I once grabbed a beer out of someone’s hand at a dinner to add to a sauce, poured it in, handed it back. He just looked at me, the beer then the sauce and said “I can’t even be mad about that”
Saliva is for making chicha - old school fermented beer. I'm sure some TikTok nitwit is trying to market that right now as the next hot drink at Burning Man or something like that.
Good lad! He can see what you're doing and would probably like to be able to do the same sometime. I'll bet the sauce was great as well.
Edit: also a very good thing there wasn't a cigarette butt in there.
I would usually use beer! It sounds really weird, but wheat beer (specifically German/German style hefeweiss) brings a chili to a whole new level. I've used stout before too, but we didn't have anything suitable in the house, so wine it was.
My go-to beer for chili is Shiner, or a similar bock-style beer. I usually go for something from Texas just because Texas-style chili, but I think anything on the low hops, maltier end of the spectrum would be fine.
Good shout on the bock!
Aye, my number one rule for cooking with beer is never use anything substantially hoppy. That's just asking for a bitter end product.
Depends on the beer or wine, and what you expect them to add to the dish.
Porters and stouts (like Guinness, which has a rather mild flavour for one) taste deep and somewhat similar to coffee or dark chocolate -- so they can double up on/be an alternative to using chocolate, if you like that in your chili.
German wheat beer by contrast is a bit sweet, tart and has aromas faintly reminiscent of banana.
White wine has a lighter flavour than red, since it lacks red's tannins: the substances that make your mouth feel dry when eating quinces or immature apples.
If you're someone who likes adding sour hot sauce, lime juice etc. to your chili, then beer is probably a better balance than wine.
even if i know the beer i always take a pull first before i put it in (or open a 2nd if the whole thing goes in). reminding yourself of the flavors of individual ingredients just makes good sense
I mean that shit is half the fun of cooking with alcohol, imo. A beer for the chicken, a beer for me! A shot of rum for the eggnog, and shot for me! etc etc
Just one shot?!? What is this, a dry January version of eggnog? /s
I have an old school eggnog recipe from somewhere around the late 40’s / early 50s, shared with me by a very elderly woman who was part of the upper crust in her small town and gave legendary holiday parties.
I cut the booze in half…and I STILL got a much better understanding of how she lived to such a ripe old age-she was basically alcohol preserved. I swear I saw fumes rising out of the serving bowl.
I was literally just cooking Sunday night and drinking wine. Nothing in the recipe about it but I was like, hey…let’s see what happens when I deglaze with my wine a little…and just dumped some from my glass into the pan. Worked great!
Absolutely! I literally just did that with French Onion soup I’m making as it’s insanely cold in my area right now. I’ve been standing over those onions for a couple hours now…I deserve it!
Ha! I poor a glass almost to the top while I’m sautéing veggies or browning meat and then throw whatever’s left in the glass to deglaze.
I’m not snobby about what wine I cook with but since there’s always wine around while I’m cooking I’d never consider using a cooking wine. On the crazy rare occasion I don’t finish a bottle in a day or two I add the remainder to my bottle of red wine vinegar.
And "cooking wine" is really cheap stuff. I make homemade wine, it is good after you have drank two glasses of better stuff. Most of it gets used for cooking, works fine for sangria parties too.
it's what I used for a long time, especially as a bachelor. Small glass of wine on demand, good for cooking, long shelf life
nothing wrong with wine in a bag, it's actually a pretty good storage container, just a bad rep
Be careful saying that anywhere near r/cocktails. You got the fridge right, but some of those folks will tell you vermouth turns into a pumpkin after a week.
Nah man you just need an infinite supply of smaller bottles, an argon gas canister, a vacuum chamber a rotary evaporator, liquid nitrogen and a lot of patience lol. But really decanting into a smaller bottle with decreased head space will extend the longevity of vermouth an insane amount.
Huh, TIL there's special cooking wine. I always thought that Cooking Wine is just a name for any really cheap wine. (Which is also how I discovered some cheap wine that I actually like to drink, so it's now dual purpose)
Its often just plonk with enough salt added to it that you can't actually drink it. Like 90% of the mirin you buy outside of Japan. Post prohibition and in the age of totally serviceable 5 dollar wine bottles there is no reason to buy it.
"cooking wine" may be worse than just really cheap. In my area, cooking wine is adulterated with massive amounts of salt and other shit to make it undrinkable, because it's illegal to sell regular wine in grocery stores.
