Choosing The Right Drink To Pair With Your Meal

Wazzup Pilipinas!

The perfect meal is a mixture of more than just the food. It is the seasonings you use, the way you cook it, and the quality of the ingredients you choose. But it also includes an often overlooked component – the beverage that you serve with it.

Choosing the right drink to pair with your meal can complement the flavors of your food in ways you may never have expected. For instance, you can’t just cook a perfect rack of lamb and serve a soda with it. The harshness of the drink will conflict with the soft flavors of the lamb and detract from the taste.

A prime example of this is when you barbecue your food. While beer and wine are a much better choice to serve with a grilled menu, even these beverages require technique to determine the right flavor or brew.

The drink you choose depends on the way you barbecue your food and the sauce and seasoning you use. There are a few general rules that you should use when you pair a wine with your barbecued meal.

Always match a dominant aspect of the sauce to your wine. If your sauce is tangy or tart, find a wine that corresponds. These types of wine are often white and citrus-flavored. However, if you use a gas smoker for your meal, you need to find a rich, red smoky wine.

Beer is always another option to serve with your barbecue, but again, you need to ensure that you match the flavor components. Many barbecue sauces have a vinegar base to them. Sauces like these need to be paired with a strong beer. Others that are more mustard-based should be paired with a sweet flavor to balance the mustard taste with something more in the citrus area.

However, if you are not a wine or beer connoisseur, it can be difficult to wander the aisles of the liquor store and decide which whites and reds are sweet enough or tangy enough to complement the choice of sauce and style of barbecue you are going to use. Short of testing every drink before you serve it with your meal, you may not have an easy way to determine which beverage will be the complement to your perfect finished creation.

You are not the only one in that situation, though. Because of this, there are places for you to turn to so that you do not have to spend hundreds of dollars to sample all of the wine and beer to choose your match (although it may be fun to do so!).

Instead, guides like this one can show you exactly which beverages to pair with which foods to ensure your dinner is a raving success.

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