Pairings for the season

Chef Ranveer Brar and Master Blender Caroline Martin create a symphony of food and alcohol as Saatvik Jha bears witness

Essentially, we’re both about flavours,” says Chef Ranveer Brar on working with Master Blender Caroline Martin. “I’m into perfume-making and tea-tastings,” notes Brar, “so there’s a lot of commonality in us when we talk about the world of flavours. It’s a great platform for both of us to connect. She has a really deep understanding of flavour. Her nose and palate are both strong. Right now it’s working in the spirit space. But it could work beautifully in the food space.” Brar’s observations are flawless. “Your nose is actually required to be much more sensitive than your tastebuds,” says Martin of the blending profession. Naturally, blenders of whisky need to reflect on what a consumer’s eventually going to do, and the consumer is going to taste it. “If we are tasting at all,” says Martin, “it’s usually small sips and then we spit it out quite immediately.” There’s no swallowing or consuming of alcohol, there isn’t any in the blender’s bloodstream while at work. “We’re quite conscious of what it could lead to,” highlights Martin, dispelling the misfounded view that a blender’s work might entail heavy consumption of alcohol. “The company that I work with,” she notes, “they ensure it’s really upfront and they put it on the line that you must drink responsibly. That’s said clearly to every employee, repeatedly. So everybody’s aware of the fact that we are working with alcohol. The driving as well as going home from work at night. You’ve got to be very careful.”

Being able to relax, consume liquor, and enjoying the whole experience is the same for a blender as any other afficionado of spirits. “It’s in a home environment or while going out socially with friends and family”, Martin points out, “Quite a different experience, because at work in our whisky capacity we are considered experts. So socially, we’re looking at it completely differently.” Given their expertise in their respective domains, one would be curious to know what stimulates individuals like Brar and Martin when it comes to food and liquor respectively. On being asked about his go-to food, Brar has a simple response, “For me that food is khichdi. It gives me peace in an otherwise confused world where my palate goes through a lot from morning to evening, trying to dissect, analyse, form an opinion about what I’m eating. Something simple, like khichdi with ghee, is a good break. It puts me, my brain and my palate at peace. That is where it becomes interesting and the palate becomes ready to go for more.”

Martin’s preferences are more varied, but equally accessible. She loves Johnnie Walker Red Label as a long, tall, cool drink with lots of ice in the glass. “Very refreshing, there’s some vibrant flavours in the air,” she says for the drink. “For me, Premier is my personal taste,” Martin proclaims, “I like sipping whisky because it’s quite complex, and there’s a perceivable peaty smokiness as well — I prefer appreciating those flavours without diluting them away with mixers. What else? I like single malt, Scotch malt. At the extreme end in terms of flavour we have Lagavulin — Lagavulin 16 Year Old is my favourite one-time sipping, relaxing whisky.”

What attracted them to make a career out of their respective passions is as fascinating as their tastes within their areas of expertise. “The city of Lucknow,” says Brar, “that was the primary inspiration. As any small-town kid, your interaction with food is family, then community and then city. Till the family and community level, it was good. At the city level that interaction became great. That’s where the balance kind of tilted towards me seeing it as an opportunity to spend the rest of my life pursuing it.” In Martin’s case, it was a penchant for sensory analysis — being able to smell and taste different things. Her degree in food science exposed her to the art of blending different ingredients together and mixing various flavours and aromas. “I was already intrigued by this,” she mentions, “before I started working with the company 32 years ago. I started off working in the liquid development area, which is almost like Smirnoff — flavoured variants. People find it a lot easier, generally speaking, to say that, ‘right, okay, that’s apple flavoured,’ because they know that there’s an apple flavour in it. When you come to whisky flavours it’s quite difficult, in comparison. People realise there’s peaty smoky notes, potentially, in a whisky. They know it’s matured in a cask, so they may say it’s woody. But then, how else do you describe it? I’m really interested in that whole aspect of things.” After a stint in development work, Martin went over to the sensory department. She was meant to be there for six months, but liked it so much that she never came back. Martin continues, “I ended up training people to be sensory panelists and to see if they had the capability. You’ve really got to be patient and describe what you’re asking them to do and all the different sensory methodologies. It’s a world that still intrigues me and inspires me. Just before the millennium I moved over into Whisky blending — so I’ve been  doing that for a while. I’m really proud to be the master blender for the Signature brand: a prestigious brand posessing high quality.”

