Blame it on Rioja

Breakfast today, courtesy of LESP. Photo: ADM

One of the more glorious advantages of living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is my proximity to Russ & Daughters. The Harry Winston of smoked fish, a downtown New York landmark, and a living history of classic Jewish-American gastronomy, Russ & Daughters today is owned and operated by third-generation Mark Russ Federman, alongside members of the family’s fourth generation, including his daughter, Nikki Russ Federman.

Every so often, when I need a physical and/or emotional boost, I walk down to their Houston Street shop, take a number, and breathe it all in, settling my excited nerves until it’s my turn to order.

My go-to sandwich used to be smoked sturgeon and caviar cream cheese on an ‘everything’ bagel, an idea inspired by a dinner special created back in the late 1990s by one-time Picholine chef de cuisine and now Esca chef/co-owner Dave Pasternack (grilled sturgeon fillet with a caviar butter sauce), but lately I’ve been mixing it up a bit.

Just two weeks ago, I ordered a slight variation: slices of smoked sturgeon and Wild Western NOVA (a lightly smoked wild Pacific salmon) on an everything bagel, with horseradish cream cheese, sliced red onion, and sliced tomato ($12.95). As my counter guy was preparing this decadent gem of a breakfast, one of his colleagues who happened to have witnessed the structure being built turned to me and said,

“Aha! The king of sandwiches.”

Whether or not she’d seen it before mattered little to me; her comment made me feel like a king for having ordered it. As for eating it, well, let’s just say noises of delight were made.

Rioja pairing: El Coto Rioja Rosado 2007. Available for purchase online at www.winechateau.com ($11.29/750ml bottle)

Frying chorizo at the Fiesta de Vendimia de Rioja Alavesa, September 2007. Photo: John Barkley.

It’s one of those cravings that kicks in with some regularity this time of year, usually in the middle of the day: an unmistakable hankering for the garlicky, smoky-spicy, porky flavors of chorizo, the Spanish national sausage, believed to have originated in Extremadura but available around the corner from virtually every street in Spain.

Now that the warm weather has finally arrived to stay (and also considering the fact that the Spanish national soccer team is performing remarkably well in the Euro 2008 championship), there’s something celebratory about throwing chorizo on the grill. The smell and taste of melting pork fat combined with paprika, or pimentón, are just quintessentially Spanish.

Even more celebratory (and authentic) would be to get a hold of a porrón, a glass pitcher with a tiny spout on one end, and a couple of cold bottles of Rioja rosé, (I like Muga, El Coto, CVNE, López de Heredia and Marqués de Cáceres), grab a handful of baguettes, and make it a day, much the way Jorge Muga made our day during a vineyard visit last year.

If, as expected, Spain wins its group (Group D) in Euro 2008, they will play the runner up of Group C (most likely France or Italy) this Sunday, June 22 at 3pm Eastern Time, just about as good a day, time, and occasion for grilled chorizo as you’re ever likely to find.

Fire it up.

Chorizo hanging above a butcher’s counter in Logroño’s central market. Photo: Daniel Hertzell.

Summer served: Grilled chorizo, baguette, and a porrón filled with Muga rosé, September 2007. Photo: Adrian Murcia

Next month marks the 10th anniversary of my first visit to Rioja, a trip I have written about before. In Madrid for the wedding of my two (still) great friends Julian and Marta in July 1998, my (still) great friend Valerie and I headed north for a visit to Bilbao, by way of a small village in La Rioja’s Tierra de Cameros called El Rasillo, where we stayed the night.

I don’t have a scanner, but recently, I took digital photographs of the photo album I put together after the wedding (and preceding trip to Bilbao), which held a bunch of receipts, maps, ripped out journal entries, etc. A short selection of these follows.

I marked our trip in a yellow highlighter pen. We took the road to Alcala de Henares out of town, but came back a different way:

Here’s a detail of our map, which doesn’t list El Rasillo, but it lies along that little secondary road (LR 253) that wraps around the Embalse de González de Lacasa, a lake formed by the damming of the Río Iregua, one of the Ebro’s tributaries.

Valerie Dumova amid wildflowers, with the Embalse de González de Lacasa in the background:

Entering the Ebro Valley en route to Haro for lunch.

My receipt from lunch at Terete in Haro, specialists in traditional cordero asado, wood-roasted lamb:

A snippet from my journal, in which I describe my wine purchases:

A great picture of my lovely friend, Valerie Dumova:

Soy yo.

