always careful
to make sure the butter is cold and hard, and she uses heat some of the time
and takes it off the heat some of the time.
It finishes rich and tangy, just as the food is plated, added to the
dish just before serving. I love it!
Beurre blanc is an example of an emulsion of oil in
water. An emulsion is a suspension of
two liquids that don’t normally mix by adding droplets of one liquid to the
other, such as oil and vinegar or mayonnaise.
The aqueous or water-based part must be acidic. You can use vinegar or an acidic white wine,
which would be most white table wines. I
don’t recommend the cooking wine that is available at the grocery store. It is poor quality and has added salt. When cooking with wine, follow the rule of
not cooking with a wine you wouldn’t drink.
The other acidic liquid you can use is citrus juice, which is what Mary
uses. She doesn’t like to open a
bottle of wine just for a little for cooking, but it’s fine if you do. You can use some of the rest to sip while you’re
working on dinner. Now, that’s cooking
with wine! Here’s Mary to talk through
the beurre blanc preparation.
I use a very simple recipe. It is
just lemons, butter, dried Provençal herbs, and capers. Many recipes call for shallots, which would
be fine.
I melt the butter in a stainless steel saucepan, although an enamel-coated
sauce pan is recommended by Julia.
After the butter is melted, I add a little of the lemon juice (or white
wine) at a time while stirring it into the butter. In Brian’s chemistry lesson (sheesh!), he
said add it in droplets, but I just do it in small amounts, not exactly
droplets. This is the time to add the
capers. You can mash a few of the capers
to release more flavors. Then I let that
mixture reduce by about a third to get it to a better consistency. I add a little salt and pepper.
Now it’s time to add the rest of the butter. This is when it is important to turn off the heat
and for the butter to be nice and cold.
The butter is melted gradually and stirred to make a rich and buttery
sauce. I want a consistency that is nice
and spoonable, not too thin, but not a paste.
It is a recipe that takes a little practice. Once you do it a couple of times, it’s pretty
easy and turns out nicely.
We love to cook on an outdoor grill. We use our grill at least a couple times a
week, year around. When we cook firm
fish, which is often, we almost always grill it. It’s easy, fast, delicious, and frees the
kitchen for other uses. This dinner is
grilled swordfish, which is readily available in the supermarket, seasoned with
herbs and spices and a little olive oil, grilled simply on medium high heat for
about 6 minutes on each side.
The side dishes were roasted root vegetables and wilted
spinach with garlic. This is the perfect
time of year for root vegetables. They
are plentiful, diverse, colorful, and nutritious. Winter squashes, turnips, parsnips, carrots, and
sweet potatoes make an otherwise ordinary dinner more interesting with no more
effort than it takes to dice the vegetables and put them in the oven.
For just the two of us, we choose only a couple of vegetables so we don’t
have a lot left over. For this dinner I chose
beets and rutabaga. Peel ‘em, dice ‘em,
season with salt, pepper, whatever herbs you like, drizzle with olive oil, toss
and bake for about 45 minutes. That’s
it! And they are wonderful! Brian especially loves the roasted beets.
Here are the vegetables, right from the oven. Now, here's Brian to talk about the wine.
When I first envisioned this blog post, I thought it would be about
Chablis, but I think I’ll save that detailed explanation for another
entry. Briefly, though, Chablis is
considered part of Burgundy, northwest of Dijon and cooler than the rest of
Burgundy. As the name implies, the
center of the appellation is the village of Chablis. The grape of Chablis is Chardonnay. The soil of Chablis is chalky limestone with
disintegrated fossilized seashells, known as the Kimmeridgian ridge, from when
the area was under the ocean. When
walking around the village, you notice the streets and sidewalks have a white,
chalky, powdery dusting everywhere. 
The cool climate and the soil create a wine with lively
acidity, citrus fruit, apple, and mineral aromas and flavors, often described
as flinty, with wonderful characteristics of crushed oyster shells, like wet
stone. Little new oak is used in the
vinification and élevage, sometimes
just stainless steel tanks, allowing the grape aromas and flavors to shine
through. Chablis is wonderful for light
fish dishes, especially shellfish. The
saline tanginess of Mary’s beurre blanc is the perfect pairing.
One of our favorite Burgundy producers is Domaine William
Fevre in Chablis. Fevre has some of the
choicest holdings of vineyard parcels in the appellation, ranging from the
Chablis village appellation wine through various Premier Cru vineyards, and the
seven Grands Cru sites, at price points from less than $20 to more than $100
for the Grand Cru wines.
For this dish, I chose the Fevre Chablis 2005. This is the village level Chablis, not a
Premier or Grand Cru. The grapes come
from several vineyard sites, but all of them have the famous Kimmeridgian clay
soil. It provides an excellent example
of the appellation without reference to unique characteristics of a specific
vineyard site. If you want to learn what
Chablis tastes like, a village-level Chablis from a good producer is the way to
start. It is a good value, inexpensive
enough that you can enjoy it often, and pairs well with many foods. Here are my notes on the wine.
Domaine William Fevre
Chablis 2005. This is a terrific
wine at an excellent value, only $15. It
has all the characteristics of Chablis.
The aroma is lemon, tart, green apple, and minerality. The palate has that great wet stone freshness,
bright lemon, great acidity, a delicious chalky, oyster shell quality, and an
interesting honeyed note. It is
refreshing and delicious with the right food.
The balance is perfect with moderate complexity and good length. The alcohol is a lean 12.5%. Mary “hearts” this wine.
We finished dinner with a slice of Époisses and pecans. Époisses
is a strong smelling, but mildly flavored cheese produced in the village of Époisses, not far from Chablis. Like many French products, it is known by the
place it is produced, reflecting the French belief, refined over thousands of
years, that the specific characteristics of a place produce an expression that
is different from other places.
Following a good rule that what grows together, goes together, Époisses is an excellent cheese choice
to pair with Chablis or other wines of Burgundy. To be honest, though, we love it with many
different wines. It is definitely one of
our favorites.
Here’s the finished dinner again, ready to enjoy on a
Wednesday evening, just a regular weeknight dinner with simple ingredients,
freshly prepared, with a little attention to pairings and timing. It was not an elaborate, expensive, extremely
time-consuming dinner, but it was a wonderful way to share each other’s company
after another busy day. Life is pretty
darn good.
That’s our post for today. We hope you enjoyed it. Keep coming back to Cépage et Cuisine for
more wine and food experiences. Also,
check out our nightly Tweets at http://www.twitter.com/cepageetcusine. Until then,
Cheers!
Mary♥Brian
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