A few days ago I attended the second edition of the very first English-spoken series of beer & food pairing events in Poland. Great food served with tasty beers and two guys named Paweł who organised the whole thing.
First there is Paweł, the chef at the cosy restaurant Kufle i Widelce (Polish for ‘Mugs and Forks’), a five-minute walk west of Cracow’s old town and just around the corner from Weźże Krafta (post in Dutch), which was one of my first beer discoveries here in the city. Chef Paweł serves burgers, tapas and other tasty dishes and the menu in his place kindly advises you about which beer style is the ideal choice to accompany your pick (which is quite a unique thing in Poland). For this event he created two tasty dishes to come with the beers, selected by the other Paweł. Beer-tasting Paweł is a Bohemian-looking, beret-wearing, bearded fellow who’s very much into beer, wine and good food. And he talks about it with great passion. He tells you the entire history of a beer or beer style in the proverbial blink of an eye (don’t forget to breathe, Paweł ;-) ), and gives extra info on why each beer goes perfectly with its partnering dish. A small-scale, low-key and cosy event to which I could convince a few of my colleagues to join and have a nice and tasty evening.
The beer that opened our tasting experience was a sour one, Kwas Epsilon, from Browar Pinta, a brewery originally from the Cracow area. The label mentioned Double India Sour as the style, which is a poetic license of the brewers to express that the beer is rather strong in the alcohol department and that they used a lot of (especially American) hops during the brewing process. It’s a wild beer that was fermented with different lactobacillus yeast strains, giving the beer its lovely refreshing sourness. The view in my glass was gold and cloudy. The aroma was fresh, slightly tart and very fruity, tropical and citrus in particular. It is a medium-body beer with a nice tartness and fruitiness in the flavour. The aging in wooden barrels is also subtly present in the flavour, especially in the rather dry, clean finish.
The dish that went with this beer was a lovely piece of cod with couscous, rocket salad, coriander and pomegranate seeds. The fruity sourness of the beer was a perfect match with the pomegranate seeds and the flavour of the beer was still light enough not to overpower the cod. The nutty touch of the rocket salad gave the pairing an unexpected extra dimension. First course was a hit, that’s for sure.
For the second course Paweł had picked one of the two indigenous Polish beer styles, the Baltic Porter, to pair a nice dish with. And his choice was not a coincidence. Since a few years 19 January has been proclaimed Baltic Porter Day by Polish beer geeks. Recently this strong, dark, bottom-fermented beer has become increasingly popular amongst many microbrewers. It is one of the many beer styles that craft brewers have rediscovered the past few years, after sometimes several decades of ‘extinction’ of the brewing tradition of that particular style, leaving their recipes gathering dust in attics or basements of former brewers. But nowadays, even the big Polish beer firms make sure to get a Baltic Porter on the market. It has become quite a big deal here, south of the Baltic Sea.
We were even especially lucky, because Paweł had managed to offer everybody not one, but two Baltic Porters, that turned out to be very different from one another. This way Paweł had the opportunity to teach us about two separate beer and food pairing strategies: complementing and contrasting. The first beer was Porter Bałucki, a nice Baltic Porter of Browar Piwoteka, a brewery in the very heart of Łódź in Central Poland. It was a very good, full-bodied, oak barrel-aged beer, with a very dark, opaque colour, a boozy aroma with hints of dried fruit and chocolate, and a flavour balancing both chocolate and hints of red fruit. The other porter was Komes, a strong, intense Baltic Porter from Browar Fortuna, just outside of Poznań, and was a different story. Intense chocolate and caramel aromas in the nose and flavour and the salient boozy character of the beer embraces you like a warm hug, every time you take a sip. Chef Paweł chose to pair these two dark beauties with a delicious chocolate souflet and cherries. I never had a sweet tooth, but I could easily have had a second dessert.
With this comparative approach, Paweł tried to prove that pairing beer and food is a ‘1 plus 1 is 3’ kind of story: Pairing a great beer with a great dish creates a third, new tasting experience. The fruity notes of the first porter contrasted nicely with the intense flavour of the chocolate cake. The second porter complemented perfectly with the chocolate, but also slightly contrasted with the cherries in the dessert, a new experience for everyone’s taste buds. The best proof of this new experience came when everybody had to vote for their favourite Baltic Porter (as a beer), and their favourite pairing. The majority of people (me included) preferred the Komes Baltic Porter as a beer, but as a partner with the dessert, the Porter Bałucki was more popular. Paweł was obviously happy the voting proved his point. As the saying goes, the proof of the beer is in the pairing (or something like that at least).
So this was a great evening, to say the least. There were only about 14 people attending, but I hope this will grow in the future. The concept is very casual and cosy and the value you get for only 33 złoty (€ 7.70, booking service costs included) is just outstanding. Keep an eye on Facebook, because there will be more events like this coming up. Or just pop in at the restaurant and let the menu guide you. Na zdrowie!
Kufle i Widelce
Czysta 3
31-121 Kraków
