I am a noob. All this basically comes from texts with my buddy.
Alright so most wines last 3-5 days. So if you are cooking with wine, you can buy something called “cooking wine” which is more like a Wine-Like-Product and is not wine and does not taste good, and people who are serious about cooking seem to avoid it, don’t cook with it themselves unless it’s some crazy last resort scenario, and do not recommend it.
If you really like wine then if you open up a bottle of wine for cooking, you can then also just…drink the wine if you don’t want it to go to waste. For many people cooking with wine in Europe this is simply what happens, a natural part of life in the flow of things, absolutely no problem.
But if you don’t want to be wasteful and are not in the habit of drinking wine, its short shelf life seems like a way to never have it when you need it, and when you need it to only use it a little and then the rest of it goes to waste, which means you won’t buy it again, which means you won’t have it when you need it…
You can do a lot with lemon and cream and capers and dill and mushrooms but man sometimes you do want that kick—how do you get that kick? What’s the missing ingredient? Oh right the wine.
Some people with otherwise perfectly functional alcohol tolerances sometimes have a pretty bad reaction to wine (this is a known effect of wine on certain people). What then? Or maybe they want to eat their chicken marsala without also getting drunk that specific night, or maybe they know they drive a lot or have to be somewhere.
Anyway, what to do? How to get into the flow of wine things without being wasteful?
My buddy has a smart response. It is simple in its theory and a bit more difficult in execution, but it does solve the problem.
→ Cook with it the normal way. Like deglazing pan after caramelizing onions etc. it lasts around 1 week in the fridge for more cooking or also use in pickling or other things
Aight so now we’re cooking.
Literally the solution to not doing enough French cooking because you never have the wine is literally to just do more French cooking because you have the wine.
Alright so let’s suppose I want to make a chicken marsala because that’s the only wine-based dish I know how to cook. If I also like and know how to make french onion soup, I can make a really nice french onion soup with the same wine.
And so I will end up using up that wine bottle through a natural process of cooking for that week.
Any time you want acidity, you can use it in place of vinegar or citrus depending on recipe.
Making a tomato paste roux and then adding good red wine can make a really tasty sauce for a stew
White wine sauces go well with garlic, lemon and herbs. With or without cream. Pasta is the classic with seafood
Sherry is great with heavy cream because it can hold up well. Good over chicken or other meat. Also super good with mushrooms
Sherry is good if you don’t drink wine because fortified so much longer shelf life and can withstand oxidation
Cooking with wine is a bell curve. You want good enough because flavor is important but not too fancy because you are heating it and blending with food
Dry sherry’s are good with seafood but I like cooking with these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amontillado
o.O Fucking Amontillado. Poe, anyone?
Inviting somebody to your house and offering them Amontillado in your basement is certainly a move this October o.O
Amontillado, a dry sherry, happens to be keto, and so if you want to be all literary and goth, or just have an alternative to being the archetype that shows up places and only drinks vodka and tequila, this can be added to your keto rotation.
And this is where we come into our next trick. If you want to practice with the recipes, if you practice with sherry while you figure out some stuff, sherry lasts over a year. Sometimes it gets better with oxidation and age.
Thanks JM for the contributions!