Cooking With Wine
Get to know the flavors that
suit you
by Bella
One of the reasons for
cooking with wine is to enhance the flavor of the food. It is amazing how
adding wine to a recipe opens additional flavors in foods—and it is so simple!
Most of the alcohol
evaporates during the cooking process, but wine concentrates the flavor, and
that includes acidity and sweetness. Don’t use too much wine, as the flavor can
overpower the dish. Add a small amount of wine and try sampling your dish; add
wine as needed. The type of wine you use is important.
Too often I hear, “Give me
something cheap. It is only for cooking.” Wrong!!! Cook only with wine that you
would drink. This does not mean that you need a very expensive bottle. A well
made medium grade for under $10 is just fine. Use something you’re familiar
with, and as you get more accustomed to using wine as an ingredient in your
dishes, you will be more likely to experiment. Try to use Sauvignon Blanc as a
white wine for sautéing, marinating, and in sauces for seafood and chicken. I
use Cabernet and Chianti for meats and meat-based sauces. It is good sense to
stay away from wines that are aged in oak barrels. These wines tend to give off
a bitter taste. If wine is very fruity, sour, or unsavory, these characteristics
will also be emphasized during the cooking. So the trick is to experiment. The
more you cook with wine, the better you will become in predicting how a
specific wine will enhance your menu.
A Few Tips for Cooking with
Wine
• When a recipe calls for
water, replace water with your favorite wine
• Stir two tablespoons of a
full bodied red into brown gravy. Let simmer to create a rich brown gravy for
red meat.
• Mix wine with your
favorite oil to baste meat and poultry.
• If a meat dish calls for
wine, first heat the wine. Do not boil the wine!
• Adding cold wine tends to
make meat tough, while warm wine helps tenderize it.
• Serve the same wine with
dinner that you cooked with as they will balance each other. If you prefer to
use a fine wine during dinner, try to stay within the same wine family.
• Cooking with wine can be a
pleasure and a great enhancement to the final taste. Just be sure that you don’t
cook with what you would not drink!
Answering
Your Questions: What is Tannin?
Tannin
is a family of natural organic compounds that are found in grape skin, seeds,
and stems. Also during the aging process oak barrels infuse tannin into the
juice. They are an excellent antioxidant and natural preservative. Tannin helps
give wine structure and texture. Winemakers have a good degree of control and
use that to enhance the final product. They use specific juice extraction
techniques to reduce or increase the amount excreted. Specifically they can
very gently squeeze the grapes to extract the juice, thereby not releasing much
of the tannin. In the case of red wine, grape skin contact is longer, the
crushing of grapes is more violent, and barrel aging is longer—resulting in a
stronger tannin dimension in the wine. In concentrated quantities it will cause
an occasional pucker sensation in the mouth and back of the throat. This is
sometimes accompanied by a bitter aftertaste, which is referred to as tannic.
Visually tannin forms part of the natural sediment found in the bottom of the
bottle. Red wines with little tannin should be drunk young. However a red wine
that should age and improve for perhaps three or more years requires a lot of
tannin. As the wine ages, the tannin softens and becomes less noticeable.
Now
you know, and remember, Life is a Matter of Taste!
Have a question about wine
or spirits, email Bella at Malbecberry@aol.com.
Bella is proprietor of Valley Wine and Liquors and Russky-on-the-Hudson in
Napanoch, NY.
Posted by Chris Hewitt
on 2:15 PM.
Filed under
Beer & Wine,
Food & Restaurant
.
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