Daniel joined the Serious Eats culinary team in 2014 and writes recipes, equipment reviews, articles on cooking techniques. Prior to that he was a food editor at Food & Wine magazine, and the staff writer for Time Out New York's restaurant and bars section."People often say to only cook with a wine you'd be willing to drink.
For the past few weeks, I've been cooking nonstop with wine, both red and white, to explore the effects of their flavor on a dish. I've compared light reds to big, tannic ones; fruity, tart whites to buttery ones that have spent plenty of time in oak barrels; off-dry wines to dry ones; cheap wines to expensive ones; and long cooking methods to quick ones.
Tasting these wine reductions, two things jumped out immediately. First , the presence of sugar in a wine like the Riesling has a drastic effect on how it tastes even after cooking, with the sweetness concentrating through reduction; the cooked Riesling wasn't quite syrupy, but it was close. So, the first big rule of choosing a wine when cooking is to consider the sweetness: Use a sweet wine only if you want sweetness in the final dish, otherwise use a dry wine.
I repeated this test with two red wines: an oaky, jammy Cabernet Sauvignon with soft tannins, and a light, tart Beaujolais Villages. That doesn't mean all pan sauces made with wine won't need an acid to balance the flavor, since that depends on the types and quantities of each ingredient in the sauce, but it supports the observation that a wine's acidity, above almost all else , will have the biggest flavor impact.
These tests show that while there's some truth to the rule of cooking only with wine you'd be willing to drink, it doesn't hold 100% of the time: I sure wouldn't be willing to drink the "wine product," and I wouldn't want to cook with it either, but I also wouldn't want to drink that wine that had sat open for two weeks—it had definitely gone off during that time—and yet, at least in this case, it was fine for cooking.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: etnow - 🏆 696. / 51 Read more »
Source: mercnews - 🏆 88. / 68 Read more »
Source: SAcurrent - 🏆 607. / 51 Read more »
Source: chicagotribune - 🏆 8. / 91 Read more »
Source: PoPville - 🏆 435. / 53 Read more »
Source: foodandwine - 🏆 366. / 59 Read more »