Writing from the 14th floor of the Chancellor Hotel near Union Square in San Francisco, on day five of a ten-day West coast trip. It’s been surprisingly brisk here for the past few days, a biting kind of cold especially at night that gets under your skin and just stays there. Or maybe it’s just that I didn’t pack enough layers….

There’s always a special joy that attends one’s first meal after a long journey. Last time I was here it was an exceedingly satisfying grilled steak burrito from Taqueria Papalote (http://www.papalote-sf.com/home.html) in the Mission, known for its smoky salsa and fresh ingredient-driven and vegetarian-friendly menu, and a six-pack of Negra Modelo with my brother Patrick’s family in the Mission.

This time it was also in the Mission, but even more “California-style”: lunch at Café Gratitude (http://www.cafegratitude.com/) at Harrison and 20th Street, a charming little organic, quasi-raw food corner café with a great vibe and a surprisingly tasty fresh vegetable and whole grain-based menu. My vegetable “Biryani” over red rice had little mountains of super-sweet snap peas, raw cashews, avocado, cucumber, carrots, cilantro, etc., etc., so much so that I couldn’t finish it. I was full, but it was a really happy kind of full, made even happier with a lemon and ginger infusion spiked with a little cayenne (why don’t I do this at home after every meal?!?) If ever food alone could get you high, this high-quality, earth-friendly cuisine is it. (Kudos to young Ms. Caroline B. for turning me on this place.)

Dinner at Beretta’s (http://www.berettasf.com/) the next evening was the first time all three generations of my family have been together in over 7 years, and they were kind enough to accommodate a huge group of us on a Saturday night. The all-Italian wine list was reasonably priced (Planeta’s tasty Cerasuolo di Vitorria was $40), the service was extremely patient and kind, and the Northern Italian-inspired food on the whole did not disappoint.

My only quibble was that the pizza crust could have been crispier, a bit more speckled with char; and my brother Patrick rightly pointed out that carciofi alla guidia (a Roman fried artichoke dish that originated in that city’s Jewish quarter) on our check did not accurately describe what was served.

But as with all special occasions, especially this one, my dear Mother’s “Sgt. Pepper” birthday, as long as a restaurant’s heart is in the right place, whatever’s wrong with an evening can be easily eclipsed by what’s right about it. It’s easy to miss magical moments when you’re spending too much time worrying about why the magic didn’t arrive exactly as you scheduled it.

More to come, including late-night taqueria excess, tapas and Palacios Remondo Placet on the water, and the best spicy scrambled eggs I’ve had since a stop in Austin, Texas in the summer of 2003.

Potatoes have become something of a theme for me this past week.

Whip(ped) Lash
Working my weekly maitre d’/sommelier shift at Chanterelle on the first day of a menu last Monday, I had a spoonful of David Waltuck’s Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes (bound with olive oil instead of butter, flavored with roasted garlic), a key component to David’s crispy-skin New Zealand Snapper with Bouilabaisse Broth. I just happened to be in the kitchen when David placed a saucepan of that hedonistic stuff on the hot slide just after a big pick up.

The degree to which my head tilts back in pleasure on my way to the dishwasher station to drop off my spoon in the silver soak is usually an accurate measure of how much I’ve just enjoyed something, and I am pretty sure an outsider looking into the kitchen at that moment would have been convinced that I was engaged in some kind of limbo lunge under an unseen pole.

Potato Lover’s Month at Gourmet
On Thursday, I opened my weekly newsletter from the revamped Gourmet.com to discover that February, according to Gourmet Editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl, is officially “Potato Lover’s Month,” an occasion she celebrates with links to four potato-based recipes and another to “Heirlooms-to-Be,” a recent blog post by Cristy Harrison on Gourmet’s new interactive website (very impressive, by the way, if you haven’t checked it out yet) about two promising new potato hybrids created in the last five years by scientists at Cornell University, the Adirondack Blue and the Adirondack Red, bred specifically for taste and performance in the kitchen.

For Cornell potato breeder Walter De Jong, Ms. Harrison writes, “culinary quality trumps other agricultural factors like yield and pest-resistance. What’s more, Cornell researchers have worked with culinary students at the CIA and elsewhere to test the Reds and Blues in various dishes, and ‘we are using chefs’ feedback to develop even better future varieties,’ says De Jong.”

