Cooking with Wine: Thinking Outside the Glass

Cooking with Wine: Thinking Outside the Glass

From:
http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/natalie_maclean/index.html

While we were chatting about cheap wines, Barbara asked about cooking with wine:

"Do you find when cooking with cheap wine, the flavor enhances the recipe or not? In my experience cheap wine does not add a lot of depth to the flavor and often detracts, if not spoil the recipe."

She's on the money, as I mentioned it's flavor in, flavor out when it comes to the wine you use for cooking. Cooking wine can't be a vinous dumping ground... cooking concentrates flavors for good or ill.

My husband is the cook in the family (I just pull the corks) and he's used wine for a number of delicious dishes. It's a great way to add flavor without fat and salt. Just ensure that your carefully decanted wine that you've been saving for dinner doesn't accidentally end up in the Osso Buco, as I chronicle in the chapter on dinner parties and food-and-wine matching in my book Red, White and Drunk All Over.

Here are a few quick tips when it comes to cooking with wine:

• Use local wines for the best flavor. Foods and wines from the same region usually complement each other because of similarities in climate and soil
• Don't add wine too late in the cooking process (unless the recipe says so) as it can impart a heavy alcoholic taste to the dish.
• Don't add too much alcohol, any more than you'd dump in a box of salt: you can overwhelm the dish (not to mention the guests) and dry out some vegetables.