Food & Wine
| Food and Wine | Chef Joey Altman's Bio | Seasonal Tips | Recipes |
It’s all about Harmony, and a Wild Mushroom Bass Beat
Bay Area Chef Joey Altman is My World My Wine's food and wine guru. As an author, TV host, chef presenter and avid guitarist, Joey combines a passion for food, wine and fun with an enthusiasm for experimentation - sort of "food & wine pairing as free form jam session".
Chef Joey Altman’s philosophy toward food and wine pairing can most easily be described as “cooking to the wine.” Rather than focusing strictly on what wines go with what dishes, Altman likes to coach people toward an ultimately more satisfying and personal approach: cooking to the wine you like best. It allows you to stick to a wine that makes you happy, and a menu you feel comfortable preparing.
What’s it all about?
His second passion being music, Chef Joy explains his philosophy of food and wine pairing with analogies to music. Flavor profiles (of wine or food) are made up of notes that correspond to bass, mid-range and treble—just like on your stereo.
Treble: Flavor notes that are salt, acid, wine, lemon, vinegar—bright flavors that provide interest to a dish.
Mid-range: Herbs, spices, vegetables— secondary, subtler flavors that provide complexity and layers to a dish.
Bass: beef stock, mushrooms, roasted meat— earthy, rich flavors that give soul to a dish.
If you think about a song you like and think of the treble, mid-range and bass notes, you’ll recognize how they all come together to make a pleasing sound. So it is with culinary creations. Take wild mushroom risotto for example: In this dish you have earthy wild mushrooms and rich broth as the bass notes, a sprinkling of parmesan cheese and thyme as the mid-range and the tang of white wine and a dash if lemon zest as the treble notes.
Once you have a sense of how a dish is made up of these taste elements, you can more easily think about how to manipulate the dish to work with a range of wines. The ultimate goal of course is a glass of wine that enhances your meal, and a meal that enhances your experience of drinking that glass of wine. So you may think you need to drink white wine with risotto, right? But what if you simply love Syrah? Well, with a little tinkering here and there, you can make it work.
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