Chocolate, cheese and beer are all part of a well-balanced epicurean diet. Each starts with humble ingredients – cacao pods, sugar, milk, barley, malt and yeast – that are transformed by a seemingly magical process. Gothamist recently learned about all three from passionate experts in a “Chocolate, Beer and Cheese Pairing,” that took place at Jimmy’s No. 43. As anyone who’s ever had a cheese plate at McSorley’s can tell you, beer and cheese isn’t too far a stretch. We’ve never had chocolate and beer together unless Young’s Luxury Double Chocolate Stout counts. Certainly we’ve never even conceived of combining all three.
Mary Izett, a self-admitted beer geek and former president of the Malted Barley Appreciation Society of New York City discussed how the chemical reactions in roasting malt and cacao are related to those that occur when roasting meat. Give yourself five food geek points if you knew she was talking about the Maillard reaction.
She also noted that the similarities between beer and chocolate result in “wonderfully harmonious pairings.” Along with another avid homebrewer Chris Cuzme, Izett is one-half of the New York City Degustation Advisory Team, the group behind the tasting. NYCDAT is “Dedicated to the promotion and appreciation of craft beer through creative and delectable food pairing.”
The event lived up to NYCDAT’s mission statement with six beers, including Belgian ales, a German dunkel and several domestic craft beers paired with raw milk cheeses from New England and chocolates from Belgium and elsewhere. Elizabeth Bland, aka The Cheese Mistress, talked about the cheeses and offered a few words of advice: “If someone ever tells you that you have to eat the rind you can tell them that the maître fromager in France doesn’t eat the rind.”
Clay Gordon, a chocolate critic and author of Discover Chocolate was there to preach the gospel of chocolate. “Cheese flavors in a chocolate are a sign that it’s gone off,” he told the audience. Gordon also extolled the nutritional value of chocolate, “It’s a nutritional powerhouse but you have to very active because it has so many fat calories.”
By now you’re probably wondering how best to taste chocolate and cheese with beer. In both cases allow them to melt and coat your palate. If you don’t, they’ll “seize up” as soon as you take a sip of cold beverage, and you won’t experience the combination of flavors. Our favorite beer of the evening was Chelsea Brewing Company’s Tsar’s Revenge, strong dark roasty cask ale brewed in a style known as imperial stout that the British used to ship to Russia in the 1800s. It went perfectly with the coffee and hazelnut flavors in the Brasero Coffee Cream. It didn’t go down so badly with the nutty Ascutney Mountain cheese from Cobb Hill Farm either.
