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As in past years, Judy Mattera might have been at the 2012 Boston Wine Expo pouring Rutherford wines; instead, she was flip-flopping around in the Miami sun.
Mattera, a Swampscott resident, less known for her wine pouring, is better known as a pastry chef and consultant. Prestigious restaurants with which she has worked include The Federalist at XV Beacon, Grill 23 & Bar and Olives, Todd English’s renowned restaurant in Charlestown.
Mattera attended cooking school at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts over 20 years ago and could have chosen a number of paths from there. Because she is the mother of three and her husband travels frequently, she chose the field of pastry, as it provided better work hours.
Aside from pouring and pastries, Mattera writes for several magazines, including Santé and McCall’s, and has been featured on the television show “Chronicle” in a segment titled, “Just Desserts.”
Last November, Mattera was honored as one of four “Women Who Inspire” at the 12th annual Awards Gala for Women Chefs & Restaurateurs. She recalls the moment when she was co-chairwoman of the three-day conference, when she hadn’t known she was a finalist for an award. Well-known chefs Rachel Klein and Mary Dumont prepared hors d’oeuvres, Jody Adams served the first course, followed by Barbara Lynch, Lydia Shire and Mattera, who shared, “I was plating the dessert for 250 people and my co-chair came in the kitchen to get me,” saying she wanted her to meet someone right now.
“Are you kidding me?” Mattera responded. “I was up next.”
She was in the midst of preparing an ambitious dessert with many components: a freeform honey custard brulee over a dried fruit compote she had paired with a Spanish wine called Victoria, with a goat cheese crema. She also made wine gelee cutouts as one of the garnishes on the plate, along with vanilla shortbread cookies cut into rectangles. Although she had help in the kitchen, walking away wasn’t something she planned on. But, after some persuasion, she finally relented.
“We took a left into the ballroom where everyone was seated, and there’s my headshot,” Mattera recalls of the moment she realized the award was hers. She didn’t have a prepared speech, she says, “but it was thrilling, exhilarating. I am very proud of that award.”
She received the WCR Golden Bowl Award, recognizing excellence in baking and pastry arts and honoring a woman whose skill in the baking and pastry arts inspires others.
As in past years, Judy Mattera might have been at the 2012 Boston Wine Expo pouring Rutherford wines; instead, she was flip-flopping around in the Miami sun.
Mattera, a Swampscott resident, less known for her wine pouring, is better known as a pastry chef and consultant. Prestigious restaurants with which she has worked include The Federalist at XV Beacon, Grill 23 & Bar and Olives, Todd English’s renowned restaurant in Charlestown.
Mattera attended cooking school at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts over 20 years ago and could have chosen a number of paths from there. Because she is the mother of three and her husband travels frequently, she chose the field of pastry, as it provided better work hours.
Aside from pouring and pastries, Mattera writes for several magazines, including Santé and McCall’s, and has been featured on the television show “Chronicle” in a segment titled, “Just Desserts.”
Last November, Mattera was honored as one of four “Women Who Inspire” at the 12th annual Awards Gala for Women Chefs & Restaurateurs. She recalls the moment when she was co-chairwoman of the three-day conference, when she hadn’t known she was a finalist for an award. Well-known chefs Rachel Klein and Mary Dumont prepared hors d’oeuvres, Jody Adams served the first course, followed by Barbara Lynch, Lydia Shire and Mattera, who shared, “I was plating the dessert for 250 people and my co-chair came in the kitchen to get me,” saying she wanted her to meet someone right now.
“Are you kidding me?” Mattera responded. “I was up next.”
She was in the midst of preparing an ambitious dessert with many components: a freeform honey custard brulee over a dried fruit compote she had paired with a Spanish wine called Victoria, with a goat cheese crema. She also made wine gelee cutouts as one of the garnishes on the plate, along with vanilla shortbread cookies cut into rectangles. Although she had help in the kitchen, walking away wasn’t something she planned on. But, after some persuasion, she finally relented.
“We took a left into the ballroom where everyone was seated, and there’s my headshot,” Mattera recalls of the moment she realized the award was hers. She didn’t have a prepared speech, she says, “but it was thrilling, exhilarating. I am very proud of that award.”
