Cameron Clos Electrique With Pork Loin Chops and Potato Corn Cakes

We’re in full tomato season, which means that if even a day goes by when we don’t eat tomatoes, we risk being overrun by them. In some ways, this makes planning meals easy, because when you think what vegetables you want to use, you automatically know that tomatoes will be one of them, but it also means that you need to think of new things to do with tomatoes, or face culinary boredom. Even though we planted zucchini as well, we’re not as overwhelmed with those, but we do have a few.

We’ve been getting remarkable poblano peppers and sweet corn of late, and I had been thinking about making some kind of corn, potato, and poblano pancakes and wanted to use them as a base for some kind of grilled meat. I needed to work the tomatoes in, so I opted to make a cherry tomato, Walla Walla sweet onion, and zucchini compote to go around the whole dish.

I still had some pork loin chops from a whole loin that I had bought so I decided to brine a few of those and grill them over charcoal and hickory. There would be enough flavors going on in the compote and corn and potato cakes and I didn’t want to add anything else to the pork because I was afraid everything would be too busy. Besides, a grilled, brined loin chop should have plenty of flavor on it’s own. I felt like drinking wine instead of beer, even though I was cooking with some chilies. Because all the ingredients were all local, I decide to keep to an Oregon wine. I love Oregon Pinot Noir, but don’t drink as much of it as I used to. This is partly because of price, and partly because my tastes have really been geared towards Southern French and Spanish wines of late. But good pinot is a remarkably food friendly wine.

I pulled my last bottle of 1996 Cameron Clos Electrique. Clos Electrique is Cameron’s top bottling of Pinot Noir. A “clos” is a walled vineyard and in this case, the wall is an electric fence, hence the name Clos Electrique. The 1996 is still drinking beautifully. It’s a deep garnet red with just the slightest hint of brick at the edge. The nose is a big, intense blend of red berry and bing cherry, smoke and vanilla. There’s an almost “chocolate covered cherry” note to it. On the palate, the wine is rich with deep layers of fruit, good acidity, and a long finish that mixes the fruit and smoke. It’s aged beautifully. Considering how approachable it was in its youth, it’s remarkable how intense and lively it is at 11 years old. It was one of the best Oregon pinots I had drunk in quite some time and made me realize why I love these wines so much.




The meal was very good, but the corn and potato cakes need to be reworked a little bit. I started with three russet potatoes and three ears of corn, a poblano chili, an egg, and a little flour to help bind it all. Unfortunately, there should be a little less corn and a little more potato. I didn’t want a batter based corn cake. I wanted the potato starch to hold it all together and figured the egg and flour would help, but I found that I could have used more potato because you need to completely get the corn kernels enmeshed in the cake or they end up in the bottom of the pan. The mix I had worked, but they were difficult to flip and to plate. Once they were on the plate, I didn’t really care, but it did require two spatulas and a quick transfer.

The Walla Walla onions in the compote had been caramelized to a sweet, rich mass and I added the quickly sautéed zucchini and briefly cooked tomatoes to it. It had a rich sweet note that worked well with the corn and the natural sweetness of the pork. The chili heat was balanced by the sweetness of the compote as well. The Clos Electrique had beautiful sweet fruit flavors but also had a fair amount of acidity which helped to cut through all of the rich flavors. If the pork had been sautéed, I likely would have added a tiny amount of sherry vinegar when I deglazed the pan and the spooned that over the pork, because another touch of acidity like that would have been nice, but it was still a great meal.