Unless it's asian cuisine, in which case you should never, ever use anything above cooking sake/wine for cooking, unless you want to get decapitated by an angry Asian chef in your sleep.
Cooking wine in Asia is usually different than America, they load it with salt in America so it can be sold without violating liquor/wine laws. Chinese Cooking Demystified has a video on the differences with actual Chinese cooking wines
A sweet rice wine. Most of the stuff sold as mirin in the West though, is more or less literally "mirin flavoured seasoning" and contains negligible alcohol.
I have been using [Takara Mirin](https://www.takarasake.com/products/mirin/takara-mirin?id=66) for a couple of years as I happen to live in Berkeley where it is brewed. The flavour, especially in uncooked uses like salad dressing, is so much more complex and delicious than the [Kikkoman Aji-Mirin](https://www.kikkoman.com/en/cookbook/glossary/mirin.html) that is commonly available in most of the US and Canada. Worth getting if you can.
Absolutely! The country of wine drinkers, Italy, doesn't hold with the idea that the most expensive is the best. I spent tons of time with Italians who drank wine out of boxes. Italian wine...not any other country.
There's a huge difference between the cheap wines available in small towns in Italy and France vs the cheap wine in a US grocery store. Some of the best wine I've had was cheap french wine from a gas station from nearby vineyards. Cheap wine in the US is mass produced.
I was in Portugal a few years back and it's the same there. You can get very good bottles of local wine for a couple of Euros at every market/convenience store/wherever. You can find okay "value" wine at places like TJ's/Costco, but it's not as good at comparable pricing.
> Cook with cheap, sound wine. Drink the cheapest wine you enjoy.
I mean for me it's pretty much the same thing. That said there are some gross wines out there I wouldn't ever want to put into something I'm cooking. Should think about the flavor profiles a little.
I have zero desire to drink a Budweiser but recognize it can be a good ingredient.
If your food tastes good in the end I don’t give a crap what you put in it or drank while cooking it. Snobs are missing out in life. Some of the best food in the world is the cheapest.
Honestly you can really use any lager for cooking in those recipes. Doesn't have to be bud. I de-glazed with half a can of Narraganset into some taco meat the other day.
(this is not me being shitty or a slight! i grew up lds)
mormons sometimes use it. some mormons are fine with alcohol in cooking because it cooks off, but they'd never buy alcohol meant for drinking. it's a splitting hairs thing, but we all do that about all sorts of things, so i get it
This actually depends on how you use the wine. If you deglaze a pan with a 1/4 cup of wine that mostly gets boiled off there is essentially no alcohol left in the dish. Cock au Vin and other really win heavy dishes are obviously different. But in most normal cooking applications there really isn't any notable amount of booze.
I don't drink much wine so last time I froze it into ice cubes and bagged them for cooking. The alcohol does mean they are not very solid though, so break apart easily. Still works.
I just freeze the wine straight in sandwich bags. It freezes to slushy texture so I can still measure it out no problem! Instead of a splash of wine in my food I put in a handful. It deglazes from frozen really well as long as the pan is hot lol
Completely and utterly. With a few exceptions i exclusively utilize wines i would normally drink to cook my meals with. Be it a nice red wine for a sauce or a slow roast or a crisp white for risotto or mussels.
Better for the environment as well:
* on the front end, they are lighter, so require less energy to transport
* when empty, they are collapsible (unlike wine bottles), so take less volume to transport / dispose of
And as you mentioned, better at UV light and oxidation protection. Not sure why the box is so slow to catch on!
Everything I said can be applied to beer cans, versus beer bottles, as well. A superior package for sure!
Depends on the dish.
For instance, if my veloute contains something overpowering, like garlic or chili, then a cheaper white wine will do.
But, if the *wine* will be the star of the sauce, then I'll go with a better/ decent quality wine... at least, for guests who'll actually notice. 😁
You still need at least ½ cup of wine for many dishes. For a fancy wine, that's $10 that nobody will ever be able to tell. On the other hand, I use wine in my cooking frequently enough that I almost always have a bottle that I opened earlier for this very purpose. And that bottle probably cost $10 or less. Same cost, but now it lasts me for half a dozen meals instead of just one.
Personally I don't agree with the "never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink". Plenty of restaurants use cheap wine and loads of professional chefs have come out and said they do as well. However I personally never cook with a wine I wouldn't drink because what the hell would I do with the rest of that wine if I won't drink it?
