Monday 27 October 2014

Five Tips for Cooking with Wine

If you’re as much a lover of the kitchen as you are fine wine, you’re in luck. This week the Ideal Wine Company reveals five tips for cooking with wine.

The Versatility of Wine
Through crafting a reputation as a provider of excellent fine wines at prices true wine enthusiasts can actually afford, we have learned of the versatility of our product. You can drink it, invest in it, collect it, turn it into a cocktail etc.

You can also cook with it. Cooking with wine is actually a pretty popular pastime. You can use it to craft mouth-watering dishes such as Coq Au Vin. Even better, when you pair a wine with a dish you’ve used wine with, you end up with an experience which will blow your tastes buds away.

Use These Five Tips to Master the Art of Cooking With Wine
Despite the fact that the way you do it often depends on the dish, there are common tips you can use whenever you cook with wine to get it right. Here are five we would suggest:

  1. Don’t Cook With Something You Wouldn’t Drink: Since the heating process burns the alcohol off, it’s the flavours of the wine that you are bringing to the dish. That is why you should only ever cook with wines you would drink. If you don’t, you’ll bring flavours you don’t find appealing to the dish.
  2. Match the Wine to the Flavour: Certain wines go with certain foods, and choosing contrasting flavours will only ruin the dish. If you’re cooking fish, for example, for heaven’s sake don’t use a rose.
  3. Pour in Slowly: Cooking with wine really is a balancing act.  Get the balance wrong, and you’ll throw the composition of the dish off. That is why whatever you’re making or using, you need to pour the wine in slowly.
  4. Taste and Stir: To ensure you are getting the balance right, stir it in gently with a wooden spoon as you pour, then taste to keep track of the balance. There’s no substitute when it comes to cooking with wine, for experience! Tasting is also useful for determining the quality of the wine before you cook it.
  5. Watch the Temperature: When wine hits a temperature of 70 degrees, it starts cooking. However if it hits 80 degrees, you can cook it too much, robbing it of some of the flavour you want to infuse into your dish. That is why you should keep a careful eye on temperature whenever you cook with wine.

Now it’s Time to Get Specific
From there, it’s time to get specific. Depending on the type of dish you are cooking, there are different ways to go about things. However these five tips should get you well on your way to crafting a mouth-watering dish by cooking with wine!