Having wine around the house is a must. It can be opened up at any time to enjoy with your dinner, or when you have a couple of friends pop by. Choosing the perfect wine is something that everybody should learn how to do. Once you start keeping wine around the house, then you have the perfect opportunity to start cooking with the same wine.
Cooking with wine can be very intimidating if you aren’t experienced as a chef or somebody that knows much about wine. In this article, we will go over several tips to help you cook with wine for some delicious results.
1. Deglazing
One of the most obvious and effective ways to use wine is to deglaze a pan with it. Deglazing is when you have seared something in a pan like a steak or some vegetables and there is some residue that stuck to the bottom of the pan.
That residue is all flavor and can create a delectable sauce to put over the meat or vegetables. Use the wine to create this sauce and it is elevated even further. The way to do so is to remove the food from the pan and add about a quarter cup of your wine of choice.
Let the wine reduce and it creates a luscious sauce that is free of any alcohol that has evaporated. It is important to use a good wine that you would actually drink because it gets intensified. All the characteristics that you would expect to taste when drinking the wine will be present in a condensed way in the sauce.
For instance, if you have a Moroccan wine from Dune wineries that is full-bodied and has a lot of fruit, this will be the dominant flavor of the sauce when the wine is reduced.
2. Braising
Another fantastic way to bring more flavor to the party is to use wine to braise. The complexity of the wine adds another depth of flavor when cooking meat or chicken in a long and slow manner. Just a little bit of wine added at the beginning of the braise will add a lot of heady notes to the dish that ordinarily would be a bit monotone. The acid present in the wine lifts all the flavors of the braising liquid.
3. Marinating
The acid in the wine will help to break down the fibers in meat that make it tough. If you want to make your meat tender. This is ideal when cooking tough cuts of meat that would ordinarily not make for a pleasant experience. Leave the meat to marinate in some wine with aromatics like carrots, onion, and celery overnight. Then, on the next day, cook the meat and use the marinade to flavor the sauce.
Lamb is a meat that takes especially well to marinading with wine and aromatics as it can be tougher than beef. Even chicken which is not tough meat will become melt in your mouth tender thanks to a wine marinade.
