Cooking With Wine? Use the Cheap Stuff
The New York Times tested the adage that you shouldn't cook with any wine you wouldn't want to drink. And guess what: It worked out just fine.
It wasn't that the finished dishes were identical -- in fact, they did have surprisingly distinct flavors -- but the wonderful wines and the awful ones produced equally tasty food, especially if the wine was cooked for more than a few minutes.
Whew! What a relief. No more cooking with the 2000 Chateau Lafite-Rothschild for us! — MARK ASHLEY
It Boils Down to This: Cheap Wine Works Fine [NY Times]
(Photo: Maulleigh, from the Consumerist.com flickr pool)
Post a comment
Comments:
My rule is that I will not cook with anything I will not drink. Thankfully there are lots of fairly good wines at very reasonable prices that make excellent cooking wines.
That adage came about back in the day when there was very little wine selection in most places, compared to today. I can remember people serving Gallo jug wines at parties...that's a fine wine to cook with, frankly.
In France it still makes perfect sense...there are a whole range of table wines that are really very good to be had at two or three Euros a bottle. But please don't waste good wine in a recipe like stews or stock where you need a lot of it...
Use the cheap stuff? I didn't know there was any alternatives! :)
If you live near a Trader Joe's, you should do your cooking with Two-Buck Chuck.
It isn't exactly delicious, but it's as good as most of what sells in the $4-$8 range -- so if you're going cheap, you might as well go really cheap.
I don't drink much, so I don't usually have an open bottle of wine around for cooking. What I use instead is something I heard attributed to Julia Child: Dry vermouth (which is wine with some herbs added). Cheap, tastes right, and easy to keep around, since most people don't drink it.
Vermouth is more of a fortified wine than a wine per se. It used to be a cousin of absinthe- made with wormwood.
My rule is that I will not cook with anything I will not drink. Thankfully I will drink just about anything.
One important caveat in the article, though, is don't cook with red wines that are heavy on the tannins, such as young Cabernets. Instead, for a red wine for cooking, use an inexpensive softer red, like a red Zinfandel...
My rule is that I will not cook with anything I will not drink. Thankfully I will drink just about anything.
That's a good way to be!
As for cooking with wine, I do it so rarely that I tend to use whatever I have around the house - but I didn't know about the additives in the cooking wine. Good to know. I do know gourmet cooks who are quite happy with Trader Joe's Two-Buck Chuck! Too bad Pennsylvania will never, ever let us buy wine at the grocery store....
Cook's Illustrated suggested using box wine. They said that it was good enough for almost all occasions and because it was in a sealed plastic bag (versus an opened bottle) it could last up to six months on the shelf (not in the fridge!). I have a box of franzia on top of my fridge just sitting there for whenever i need that 1/2 cup of white wine.
btw (cheap 98% fat free ground turkey & a little bit of white wine to marinade in makes a GREAT burger).
I cook w/ 82 Lafite
I'm surprised Consumerist hasn't posted that bit about filtering cheap vodka with Brita pitchers to make it drinkable. Or did I miss it?
The no-drink-no-cook rule seems awfully subjective. I can't stand dessert wines to drink, no matter how expensive they are, but they're great to cook with.
I've always understood that adage to mean, "Don't cook with 'cooking wine,'" which has added salt, sugar, and seasonings.
K