Cooking with Wine

"Now I am going to talk about cooking with wine and there are two aspects to that. Cooking with it and also deciding what wine to cook with. A lot of people use these prebottled cooking wines that you can get in the grocery store just along with the vinegars, olive oils and things like that. I actually don’t recommend using these because they are not very high quality and if the reason you are using them in the first place is for concern for the alcohol. This particular one here has 12 percent alcohol by volume which is not that much lower than a regular white wine. So, when you cook with the wine in any way, the alcohol is going to evaporate for the most part so go ahead and just use regular wine whatever it is that it calls for whether it is a dry white wine or red wine. Go ahead and buy a bottle of it and you can cook with it and have a glass of it while you are cooking while you are cooking. That is what I do. When it comes to the quality of other wine, a lot of people keep a bottle of Chardonnay or Cabernet for 2 to 3 weeks in the refrigerator, in the pantry and they use that to cook with. I am going to tell you today you do not need to do that because the wine is already oxidized and the flavor is not what it should be. You should never cook with wine that you would not drink because as the alcohol evaporates, the flavor of the wine actually concentrates. So for instance, if I heat up a pan to maybe make a port wine reduction or a demi-glaze, you are going to heat up the pan and when you pour the wine in as it starts to cook and heat up, like I said that alcohol is going to evaporate. So what you are left with is a pure concentration of flavor. That is why port wine reduction on fillet is so good because that flavor has just been intensified. So if you start off with a wine that has already gone bad then that flavor is going to be concentrated and it is not something you want to do. As the wine heats up, the alcohol goes out so use a wine that is high quality at least higher quality than something that has been sitting around or is cooking wine which is not very cooking so don’t cook with wine you would not drink."