John Collins' trade wine tasting at Den Anker

Gary Jordan and Louise Genis on the Jordan table take requests and questions

Jeanette Bruwer of Springfield Estate talking to a customer

Taste, swirl, swallow or spit?  Everyone enjoying the atmosphere at Den Anker restaurant in the Waterfront

Discussion about the wine on the Thelema Sutherland table

Some of the canapés on offer:
Bitterballen – mini warm deep fried meat croquettes served with a German style mustard

Salmon tartare on croutons, with topped with mini onion sprouts , needed salt

Duck foie with a shard of caramel on mini toasts – a brilliant match with the sweet wines

Spicy hot curried prawns wrapped in Greek Kataifi pastry and deep fried.  Huge prawns and a serious sizzle.

Jewelled raw tuna marinated in soy and sprinkled with chopped pistachio nuts

The lovely ladies on Kleinood’s stand

Gordon Newton Johnson pours his Resonance Sauvignon/Semillon blend for Louise and Mark Herd

Deon Joubert on the Diemersfontein stand, having a giggle with John

Waffles, syrup and ice cream with strawberries - Belgium is famous for them

Do have a Belgian chocolate or two..

We leave as evening sets in and paying customers take back the restaurant

The waterfront in the evening glow. This is the famous Time Ball, which gave masters of ships in earlier times an accurate check for their chronometers

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013

130918 Main Ingredient's MENU - 30th Blaauwklippen Blending Competition Awards, Heritage Day, Caramel sauce

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Cormorants face the gathering storm

In this week’s MENU:                                

    30th Blaauwklippen Blending Competition Awards

    Heritage Day

    Caramel sauce

Follow this link to see our Main Ingredient blogs, because to tell our whole story here would take too much space. Click on Bold words in the text of this edition to open links to pictures, blogs, pertinent websites or more information. Follow us on Twitter: @mainingmenu

This week’s Product menu: Truffles are the flavour of the moment and truffle related products are bmoving out as fast as we can replenish our stock. Must be the wintry weather! In addition, we continue to receive enquiries for Mediterranean and Middle Eastern products like sumac and za’atar and for Puy lentils, black beans, beluga lentils and other pulses. We do have all of these currently in stock. We surmise many of you are using Ottolenghi cookbooks! Our online shop shows our range of rare and exciting products which you are unlikely to find elsewhere in South Africa. See it here

Our market activities Come and visit us at the Old Biscuit Mill’s wonderfully exciting, 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. It’s quite easy if you know how. Click here for a map which shows where we park.

A relatively quiet week has given us a chance to catch our breath and spend a little time doing essential things around the house and entertain a few friends to a dinner party. Off again tomorrow to Muratie for the Cape Winelands Cooking Challenge, more about which next week.

30th Blaauwklippen Blending Competition Awards     If you are in a wine club that meets regularly, you probably know about this annual completion. If you don’t, be sure to enter your club next year. Or you could use the time in the next year to form your own club. You can get details on the Blaauwklippen web site. For a small charge they send you a box of wine and instructions on what to blend and how to blend it.

We have certainly taken part several times over the years as member of our wine club, the Oenophiles and had great fun doing the blending of the bottles of different Blaauwklippen wines into an acceptable blend for Blaauwklippen to market and sell. One thing it does illustrate very clearly is how complicated and how finite it is to blend wine. We have found that it teaches wine lovers not to be so blasé about the wine they are drinking.

We attended the award ceremony at Blaauwklippen last Friday, where we met all the possible winners, and many of the people responsible for starting this competition, who were really surprised at how quickly the years have gone by. Walter Finlayson, Alan Mullins and Angela Lloyd told us how it had started and how it had evolved over the years to become the success that it is. This year, they decided to create a small side competition and invited all the media to enter their blends and we took part in this, sadly without success. The winners were the Natalia Wine Society from Durban and this is their third time of winning, so these people obviously know what they are doing. Interestingly there are two other clubs who have also won the award three times. The media award was taken by winemag.co.za. Congratulations to all. Click here to see the photos and what we had for lunch.

Here’s your Heritage Day     Steve Jeffrey of The Charcuterie will be releasing a once off limited release of two unique boerewors’ available on Saturday only at The Neighbourgoods Market. As he says, “To celebrate our national heritage on National Braai Day, what better ingredients than Brandy & Coke and Mrs Ball’s Chutney and Old Brown Sherry!!”

