Saturday Kitchen 25.6.11

(by susie)

I was dispatched to Daventry this last week for BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen, in a quest to find wines for a heavenly lobster dish and some pretty special bread.

Richard Bertinet is a chef of French extraction who runs a cookery school in Bath – a food equivalent of our wine school, I suppose. His speciality is baking and bread, so it was no surprise to find out that this was what he was up to in studio.

He cooked up a fougasse bread, to be served with chickpea and olive oil purée (note: not houmous), pesto and tapenade.

We road tested a few wines at home and came to the conclusion that either a nice southern French rosé or a Mediterranean white worked best. In the end, I opted for the lovely Domaine Félines Picpoul de Pinet 2010 (Waitrose, from £5.99).

Richard’s verdict? ‘Beautiful: it goes very well; fresh, lovely.’ Tasting the combination, fellow chef Tristan Welch declared himself ‘in heaven’.

Tristan was preparing a lobster dish with lobster tortellini, which I paired with the Finest Hautes Côtes de Beaune 2009 (Tesco, from £8.82).

‘I’d quite happily be stranded [on a desert island] with this dish and glass of wine,’ he said, adding, ‘the match is perfect, she’s done a fantastic job’.

The match also got a thumbs up from James (‘bargain; great combination’) and Richard, who uttered a wonderfully gnomic French phrase: ‘du pain, du lobster, du vin…’

The show, recipes and archive material of Keith Floyd, Anjum Anand and Rick Stein, is available on BBC iplayer until 2.7.11. Wine bits are at 15:50 and 57:40.