Epicurious Wine Pairing

I guess the universe read my blog and wants to help me out with wine pairing. The folks at Epicurious have teamed with the folks at Snooth.com to pair all 25,000 recipes with several wine choices. I'm looking forward to using this feature as most wines that we buy don't list the foods they would go well with, and even when they do, it seems dubious. This wine goes with pasta, huh? What kind of pasta? Will it go well with red meat sauce as well as a crab and lemon sauce? Doubtful. I guess we better get ourselves over to our wine megastore, Total Wine, and stock up.

Tonight, once again, I didn't read a recipe all the way through. Do I think I know better? I even told myself to read it all the way through first to avoid mistakes. But nope, I read it all the way through, but I skimmed it, and that really doesn't work. I made Salmon with Orecchiette, Caramelized Onions, and Horseradish Cream



I chose this recipe by looking for salmon recipes that I've saved in my recipe box on Epicurious. It called for broccoli rabe, and since we had broccoli in the fridge, I said "close enough". I knew we also had the prepared horseradish, clam juice, onions, pasta, even though it wasn't orriechiette, half-n-half to sub for the cream, and parmesan.

Epicurious and Snooth recommended a gewurtztraminer or a Central California Coast Pinot Noir, so we opened the Martin Ray and it did indeed pair well, though it's such a good wine, it'd probably go well with almost anything.

Back to the screw up. This dish had many components to it, so save it for a night when you have time to wash a lot of pans. Anyway, I caramelized the onions, though I think they should be cooked at a lower temp than the recipe calls for, parboiled the broccoli, cooked the orzo, which is much smaller than the pasta that was called for but which I deemed an acceptable substitute, reduced the cream and clam broth and whisked in the horseradish, then seared the salmon. The part that I missed was that the sauce mixture wasn't supposed to be combined with the pasta & veggies, so it separated a bit, but also the flavors melded perhaps more than they should have. I'm definitely making this again and following the recipe exactly. The flavors were there, but I know that prepared as directed the whole dish will be really delicious.