1.    Brandy & Coke with fragrant sweet spice notes and roasted coriander.

2. Mrs Ball’s Chutney with warm piquant spice notes laden with apricots poached in old Brown Sherry

Their normal range of seven unique fresh sausages will also be available. Come and try and buy.

Special things to do on Heritage Day can be found in our Events Calendar

Recipe      We had a dinner party this week and Lynne made one of our favourite desserts, a classic Tart Tatin. We tried another variation this week and used good apples and a small tin of pineapple rings. Lynne arranged them in the centre with a cherry in each ring. We had this recently at The French Connection and particularly liked the caramel sauce they served with it. It is much easier to make than it seems, if a little risky as making caramel can be hot and dangerous. Just be careful.

Caramel sauce

200g / 1cup white sugar - 90g butter - 120g cream

Put the sugar in a thick bottomed deep pan and cook on medium until it melts. Keep swirling the pan so that the sugar can cook evenly, but do not stir or it will crystallize.

Once the sugar has melted and reached a deep brown colour, move it off the heat and add the butter all at once. It will foam up, so be careful. Stir until it's completely melted into the caramel. Then pour in the cream - it may still be foaming - and whisk until you have a good sauce.

You can bottle this and keep it in the fridge for about two weeks. Warm slightly if you want to serve it with dessert. Or you can pour it over a cake, ice cream, tarts, crumbles, pancakes, brownies, waffles even toast., there are endless delights.

If you want a salted caramel sauce, stir in 1 teaspoon of sea salt.

Buying from us On Line   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 on line shop. We can send your requirements to you anywhere in South Africa. Please do not pay until we have confirmed availability and invoiced you, then you pay and then we deliver or post. When you make an eft payment, make sure that it says who you are. Use the form on the website to email us your order. Click here to see our OnLine Shop.

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 see what’s happening in our world of food and wine (and a few other cultural events), visit our Events Calendar. It needs updating and we’ll do that tomorrow. 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.

Learn about wine and cooking We receive 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 of Cathy’s WSET and other courses here and here and the CWA courses here.

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. We plan to visit their French establishment after Vinexpo. A calendar of their classes can be seen here. Pete Ayub, who makes our very popular Prego sauce, runs evening cooking classes at Sense of Taste, his catering company in Maitland. We can recommend them very highly, having enjoyed his seafood course. Check his programme here. Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has cooking classes in Fish Hoek and conducts cooking tours to Normandy. You can see more details here. Emma Freddi runs the Enrica Rocca cooking courses at her home in Constantia. Brett Nussey’s Stir Crazy courses are now being run from Dish Food and Social’s premises in Main Road Observatory (opposite Groote Schuur hospital). Lynn Angel runs the Kitchen Angel cooking school and does private dinners at her home. She holds hands-on cooking classes for small groups on Monday and Wednesday evenings. She trained with Raymond Blanc, and has been a professional chef for 25 years. More info here

18th September 2013

Remember - if you can’t find something, we’ll do our best to get it for you, and, if you’re in Cape Town or elsewhere in the country, we can send it to you! Check our online shop for details and prices.

PS If a word or name is in bold type and underlined, click on it for more information

Phones: +27 21 439 3169 / 083 229 1172 / 083 656 4169

Postal address: 60 Arthurs Rd, Sea Point 8005

Our Adamastor & Bacchus© tailor-made Wine, Food and Photo tours take small groups (up to 6) to specialist wine producers who make the best of South Africa’s wines. Have fun while you learn more about wine and how it is made! Tours can be conducted in English, German, Norwegian or Dutch flavoured Afrikaans.

Recommendations of products and outside events are not solicited or charged for, and are made at the authors’ pleasure. All photographs, recipes and text used in these newsletters and our blogs are © John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus. Our restaurant reviews are usually unsolicited. We prefer to pay for our meals and not be paid in any way by anyone. Whether we are invited or go independently, we don’t feel bad if we say we didn’t like it. Honesty is indeed our best policy. While every effort is made to avoid mistakes, we are human and they do creep in occasionally, for which we apologise. Our Avast! ^® Anti-Virus software is updated at least daily and our system is scanned continually for viruses.