She received the WCR Golden Bowl Award, recognizing excellence in baking and pastry arts and honoring a woman whose skill in the baking and pastry arts inspires others.
“Our honorees help advance the work of WCR and lead the way for a new generation of women chefs and restaurateurs,” said WCR president Jamie Leeds.
Other honorees from the Boston area included chefs Barbara Lynch Gruppo and Lydia Shire and tea sommelier Cynthia Gold.
Time to wind down
Mattera has been around the chopping block long enough to be a mentor for young people coming out of cooking school. She says many new cooks think once they’re on a cooking show, they’ll be celebrity chefs.
“But that’s not true,” she states.
It has taken many years of networking and experience to prove expertise in the culinary field, though a taste of Mattera’s pastries is proof enough of her excellence as a pastry chef. But working the many hours she had in the past was something she didn’t want to continue.
“I was getting older,” she says.
Since 2002, ever since she completed “Mastering Wine” at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in Napa Valley, Calif., her passion began to shift and blossom into pairing sweet wines.
Mattera offers an analogy to pairing wines:
‘If you want to have lemonade with your brownie, be my guest, but I think I could offer a better choice in a glass of milk.’
If there’s one thing you can take away from a lesson with Mattera, it is to always have your wine sweeter than the dessert being served.
“It’s the one rule,” she states.
Once she realized her newfound passion in pairing, she used her Rutherford connection to earn the pleasure of working as a consulting chef for Robert Mondavi Family of Wines. They would give her the wines, and she would pair them with desserts and make tasting note cards.
“They would give me their pinot noir and I would taste it and then decide what to do for pastry,” she explains of her position, which she held for six months.
She fans out a series of beautifully typeset note cards and explains her process:
“You know how you hear about wine tastings, like at Shubie’s,” she explains. “There would be a table set up with someone to pour the wines.”
Mattera would arrive with tasting note cards and pastries in hand and explain why she decided to pair the pastry with a particular wine. As a result, wine sales would boost.
“Nobody was buying my pastries,” she says. “They weren’t for sale. It was about the wines.”
Her pairings worked.
“I once did a black mission fig crostata with a Carmenere reduction and I sold so much Carmenere it was unbelievable,” she recalls.
In 2004, when Mondavi was bought by Constellation, her role as a consulting chef no longer existed, so she began her own company, Sweet Solutions, knowing that she wanted to get away from the restaurant business and concentrate on wines.
“Why not?” she says. “Change is good!”
Sweet Solutions is not a bakery, and it’s not a catering company. It’s truly a business to educate the public, as well as pastry chefs on sweet and fortified wines.
“Sweet and fortified wines are very misunderstood and not appreciated,” she says.
Her goal is to educate, so each year, Mattera leads a chocolate pairing class at Gordon’s in Waltham, exposing people to the various sweet wines she pours.
She also tastes and reviews wines and spirits with various firms and write reviews for Taste of the Seacoast magazine, as well as others, such as Quarterly Wine Review. And she believes that people should not rely solely on Robert Parker points when they choose dessert wines.
In fact, as she readies to prepare the dessert course — a strawberry rhubarb Napoleon — for the annual dinner for Les Dames d’Escoffier at Sandrine’s Bistro in Cambridge in March, she’s hoping to persuade the sommelier to go for a demi-sec or sparkling wine, something light for the end of the meal.
Her mission is clear: to get people educated enough to seek out sweet wines.
“They’re not doing that yet,” she says.
But she does see a change in dessert menus that offer wine pairings.
“I used to look at the dessert menu first. Now, I look at the wine list and I go right for the sweet wines.”
Today, she likes to view the menu to see if the wines offered are a balanced and good selection of Old and New World, and if there are wine selections from each of the categories she teaches.
“Maybe I should have an app,” she says, half joking.
But, she admittedly doesn’t know where to begin. She does use Twitter, however, and most recently “tweeted” about a South African wine — and the wine company sent a message back.
“I’d like to offer them a recipe to go with it,” she says.
Many people in the wine world ask Mattera for advice, including Magrit Mondavi, who once asked her what she thinks about chocolate and cabernet sauvignon, to which Mattera says she replied, “I don’t. There are too many tannins competing. Why not just finish your wine and go to your fortified wines?”
