FORAYS INTO FLAVOUR

Unravelling the recipe for a great gin

After a bit of a difficult relationship with them in my late teens and early 20s, I can now unashamedly admit that I love food and I love eating (my better half would make a joke here about how I end up wearing as much of any meal as I eat, but I’m sure that could be interpreted as a compliment to the chef).

Thanks to my foodie mother, I’m lucky that eating out has always been a part of my life and this has given me access to some truly memorable foodie experiences, from sampling a salad with Canadian sea vegetables on Vancouver Island, to eating slow-roasted lamb and potatoes by the sea on Zakynthos, to a very theatrical dry ice-packed dessert at the Space Needle in Seattle.

There are few things more exciting to me than being in a new place and getting in amongst its cuisine, whether wandering wide-eyed around a fresh produce market or sampling the truest ‘local’ dishes on a restaurant menu. Seeing how great culinary minds combine the ingredients at their disposal to make delicious, multilayered plates of food leaves me reeling in wonderment and feeling thoroughly grateful that I get to experience the fruits of their labours.

This love of and access to good dining-out experiences is also what first introduced me to the idea of pairing gin with food. A friend of my mother’s – and a fellow gin lover – invited me and my sibling to a gin and food pairing night at a gastropub in a little village in north Norfolk. It was a fivecourse menu that paired some excellent local produce and simple but skilful cookery with a broad range of gins.

As someone who was fairly near the start of their gin journey at the time, this was an eye-opening evening for me in terms of the styles of gin available (it was the first time that I tried an Old Tom gin, as well as Four Pillars’ spectacular Bloody Shiraz gin) but also how well matched this spirit can be with a plate of food. Prior to

this, having a glass of cider with a meal, rather than the traditional beer or wine, would have seemed exotic, let alone hard liquor. By the end, I was completely sold on the partnership (I was also a little tiddly, after everyone else at the table palmed the rhubarb-flavoured gin that was served with dessert off on me, but that’s by the by).

Also, the fact that we had such a delightful and insightful experience in a village pub in East Anglia shows that gin and food pairings do not have to be the stuff of expensive fine-dining experiences. Done right, the humblest of meals can be enhanced by juniper spirits; all it takes is a host with the interest, knowledge and passion to show you how one complements the other, and a chef willing to take on the task.

When you consider the way that gin is designed and produced, the comparisons to cookery are blindingly obvious: you create a recipe with precise combinations of raw ingredients and ‘cook’ or prepare them together in ever more creative ways to produce a liquid with a particular aroma, flavour and texture.

And it stretches beyond process to the people. Much like chefs, distillers have an enviable platform to explore different ingredient combinations to evoke feelings and sensations, whether it’s a ‘coastal’ gin using seaweed for a salty tang, an Indian gin teasing out the aromatic spices of the country’s cuisines, or a smoked gin bringing a barbecued symphony of flavours to your palate. As the eyes can be a window to the soul, so a gin can now be a window into how a country cooks.

Much like chefs, distillers have an enviable platform to explore different ingredient combinations

In this issue, our writers are exploring the part that food and culinary process plays in the creation and enjoyment of gin, from the influence that Michelin-starred chefs can have on the distilling process to the fine art of matching flavour profiles in gin cocktails.

To overlook gin’s place at the dinner table would be doing it a disservice. Do yourself and your favourite juniper spirit a favour and play around with some pairings!