Dallas Food Blog

Patrick Michels

​Matching wine to tomato soup wouldn't seem all that difficult. Fine dining restaurants routinely piece together bisques and fresh purees, after all--and their sommeliers can generally cope.

But in this column we don't bother to make fresh, upscale, herb infused soups. That would require buying tomatoes, basil...far too much trouble, to start with, and quite expensive, considering how quickly real ingredients begin to rot.

A few decades ago Andy Warhol made his name celebrating on canvas the fact that most Americans succumb to convenience. This column, however, has always contended that wine goes with just about everything--from fast foods like McDonald's to the stuff you find on grocery shelves.

Of course, Campbell's poses at least one key problem when it comes to pairing.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

It's funny what foods frighten the wine experts.

When I began calling around about this week's pairing, I expected nods to certain reds that go well with chocolate. But the guy at Dallas Fine Wine & Spirits blurted "I have to think about it"--and hung up without taking my number.

Happens a lot, come to think about it. Just more often this week. At least Richard O'Neill at Centennial took a moment--during which, I assume, he planned to drop the receiver--and then said "that's a tough one."

The problem, it seems, is all of that nougat and caramel. Chocolate has a distinct flavor that needs a bold wine willing to tussle with bitter and sweet notes. The other elements of a Snickers bar, however, require something more subtle.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

As a kind of homage to Howard Johnson's, I really wanted to find a box of Mrs. Paul's breaded clams. They were a staple back in my grad school days...well, that's probably the wrong choice of words--teaching assistants in history earned roughly half the poverty level and we had to buy 900 books for each seminar. Mrs. Paul's clams were more of a special occasion meal.

It helped that they came with a pouch of pickled green things for making your own tartar sauce.

Unfortunately neither Albertson's nor Tom Thumb stock the brand. So for this week's pairing I ended up with Gorton's popcorn shrimp: unsold scraps of musty bait meat salted until reasonably palatable--not the sort of thing you'd think wine would handle well.

Patrick Michels

​ "God, I hate Candy Corn."

Those were the first words from Timothy Mercer, wine buyer at Cork in Uptown, after I asked about this week's pairing. And, as it turns out, I hate the stuff as well. In fact, I can think of very few people who really like Candy Corn.

Few treats, however, have lasted as long as these artificially colored wedges of corn syrup, sugar and honey. Since first created in the 1880s Candy Corn has become an institution, with Americans snapping up bags by the tens of millions each year...although most of that ends up in landfills, feeding a breed of super rats.

Come Sunday, most of us will have some leftover Candy Corn around the house. Might as well open a bottle of wine to go along with them--but which one?

Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Patrick Michels

​
Deriding fast foods is somewhat de rigueur on blogs such as this. We're supposed to appreciate the efforts of chefs and skilled short order cooks as opposed to the corporate ethic, right?

But I'm not going to do that (at least on this occasion). However placid in flavor and thin in texture, I've had chili stewed over a campfire that was quite similar--and very much appreciated.

Besides, you can't call Wendy's fast food, because it's way better--or so I'm told.

OK, so I believe too much of what I watch on TV. The chain does, at least, allow their chili to simmer for awhile--although because they season for common tastes, there's little for slow cooking to develop other than basic, hamburger flavors. Oh, there's a wobble of pepper and some vegetal bitterness, but not much depth.

Surprisingly, the timid nature of Wendy's chili makes wine pairing all the more difficult.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

As a cereal, Rice Krispies were never a favorite. Yeah, they had that snap, crackle, pop gimmick, but you still needed five or six tablespoons of sugar to make them palatable.

Then someone came up with a brilliant scheme: the Rice Krispies treat.

Once laden with melted marshmallows and butter then formed into bars, the loquacious puffs were freed from the breakfast table. People bring them to children's birthday parties, office functions, bake sales and anywhere else gatherings occur...except wine tastings.

And that's a real shame, for the sweet-toasted-vanillaish flavor almost cries out for an alcohol chaser, right? 

Patrick Michels/foodistablog

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

There's gonna be a moment when you think "this is the low point--it can't get any worse." Of course, intellectually you know it can get much worse. But the little speech, however mistaken, helps you cope with the situation.

