Evodia Garnacha is great with pork.
(Note: "Meal of the Week" is a weekly food & wine pairing feature appearing on Examiner.com on Fridays, detailing an exception food & wine experience in Chicago. To suggest a pairing or a dining experience, e-mail BrettAshleyMcKenzie@gmail.com.)
On an unusually cold late August Sunday, my husband and I were both feeling under the weather, so I decided to warm us both up with a homemade family meal. Money was tight, so a trip to the grocery store for some choice cuts of beef or fresh fish was not an option. Also, as we would be going away the following weekend, I wanted to use up some perishable ingredients rather than let them spoil. I had to make due with whatever I could find in my fridge, freezer and pantry. Pickings were slim. I had chili seasoning but no ground meat, pasta but no tomatoes (canned or otherwise) for sauce, coarse sea salt but no black pepper.
The meal I finally decided on was centered around a pork tenderloin I'd forgotten about in my freezer. A few weeks prior, Jewel-Osco ran a two-for-one sale on pork tenderloin, and even though I'm not particularly partial to this cut of meat, I bought two. I'm really glad I did, because I realized that I could finely cut the meat up and make a wholesome pork stew.
After thawing and cutting the meat, I seasoned it with my favorite fall spices--a little cinnamon, a little allspice, and some paprika--added some sea salt and red pepper flakes, and threw it into my slow cooker. I searched my kitchen for some sort of broth, because the meat's juiced simply wouldn't be enough to serve as the base for an entire stew. Finding not even a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup, my gaze finally fell on a half-finished, week-old bottle of wine. I poured the wine over the meat, added some olive oil, and left the pork alone for a few hours.
When I came back to check on the pot, the meat was cooking nicely and truly delicious smells were wafting from the slow cooker. I wanted the pork to be as tender as possible--there's nothing worse than tough-to-chew stew--so I poured about a cup of milk in. Realizing I'd still need more liquid ingredients to keep the meat tender, I added a bottle of beer I found in the fridge.
After a few more hours of simmering the meat and broth, I added an onion (finely chopped), frozen carrots, frozen peas, and finely chopped garlic to the pot. All in all, the meat cooked for eight hours, with the veggies being added toward the sixth hour.
I cooked up some egg noodles, added a generous hunk of butter, and served my stew over top. It was unreal. So savory, so wholesome, and so easy. The same stew can be made using beef or roasted chicken.
Because pork is a white meat, yet more substantive than chicken, wine pairing can be a challenge. My stew was quite hearty, but the flavors not so strong that it called for a Cabernet or bigger red. So I opened a bottle of Evodia Garnacha from Calatayud, Spain ($10.99 at Just Grapes). Garnacha, the same grape as Grenache (which is typically found in Cote du Rhone reds), and is lighter-bodied than Merlot, Shiraz, or Cab, but bigger-bodied than Pinot Noir or Sangiovese. The flavor profile, cracked pepper and dark berries, was not only perfectly complimentary to the pork stew, but the notes of pepper throughout helped with the fact that I had absolutely no pepper to season my stew with.
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