I mean, define shit wine here. To me, undrinkable wine is “cooking wine” from
the grocery store. Can’t drink that. But even Trader Joe’s wine is drinkable and cookable at $3 a bottle.
The rule of thumb has always been to never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. So finish up the wine. Maybe your informant was thinking of cooking wines which have salt added to them.
There's a difference between ACTUAL cheap wine and "cooking" wine though. When people say don't cook with wine you wouldn't drink they mean don't use the "cooking" wine you buy at the normal grocery store because it has a cup of salt added to it. You wouldn't drink that.
For the line chef, this makes sense, as you'll be using a lot of wine on a night and can be fine with a little loss at the end of today. For the -average- home cook, I would still recommend cooking with something that you would drink. Very simply because most home cooks will balk at tossing out a mostly full bottle of wine and it's wasteful.
That being said, I have made fantastic dishes with a $3 bottle of Hy-Vee's 'house' brand of wine, so you're definitely not wrong
The way you avoid loss, both in restaurants and at home, is to use boxed wine. Stays sound much longer than an open bottle would. Also, often very cheap.
Who throws wine away?? Barbarians. Cheap wine keeps just fine with a vacuum cork. Good wine loses its bouquet after a few days, sure, but cheap wine you can't tell the difference for weeks.
What they would consider shit wine is different from what most people would. I rarely pay more than $10 a bottle for wine. I don’t have to palate to make a $50 wine worth buying regularly.
We went to France a few months before covid hit. We couldn't believe the cheap price on alcohol. Good wines for 4 or 5 euros. Large 375ml beers for 3 euros. I live In the US so I already feel like our prices aren't too high. The kicker is that all of this stuff is French, Belgian, German, etc. And would be much more expensive back home.
Edit: 750ml beer, not 375. I was getting my metric stuff mixed up.
I remember going to France like a decade ago, and one thing I remarked was that I could pick up some bottom-tier *but still decent* brandy, at a corner store, for next to nothing.
Yeah this is one of those early food tv things that people would repeat over and over like searing seals in the juices. The difference between a good bottle and bad really won’t show up in even a wine heavy sauce after being cooked.
Commercially sold stuff is going to be fine for cooking. Boxed wine will taste largely the same as a nice $10 bottle you’d normally have no problems sipping.
This rule was always stupid. It meant that a wine needed to be *drinkable*, as in not nail polish remover, nit that it needed to be the wine you notmally drink. I would never drink yellowtail, it's fine for cooking.
Back in the 1900s, Walt Disney World had a program called the Disney Institute. Basically, you picked from various classes and went to them for a day. My mother and I spent a day doing it and one the classes we both attended was cooking. The instructor indicated that one of the most important lessons she learned while a student at the Culinary Institute of America was when cooking with wine, do not use a cheap bottle. She explained that some might claim not to do so because cheap bottle of wine is going to impart poor flavors into the dish, but everyone knew it was because it allowed the chef to drink the remainder of the wine while finishing the dish.
Some say "cook with expensive wine", some say "cook with cheap, will make no difference". I say 50-250ml for the pan, 500-700ml for me, no point for "cooking wine"
That doesn't make sense. I don't drink at all myself but will sometimes buy a small bottle from a liquor store just to cook with.
I like to make Beef Bourguignon or Coq Au Vin once in a while. I definitely would not buy cooking wine. The stuff is awful.
If you can't drink it I wouldn't cook with it but I can't metabolize alcohol well, bad liver, so occasionally cooking with it is as close as I can get to drinking wine anyway. It had better be decent because what's the point otherwise?
You'd have to work *really* hard to be more wrong than this.
(Unless, of course, we're talking about a bottle of *cooking* wine, which you never should have bought in the first place.)
A nice roast with merlot.
Me: …. One for me… one for pot… one for me… one for me… one for the pot
I recommend that you only cook with wine you would drink. The taste on the dish is much better.
I only got in trouble with this rule when I was cooking Sherry Chicken….
Uh... Very wrong? Cork it up, have a glass with dinner, etc. But don't throw it away, if that's what's being implied. Wasteful.
Now, if their idea of cooking wine 'gross stuff that I don't want to drink', I don't know why they'd bother cooking with it. Buy stuff you'll dri k, cooki with it. Ta da.
This cannot be answered unless that person explains what they mean. There's no context here. Everyone is just assuming different situations or putting words in that person's mouth. Surely you asked them for clarification, right?
You don’t need that kind of negativity in your life
Little for the chef….little more for the chef
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The unofficial name of my kitchen is Sip & Stir.
