150212 Main Ingredient's MENU - Volare at Peddlars, Franschhoek Summer Wines, Bertus at Spice Route, Jordan chenin, Plum & cinnamon tart

Evening on Milnerton lagoon

In this week’s MENU:

 This week’s products: SE Asian summer ingredients

 Volare, Oh Oh Oh

 Franschhoek Summer Wines

 Bertus Basson at Spice Route

 Black Pearl

 Red Hot Glass, de Villiers Chocolate and Cape Brewing Company on Spice Route

 Jordan Harvest lunch and 2014 Chenin Blanc release

 This week’s recipe: Summer Plum and Cinnamon Tart

 Learn about wine and cooking

We write about our experiences in MENU, not only to entertain you, but to encourage you to visit the places and events that we do. We know you will enjoy them and we try to make each write up as graphic as we can, so you get a good picture of what is on offer at each place, restaurant, wine farm, festival we visit.

To get the whole of our story, please click on “READ ON.....” at the end of each paragraph, which will lead you to the related blog, with pictures and more words. At the end of each blog, click on RETURN TO MENU to come back to the blog version of MENU.

This week’s Product menu      South east Asian recipes are perfect for our summer, light and zingy Some of the ingredients are hot, other quite pungent, like shrimp paste, ketjap manis and fish sauce. Find them here

This week we have had a chance to review two new restaurants, attend a summer wine festival and taste a newly released Chenin Blanc

Volare, Oh Oh Oh      Peddlars on the Bend has been a well visited pub in Constantia for years. It has now been acquired by Chef Brad Ball (who is also the CEO) and partners Steve and Rob Fleck and has been renamed Peddlars & Co. Their new upmarket Italian themed restaurant Volare has recently opened and we were invited to visit and dine last Friday evening. Soon there will be four venues on the property: Volare, The Local - a bar serving craft beers and platters, The Oak Terrace offering Al Fresco dining and Graciales offering small delicious plates for sharing Read on

Franschhoek Summer Wines       This summer festival allows the Franschhoek wine farms to show their best white wines for summer drinking and it is a lovely relaxed event held at Leopards Leap on the lawn. Food is available in the restaurant, there was live music and, on a perfect Saturday, lots of people were having a lot of fun in the sun. Read On

Bertus Basson at Spice Route     The Mining Indaba has been filling Cape Town this last week and it was hard to get a reservation at our favourite restaurants as they were heavily booked, so this gave us a chance to go to this new restaurant, which has only been open for a few days. Bertus Basson is one of our top chefs, a man with a wild child reputation for fun and interesting gourmet food, so we were keen to see what he is doing there. It has a South African traditional food theme running through the menu, but with lots of twists and surprises, as we would expect from Bertus, who deconstructs and enhances and uses the best fresh ingredients. At last there is a place to introduce your guests to traditional South African dishes with good wine. And of course there are a lot of other things to do on Spice Route. Read On

After Lunch we visited Red Hot Glass, de Villiers Chocolate and Cape Brewing Company on Spice Route. See them here

Black Pearl      As we were in the Agter Paarl area for lunch we decided to visit this farm on the A44. We used to sell their wines when we had our wine shop but had never been to the farm to see the Nash family. Read on

Jordan Harvest lunch and the release of their 2014 Chenin Blanc      Phylloxera is a tiny destructive louse, native to America, which preys on and destroys the roots of grape vines. It was accidentally introduced to France in the 1860’s, spread rapidly and devastated the vines there and in the rest of Europe and they all had to be replanted. It also made its way to South Africa on vine root stocks and caused major devastation. It is the reason that all vines in most of the world have to be planted on American root stocks which are immune to it. It was discovered in Mowbray in the Cape in 1886 by a French scientist, Dr Louis Albert Peringuey. He was an Insect taxonomist who became Inspector-general of vineyards in the Cape. Jordan wines have honoured him by naming their newly released 2014 Chenin Blanc after him and we were invited to their Harvest lunch to taste it. Read on.

This week’s recipe is a Summer Plum and Cinnamon Tart. Do not use prune plums, but nice juicy plums which are in season at the moment.

A roll of Flaky pastry – 10 sweet plums – 60 g sugar - ½ t of ground cinnamon - T 2 water – 1 T butter – 2 T corn flour – a pinch of salt – vanilla extract or almond extract - juice of half a lemon

Turn your oven to 190°C. Grease a 22 cm deep pie dish and roll out two circles of pastry. Line the dish with the bottom layer of pastry and put into the fridge to rest, together with the rest of the pastry.

Halve the plums, remove the pips and put the plums into a pan with the cinnamon, sugar, butter and water. Cook until the plums are beginning to soften. Taste and adjust the sweetness or add the lemon juice if the plums are very sweet. Add half a teaspoon of either the vanilla extract or the almond extract according to your taste and the pinch of salt. Remove a couple of tablespoons of the juice and stir in the corn flour then stir it back into the plums. This will prevent the juice from being too liquid when the pie is cooked. You can also use tapioca flour. Set aside to cool.

Fill the pie dish with the plum mixture, cover with the other circle of pastry. Crimp and seal the edges with well beaten egg, decorate the top with pastry trimmings and glaze with the beaten egg and some sugar. Place on a metal tray to avoid spills. Bake for 50 minutes or until the pastry is crisp and golden. Allow to cool for a while before you slice. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Karen Glanfield has taken over the UnWined wine appreciation courses from Cathy. See the details here

The Hurst Campus, an accredited school for people who want to become professional chefs, has a variety of courses. See the details here

Chez Gourmet in Claremont has a programme of cooking classes. A calendar of their classes can be seen here.

