A Guide to Cooking with Wine
By Lee Dobbins 

Don’t just sip it, eat it!

Want to enhance and improve the taste of your favorite dish? Think that adding wine to your recipe will make it more scrumptious and mouth watering? Well then, you’re absolutely right!

Wines are widely used in the cooking world because they intensify taste and zest. They are also capable of releasing flavors from food that are not possible by regular means of cooking.

The main question you must have now is this: What type of wine goes with what type of food?

You have red wines, white wine, sparkly champagne, sherry etc. You have grape vine types like merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, zinfandel, syrah, and Riesling. With the wide variety of them available, picking a wine is pretty tricky. The secret here is to know what combinations are used by professionals.

1. Red Wine

There used to be a rule in cooking that “red wine goes with red meat, white wine with white meat”. Although it’s not really true anymore, most chefs still go with that.

- For red meat, young and full bodied red wines are recommended. Try going for Zinfandel Red or Merlot.
- For red sauces, robust, full bodied wines are best. Make pasta, pizza or other tomato-sauce based dishes with it.
- Using root veggies with beef stock? You might want to look for an earth red, full bodied wine. The color it imparts to the meat makes it all the more wonderful.

2. White Wine

Cream based sauces, butter and herbs. Yum. White wine is usually used with white meat and best for light colored dishes.

- If you fancy a zesty dish, add some sparkling champagne.
- For chicken, pork or veal, try cooking with white wine. Spice up your grilled chicken by mixing dry, white wine with butter as the sauce.
- Crisp, dry white wines are ideal for seafood soup and shellfish dishes. Bouillabaisse, anyone?
- Leftover sweet white wine in your fridge? Why make delicious, delectable desserts? Whip up some Bavarian cream.

3. Fortified wine

Fortified wines are what they are: fortified. Additional neutral alcohol is added to them. Then they are aged for a long time. Examples are sherry, port and vermouth.

- Sherry is great for poultry meat and vegetables soups.
- For sweet, fruity dishes or desserts, splash some port or vermouth. Your dry vermouth can also be a good substitute for white wine.

4. Cooking wine

Cooking wines are relatively less pricey wines that use salt as a preservative. They can be found in supermarkets and groceries. Most professional chefs disdain the use of cooking wines because the salt content is hard to work with. You may need to adjust your recipe to work with the saltiness.

5. Exotic wines

Cooking is an experiment. If you’re feeling bold and daring, you could try cooking with exotic wines. Asian wines are popular choices for an all together different meal. There is the sake, bekseju and seol joong mae.

- Sake is a rice based wine from Japan. Although it’s mainly a beverage, it is popular as an additive to many Japanese dishes.

- Beksuju is a Korean wine made from raw rice and herbs. It can be used in vegetable dishes to increase the ‘herbal’ feel. Seol Joong Mae, a fruit wine made from plum, can be used for desserts and fruity dishes.

I hope that clears up some of your confusion. With that said, here are some few reminders for the novice cook:

- Cook only with wine that you would drink. There is no sense in cooking something that you wouldn’t want to taste.

- There are a lot of good, quality yet inexpensive wines out there. Don’t get too carried away and buy something that’s way off your budget.

- Don’t cook using aluminum or cast iron cookware. Alcohol is reactive with these materials and could cause harm to your dish.

- After adding your wine, try to wait for 5-10 minutes before tasting it. Wine needs to simmer for a while before it can impart flavor to your food.

- Got some left over wine? Put them in your ice cube tray and freeze them. This makes them good for future use.

Get your favorite recipe, pick a wine and start cooking!

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.