Discover Cooking

There are many opinions when it comes to cooking with wine. A lot of us sometimes find ourselves with 1 or 2 open bottles of wine in the fridge unless of course we belonged to a wine of the month club. After being opened and re-closed, the wine is at its drinkable best within a couple of days, but what about using the wine for cooking? Most top chefs will claim that the types of wine used in cooking should be of top quality comparable to the food products that you are using to prepare the dish.

The background of the food that is being cooked also seems to be an important factor according to many experts on the topic. For example if you are preparing a good Italian style pasta meal then you should only use Italian wines for cooking and drinking with the meal.

When preparing red meat dishes with wine, a red wine is best to use for a sauce, lighter meats like chicken, turkey and also fish are enhanced by the use of white wines in the preparation of a sauce. Foods can be prepared in so many delicious ways and it’s also not only a case of which wine is used in the preparation, but also how the wine is being used in the recipe.

If the wine is not to be heated in the preparation of the dish, perhaps in steeped fruits like strawberries, it would be worth choosing a cheaper wine. If on the other hand the recipe needs the wine to be heated, as in a reduced sauce, although a full bodied wine is often recommended, the wine when heated, the wine goes through many transformations, making the initial flavors of the wine difficult to preserve.

However until more research proves differently, most of us will continue to see cooking as a wonderful way of using up wine leftovers! Of course we must be careful of wine stains whether it is from cooking with wine or from drinking it. The process of getting rid of wine stains can indeed be very tough not just from clothes and carpets but also wine stained lips.