FOOD FOR THOUGHT
Mark R. Vogel
Epicure1@optonline.net
Cooking With Wine I
There’s a plaque in my kitchen that reads: “I love to cook
with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.” It’s the latter half of this
whimsical quip that is the crux of the current discussion. In the first half of
this two-part article we will focus on selecting wine for culinary applications.
In the second half we will discuss the procedures for cooking with wine.
Let’s start with a few basics. NEVER, under any
circumstances, not even at gunpoint, use cooking wine. Cooking wine is extremely
low quality wine that has been imbibed with excessive salt and other unnecessary
flavoring agents. As will be discussed in greater detail in part II of this
article, cooking with wine concentrates its flavors. Thus, the grody, salty
cooking wine will end up even nastier and saltier tasting.
Always use table wine, i.e., wine that would be served to
drink with the meal. Now the question becomes how good does that wine need to
be? The baseline standard is illuminated by the old adage, “if you wouldn’t
drink it, don’t cook with it.” Endeavor to employ an inexpensive, but
nevertheless pleasant tasting wine. Don’t buy the cheapest wine on the shelf.
That’s a sure fire way to procure any of a number of wretched potables that are
giving the rest of the wine world a bad name. Remember, if it’s grim tasting
from the bottle, it will be even worse in your cooked dish. There are plenty of
economical wines that are serviceable but you must experiment. Seek the counsel
of your wine retailer and taste various wines to develop a repertoire of cost
effective wines suitable for cooking.
OK, so we know the rotgut du jour is out. What’s next? Well,
there’s red, white, dry, sweet, light, medium, and heavy bodied wine. The
easiest starting point is the oversimplified axiom: red wine with meat and white
wine with fowl/fish. This standard excels at the extremes. For example, if you
were making a sauce from the drippings of a hearty beef roast, this is a
no-brainer red wine scenario. Conversely, if you were preparing a pan sauce for
a light, white fish, say sole or flounder, that you sautéed in butter and lemon,
white wine is the only way to go.
The rule starts to break down with the multifarious dishes
in-between these poles. Take for example salmon, (a heartier fish than sole),
with a tomato based sauce. Here you could employ a light red wine. The classic
French dish coq au vin is chicken braised in red wine. Some cooks use white wine
when making a meat sauce such as Bolognese. White wine also mingles well with
various pork dishes. There are countless other examples. The point is this: For
dishes between the extremes, strive to match the color of the wine and its body,
(light, medium, or full), to the robustness of the dish. Generally speaking,
heavier fish and fowl with stouter sauces or lighter red meats, (such as pork or
veal), with suppler sauces, can often pair with a heavier white or a light red.
The next piece of information you need to know is which wines
are lighter or heavier bodied. Light bodied whites include Pinot Grigio, Soave,
and Sauvignon Blanc. Heavier whites include Chardonnay and Chenin Blanc. Light
reds include Beaujolais, Dolcetto, and Cotes du Rhone. Heavier reds include
Cabernet Sauvignon, Barolo, Bordeaux, and Syrah. This is not an exhaustive list
but a general guide. But to make matters more complex, sometimes a traditionally
heavier wine is made in a lighter style. For example, the cheapest Cabernet in
your local wine shop will not carry the weight of a higher quality Cabernet.
Numerous vintners make inexpensive, mass-market wines. In order to grind out a
profit from their run-of-the-mill, $8 a bottle Cabernet, they need to maximize
the vineyard yield. This produces a less concentrated wine. As always, a
combination of erudition, consulting your wine retailer, and tasting experience
will enlighten you to the who’s who in wines.
The next choice is dry or sweet. This isn’t too complex.
Almost always, dry wines are employed for savory dishes and sweeter wines for
sweet dishes.
If you’re a more serious cook and wine enthusiast, you’ll
wish to venture beyond the boundaries of red vs. white, light vs. heavy, and dry
vs. sweet. At the most sophisticated level, wines will also be chosen based on
how their specific nuances commingle with the particular food in question. For
example, Sauvignon Blanc is often known to have herbaceous undertones. Thus, it
would be a good choice for a dish where the herbs are prominent, (assuming a
white wine was appropriate to begin with). Some Chardonnays have buttery
elements and pair well with butter based sauces. Zinfandel, known for its berry
flavors would work with a fruity sauce. For poached pears, I prefer Beaujolais,
a light and fruity wine.
A final optional guideline is to use the same kind of wine in
the dish that you are serving with the meal. Obviously you would employ a more
economical version for the cooking.
