PAIRING DOESN'T HAVE TO BE ONE BEVERAGE TO ONE DISH...

What do I mean by this strange statement?

I mean that when you have a complex dish, such as the French toast that Friend of Pairteas Marzi Pecen (tea expert/perfumery expert/flavor expert) enjoyed recently, you can choose beverages that will bring out different flavors in turn, first one and then the next, in other words two (or more) beverages with one dish.

Here's the dish she had:

It's French toast filled with dulce de leche, topped with apples, and covered with caramel and cinnamon. Incredibly rich!

While the toast, dulce de leche, caramel, and the cinnamon activate the warm and hot receptors, the apple activates primarily the cool receptors.  What beverage would one choose to go with this dish?

Here's a basic principle:  a beverage pairs well with a dish when they both activate the same receptors. When they do, the flavors of both stand out.

And another basic principle: warm and hot receptors inhibit cool and cold receptors and vice versa.

So what should you choose when you have both warm/hot and cool/cold elements in a dish?

Marzi chose grapefruit juice and coffee to go with this dish, with water as a chaser:

Excellent choice! And here's why:

Good coffee has multiple compounds that have a caramel flavor and that activate the warm and hot receptors, particularly the latter—the same receptors that are activated by burnt toast. That's why Marzi found that the coffee brought out the toastiness of the dish, and why it went so well with the caramel flavors. However, with this combination she could hardly taste the apple.

So she took a forkful of the dish with grapefruit juice, and a completely different flavor profile appeared! The apple came to the fore, because grapefruit juice has multiple compounds that activate the cold receptors; and the bitterness of the juice was sufficient to mute the somewhat excessive sweetness of the dish.

Take some water, repeat the sequence, first with coffee and then with grapefruit... Marzi had a kaleidoscope of flavors, and thereby complete enjoyment of a complex dish!

We have the habit of pairing one single beverage with a given dish, no matter how complex that dish is and how many disparate receptors it may activate. I recommend thinking of a dish as opening up like a book, with a new chapter revealed with each bite, with each chapter having its own music, its own accompaniment.

Thanks so much, Marzi, for giving us this excellent pairing example!