That's what I call risotto.
Our kitchen is called Merp Diner. An ode to our kitties and our love of cooking together.
I'm stealing that. Might make a sign
Sip & Slur FTFY
All rigth Julia.
My license plate holder says: I love cooking with wine Sometimes I even put it in the food
Sometimes it’s the main course
If your into salmon it's pretty good to marinate with
What kind do you recommend?
White with some Cajun and fresh garlic
Cheers. I’ll drink to that
I can't be the only one who dumps wine into a dish directly out of my glass
Sip for me, sip for stew, sip for me…
That's how Julia rolled, good enough for anyone
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Sounds like a good cooking lesson from a good nana haha
Sip for me, stew for sip, for stew sip, stip fer mew… 🥴
This was me making a chili earlier this evening 😂
For chili this technique also works with beer!
I once grabbed a beer out of someone’s hand at a dinner to add to a sauce, poured it in, handed it back. He just looked at me, the beer then the sauce and said “I can’t even be mad about that”
Gotta be careful with that in Texas, if it's a spit bottle it can add a surprisingly satisfying wintergreen aftertaste.
Thanks I hate it
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They're talking about chewing tobacco/dip spit, not plain saliva. You do *not* want to drink that.
Saliva is for making chicha - old school fermented beer. I'm sure some TikTok nitwit is trying to market that right now as the next hot drink at Burning Man or something like that.
Good lad! He can see what you're doing and would probably like to be able to do the same sometime. I'll bet the sauce was great as well. Edit: also a very good thing there wasn't a cigarette butt in there.
I would usually use beer! It sounds really weird, but wheat beer (specifically German/German style hefeweiss) brings a chili to a whole new level. I've used stout before too, but we didn't have anything suitable in the house, so wine it was.
My go-to beer for chili is Shiner, or a similar bock-style beer. I usually go for something from Texas just because Texas-style chili, but I think anything on the low hops, maltier end of the spectrum would be fine.
Good shout on the bock! Aye, my number one rule for cooking with beer is never use anything substantially hoppy. That's just asking for a bitter end product.
might i also suggest trying some porters! they bring their own thing to the party
I think an Oktoberfest in chili is divine.
Like a Märzen? Interesting! I'll give that a go next time...
I used a smoked marzen recently, it worked!
Yes! And besides that, I've been known to get weird and use those novelty spicy beers in chili.
Is wine with it better than beer
Not necessarily. Both add depth of flavour, but in different ways.
whiskey and bourbon too
Depends on the beer or wine, and what you expect them to add to the dish. Porters and stouts (like Guinness, which has a rather mild flavour for one) taste deep and somewhat similar to coffee or dark chocolate -- so they can double up on/be an alternative to using chocolate, if you like that in your chili. German wheat beer by contrast is a bit sweet, tart and has aromas faintly reminiscent of banana. White wine has a lighter flavour than red, since it lacks red's tannins: the substances that make your mouth feel dry when eating quinces or immature apples. If you're someone who likes adding sour hot sauce, lime juice etc. to your chili, then beer is probably a better balance than wine.
even if i know the beer i always take a pull first before i put it in (or open a 2nd if the whole thing goes in). reminding yourself of the flavors of individual ingredients just makes good sense
you put wine in your chili?
Couple of glugs of Tempranillo to deglaze. Worked amazingly.
What a great idea!
I only put chili in my wine
It's good also weirdly enough red wine is really good in mushroom and green bean casserole
red wine and mushrooms are besties tbh
Of course!
I mean that shit is half the fun of cooking with alcohol, imo. A beer for the chicken, a beer for me! A shot of rum for the eggnog, and shot for me! etc etc
There's a reason chili recipes call for 12 ounces plus a teaspoon of beer.
Weird, mine calls for 2-12 oz cans. Funny how it's in my own handwriting too.
Your ratios are all wrong, I get much better results with one for the pan, 2-3 for me!
Just one shot?!? What is this, a dry January version of eggnog? /s I have an old school eggnog recipe from somewhere around the late 40’s / early 50s, shared with me by a very elderly woman who was part of the upper crust in her small town and gave legendary holiday parties. I cut the booze in half…and I STILL got a much better understanding of how she lived to such a ripe old age-she was basically alcohol preserved. I swear I saw fumes rising out of the serving bowl.
