Cooking with Wine

Cooking with Wine
by Ian Love
Wine is great when you pair it with food, but wine is also great when you cook it in to food. You can enhance the flavor of many recipes if you add the proper 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.You could spend the same amount for a cheap bottle of wine and get as good of a wine as your cooking wine will be. Logically, you must ask yourself if adding bad wine to your food will make your food taste better.On this premise, you should only add wines to the foods that you cook that you would actually 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 be disappointed in the outcome.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 flavors to your food. You want to add flavors that complement your food and bring out the natural flavors of 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.A great recipe that utilizes white wine is for shrimp. For this recipe you sauté large headless, shell-less and de-veined shrimp in a sauce pan with a little olive oil, a lot of basil and a fair amount of garlic until the shrimp is opaque and then add a quarter of a cup of Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc. Stir over medium heat for a couple of minutes and serve the shrimp alone or over pasta or rice.As you can see, cooking with wine is simple. In fact, it is one of the simplest and easiest ways to make an ordinary dish taste like something special. Furthermore, because you usually use small amounts of wine with which to cook and because the wine is usually complementary to the dish that you cook, if you cook with wine, you will inevitably have the perfect wine to serve with the food that you cook.