Wine and food are a great combination, but wine is also great when you add it into food. You can enhance the flavor of many recipes when you add the right wine to the recipe at the proper time.
When adding wine to your recipes, you will enjoy the outcome more if you make a cooking with wine rule for yourself never to cook with wine that you would not drink. Unfortunately, this logic escapes the grocery stores that offer "cooking wines." Cooking wines are simply wines that are more vinegar than grape or overly sweet over priced wines. Cooking wine should be good enough to drink!
You could spend the same amount on a cheap bottle of good wine as you would spend on a cooking wine. Logically, adding an inferior wine to your food will not make your food taste better.
On this premise, you should only add wines to the foods that you cook that you would actually be happy to drink.
For instance, a half of a bottle of dry red wine added to a bordelaise sauce must be a fine dry red wine
because of the large amount of wine in comparison to the other ingredients in the sauce. If you added a half of a bottle of substandard red cooking wine, you would surely be disappointed with the results.
While most of the time that you cook with wine you do not use as much as a half of a bottle, you still want to only add the best flavour to your food.
Often, cooks add Zinfandel or Chianti to spaghetti sauce because it adds rich tartness to the sauce that blends well with tomatoes. You do not have to add very much red wine to a spaghetti sauce to make a difference to the sauce and since you are using good wine, you can drink the leftover wine from cooking the sauce. Then again, you might use leftover wine from last night to add to today's
spaghetti sauce.
Cooking with wine is simple. In fact, it is one of the simplest and easiest ways to
make an ordinary dish taste special. Furthermore, because you usually use small
amounts of wine with which to cook and because the wine is complementary to the dish that
you cook, when you have finished cooking you will still have enough left to serve with the piece de resistance that
you have prepared. Or maybe you will need to open another bottle...strickly depending on the number of chefs in the kitchen.
At Alegria, there is Charles and I, the cats Ebonie and Lady Liquorice and even Beau the stallion sometimes puts his head through the kitchen window...so that makes five cooks.
To find out more about cooking with wine and experience the unique approach to cooking and drinking in the Alegria kitchen first hand, join us for a residential Fine Wine Workshop. You certainly will not forget the experience in a hurry!
Hope to see you soon, CLICK HERE for more information.
