Recently, we were invited to a cheese and saké tasting at the French Cheese Board in New York City. Think you should sip saké only with Japanese food? Think again.

While it doesn’t seem intuitive, the the traditional Japanese drink, brewed by fermenting rice, has a broad range of flavors and styles that pairs with various foods. Like wine, it’s a global beverage.

Saké is made from four ingredients: rice, water, yeast and koji, an enzyme. Saké is fermented and brewed like beer, but served like wine. It is also characterized as a wine because of its alcohol content is similar.

Think of saké as you’d think of white wine. A bolder saké can stand up to spicy cuisine, like Indian food. It can also pair well with French dishes. A milder sake is better with delicate flavors like sushi and sashimi.

Now for the cheeses: Another reason saké pairs well with cheese is that both contain lactic acid. Most aged cheeses go better with bolder sakés, fresh cheeses (like chèvre) with milder ones. With aged cheeses, we personally like:

 
As with white wine, serve saké semi-chilled, around 60°F.

The journey to knowledge includes trying what you can get, and seeing how you like it. That goes with both sakés and cheeses.

 
WHAT CHEESES SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?

Your favorites! We’re serving saké and cheese today, for Mother’s Day, with Truffle Tremor, a truffle cheese; Point Reyes Blue Cheese; Red Hawk, a strong, Muenster*-style cheese from Cowgirl Creamery; and a Brie. The first three cheeses are from Marin County, north of San Francisco; Brie is imported from France.

If you want to see what pairings others have done, check out the website TrueSake.com, written by a sommelier who recommends his top three cheese pairings with particular sakés; and look for similar content online.

If you’re not sure about taking this on by yourself, ask your local cheese store to set up a tasting. Here’s a report from CurdNerds on a tasting at Murray’s Cheese in New York City.

More to discover:

 
*That’s Alsatian Muenster, not the mild American “munster.”

Here, the conventional olive or lemon twist is replaced with with microgreens and a large, stemmed caper berry: arty and pretty.

Use your favorite Martini recipe or this one:

RECIPE: CLASSIC DRY VODKA MARTINI

Ingredients Per Drink

Make it pretty for Mother’s Day. Photo courtesy Gresy Goose.

Preparation
1. COMBINE ingredients in a shaker with ice. Shake and strain into a Martini glass.

2. GARNISH and serve.
  

If you still haven’t settled on a dessert for Mother’s Day, here’s the easy way out.

You can make cupcakes like these, from SweetStreetDesserts.com, simply by purchasing plain cupcakes and topping them with a large piece of candy.

Instead of sprinkles, the idea is to have one chocolate “centerpiece” to top the cupcake. Consider: