Wine is a valued beverage. It possesses different and complex flavours, and has qualities such as acidity, sweetness, absence or presence of tannins and also possesses varying alcohol content. Wine is a great beverage to drink, and it is also used in cooking. Cooking with wine has been proven to offer quite a variety of advantages; it not only adds some complex flavours to your meal but also has antioxidants that help in weight loss. Although only red wine has resveratrol a muscle-maintaining and anti-aging antioxidants, white wines have plenty of waist-whittling benefits. One study particularly found that ellagic acid, a chemical found in dark red grapes, aids in slowing fat cells growth and preventing the development of new ones. Cooking with wine requires one to equip themselves with specific tips. One of the most important is to ensure you source your wine from reliable stores. Review sites such as the UK collected reviews can help you with this. Flavourly reviews can also help with different varieties of wines. Below are tips that you should apply while cooking with wine.
- Don’t use a wine you can’t drink to cook
If you don’t enjoy sipping a specific wine, definitely the taste it’ll add on your food will not also be pleasant. Despite the many opinions, the truth is that cooking doesn’t improve the flavour. Cooking has been proven to worsen certain flavours. Thus, you should be careful when picking the wine you’ll use for cooking, always go for the wine you love and have taken for quite some time. This will ensure that you’ll make a delicious dish.
- Be careful when choosing your wine
Whether you go for white or red wine is dependent on what you are cooking. If you are preparing a red sauce for spaghetti or cooking red meat, you can go for a full-bodied young red wine. On the other hand, if you are cooking a root veggie-filled soup or some beefy, you can go for a full-bodied earthier red wine. Dry white wine would be suitable when you are cooking seafood, veal, pork, poultry, cream sauce or a vegetable-based soup. Sweet fortified wine or sweet white wine is ideal for deserts. Always avoid cooking with wines that have additives containing sodium as they aren’t good for your health.
- Know when to pour.
The time that your wine should cook on the stove depends on the colour of the wine you choose. If you go for a light dish with white wine, ensure that it doesn’t cook for an extended period. As a general rule, red wine cooks for longer periods to improve their dip ruby hue. To ensure best results do not add alcohol into your dish just before serving. Doing this, for example, to a meal of chicken will make it taste like vino. You should always ensure that you let the wine cook together with the food. This ensures that the range of flavours in your wine intensifies. If you feel that your dish requires some more wine when it’s very near to getting ready, ensure that after you add the wine, let it cook for 10 minutes to ensure the wine flavours the dish adequately.
- Use wine as a marinade
If you have scheduled meat for dinner, you can marinate it before cooking it. Wine has tannins, which aids in breaking down the toughness of meat proteins. The wine’s acidity will also help to balance with the fat and oil in the meat, which will help prevent the meal from becoming lacklustre and dry. If you want to make a complementary sauce with some wine, avoid using the liquid you used to soak your uncooked meat, this is because it may have harboured bacteria that may be harmful. Always use some fresh wine to simmer your sauce, this way you will avoid foodborne ailments.
- Know the amount that is enough.
Just as knowing when to pour wine into your meal is essential, it is also essential to understand how much wine you should add. When making soups, per cup of broth add two tablespoons of wine. For sauces, per one cup add a tablespoon of wine, for gravies, in one cup add two tablespoons. Meats and stews will go perfectly with a quarter cup per pound.
In conclusion, when adding wine to your dish, be aware that it increases the acidity level in your dish. Thus you must adjust other flavours. For instance, reduce acids such as citruses and lemons. Also, bitter flavours don’t go well with wine, therefore reduce such flavours.