Recommendations
Pastéis de nata with Kopke Colheita Port 2003
On the plate are small custard tarts in puff pastry, with a mottled burnt top, lukewarm from the oven. The 2003 colheita sets dried fruit, spices and a long, lightly sweet finish against them.
From the shelf
The bottle
According to the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto, a colheita is a tawny from a single harvest year that matures in cask for at least seven years; this bottle comes from the 2003 harvest and has therefore spent far longer than that minimum on wood. The Kopke wine is 20 percent alcohol and comes in 75 centilitres. The house describes an intense red colour with an orange rim and a complex nose of dried fruit and a little spice, with good structure, balanced acidity and a slightly oily, long finish. Kopke is the oldest port house in the Douro and is known for this category, in which a separate lot from each harvest year stays in cask for years instead of being blended. The institute recommends a serving temperature of 10 to 14 degrees for tawny.
The combination
Why this works together
Pastéis de nata are essentially egg, milk, sugar and puff pastry, with cinnamon and a top baked black-spotted in the hot oven. Those scorched spots and the cinnamon lie close to the spices and dried fruit that the house describes in this colheita, so plate and glass complement each other instead of fighting each other. The custard brings a lot of fat from milk and yolks, and the puff pastry even more from the butter; the acids and the twenty percent alcohol of the wine clear that up between two tarts. Because the port has stayed sweet after so many years in cask, it holds its own next to a sweetened dessert; a dry wine would come across as thin here. The weight fits too, because one tart the size of a palm asks for no more than a small glass.
At the table
The dish
- For 4 people
- Ready in 45 minutes
- Type dessert
What you need
- 1 egg
- 1 egg yolk
- 60 g caster sugar
- 1 tablespoon cornstarch
- 200 ml full-fat milk
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ground cinnamon
- 450 g puff pastry, cold
- a muffin tin for twelve, lightly greased
How to make it
- Preheat the oven to 230 degrees.
- Put the egg, egg yolk, sugar and cornflour in a saucepan and whisk until smooth. Gradually whisk in the milk until there are no lumps left.
- Heat the mixture over medium-high heat and keep whisking until it thickens and begins to boil. Let it boil for another two minutes, take the pan off the heat and stir in the vanilla extract and a pinch of cinnamon.
- Pour the custard into a glass dish and let it cool. Place a sheet of baking paper on top in which you have pricked a few holes with a fork, so that no skin forms.
- Roll out the cold puff pastry to three millimetres thick and cut out rounds of 7.5 cm. Press them into the muffin tin.
- Fill each small bowl with a generous dessertspoon of chilled cream.
- Bake the tartlets for sixteen to twenty minutes, until golden brown and some dark spots appear on top.
- Leave them in the tin for five minutes, then place them on a wire rack. Serve them lukewarm or at room temperature.
In the glass
Serving
Serve the colheita between 10 and 14 degrees, the range the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto uses for tawny. A small tulip-shaped glass, filled to a third, brings out the spices and dried fruit best. Decanting is not needed for this style; if a fine deposit has formed after more than twenty years, stand the bottle upright for a day and pour it carefully. Together with the tawnies with an age statement, this is the style that keeps the longest: according to the institute, an opened colheita stays good for one to four months.
Everything about Kopke Colheita Port 2003Back to Recommendations from ’t Bockje
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