Potato Apotheosis: A Match for the Ages
Potato Interlude 2008 reached its high point on Tuesday night, however, on the beautiful and blustery evening my friend, fellow close Dylan listener, and Chanterelle line-cook Charles Imbelli (he made an appearance on BIOR once before, in a post on a fishing trip we took late last summer) and I met uptown for an evening of uniform deliciousness at Thomas Keller’s per se restaurant in the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle.

All twelve courses were so good, so consistent, such little marvels of harmonic flavor concentration and uncompromising product sourcing and technical execution, it seems a little unfair to single out one dish, but the cheese course, combined with the wine I chose for the meat and cheese courses, La Rioja Alta Viña Ardanza 2000 Rioja Reserva, just so completely knocked me out at a point in the evening when I didn’t think anything else could knock me out, that it merits special consideration.

The cheese course was Pyrenées Ossau Vielle (an aged, very buttery, and slightly ‘lamby’ sheep milk cheese from the western Pyrenées of France) served with Twice Cooked Red Bliss Potato and Applewood Smoked Bacon Vinaigrette. I am still thinking about it longingly a week later. The texture and intensity of the cheese, the way its fattiness just seamlessly melded with the creamy potato mash inside the shell of the Red Bliss’s skin, and the way everything came together under the heady flavor spell of that awesome bacon vinaigrette, it was just…wow. A sip of the Viña Ardanza, earthy, tart, wintery in its own right, measured in its fruit, and we had on our hands a match for the ages.

After a moment of silent reverie, and a grateful-to-the-universe look outside the window toward Central Park, I turned to see what Charles thought.

“Man,” he said, “I wish I could wake up to that every morning.”

That makes two of us.

Francis Paniego (top) at El Portal de Echuarren, Ezcaray, Spain, October 2005 (Photo: Daniel Hertzell); María José López de Heredia (bottom) at Bodegas R. López de Heredia, Haro, Spain, October 2005 (Photo: Eric Striffler.

If ever a moment illustrated the harmonious coexistence of tradition and modernity in Rioja, a phenomenon applicable to all of Spain really, it was my dinner at Francis Paniego’s El Portal de Echuarren with Bodegas R. López de Heredia Viña Tondonia managing director María José López de Heredia, while on a press trip to the region in May 2006.

Apart from finding Ms. López de Heredia exceedingly charming and passionate–and grappling, I must admit, with a profound sense of delirious incredulity that I should find myself in such exalted company–I was just mesmerized by how well her bodega’s wines went with Francis Paniego’s food.

Which is significant because here we were in Rioja’s ski vacation town of Ezcaray enjoying the food of the region’s most talented and celebrated practitioners of Spain’s cutting-edge Nueva Cocina, all the while drinking wines from a bodega that’s become an icon for classic winemaking in Spain.

Our whites that evening included the 1995 Viña Gravonia Blanco Reserva (100% Viura, aged for four years in American oak), the 1988 Viña Tondonia Blanco Reserva (15% Malvasia*, six years in oak), and the 1981 Viña Tondonia Blanco Gran Reserva (10 to 15% Malvasia, up to eight years in oak and another fifteen before release!).

The aromas of the ‘81 Tondonia Gran Reserva were heady and seductive, unlike anything being produced right now in Rioja–”honey, bitter almond, coconut, (petrol?), something tropical,” I wrote in my notes. The wine’s acidity was very much alive, a Grand Cru Chablis-like foil to the evening’s third course: a metallic, Belon-like oyster (I forgot to ask for the name) served with grilled melon and quash puree, and drizzled with almond cream.

But it was with the fourth course that the ‘81 Tondonia really showed it brilliance as a food wine: spears of white asparagus with a perrechico cream drizzled with extra virgin olive oil. Perrechico, Maria Jose told me, was a seta de la temporada, or a seasonal wild mushroom, found in the surrounding hills from April to June.**

So, why 1968?

Well, fast forward a year and half: now working on behalf of the region, accompanying the author and wine columnist Elin McCoy, I had dinner with María José in Ezcaray once again, this time at Echuarren, the traditional restaurant next door to El Portal, operated by Francis’ mother, Marisa Sanchez. At one point, María José pulled out a bottle of 1968 Viña Bosconia Tinto Gran Reserva and told us that this was a special vintage for her, since this was the year she was born.***

She also told us that one of Spain’s glossy magazines had recently run a feature called the “Generation of 1968,” centered on Felipe, Prince of Asturias, the only son of King Juan Carlos I and heir to the Spanish throne, who was also born in 1968. Among the famous Spanish 68-ers also included in that feature: María José López de Heredia and Francis Paniego.