Some months ago I went through this process when pairing wine to pan seared Spam. "Can't get worse," I said to myself at the time. Yet this week I had to walk into the neighborhood Kroger, hunt up and down the chips aisle for two likely bags of pork rinds, then head over to a wine shop to ask--out loud in front of other customers--the 'which wine works best with' question.

Pretty low, indeed.

Yet somehow I was buoyed by the words of Brian Luscher, chef at The Grape. "I would get a Champagne," he said when I called about this week's pairing. "Not a California sparkling wine, but a real French Champagne--something earthy, mushroomy, yeasty, with real terroir."

​The time has come, once again, to reflect on three months of drinking...and art.

Over the summer we paired wine with the good (bacon, deviled eggs), the bad (Boca vegetable burgers), but nothing really ugly. We even tried some classic American desserts--Chips Ahoy, for example.

Long, hot days gave artist Patrick Michels far too much time to delve. Not good, for he is at once anti-social and fully aware of the world around him. Michels despises the mores and values held sacred by others, yet is driven by a strong sense of right and wrong--one messed up dude, in other words.

But so many of our best artists are tortured sots. At least he hasn't sliced his own ear or anything--stains don't come out of these industrial carpets easily. Anyway, from the depraved to the sublime, his best work of quarter three:

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

There were no deluxe boxes with creamy, canned cheese goo when I was a kid. There were no cartoon-shaped pastas, either. All we had was regular old macaroni and a packet of salty powder that magically transformed into orange paste when dumped into the pan.

And somehow this is the stuff that got a generation hooked on mac & cheese.

I'm not here to question how this improbable thing occurred. But the cravings are bad. Very bad. So bad that when an expat shop in Prague received a shipment of Kraft macaroni & cheese, they generally sold out in a matter of hours...at roughly $20 per box.

Hell, I didn't even want to spend that much on the wine for this week's pairing. I figured fake cheese powder bolstered by sodium could wreck any good wine, whatever the price point.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

At some point we must outgrow milk and cookies.

So as adults, what do we resort to? Coffee and cookies? I guess if we want to be adult in the Sam Spade sense of the word, we could try bourbon and cookies. Whatever, we still need a Chips Ahoy fix every once in awhile.

There must, of course, be a wine-based solution--a sophisticated adult beverage to go with the however many dozen chips they cram into a cookie.

Patrick Michels/Hvnly via Flickr

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

It's not much of a stretch to say the 20th Century and all its technological marvels began with the invention of the club sandwich.

Think about it: the stack of turkey, bacon, ham, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato was introduced in 1894, at least according to the most common origin story. Shortly after that, we had the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, Marconi, Farnsworth and--of course--Dizzy Dean. Who's to say these guys weren't inspired by lunch?

The problem is finding a wine to go along with what James Beard called "one of the greatest sandwiches of all time." With three meats, a fruit, two vegetables (Quizno's throws on diced onion) and such, there's plenty to consider.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Whoever first decided to shatter fried tortillas into wedge shapes and open a jar of salsa was some kind of improvisational genius. In one moment he--or she, but most likely he--gave the art of lounging around watching football all weekend a worthy culinary partner.

Oh, sure--potato chips and sour cream dip are fine...if you're the sort who thinks Truman might be too soft to deal with those pesky reds.

Chips and salsa is a healthier combination, full of tomatoes and stuff. You can pretend they reflect an appreciation of global cuisine, even when the salsa comes from New York City. The chips can be shaped into miniature bowls. Sheer genius.

There's only one thing this culinary mastermind overlooked. An overload of bold flavors--salt, jalapeno, onions--makes pairing with anything other than beer damn near impossible. Doesn't it?
  

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

There's no real shame in picking up a brick of Colby, Monterey Jack or one of those so called "Swiss" cheeses you find on grocery shelves--not really. You can't make it to Scardello every day and those in-laws from Arkansas are fond of that orange stuff from Walmart.