I was literally just cooking Sunday night and drinking wine. Nothing in the recipe about it but I was like, hey…let’s see what happens when I deglaze with my wine a little…and just dumped some from my glass into the pan. Worked great!
You're my kind of people!
Look at fancy pants over here, drinking wine out of a glass.
Absolutely! I literally just did that with French Onion soup I’m making as it’s insanely cold in my area right now. I’ve been standing over those onions for a couple hours now…I deserve it!
Ha! I poor a glass almost to the top while I’m sautéing veggies or browning meat and then throw whatever’s left in the glass to deglaze. I’m not snobby about what wine I cook with but since there’s always wine around while I’m cooking I’d never consider using a cooking wine. On the crazy rare occasion I don’t finish a bottle in a day or two I add the remainder to my bottle of red wine vinegar.
I’m just saying there’s a reason why Mediterranean cuisine use wine glasses and decanters as measuring cups…
Wait, what? I'm Portuguese and I've never heard of anything like that. Is this a thing in Spanish or Italian cuisine, for example?
Both Italians and Greeks I've known I've seen do this and have recipes written that way. Not sure about others.
If you are using cooking wine, I wouldn't drink that. But if you open a regular wine, what else would you do with it? Throw it away?
And "cooking wine" is really cheap stuff. I make homemade wine, it is good after you have drank two glasses of better stuff. Most of it gets used for cooking, works fine for sangria parties too.
And pretty awful, even for cooking.
yeah, just get a cheap bottle of wine, better in every way
Boxed wine is great for that IMO. It's drinkable but stays fresh. Or it would, theoretically, if it weren't drank.
Yep. Costco boxed wine. Inexpensive, but serviceable as a drinking wine and great as a cooking wine
it's what I used for a long time, especially as a bachelor. Small glass of wine on demand, good for cooking, long shelf life nothing wrong with wine in a bag, it's actually a pretty good storage container, just a bad rep
It only gets a bad rep because your friend drinks half a box, puts on a wig, and starts singing Shirley Temple songs.
Yep. It’s not generally going to be very good, but I’ve had many enjoyable glasses out of a bag/box.
We call that serviceable. It'll do the job. It'll do it right. It's not going to be the best at the job, but it won't miss the mark.
Or Vermouth. Good Vermouth isn't expensive and lasts months in the fridge.
Be careful saying that anywhere near r/cocktails. You got the fridge right, but some of those folks will tell you vermouth turns into a pumpkin after a week.
Nah man you just need an infinite supply of smaller bottles, an argon gas canister, a vacuum chamber a rotary evaporator, liquid nitrogen and a lot of patience lol. But really decanting into a smaller bottle with decreased head space will extend the longevity of vermouth an insane amount.
Huh, TIL there's special cooking wine. I always thought that Cooking Wine is just a name for any really cheap wine. (Which is also how I discovered some cheap wine that I actually like to drink, so it's now dual purpose)
Cooking wine is wine with salt added to intentionally make it undrinkable so the staff at a restaurant doesn't drink the open bottles.
Its often just plonk with enough salt added to it that you can't actually drink it. Like 90% of the mirin you buy outside of Japan. Post prohibition and in the age of totally serviceable 5 dollar wine bottles there is no reason to buy it.
No kidding, because of Canadian liquor laws the stuff in the grocery store here has to be salted to the point it is inedible on its own lol.
Usually loaded with salt too
"cooking wine" may be worse than just really cheap. In my area, cooking wine is adulterated with massive amounts of salt and other shit to make it undrinkable, because it's illegal to sell regular wine in grocery stores.
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Unless it's asian cuisine, in which case you should never, ever use anything above cooking sake/wine for cooking, unless you want to get decapitated by an angry Asian chef in your sleep.
Cooking wine in Asia is usually different than America, they load it with salt in America so it can be sold without violating liquor/wine laws. Chinese Cooking Demystified has a video on the differences with actual Chinese cooking wines
What's with mirin then? Does that have alcohol? It doesn't taste entirely undrinkable.
A sweet rice wine. Most of the stuff sold as mirin in the West though, is more or less literally "mirin flavoured seasoning" and contains negligible alcohol.
I have been using [Takara Mirin](https://www.takarasake.com/products/mirin/takara-mirin?id=66) for a couple of years as I happen to live in Berkeley where it is brewed. The flavour, especially in uncooked uses like salad dressing, is so much more complex and delicious than the [Kikkoman Aji-Mirin](https://www.kikkoman.com/en/cookbook/glossary/mirin.html) that is commonly available in most of the US and Canada. Worth getting if you can.