Doing justice to the nuances of their professions, both are categorical in asserting that it’s difficult to have ‘favourites’, as such. Once exposed to the finest that food and drink have to offer, it becomes hard to compare different apexes. On his pursuit of the oceanic variety of food —  good and different kinds of food — Brar says, “while our body doesn’t really need so many varieties, food is more nutritional, it has a role to play which is more nourishing than pleasing — but at some point in time, food also has to sink in with where you are. What we talk about as regional, local, natural, essentially means that it has got to sink in. It must align with your being and with where the being exists.” In a broader sense, this translates to savouring the dosa in Chennai or the fish in Kolkata. “In a narrower sense,” Brar contends, “this means having matar when you’re in Jaipur because it grows there the best. Having it only till January because after February it’s going to be frozen. Having the kulfi in Amritsar because the milk is great. So, hyper-regional and hyper-seasonal.” The beauty of it lies in finding out where and when is good. According to the master chef, “We don’t need variety to stay fit. We need the right proportions. But it depends on what you define as staying fit. Keeping myself fit in Delhi, versus doing the same in Norway, or in Mumbai — I have to align to what’s around me. That’s what’s exciting, that’s where variety comes in, that’s where a deeper sense of understanding comes in.” On Martin’s part, she’s just as frank, “I get asked that a lot, ‘What is the perfect whisky?’ It’s great that we’ve got so many whiskies out there that you can actually make a choice, and you can choose the one that is appealing to your satiation. So, what is the occasion? How do you feel inside your head? What’s your mood like? What are you wanting from the whisky? Do you want it to be a long, tall, cool drink that’s refreshing or do you want it to be a short, neat measure that’s going to be a sipping whisky? So, I can’t answer this question of what’s perfect. It’s a very interesting question, but it really just depends on the moment and what I would like.”

Being seasoned professionals, the duo have illuminating insights on their respective fields. Many people tell Martin, “It’s a male dominated industry, a man’s world in terms of whisky.” She disagrees, asserting, “When I started, 32 years ago, there were a lot more males in this side of the business. However, I’m really encouraged to see that we’ve got more and more females. Within the team I work in we’re 12 people — the gender ratio is roughly 50:50. You’ve got to be given equal opportunities, but what’s more important is keeping the ability to deliver what you want to deliver. If you can’t smell and describe, because some people can’t really detect anything, then you aren’t going to be any good in the whisky blending team. So, capability over equal opportunity.” For Brar, the insight lies in how food becomes an extension of culture. “What is culture?” he answers, “Culture is an extension of social behaviour that expresses itself through various means. The means visible to the world are music, dance, art, performance, food, and lifestyle. In any place, a culture expresses itself through these mediums. Food is as essential a medium of expression. Let’s take the example of Hyderabad. Whether it’s the Osmania biscuit, which reflects threads of Iranian culture, or it’s the buffalo-beef kebabs that you see which reflects the Muslim culture that we’ve grown up in (in Lucknow). Food is the first reflection of culture. Then it transcends to art, dance, performance and music. You could probably ask a bookworm about their favourite genre — thriller, mystery, drama, etc. What’s my favourite genre of food? Well, it’s rice dishes. I find rice as a grain very fascinating. How different cultures have treated it is a subject to study in itself. Whether it’s a risotto from Italy, or a pilaf from Greece, or a pulao from Iran, or a biryani from Pakistan. Rice, across cultures, you can truly understand that culture, studying just rice history.”

The two experts were brought together for ‘Signature Tastings - Food and Whisky Pairing’, a masterclass organised at Le Meridien Hotel on Wednesday. “It’s been a real eye-opener, working with Chef Ranveer earlier on this week,” says Martin, “he does something a wee bit different every night. I’m no expert on food like the chef, but I really understand that by adding two-three ingredients together you end up with something completely unexpected and different from any of the individual parts. That’s true even in whisky blending. There’s a lot of overlap in terms of how you describe flavours, whether in food or in whisky. Some of the single malt scotches, for example, are very fresh and fruity, like apples or pears, and that’s the type of language we use. There are two different concepts at play here. One is food pairing, where you have a whisky and a food item — two individual components, and you appreciate the flavours in both. Or you incorporate whisky into cooking, which I find to be a bit more novel.” Continuing on that note, Brar adds, “In this whole flavour space, one and one is eleven. That’s how we think. For me, how it works is, there are flavours that go well with one another only to accentuate one another. As a society we’ve always been one which drinks first and eats later. Sometimes, vice-versa. We have this appreciation for food which we are reluctant to dilute. Where I’m coming from is purely saying it’s not diluted, that it’s going to get enhanced if paired with the right proportion and the kind of beverage. It’s a difficult idea to put forth in the Indian context, because we’re not like that. However, once we understand that it’s only making our appreciation of food better. Whisky in particular lends itself really well to North-West Frontier cuisine, and Punjabi food, for all of which we are suckers. That smokiness, that sweetness of the tomato, that slight acidity that chat masala gives. I think it’s a perfect spectrum for something like a whisky pairing.”

In summary, the evening was an action packed session hosted by the two. The two presented a sweet potato gallet with apples — Signature cured apples — and a honey Signature butter with it. The ‘Old Fashioned’ is Martin’s favourite whisky cocktail, and that was one presented at the event — with a few twists. They mixed a peach flavour additive, a subtle twist on it that made it really fruity.  And light of what the chef said, Delhi is a great place to have whisky with your food. “The good thing is that Delhi food — Punjabi food — is everywhere. Overall, unfortunately, we define that as Indian food. So it’s the right place to start,” concludes Brar.