Cooking with wine!Cooking with wine is a skill worth mastering. Many great chefs worldwide use wine as a key ingredient in all kinds of styles and regional cuisines. There are many facets to the subject, and many ways in which wine can be added to your recipe. I will try to cover the basic theories and techniques here. After you have read this page, check out my collection of
wine recipes.
Which Wine to Use?If the wine tastes bad, the food will taste bad. Does this mean you should pour your finest bottle of special-occasion wine into the shrimp sauce? No! But, choose a wine that tastes good and you enjoy drinking by itself. On this same note, I recommend against using cooking sherry or any wine made specifically for cooking. Usually these wines are not made to drink. They are salty and contain chemical preservatives that affect the taste. If you wouldn't want to drink it, why would you want it in your food? OK, I think I've made my feelings clear on this subject (can you tell that it's a pet peeve of mine?). When choosing a wine to cook in your food, pick a wine with characteristics that will intensify the natural flavors of your food, not overpower them. If it is a sweet berry sauce, pick a sweeter, fruit-forward red wine to put in it. If you are making a rich, buttery white pasta sauce, use a buttery white wine. Also consider the color of the wine. Use red wine in darker colored dishes and white wine in lighter dishes. Usually you can use the same wine that you will serve with the meal. If you are not sure, here are some food and wine pairing tips.
What Happens to the Alchohol?So you like cooking with wine and want to serve your best fish with wine sauce for dinner but you don't want the kids to get sauced...not to worry. Cooking with wine does not necessarily mean that there will be wine in your food. Depending on the way it is prepared, most of the alcohol from the wine will evaporate out of the dish.Alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than water, so if your sauce is simmering, the alcohol is boiling away, leaving only the desirable wine flavors behind. So, while there may be a tiny bit of alcohol left in the dish, most wine sauces are safe to serve the whole family. MarinatingWine is commonly used to marinate meat. The alcohol in the wine helps to tenderize the meat (beer is often used for the same purpose), and the flavor of the wine helps to season the meat. A meat dish which has been marinated in wine will be more tender and will cook more quickly.You can also use the leftover marinade to make the sauce for the dish. I like to marinade steak in a red wine with soy sauce, garlic, salt, black pepper and Italian dressing. I'm getting hungry just thinking about it! Cooking with WineWhen reducing wine, try to do it slowly over low-medium heat. This keeps the flavors intact and allows the meal to stew in the wine and really soak up the flavors. Generally, the longer you cook wine, the more subtle the flavor characteristics will be. If you add wine to the mix too late, it might add a harshness to the flavor of your dish. As a rule, red wine should be reduced to about one tenth of its original volume. So if you add 1/2 cup of red wine, it should be reduced to about 2 teaspoons.
Using Wine to Flavor Your DishWine can sometimes be used to flavor your dish, without cooking or reducing the wine. When used this way, the characteristics of the wine become very important, as they will be much more noticeable in the dish. So if you are making a sweet sauce for your dessert, be sure to pick a sweet, rich, full-bodied wine.I was very impressed by a friend's dessert a while back that was a simple chocolate ice cream with some fruit and a sweet port wine mixed with chocolate drizzled on top. Simple and delicious! In ConclusionThis is a very basic guide to the fundamentals of cooking with wine. There are many facets to this subject and plenty of detailed information is available on the net and in cookbooks. In addition, there are hundreds of great recipes available on the web. I have put together a page with a few of my own favorite, tried and true wine recipes. Click here for a collection of my favorite wine recipes.
|