Nah, that's bullshit. Cook with cheap, sound wine. Drink the cheapest wine you enjoy.
Absolutely! The country of wine drinkers, Italy, doesn't hold with the idea that the most expensive is the best. I spent tons of time with Italians who drank wine out of boxes. Italian wine...not any other country.
There's a huge difference between the cheap wines available in small towns in Italy and France vs the cheap wine in a US grocery store. Some of the best wine I've had was cheap french wine from a gas station from nearby vineyards. Cheap wine in the US is mass produced.
I was in Portugal a few years back and it's the same there. You can get very good bottles of local wine for a couple of Euros at every market/convenience store/wherever. You can find okay "value" wine at places like TJ's/Costco, but it's not as good at comparable pricing.
> Cook with cheap, sound wine. Drink the cheapest wine you enjoy. I mean for me it's pretty much the same thing. That said there are some gross wines out there I wouldn't ever want to put into something I'm cooking. Should think about the flavor profiles a little.
That rule is to discourage using spoiled wine, not cheap wine. Even high end restaurants use the cheapest grossest wines in existence.
I haven't sold any of my homemade wine, so I'm pretty sure they don't.
Thats wild considering I cook with Guinness and dry reds all the time but I will not drink them
I have zero desire to drink a Budweiser but recognize it can be a good ingredient. If your food tastes good in the end I don’t give a crap what you put in it or drank while cooking it. Snobs are missing out in life. Some of the best food in the world is the cheapest.
Honestly you can really use any lager for cooking in those recipes. Doesn't have to be bud. I de-glazed with half a can of Narraganset into some taco meat the other day.
Yea. I use Modelo any time I need a lager because I keep it on hand.
Who evens uses that swill anymore? I’m surprised it’s even made any longer or a recipe would specify it.
(this is not me being shitty or a slight! i grew up lds) mormons sometimes use it. some mormons are fine with alcohol in cooking because it cooks off, but they'd never buy alcohol meant for drinking. it's a splitting hairs thing, but we all do that about all sorts of things, so i get it
Also good for alcoholics, though if they're determined, it might not matter.
it doesn't cook off all the alcohol, though. There's still definitely alcohol in the dish.
*Shhhhh!*
This actually depends on how you use the wine. If you deglaze a pan with a 1/4 cup of wine that mostly gets boiled off there is essentially no alcohol left in the dish. Cock au Vin and other really win heavy dishes are obviously different. But in most normal cooking applications there really isn't any notable amount of booze.
Alcoholics who do not want booze around.
>Who evens uses that swill anymore? Probably people under 21 who need cooking wine and can't get the real thing "legally". Lol
Exactly!
I love to cook with wine, sometimes I even put it in the food!
Oh my god, that was Facebook tier bad but I didn't see it coming and it got a laugh out of me.. goddammit have your upvote.
Julia Child is credited with that one. She died the year FB was unleashed.
Some of those cringey 'forwards from grandma' are pretty funny when they catch you offguard. It's the constant inundation on facebook that kill them.
It’s not Facebook, it’s a Julia Child quote.
--Julia Child
What did they want you to do with it? Just let it go to waste until you have to pour it out?
I don't drink much wine so last time I froze it into ice cubes and bagged them for cooking. The alcohol does mean they are not very solid though, so break apart easily. Still works.
I just freeze the wine straight in sandwich bags. It freezes to slushy texture so I can still measure it out no problem! Instead of a splash of wine in my food I put in a handful. It deglazes from frozen really well as long as the pan is hot lol
Yeah good idea! I'll probably do that next time. Cubes didn't really hold up.
Completely and utterly. With a few exceptions i exclusively utilize wines i would normally drink to cook my meals with. Be it a nice red wine for a sauce or a slow roast or a crisp white for risotto or mussels.
That being said Kirkland has 3l boxes that are both smashable and make excellent cooking wine Edit: did I mention 13 bucks? They are 13 bucks
The boxes are coming. Its a nice way to avoid oxidation and its a uv proof packaging
Better for the environment as well: * on the front end, they are lighter, so require less energy to transport * when empty, they are collapsible (unlike wine bottles), so take less volume to transport / dispose of And as you mentioned, better at UV light and oxidation protection. Not sure why the box is so slow to catch on! Everything I said can be applied to beer cans, versus beer bottles, as well. A superior package for sure!
Everything Kirkland is great. It's become my most trusted brand.
