Pairing No No No..Or!

Food and wine pairing dinners, cocktails and other events have been going for many years and very successfully I might add. So to the big question is pairing food and Whisky, does it work?

I have been in the hospitality industry for over 20 years, I say over as when I put the right number of years it makes me feel old. As I’m a Whisky novice I do consider myself with some expertise on pairing as I was a chef for 20 years and have conducted many pairing sessions for various clients and product launches. But what about Whisky you ask? Well its simple pairing with certain foods I would say yes definitely but pairing with 4, 5, 6 or even more courses on a degustation menu is a clear No!

I have on many occasions been to dinners with a great number of courses and matching Whiskies, either from one distillery or from various and I can honestly say that I would rather forget the food courses and focus on the Whisky courses. At this point I can tell you the arguments start, why not? You don’t know what you’re talking about! your talkin pish!, I know people who pair whisky with food! However pairing with some dishes is possible but as I mentioned not as a dinner with a number of courses.

So here to patronize the crazies……………….. is combining food and whisky that crazy in some cases or individual dishes………… remember it is only my opinion in many of distillery whiskies you find salty, sea weedy qualities, a note that resonates with shellfish. So to test this out we ventured into the gastronomic world and sampled the possibilities by the pairing of oysters and whisky, testing what it might bring to us. Looking at both individually they can be outstanding so let’s see how they fared together.

So we experimented and tried to find out what the hell happens when the two meet, mingle and express on one's palette, we took for this trial a smoky whisky and sea-salty oysters.

And the answer is magical.

To give you an insight, we used Smokehead and some amazing Australian oysters, we use tester tubes to keep the whisky in for each oyster and in a glass a dram of the malt, the guest then squeezes the tube onto the oyster and waits for a couple of minutes, then in it goes, at this point chew on the oyster and enjoy it as much as you would the dram when tasting, the 2 minutes lets the oyster be macerated by the malt and allows it to absorb a little of the smokiness, then the dance begins between the creamy buttery oyster and the peated, slightly peppery dram. I am not an oyster eater but this was magic. I will experiment with some other malts and oysters to see what happens in the mouth.

If you’re an oyster lover give it a go.