“Dessert wines just get a bum wrap,” she says, used to the usual two responses from those whom she asks to try the wines: “Nope, not for me, too sweet,” or “I love them, but not with dessert.”
“I have my work cut out,” she says. “And I’ve been doing this for a while.”
She says even the wine director may not have enough knowledge or interest to pair sweet wines with a menu.
“You have to educate your wait staff to be able to say to someone, ‘Have a little sip first,’” she says.
In today’s tough economy, Mattera says more people are open to trying sweet wines in the Boston area, but she doesn’t get a lot of work in the suburbs.
Through Sweet Solutions, she’s worked at WGBH for a company event and has another one planned there in December. At the moment, she’s preparing for her fourth James Beard dinner, this one in April, with a test run on the Sunday following this interview.
An education in sweet wines
Mattera prepares for a tasting class with a paper placemat that lists four wines and has enough space so people can write notes. She always has water next to the wines for cleansing of the palate before each tasting, and a spit bucket is in the form of a paper cup.
Once her pupils are seated, she will talk about sweet wines and the categories.
One category is demi-sac, or champagne/sparkling wine that is half dry and half sweet, and great with a light dessert.
“Veuve Cliquot has a wonderful demi-sac,” she offers.
Other wonderful wines are from the Loire Valley, such as a Cardinal, which she describes as a wonderful red one she hopes to have paired with her strawberry rhubarb Napoleon for the Les Dames d’Escoffier dinner. And then there’s Brachetto d’Aqui, a bright red Italian sparkling wine, terrific with chocolate dipped strawberries.
“Late harvest” is another category, and within this category the grapes are either picked with noble rot, the good fungus, or not. Sauternes are known as the noble rot wines, and Mattera loves them.
And then you have ice wine, she explains, defined as grapes picked while still frozen on the vine, usually from Canada, Austria and Germany, where it’s very cold.
The alternative to ice wine is vin de glace, or wines of the ice box — not a true ice wine, but picked during late harvest and immediately frozen, to be pressed later on.
Mattera lists more, like an Italian moscato d asti she says may be too sweet for palates starting out, and fortified, like port and sweet sherry, Madeira, banyules, a French wine made from the grenache grape found close to the coast of Spain.
“Fortified wines are excellent with chocolate,” Mattera says, “but not an ice wine, unless it’s a red cabernet franc wine.”
Mattera strives to pour from various countries, and for this tasting, she pours an Alicante, grown in the south Mediterranean in Spain, where it’s very hot, and where muscat grapes grow well. A yellow gold Mistela vall de xalo, Alicante is paired with fresh berries, layered with wine gelee made from orange muscat, sugar and orange zest, cut into cubes and served in a wine glass. This dessert, she says, brings out the orangey citrusy flavors, and vice versa.
The swirling begins, and Mattera calls out the nose of a Muscat.
“It doesn’t smell sweet,” she shares. “There’s honey in there, with white flowers and citrus overtones.”
She’s bringing this wine to the practice dinner for the James Beard dessert.
Next is Kracher Scheurebe TBA, No. 4, from Burgenland, Austria, the sweetest of the four tastings. With this wine, Mattera pairs a frozen lemon Bavarian with candied kumquats and a candied Meyer lemon. This dessert is made with mascarpone cheese she says she had to freeze to flip out of the mold. There are candied violas on top, serving as the French garnish she was able to purchase in Porter Square, Cambridge.
“Trocken beeren auslese,” or TBA, is the sweetest of the sweet wines,” she shares of this bright yellow, possibly oaked wine. “I get a lot more lemon on the back of my palate,” she says of the wine she reviewed for Santé magazine. “It’s a varietal people might not recognize,” she says. “You want to pair it with something light like a mousse.”
There is no doubt that Mattera can easily convince oenophiles to taste sweet wines by tasting them with her desserts.
And if people have the proper wine to pair with pastries, it makes the end of the meal more memorable. Mattera recommends giving a bottle of sweet wine as a unique gift, and what better gift is there to bring over to your special friend, or valentine, than something sweet?
