Tasting Simplified

Yesterday I enjoyed a wonderfully fun educational lunch with the "Swami of Umami" Tim Hanni.

Tim served up a variety of foods (steak, shrimp, asparagus, spaghetti squash) with and without magic seasonings. And I got first hand how we can basically drink any wine with any food, provided we know the remedies. A wine too tannic is softened if you add salt or a squeeze of lemon on the food. And we all know what happens if we have something sweet before sipping a dry wine - yuck, the wine becomes sharp and biting. Tim explains it this way - if you eat something sweet it diminishes any softness from coming out from the wine. The remedy, the salty sour trick.

The Robert Mondavi Winery also has these culinary tricks written up.

This sure makes me happy to be able to enjoy red wine with the whitest of foods, a no-no in the past.

And one last bit of taste education here - what is umami? Umami is the 5th taste of savory and comes from amino acids, especially glutamate, as seen here in MSG, also in nucleotides. The foods containing these constituents are meats, cheeses, soy sauce, mushrooms, anchovies, lots more.

Isn't it great to discover how to enjoy any wine with any food?