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Aged cheese croquettes with Niepoort 10 Years Old Tawny Port

On the plate are small cheese croquettes of mature Dutch cheese, a minute in hot oil, crisp outside and molten inside. Opposite them, the port is a ten-year-old tawny, whose residual sugar softens the salt and which is cool enough to cut through the frying fat.

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From the shelf

The bottle

Niepoort is a Dutch-Portuguese port house founded in Porto in 1842 and still in the hands of the family. This is a tawny with an age statement of ten years: a blend of wines aged in oak casks until the average comes out at ten years. Those years of oxygen turn the fresh fruit into dried plum, toffee and wood. This bottling comes in 70 centilitres and is at 19.5 percent alcohol, with about 107 grams of residual sugar per litre, which according to the classification of the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto falls in the sweet class. For tawny the institute uses a serving temperature of 10 to 14 degrees.

Niepoort 10 Years Old Tawny Port

The combination

Why this works together

A cheese croquette puts three things on the plate, each asking for something different. The salt and savoury depth of mature Dutch cheese come from long ageing, in which proteins break down into free amino acids; that salt is softened by the residual sugar of the tawny, because sweetness suppresses salt much more strongly than the other way round, as Green and colleagues showed. The frying fat is the second: a croquette comes out of oil of almost 200 degrees and leaves a coating on the tongue. A tawny is served cooler than most red ports, and that chill plus the alcohol clear away that fat, so the next croquette feels crisp again. The third is the match itself: ten years in cask give the port a nutty, caramel-like tone, and melted mature cheese has exactly that savoury-sweet side.

At the table

The dish

  • For 4 people
  • Ready in 45 minutes, plus 3 hours chilling
  • Type cheese course

What you need

  • 50 g butter, diced
  • half an onion, very finely chopped
  • 1 fresh bay leaf
  • 50 g flour, plus 4 tablespoons for breading
  • 250 ml milk
  • 100 ml chicken or vegetable stock
  • salt, pepper and freshly grated nutmeg
  • 3 gelatine leaves
  • 175 g mature Dutch cheese, grated
  • 50 ml cream
  • 1 egg yolk
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 100 g panko or other dry breadcrumbs
  • sunflower oil for deep-frying

How to make it

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and the bay leaf and fry them gently until the onion is translucent.
  2. Sprinkle in the 50 g of flour and stir for 2 minutes. Then add the milk and the stock little by little and keep stirring until you have a smooth, thick batter. Whisk out any lumps and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
  3. Soak the gelatine in cold water. Stir the cheese and the cream into the sauce and take the pan off the heat. Squeeze out the gelatine and stir it in. Let the mixture cool for 5 minutes to about 65 degrees and then stir in the egg yolk.
  4. Spread the mixture on a clean tray and let it cool. Cover well and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
  5. Using a piping bag with a 13 millimetre nozzle, pipe strands of about 30 centimetres onto baking paper and cut them into pieces of 4 centimetres.
  6. Set out three bowls with the flour, the beaten eggs and the breadcrumbs. Dip the pieces in the flour, then in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs, and repeat the egg and the breadcrumbs once more. Place them on a tray and refrigerate for 1 hour.
  7. Heat the oil to 195 degrees. Fry no more than four croquettes at a time, about 1 minute, moving them occasionally, until golden brown. Let them drain on kitchen paper and serve immediately.

In the glass

Serving

Serve this ten-year-old tawny at 10 to 14 degrees; half an hour in the fridge usually brings a bottle at room temperature there, and with a fried dish that coolness helps. Use a tulip-shaped glass and fill it no more than a third. Decanting is not necessary. According to the institute, an opened bottle of tawny with an age statement keeps for one to four months; store it upright in a cool place.

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