Besides, shopping for inexpensive brands at the local grocer is relatively hassle-free. The blocks of Cheddar, Swiss and Monterey Jack I picked up for around $3 each from a supercenter all taste about the same.

Oh, the Jack showed some milky characteristics and the large, extremely cheap Swiss--the holes were more like dents--shared a flavor profile with tainted water. But even the Cheddar had a tang similar to the others.

Should make for an easy wine pairing, right?
 

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Back in 1982 I took off with a friend on summer long road trip up and down the east coast, from Montreal to Atlanta and many, many points in between.

It was a good trip. We walked the route from Lexington to Concord (that's an American Revolution thing), touched Bock's Car in Dayton (a WWII thing), saw the Cardinals play in several different cities, ate fried clams in New England and fried chicken in Georgia. And fried ham in Virginia, come to think of it.

Now here's the embarrassing part: Every time we ran across a Dunkin' Donuts we stopped and ordered three apiece. About two months into the journey, I noticed my friend--now a professor at SMU--phantom counting as we waited for our doughnuts. "Hey," he finally blurted, "three and three make six. That's a half-dozen."

Yep, ordering a half-dozen doughnuts was significantly cheaper than our three each approach. Only took us sixty days to figure it out.

Determining which wine to go along with six of the chocolate glazed variety, well, for that I turned to an expert at Centennial in Addison.
 

Patrick Michels/Vanessa Pike-Russell via Flickr

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food...or in this case, smoke.

The gentleman at Pogo's was adamant when I asked the usual "which wine would go best with" question.

"I wouldn't pair it with wine," he told me. Twice.

Obviously whiskeys or Cognac set well against the creamy, leathery, bitter smoke from most decent cigars--hence the impulse to reach for a good single malt. But this is a wine pairing column and I'd already picked up an Oliva Serie G with a Camaroon wrapper. A nice cigar for $5.45.

So c'mon, Pogo's Guy.

Patrick Michels

​Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

There's nothing better than a pound or so of ground beef slapped on the grill...except maybe the same, topped with bacon.

Of course, some people are content--or so they say--to deny themselves life's culinary pleasures...although I must admit, Boca does a surprisingly decent job turning soy, wheat gluten, corn oil, disodium inosinate and such into sturdy fabric with a pan-browned flavor.

Finding the right wine to go with a real burger is never much of a problem. But soy-based vegetable burgers present something of a challenge. Instead of dripping fat, after all, there's a strange coating from sesame and corn oils. In place of the rich, meaty flavor, Boca's burgers present nutty and bitter background notes.

So what the hell works best?

Patrick Michels/inyuaki.com via Flickr

​Ah, bacon. Nature's most perfect food.

If only--and I don't mean this to sound like a prayer--some higher being could improve on the flavor of pork belly, cut into rashers and fried in an old pan. Yeah, I know all about the chocolate covered stuff. But that's more of a television-age lark (thank you, Homer Simpson) than a combination for the ages. And there's no alcohol involved.

So I rushed north to Vin Classic in Plano to consult with one of my favorite experts, someone who--when presented with offbeat questions--wanders the aisles, stopping here and there to consider the pros and cons of a particular bottle. Unfortunately, she had taken the day off and I was left with a disinterested clerk for wine pairing guidance.

Serves me right for not calling ahead, I know. Bacon deserves more respect.

Patrick Michels/qwrrty

Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Why restaurants leave this snack to family reunions and church gatherings, I'll never know. There are infinite possibilities (well, not infinite, but quite a few), almost everyone likes them and line cooks can whip them up in advance, so there's no frenzied dinner rush preparation.

Of course, if you haven't made deviled eggs in, oh, 20 years...Let's just say the friend I coerced into fixing the things decided to put her own stamp on the age-old recipe. Either that, or she miscalculated the number of egg yolks necessary to create a fluffy filling.

This after she first covered hard-boiled eggs in mayonnaise and reached for the masher.

Guess I'm trying to get across that these were not the most traditional of deviled eggs, at least in appearance. The flavor, however, was of a good old, straightforward, picnic variety--which means the wine must contend with fat, protein, tang and spice.