In addition to the new Sense of Taste Culinary Arts School, Chef Peter Ayub runs a four module course for keen home cooks at his Maitland complex. Details here

Nadège Lepoittevin-Dasse has French cooking classes in Noordhoek 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.

12th February 2015

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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 and standard 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.

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Jordan harvest report and launch of Inspector Peringuey Chenin blanc

Phylloxera is a tiny destructive louse, native to North America, which  preys on and destroys the roots of grape vines. It was accidentally introduced to France in the 1860’s, spread rapidly and devastated the vines there and in the rest of Europe and they all had to be replanted. It also made its way to South Africa on vine root stocks and caused major devastation. It is the reason that all vines in most of the world have to be planted on American root stocks which are immune to it. It was discovered in Mowbray in the Cape in 1886 by a French scientist, Dr Louis Albert Peringuey. He was an Insect taxonomist who became Inspector-general of vineyards in the Cape. Jordan Wine Estate has honoured him by naming their newly released 2014 Chenin Blanc after him and we were invited to their Harvest lunch to taste it

Jordan’s new Harvest T-shirt

Gathering for a welcoming drink outside the Bakery

Chef George Jardine menu planning inside the Bakery

and contacting suppliers
Lynne was delighted to see that he has just produced a cookbook and bought one immediately. The recipes are very accessible and as George said, we have probably eaten half of them already. She can’t wait to try cooking some of them at home

Gary Jordan welcomes us with glasses of the Jordan Barrel fermented 2013 Chenin Blanc

Kathy Jordan and Jacques Steyn

Platter editor Philip and Cathy van Zyl MW

Gary tells us what a great harvest it is this year and about the weather that led up to it. He said how amazing the grapes are, that they have never seen better and that it is going to be a bumper harvest. It started two weeks early, on the 22nd of January, the earliest recorded harvest in all the 23 harvests they have done on Jordan. They are mid way through and about to start picking their red grapes, starting with the Merlot

Kathy told us that they are very busy in the cellar, and they are still doing some pre-harvest bottling! They may be able to finish in time for Easter this year, but will still have work to do in the cellar

The farm dogs at all our feet. We heard about the Chenin blanc vine improvement programme they are doing with Ken Forrester and Bruwer Raats by doing clone selections from existing vineyards to get rid of viruses. The launch today is of the 2014 Chenin. It was the first vineyard they planted on the property, the vines were trellised and they are the Montpellier clone, which is different from most of the chenin clones planted in South Africa

We ventured briefly into the cellar to taste the sweet juice of the just picked Chenin grapes and the fermenting must from the previous day’s picking. The juice was sweet and grassy, while the must was full of guava and green grass, herbs, and lemon zest with crisp zingy fruit acids, but in perfect balance with the grape sugars and has great depth of flavour. It is amazing to see what the addition of yeast and one day’s fermentation can do to grape juice. We can’t wait to see what this year’s Chenin will be like. It will go into third fill oak barrels

While we were in the cellar, the grapes kept coming in and the press was working full time

Working on the press

Listening, taking notes, tweeting and tasting

Kathy pouring out the fermenting must for Angela Lloyd

Then it was time to taste the new 2014 under the trees with lunch

Gary getting us all seated

He introduces the 2014 Jordan Chenin, named after Inspector Peringuey, and tells us his history

These are similar to the stone age tools that Peringuey was digging for when he discovered Phylloxera in the vineyards in South Africa. These have been found in the vineyards on Jordan and are very impressive. Obviously stone age man lived on this hill

They are well made and all have a purpose

The 2014 Inspector Peringuey Jordan Chenin Blanc. It has complex flavours of warm golden berries with gentle alcohol. The nice balance of acid and sugar with restrained elegance and minerality make this an excellent food wine

The lunch menu

The cheese and charcuterie platter to share

One of this year’s wine apprentices. Ksenia Findlay is from Scotland (but originally from Russia), speaks with a cultured Glaswegian accent and is loving her harvest at Jordan

Alan Mullins CWM, having a great day

The vines going up the steep hills

Three good breads from the Jardine bakery with aioli, pesto and tapenade

Food for some customers

Alan Mullins chatting with Ina Smith, who runs the South African Chenin Blanc Association

The dessert platter with sweet delights from the bakery. The absolute killer was the chocolate pie with meltingly crisp buttery pastry, thick chocolate ganache and, beneath it, sticky, salty caramel. We ate far too much of that. Because we could. And wanted to. The fruit and nut filled brownies and the tiny almond cakes topped with lemon icing and poppy seeds were also super moreish. You can go and buy them all at the Bakery.

Dax Villaneuva with Jeanri-Tine van Zyl

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2015

Glass blowing, chocolate and craft beer at Spice Route

After lunch, we visited some of the other amenities on Spice Route, starting at 

which produces an enormous selection of decorative glass

and watched the glass blowers in action

producing a decorative flask

While Anne and Lynne went to see the de Villiers chocolates

John went to see Brewmaster Wolfgang Koedel at CBC and to buy some of the delicious Mandarin IPA, which was sold out on our last visit

It was sold out again and he bought the Imperial IPA, but Wolfgang took him into the brewery

for a taste of the Mandarin from the tank

followed by a taste of the Harvest lager

Cheers!

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© John & Lynne Ford, Adamastor & Bacchus 2015