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Main Ingredient’s weekly E-Journal
Gourmet Foods, Ingredients & Fine Wines
Eat In Guide’s Outstanding Outlet Award Winner from 2006 to 2010
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The V&A Waters
In this week’s MENU:
• Products
• Our market activities
• Villiera at the Vineyard
• Sue Anderson trade wine tasting
• Hartenberg’s The Stork, a champion
• Hostex
• Chicken and artichoke risotto
• Bottled v purified water
• Events and Restaurant specials
• Wine courses & cooking classes,
Products The Cape has been wearing her winter clothes and we have had a few days
of typical damp and cool weather – just the thing for comfort food like risotto. We will
have more risotto rice and stock cubes tomorrow. We have other winter delights in
stock, especially ready to heat and eat duck confit and traditional French cassoulets
and pot au feu. For those and any other products you need, you can access our product
list and see pictures in our website. If you can’t find what you need, let us know and
we will try to find it for you. Until our online shop is ready, drop us an email and we
2. will help you. We are very happy to see that traffic on our website is increasing and
more orders are coming from it.
We have a lot of fun putting MENU together each week and, of course, doing the
things we write about, but making it possible for you to enjoy rare and wonderful
gourmet foods is what drives our business. We stock a good range of ingredients and
delicious ready-made gourmet foods. You can contact us by email or phone, or through
our website. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa.
Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s brilliant, exciting
and atmospheric Neighbourgoods Market, as always, this Saturday and every Saturday
between 09h00 and 14h00. Tip: Some visitors tell us how they struggle to find parking.
Click here for a map. We will be back at Long Beach Mall on Friday 8th June from
09h00 to 16h00. We look forward to seeing you there.
This winter weather does always send us to more sustaining food. Gascony in France is
the area where they eat the most duck and use the most duck fat and where they have
the lowest levels of heart disease. So Lynne is beginning to think it might be time to
make that annual pot of cassoulet and other rich casseroles. Did you know they even eat
cornmeal (phutu pap!) in that area? Here is their recipe using duck fat for a sweet or
savoury treat. You can use polenta for this if you don’t have cornmeal.
Miques de Mais
250 ml fine cornmeal – 750 ml water – a pinch of salt – 25 g duck fat – sugar – brandy –
more duck fat
Get the water, salt and fat to a rolling boil then pour in the cornmeal ‘ like rain’. Turn
down the heat and simmer over a low heat, stirring with a wooden continuously for
approx. 30 minutes until the mixture no longer sticks to the sides of the pan. Pour into a
square or rectangular dish and allow to cool and set then cut into 3.5 cm squares. Fry
these in duck fat then sprinkle with sugar and flambé with brandy or cognac. You can
also serve them with a good rich duck gravy.
OLD MUTUAL TROPHY AWARDS AT THE MOUNT NELSON This extremely well
organised event started with us arriving an hour too early as we got our wires crossed
but allowed us a rare hour on the terrace of the Mount Nelson drinking great coffee and
discussing business. We met the Nellie cat, a super shiny black sedan with huge green
eyes, as yet unnamed but with a penchant for the buffet. We think he/she (difficult to
tell) might like the name of Velvet after that lovely cocktail black velvet a mixture of
champagne and Guiness. Class and naughtiness in one package!
Into the Conference centre at 12 for good canapés and a glass of bubby to see who was
there and chat. It always amuses us when we see winemakers who think they are there
simply to attend. Generally, if you have been invited, you have won something and
these prestigious awards now in their 10th year are worth getting. The rigorous blind
tasting procedure by local and international judges means a fair showing for good wines.
The awards are interspersed with a good lunch and this year Rudi Liebenberg gave us
lovely food. We started with beautifully tender and rare pieces of pepper duck, duck
confit wrapped in buttery pastry and duck giblets accompanied by sweet and sour pieces
of pickled persimmon a great match for the rich duck. Our table drank Ken Forrester’s
Old Vines Reserve Chenin, Groote Post Reserve and Delaire Sauvignons Blanc with the
first course.