Patrick Michels

There was an advertising jingle back in the 70s proclaiming Americans love for "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet."

Slogan writers often take some liberties, of course. I mean, football was already the nation's number one sport by then. And clearly this was before Miley Cyrus, reality television and i Phones...although the ad was right about Chevy, which we love so much we now own the company.

A lot of things have changed, in other words. But through decades of 'tax and spend' liberals and 'don't tax but still spend' conservatives, from one undeclared war to the next, Americans have remained true to the apple pie.

There is, as we all know, nothing so satisfying as warm apple pie.

Naturally, we want an all-American wine to go along with this dish, right? So Denise Jones of Vino 100 in Uptown headed straight for the Chardonnay rack.

Patrick Michels

Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Maybe I'm jumping the gun on this. Then again, writing a corn dog piece around state fair time seems far too cliche.

So what the hell--it's summer, the season of food on a stick, and our own Jesse Hughey just won a corn dog eating contest over the weekend. Why not pair batter-dipped dogs with a decent wine?

If possible--I mean, the State Fair brand box of frozen specimens I bought at Tom Thumb presents a combination of nitrate-laden mystery meant and sugar sweet coating that could, quite possibly, frustrate any wine expert. But after blinking once--maybe twice--in disbelief, the guy at Pogo's strode instantly toward a shelf of discounted California claret.

"You don't want to think about it?" I asked.

"No, this will go nicely," he replied. Maybe he just wanted me out of the store--and fast.

Once again we pause to reflect upon the previous three months, in which we paired wine with Cheez Its, nachos from 7-Eleven, frozen taquitos and other delicacies.

Twice during this span we encountered nearly inedible items. But not once did our intrepid graphic artist, Patrick Michels, flinch. Not even when approached with an empty bottle of wine and lame apology for tossing out the can of Spam he needed to create an illustration. He simply rushed to the store and bought another.

Probably gulped it down, too--such is his level of desper...um, commitment.

So, without further ado, we present Michels' best work from the second quarter. These fine gallery pieces will vie for top honors at year's end.
 

Patrick Michels/liza31337/protohiro

Chicken salad is of great cultural significance. Unlike omelets, which require a measure of creative destruction--can't make one 'without breaking a few eggs' speaks to enduring human progress, a can-do attitude, let's soldier on and get the job done, that sort of thing--the chicken salad idiom allows us room for laziness. It's impossible, as we all know, to create a decent version from a pile of chicken shit, right? Hey boss, it seems to say, I couldn't get it done because you failed to provide me with the right materials. It's a chance to slack off, take it easy, drop the ball and not worry about consequences.

So what's not to like about chicken salad? Take the day. Relax. Think about it over a bottle of...of...What the hell goes with a good old fashioned chicken salad sandwich?

Patrick Michels/BrokenSphere

Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

I've commented already about the quick-service seafood chain's diabolical attempt to add a few years to my life, at least on paper. But the store I visited for this week's wine pairing also tries to break you down physically, overloading each piece with grease and sodium.

Sound good? They were also running an apparent contest to see how long they could hold out before changing the cooking oil.

As a result, the popcorn shrimp smacked of musty shellfish, salt and old oil. Fish fillet had a sandy, malty, salty, old oil-y flavor. And the butterflied shrimp (or maybe it was their "lobster," who can tell?) tasted more like gummy sodium and old oil.

Fortunately, matching wine to a vat of outdated grease and Morton's salt is easier than you would think.

Patrick Michels

Each week, Pairing Off attempts to find just the right bottle of wine to go with ordinary food.

Without the existence of frozen supermarket taquitos, most guys wouldn't have survived their 20s. Hell, even after we've overcome all that Darwin throws at us over that particular decade--beer bongs, beer pong, the 7-Eleven beer run--we still rely on the occasional batch, pulled hot from the oven.

It's the beer run we drop as tastes evolve, not the taquitos.

The marriage of suds, tortillas and meat is a fine one, mind you. But spouses, girlfriends and the other things that frown upon our old ways eventually force most guys to ditch the frozen meal...unless they find a way to dress it up somewhat.

As we've learned, a bottle of wine makes everything from Triscuits to chicken-fried steak seem a little more sophisticated. But how does one salvage a box of taquitos?
 

Patrick Michels

When these things hit the market sometime back before disco--maybe even before streaking--Pringles canisters told a whole creation story: how machines shredded potatoes into a near liquid paste, reconstituted this mass into wavy wafers and such.

It was all very appetizing.

The process, in fact, remains so far removed from 'normal' that the parent company recently argued in British courts their chips should not be considered potato products.

Hmm...the un-chip. So how does one go about selecting wine for potato-rice-preservative crisps masquerading, through the miracle of industrialization, as the real thing?
 

Patrick Michels

Yes, those little jars of whitefish roe, dyed black and resting on grocery shelves until someone gets the urge to bake up a caviar pie...or whatever.

This is the stuff nausea is made of: inky, heavy with brine, slimy in texture. Once opened, the air around the jar picks up a disturbing fragrance of yeast and tadpoles. The flavor is even less appealing, reeking of salt and bait.

Prized caviar from Iranian or the pre-poaching Russian fisheries pops cleanly, releasing the taste of fresh fish and seawater. Supermarket roe, bound in salt and water, comes across as something one might toss overboard to attract hammerheads.

Yet oddly enough, the same sort of wine works with both.

Patrick Michels/jasonlam via Flickr

I lost a lot of respect for Sarah, our editorial assistant. Just a little while ago she admitted an affinity--well, more than an affinity, an absolute love--for 7-Eleven's nachos.

While I respect that the convenience store provides nachos, with an all-you-can-pile-on policy for condiments and all-you-can-pump yellow cheese-resembling goo, only the poorest of undergraduate males could ever love...

Oh, right--journalist pay.

But, really, 7-Eleven's concoction is rather disgusting to contemplate: commercially stiffened masa and preservatives covered in artificial flavoring and some kind of binding product. Only the pickled jalapenos and salsa withering in the stale air give it any 'freshness.' So there's bound to be a few difficulties pairing the nachos with wine.

Patrick Michels

When asking about dishes considered unsuitable--or at least unusual--for wine, the experts generally push me toward something fruity and acidic.

Makes sense, really: these are the two elements most capable of battling excess salt, wallowing fat and other banes of wine pairing. So when I approached the woman at Majestic on Oak Lawn looking for something to go with orange chicken from a bag picked out of a Tom Thumb frozen food aisle, she almost immediately (after the raised eyebrow and the "how much do you want to spend?" question) escorted me to a sale rack of Sauvignon Blanc.

Patrick Michels/sebrenner, via Flickr

No matter how many variables I threw him, the guy from Crush kept pointing to the same three wines, although not in the same order.

It has a lot of fat. Yes, this would be best, but these would be good. I think it's cured with Chianti. Maybe, so this will work nicely, also this and this. Of course, one of those bottles had a $39 sign posted under it, so...option number two.

The salami in question was one picked up at Central Market. Instead of the harsh nitrate taste found in grocery varieties, it has a silky texture (thanks to sizable globs of fat) and even salinity backed by a mineral character with herbs and a peppery finish. In other words, one damn complex tube of cured meat.

No doubt La Mozza's 2006 I Perazzi Morellino di Scansano is a good wine--Robert Parker rated it at 90 points, I believe. Matching to the meat is one thing, however. Dealing with all that fat? Now that's a bigger challenge.
 

Patrick Michels/Petroleumjelliffe, via Flickr

One thing that becomes clear, as we move through this series, is that pairings can be a bit fussy.

The nonchalant approach of discarding a specific recommendation in favor of something easier to find within the same style doesn't always work--at least not when you're dealing with beasts such as processed food. And people who truly understand wine aren't always thoroughly familiar with, say, Spam. Or with this week's subject: Cheez It crackers.

Notwithstanding that Cheez Its, to me, represent one of the four food groups (with coffee, alcohol and Thin Mints filling out the nutritional guidelines), I agreed with Wine Therapist's Keri Oldham that salt would be the biggest factor in matching cracker to wine.