_________

NOTES:

*According to Ms. López de Heredia, Malvasia is also known as Rojal, from the Spanish word for red, because it oxidizes easily.
**Last September, while meandering through a one of San Sebastian’s main squares, Amy and I stumbled upon a series of bookstalls, and by chance came across a beautiful little book called Las Setas Comestibles by Andres Buesas (Vitoria: Caja Provincial de Ahorros de Alava,1967). When I got back to the U.S., I looked up perrechico, and there its was: Tricholoma Georgil, a variety found in northern Spain, known variously as muserones (Cataluña), seta de piedra (Castilla), and setas de orduña. For the record, the variety did not appear in either of my North American wild mushroom field guides.
*** Also the birth year of my brother Patrick, not to mention also that of Manuel Camblor, who commiserates with other members of the turning-forty-this-year-if-I-haven’t already crowd in the ‘comments’ section below.

CLASSIC COMBINATION: Chuletillas de cordero asadas (Grilled baby lamb chops), piquillo peppers, and fries, taken at Posada Mayor de Migueloa, Laguardia, Spain, September 9, 2007.  Photo: Jon Stamell.

It’s that time of year when one of viticulture’s most bracing demands comes a-callin’: the winter pruning of the vines.  By clipping the canes of each plant after the vines have shut down for the winter, a wine grower can reduce the quantity of fruiting buds and, therefore, improve the quality of the buds that eventually flower and bear fruit later in the season.

In Western Europe, the practice of grilling meat over the smoldering embers of vine clippings dates back several thousand years. In Rioja, the ancient practice of cooking meat over sarmientos in fact came to define the regional cuisine, and today traditional asadores, restaurants specializing in grilled meat, are still everywhere, thriving even as edgier cooking has made its way into the valley.

At the same time, Rioja’s cuisine helped to shape the evolution of its wine.  John Radford points out in Wines of Rioja that, even if it were possible, it’s unlikely that a red wine like Rioja would have fared very well along the seafood-rich estuaries of coastal Galicia. In other words, razor clams and sea scallops called out for high-acid, aromatic whites (i.e., Rias  Baixas, Ribeiro, Valdeorras); in Rioja, grilled baby lamb chops, or chuletillas de cordero, called out for something quite different.

And speaking of lamb chops, a reader named Marco Romano left a comment on one of my most recent posts and confessed that “Rioja is the wine that turned me into a lover of wine with food. Grilled lamb chops marinated in olive oil, garlic, pimenton, cumin and arbol chilies over charcoal with a Rioja reserva. Ah…”

Of course, I immediately asked for a recipe, and he quickly complied.

As for the grape vines, well, that’s the hard part.  A 2006 Wine News article on cooking with vines, written by Carole Kotkin, suggested contacting Kalmazoo Outdoor Gourmet, which sells grape vine chips, although I took a look at the website, and “grape vines” appears to be missing from the order form, even though it’s mentioned as an option on the product list. A phone call is definitely in order.

Or you can do what I plan to do next week, after I get back from Napa: call your nearest winery.

Grilled Marinated Lamb Chops
Recipe submitted by Marco Romano
4 loin chops, or 8 baby loin chops (chuletillas), if you want to get really authentic
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp. sherry vinegar
3 cloves roasted or raw minced garlic
1 tsp+ pimenton
1 tsp+ ground cumin
Ground arbol chilies* to taste
Salt & pepper

Mix the oil and vinegar with the garlic and spices, and marinate lamb for 2-4 hrs. at room temperature. Grill over hardwood in an outdoor pit.**

Serves Two
Wine Pairing Suggestions: Mr. Romano recommends the following Reservas

Lopez de Heredia “Vina Tondonia”
Muga “Seleccion Especial”
Contino
CVNE
Sierra Cantabria
Marques de Murrieta
Monte Real
Rioja Alta
Vina Real

*Chiles de Arbol, usually sold whole, are available at Latin markets across the country and at select Whole Foods.

**A good substitute for vine chips would be chips of some easier to find fruit woods: apple, apricot, cherry, nectarine, or peach.  Check out barbecuewood.com or kalamazogourmet.com.  I must confess that I have never cooked with wood before, but the three websites linked in this post seem to have enough information to steer us in the right direction. Still, proceed with caution.