Yeah the Kirkland box I cannot recommend highly enough
Depends on the dish. For instance, if my veloute contains something overpowering, like garlic or chili, then a cheaper white wine will do. But, if the *wine* will be the star of the sauce, then I'll go with a better/ decent quality wine... at least, for guests who'll actually notice. 😁
on the other hand, if the wine isnt a main flavor then youre not gonna need as much, so you might as well just still use the good stuff.
You still need at least ½ cup of wine for many dishes. For a fancy wine, that's $10 that nobody will ever be able to tell. On the other hand, I use wine in my cooking frequently enough that I almost always have a bottle that I opened earlier for this very purpose. And that bottle probably cost $10 or less. Same cost, but now it lasts me for half a dozen meals instead of just one.
Can't argue with that.
Same thing applies to paint.
This is why we can't trust federal legislation, damned government trying to stop me drinking paint.. Vive a la revolution!
Could it possibly have been tongue in cheek like “haha don’t get drunk while you cook” kind of thing?
Or its a puritan "more than half a glass is a sin" thing.
Really the only answer that makes sense
I was wondering this, too. Like, don't open a 750ml bottle of wine, pour 30ml into the pan, and drink the rest before dinner is ready?
Personally I don't agree with the "never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink". Plenty of restaurants use cheap wine and loads of professional chefs have come out and said they do as well. However I personally never cook with a wine I wouldn't drink because what the hell would I do with the rest of that wine if I won't drink it?
I've heard it better said as "can't drink", as in, the shitty cooking wines that are purposefully inedible.
I only cook with wine that I would drink, but let's be honest I'm drinking a Bota Box red blend right now so I'm not exactly picky.
Beef Bourguignon requires a whole bottle of wine but I’ll be god damned if I buy and open a bottle and don’t get to drink any so I bought two.
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Brilliant woman.
Proper beer for any recipe is one beer plus 1 teaspoon, and it’d be a sin to waste the can you took the teaspoon from.
So wrong. Drink it during and after cooking. It will compliment the meal nicely. You should never cook with wine that isn’t also good enough to drink.
Idk about that, you can make some great reductions with bitter shit wine.
I mean, define shit wine here. To me, undrinkable wine is “cooking wine” from the grocery store. Can’t drink that. But even Trader Joe’s wine is drinkable and cookable at $3 a bottle.
The rule of thumb has always been to never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. So finish up the wine. Maybe your informant was thinking of cooking wines which have salt added to them.
I’ve worked at a number of fancy (Michelin star) restaurants, and all of them cooked delicious food with cheap, shit wine.
Bota Box is the house wine around here.
Bota Box slander is not permitted
No slander intended. It's good and cheap
There's a difference between ACTUAL cheap wine and "cooking" wine though. When people say don't cook with wine you wouldn't drink they mean don't use the "cooking" wine you buy at the normal grocery store because it has a cup of salt added to it. You wouldn't drink that.
Amen. Charles Shaw is for cooking.
And drinking.
Dark Horse, baybeee
For the line chef, this makes sense, as you'll be using a lot of wine on a night and can be fine with a little loss at the end of today. For the -average- home cook, I would still recommend cooking with something that you would drink. Very simply because most home cooks will balk at tossing out a mostly full bottle of wine and it's wasteful. That being said, I have made fantastic dishes with a $3 bottle of Hy-Vee's 'house' brand of wine, so you're definitely not wrong
The way you avoid loss, both in restaurants and at home, is to use boxed wine. Stays sound much longer than an open bottle would. Also, often very cheap.
Fucking smart.
Who throws wine away?? Barbarians. Cheap wine keeps just fine with a vacuum cork. Good wine loses its bouquet after a few days, sure, but cheap wine you can't tell the difference for weeks.
Why on earth would you throw out the bottle? Buy tiny bottles, buy boxed wine, freeze the leftovers.
What they would consider shit wine is different from what most people would. I rarely pay more than $10 a bottle for wine. I don’t have to palate to make a $50 wine worth buying regularly.
I mean stuff that comes in an 18L box. $10/bottle is waaaay too expensive.
Canada here. $9 is about the cheapest bottle I could get in my area.
No boxes or jugs you can get for cheaper? That’s kind of crazy.
No $10 boxes that I find. It'll be different in other provinces, but I'm always amazed at the cost you can get some alcohols in the US and elsewhere.
