Sake & Spice: Matching Sake with Indian Cuisine (October 28th 2015)

To celebrate their 10th Anniversary, Moti Mahal, an Indian restaurant in the heart of Covent Garden, London, has organised a series of dinners matching different drinks to Indian cuisine.  Spiced food can be particularly difficult to match with due to hot spices and strong flavours dominating the more subtle flavours in most drinks.

In the U.K, due to our historical links to India, Indian curry reins supreme when it comes to spicy food. Lager is the most common accompaniment, acting as a refreshing palate cleanser. Some people also match spicy, full flavoured wines such as Gewürztraminer or Shiraz which make a decent attempt to stand up to the spice.

Sake isn’t generally found on Indian restaurant’s menus and isn’t an obvious choice, after all sake goes well with delicately flavoured Japanese cuisine, which rarely has any spicy flavours, right? Well, Moti Mahal experimented matching sake with Indian cuisine, and found this unlikely pair actually work incredibly well together.

This isn’t such a bizarre finding really. If you think about it, whilst most drinks struggle to stand up to hot wasabi, sake works brilliantly, so surely it should work in a similar way with other hot spices? There are also plenty of sakes which are opulently aromatic and therefore match up well to spicy foods which have many layers of flavours. Sake also traditionally acts as a refreshing palate cleanser, exactly what you want when you’re eating spicy foods!

The matches which most impressed me paired up Daiginjos (Kimura Fukukomachi Junmai Daiginjo and Daiginjo) generally the most aromatic style of sake, with a lightly spiced, beetroot and peanut salad, with stuffed peppers, minted potatoes and green peas, and a more spicy lamb chop dish with caraway seed, Kashmiri chillies, mooli raita and avocado chutney. The interplay of the opulent aromatics of the sake’s fruity melon and lightly aniseed notes and those of the spiced dishes worked really well. The umami boosting qualities of the sake shone through when combined with the earthy, smoky flavours of the tandoori-cooked lamb, and the slight sweetness of the sake also contrasted beautifully with the saltiness of the lamb, finally refreshing the palate at the end.

A namazake (Tengusake’s Gozenshu 9 “Mountain Stream” Junmai Nama Bodaimoto, one of my favourite and most food-friendly of sakes) also worked well with spiced red mullet cooked with basmati rice and raita. Unlike most sake, namazake is unpasteurised,  lending it a zingy character that’s hard to describe but matches up well to dairy products like cheese. The creamy yoghurt notes worked really well with the lively nama flavours adding another dimension.

All in all, I was really impressed. It may not be an obvious match, but sake does work well with curry. I’ll continue to experiment with different styles in the future…..