This electronic journal has been sent to you because you have personally subscribed to it or because someone you know has asked us to send it to you or forwarded it to you themselves. Addresses given to us will not be divulged to any person or organisation. We collect them only for our own promotional purposes. We own our mailing software and keep our mailing list strictly confidential. If you wish to be added to our mailing list, please click here to send us a message and if you wish to be removed from our mailing list, please click here to send us a message.

Blaauwklippen Blending Competition awards lunch

Each year the label for the bottle is changed. This is the bright and fun painting of the label done by artist Frans Groenewald.  They will fill in the names of the winners when the label is printed

A welcome glass of Blaauwklippen White Zinfandel

Some interesting canapés:

Duck in puff pastry

Tiny feta and spinach quiches

The best were pancakes filled with smoked salmon and topped with a dot of cream cheese and salmon caviar with a sprig of dill

Alan Mullins, one of the originators of the blending competition with PR whizz Nicolette Waterford

Prizes?  No, gifts for all attending, which included some beautiful Vitria wine glasses and a magnum of the winning wine

Two long tables sit down for lunch and the awards

The menu for the day

Wine Maker and GM of Blaauwklippen Rolf Zeitvogel tells us the history of the competition and that the wine we will drink with our lunch will be the as yet unidentified winning blend

Our starter of chicken ballontine stuffed with olives, peppers and chicken farce, accompanied by a bangle of crisp cheese, atop a moist mushroom and feta quiche. The chicken was a little dry, but the stuffing was deliciously complex. Served with Blaauwklippen 2013 Chenin Blanc

Walter Finlayson, past winemaker at Blaauwklippen, tells us about his role in the formation of the competition before he went on to Glen Carlou

Anel Grobler of Spit or Swallow tweeting the awards to her followers

Rolf Zeitvogel and Walter Finlayson

Rolf chats to John, who was from the first wine club to win 30 years ago. They are also from Durban

Dave Hudson of Cape Town represented another previous winner

Dave and Janet Hudson

Cape Wine Master Clive Torr has been a judge of the competition over the years

Angela Lloyd tells us how the competition mushroomed from the original entries. They never imagined how long it would last and how enthusiastically it would be supported, by the sponsors and the wine clubs

Natalie Campbell of Blaauwklippen, PA to Rolf Zeitvogel and co-ordinator of the competition

Nicolette Waterford. Her public relations company, Waterford Communications, organised this very well run event

Media making notes: Chris von Ulmenstein and Norman McFarlane

Suzette Biermann, representing finalist Oude Molen Wynkring from Potchefstroom in the North-West Province

Nominee Laurence Davies of the Natalia Wine Society thought the wine tasted a bit familiar

Dwayne and Helen Embery, represented Web Wine Society from Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape

Alan Mullins enjoying lunch and the awards

Sasha van Zyl of  winemag.co.za, who won the media award

Blaauwklippen's assistant winemaker, Albert Basson

And here is the winning wine for us to taste

Our main course was an extremely tender roasted lamb rump on a smoked potato purée, (thank heavens not over-smoked) with a deep and rich black olive jus and perfectly cooked baby vegetables  This was served with an anchovy and caper butter, which Lynne felt added too much salty contrast to the rich sweet lamb, so she added only a tiny dab

 Denise Huff of Vitria Glass, one of the sponsors of the awards

Seated at the end of the table are the four most valuable members of staff from the cellar. They have to organise all the bottling of the wines to be blended, their packaging and dispatch to the clubs. Then they have to assemble the blends which are entered for tasting, as well as make up the final winning blend. Work well done

Walter and Jill Finlayson

First award is the Media award to winemag.co.za. Receiving it from Rolf is Sasha van Zyl

Natalie

And the award for the best blend 2013 goes to Laurence Davies of Natalia Wine Society in Durban

He is delighted and amused that he spotted it when he tasted the winning wine with lunch

Lots of smiles from the award winners

Here, assembled, are all the finalists and the winners with Rolf and Albert

Laurence and Jenny Davies with Rolf Zeitvogel

Rolf with Helen and Dwayne Embery

and with the Biermanns from Potchefstroom

Laurence and Jenny, proudly taking the trophy home

And, finally, our dessert - soft stewed and macerated pear with a deeply delicious chocolate mousse, slices of chocolate Madeira cake, Chantilly cream and a strawberry vodka jelly, served with a glass of Blaauwklippen Zinfandel Noble Late Harvest

© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2013