Cooking With Alcohol

Series Summary

It could be said (though not in any textbook that I’ve ever read) that a little bit of alcohol makes the world go round. Beer, wine, booze, liquor, hooch, spirits, sauce, grog, krunk juice, the hard stuff, cocktails, brew, firewater, liquid courage, social lubricant, and aqua vitae (water of life): no matter what you call it, alcohol is inexorably fused to the heart of human culture. We drink it to celebrate a special occasion, to socialize and have a good time, to unwind at the end of a day…and to cook with.

In these free cooking classes on video, learn how to make three tasty recipes with everybody’s favorite pastime: alcohol. Our expert chef will show you step-by-step tips on how to cook filet mignon with a red wine sauce, tequila lime shrimp with, you guessed it, Jose Cuervo, and bananas foster with rum sauce. Take some time to enjoy the finer things in life. Block out an afternoon, go to your local liquor store and stock up, and take some time to make at least one of these recipes this weekend. And who’s to say you can’t spill a little of that hooch down your gullet while you listen to the sizzle of the shrimp on the barbie.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chef Rainer Wickel and I'm here today with Expert Village.com. Well today we're going to be cooking with alcohol. We're going to be making three dishes that are extremely tasty. Now, when you cook with alcohol it really gives foods a very unique flavor. There are a multitude of recipes that you can use by cooking with alcohol. Now when it comes to wines or like a sherry, these are the types of alcohol that we actually use to make sauces because it really gives the sauce an outstanding flavor and it makes it really, really unique. And then you can also use tequilla, rum, whiskey, there are a multitude of dishes both chicken, shrimp or even with beef that you can use these alcohols to cook with. And what it does is it brings that unique flavor into the meet that is really, really tasty. Now today I'm going to be sharing three recipes with you. The very first recipe that we're going to be cooking is filet mignon in a red wine sauce. Now, this particular dish you can really use with any type of steak because this is really a sauce that compliments beef really, really, good. But, for today we're actually going to be using filet mignons because it really is one of the best cuts of meat. Now, the second recipe I'm going to be sharing with you is tequilla lime shrimp, and specifically tequilla lime shrimp skewers, which we're going to be cooking on the grill. And what we'll be doing is we're going to be making a marinade with tequilla and we're going to put the shrimp into the marinade and actually put it into the refrigerator overnight so all that flavor gets into the shrimp, then we'll go ahead and cook it after that. The third recipe I'll share with you is called Banana's Foster, and this is a very, very, common desert. You'll find this in a lot of restaurants and it's actually pretty famous. This particular dish is also a little fancy because what we're actually going to be doing is we're going to be setting the alcohol on fire to be able to, first of all, burn off all the alcohol and to actually burn all that good flavor into the bananas. And these are the three recipes I'm going to be sharing with you so let's go ahead and cook with some alcohol."