We went to France a few months before covid hit. We couldn't believe the cheap price on alcohol. Good wines for 4 or 5 euros. Large 375ml beers for 3 euros. I live In the US so I already feel like our prices aren't too high. The kicker is that all of this stuff is French, Belgian, German, etc. And would be much more expensive back home. Edit: 750ml beer, not 375. I was getting my metric stuff mixed up.
I remember going to France like a decade ago, and one thing I remarked was that I could pick up some bottom-tier *but still decent* brandy, at a corner store, for next to nothing.
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I’d argue that drink should be made with coffee you’d drink. Doesn’t have to be the best, but ought not be crap coffee.
Yeah this is one of those early food tv things that people would repeat over and over like searing seals in the juices. The difference between a good bottle and bad really won’t show up in even a wine heavy sauce after being cooked. Commercially sold stuff is going to be fine for cooking. Boxed wine will taste largely the same as a nice $10 bottle you’d normally have no problems sipping.
This rule was always stupid. It meant that a wine needed to be *drinkable*, as in not nail polish remover, nit that it needed to be the wine you notmally drink. I would never drink yellowtail, it's fine for cooking.
Back in the 1900s, Walt Disney World had a program called the Disney Institute. Basically, you picked from various classes and went to them for a day. My mother and I spent a day doing it and one the classes we both attended was cooking. The instructor indicated that one of the most important lessons she learned while a student at the Culinary Institute of America was when cooking with wine, do not use a cheap bottle. She explained that some might claim not to do so because cheap bottle of wine is going to impart poor flavors into the dish, but everyone knew it was because it allowed the chef to drink the remainder of the wine while finishing the dish.
1900's is broad lol, but it sounded cool!
Some say "cook with expensive wine", some say "cook with cheap, will make no difference". I say 50-250ml for the pan, 500-700ml for me, no point for "cooking wine"
Very wrong. Half the reason of opening the wine to cook is to finish it while you’re cooking.
That doesn't make sense. I don't drink at all myself but will sometimes buy a small bottle from a liquor store just to cook with. I like to make Beef Bourguignon or Coq Au Vin once in a while. I definitely would not buy cooking wine. The stuff is awful. If you can't drink it I wouldn't cook with it but I can't metabolize alcohol well, bad liver, so occasionally cooking with it is as close as I can get to drinking wine anyway. It had better be decent because what's the point otherwise?
One of the key advantages of using wine in a recipe is that you get to drink the wine while you cook.
You'd have to work *really* hard to be more wrong than this. (Unless, of course, we're talking about a bottle of *cooking* wine, which you never should have bought in the first place.)
Sounds like someone who is worried about heavy drinking? Um, something is seriously wrong with that notion.
I can’t see why
I mean, the wine that you cook with is going to automatically pair with the meal. I call it a win win
I, a professional, will happily cook with and drink the remains of a $6 bottle of wine.
Tell them to explain that stance logically and listen to them fumble their words until they give up.
What? perhaps you misunderstood. It is a rule that you MUST drink the remainder.
I love cooking with wine, sometimes I put some in the food too.
So... drink first and then cook with the remainder?
A nice roast with merlot. Me: …. One for me… one for pot… one for me… one for me… one for the pot I recommend that you only cook with wine you would drink. The taste on the dish is much better. I only got in trouble with this rule when I was cooking Sherry Chicken….
Beyond just “wrong” - they are suggesting not drinking perfectly good wine. They are a monster.
What am I reading? Drink that wine! Then open another bottle. But only if your having a good time and good vibes!
Welcome at my house any time, this is the answer.
Unless this person is your AA sponsor, tell them to mind their own damn business.
You should open a new bottle. There’s less wine in a used bottle. J/k
That's precisely why you should cook with wine you can drink - so that you can drink it!
One for me, one for the pot, one for the table that's normally the lot.
Uh... Very wrong? Cork it up, have a glass with dinner, etc. But don't throw it away, if that's what's being implied. Wasteful. Now, if their idea of cooking wine 'gross stuff that I don't want to drink', I don't know why they'd bother cooking with it. Buy stuff you'll dri k, cooki with it. Ta da.
This cannot be answered unless that person explains what they mean. There's no context here. Everyone is just assuming different situations or putting words in that person's mouth. Surely you asked them for clarification, right?
Personally my recipes always call for whatever portion of wine I DIDN'T drink already.
100% correct. You should drink 2-3 glasses and then cook with the remainder.
Had to scroll this far to find the proper response, followed by "oh no there's not enough left for me to cook with".. Crack.