Cooking With Wine – Ideas & Tips To Make Food Even More Fun

People like to drink alcoholic drinks. Nothing new, right. You too probably enjoy a glass of inexpensive wine now and then. Or maybe you have a glass with your dinner every day? Nothing bad about it. Doctors even recommend moderate wine drinking to boost health. So, cheers.

But how often do you cook with the wine you drink? And why cook with it? When properly used (as an ingredient), wine has an amazing power to improve the taste of the food you cook. It connects with both fat and water molecules, making you food smell and taste better.

And when it comes to which dish to cook with wine, there is a vast variety of wonderful recipes which can be combined with any quality but cheap wine. In fact, the flavour of any dish can be enhanced with a hint of a good white or red wine.

Inexpensive-Wine

Here are few of our ideas & tips to make food even more fun.

Smart picking 

The easiest part. When choosing the wine to cook with, pick something you’d drink. NONE of those ‘cooking wines’, unless you drink those with your Spaghetti alla Carbonara or grilled rib-eye steak. Of course, no need to use the nice stuff for cooking. Save those for the table, because their nuance will be lost in the cooking process anyway. Choose some good but inexpensive wine; a wind down wine you drink to relax after a hectic day at work.

Let it get in

Wine is your best partner when cooking meat. Its flavour is strong enough to complement and not to overpower the dish. You can start by adding a bit of it into the marinade. Too much wine can denature the proteins and also affect the texture of the meat. Dark wines pair best with dark meats (pork and beef) and white wines go perfectly with white meats (chicken, fish) or seafood.

Soak it up

Although you cannot substitute wine for water during the whole cooking process, you can substitute a bit of water for some inexpensive wine to add a bit of flavour. This technique is perfect for poaching fruits, since the wine enhances the sweetness of the fruit. While pears in red wine make the perfect combination for cold winter days, apricots in white wine are a lovely dish to enjoy in the summer.

Make sweets even more fun

Desserts are good as are, right? But they can get even better if combined with red or white wine. Spike the flavour of your fruit with a red wine caramel sauce or add a few tablespoons of sweet dessert wine to you cake batter to make the taste a bit more intense.