Main course was a lamb loin wrapped in butternut slices, quite inspiring for home
dinners; and a piece of very tender barbeque lamb neck that tasted like Asian duck and
shredded beautifully resting on a layer of spinach; a small square of pave potatoes
(finely layered and baked) topped with Jerusalem artichoke puree and the dish dotted
with winter vegetables, like carrots, baby broad beans and barley and a rich lamb jus.
We had tastes of Backsberg Shiraz, Hillcrest Hornfels 2008; and Uitkyk’s 2008 Carlonet
all of which were good wines for the food.
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Dessert, ahh dessert: Served to us was a delicious Nederburg Noble Late Harvest AND a
Neethlingshof Maria so it needed to match all those complex sweet, fruity and nutty
flavours and did. A nutty and soft square of wet almond cake covered with macadamia
nuts, a caramel praline and an almond praline ice cream, vanilla poached pears and
small squares of caramel toffee, all the tastes of the wine on one plate.
We had great company on our table: Old friends and colleagues Mike Neebe from Axe
Hill, surprised and delighted with his award, Jeff Grier from Villiera equally surprised at
his award for the best Bubbly the Villiera for Woolworths .
BURGUNDY STYLE WINES GROWN IN SOUTH AFRICA – Chardonnays and Pinot
Noirs. Last Sunday we were delighted to be invited by Corlien Morris of Wine
Concepts to the Burgundy Lovers’ Festival at the Vineyard Hotel. This excellent, unique
annual tasting showcases their selection of the best Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs
produced in South Africa. Our Chardonnays are showing incredibly well now, especially if
they have some age on them – the 2010’s were marvellous. We were so glad to find that
only one of the many wines we tasted was over-wooded and too over the top for us.
Should a wine have 14 months in 90% new French oak? Who nowadays is wealthy enough
to afford all these new barrels? There were still people at the tasting who like this style
but thankfully not many. Our wine trade has seen the light and is producing wines that
show the character of this elegant noble grape and bring out the lovely fruit , not
masking it with heavy vanillas and deeply scorched new barrels, but using gentle oak to
support it.
Favourite Chardonnays tasted were Iona 2010 Newton Johnson Family Vineyards 2011
which is very Chablis like, Oak Valley 2011 is full of citrus especially limes and has a very
full palate with a long end; De Wetshof The Site 2010 is pretty and perfumed and also
full of lime and other citrus and we will watch the Paul Cluver 2010 which isn’t quite
there yet but is showing great promise. The Vriesenhof 2011 was also a pinnacle showing
Chablis style, some great fruit and even a little thyme mid palate.
It is good to see how many Pinot Noirs we have now, not all are perfect but there are
definitely a couple of distinct styles emerging - dark, wooded and moody or lighter with
full berry fruit and lots of elegant length. Our taste is more for the latter style, probably
because it goes so well with the food we eat.
We loved the Shannon Rockview 2010 and lots of people in the room were talking about
it very positively and recommending people taste it, so it is safe to say it was one of the
show favourites. The Sutherland 2010 from Elgin grapes is delicious and the De Grendel
2006 is just superb with rich fruit predominating. Sadly it is sold out. If you have some,
now is the time to drink it. Cathy Marshall always impresses and Lynne has written just
one word of description in her notes: Beautiful. Creation 2011 is full of soft
strawberries.
Food and wine (and a few other) events for you to enjoy
There is a huge and rapidly growing variety of interesting things to occupy your
leisure time here in the Western Cape. There are so many interesting things to do in
our world of food and wine that we have made separate list for each month for which
we have information. To help you choose an event to visit, click on our Events
Calendar. All the events are listed in date order and we already have a large number of
exciting events to entertain you right through the year. Click here to access the
Calendar. You will need to be connected to the internet.
Learn about wine and cooking We have had a lot of enquiries from people who
want to learn more about wine. Cathy Marston and The Cape Wine Academy both run
wine education courses, some very serious and others more geared to fun. You can see
details here.
Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their
classes can be seen here. Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs
