I have never used it, but I was at the neighborhood grocery store today and they had several bottles of this in the discount cart, marked down to $1.99, so I thought “what the heck?” and picked one up.
I’m assuming it’s useful in things like pasta sauces. I did see that it has quite a bit of salt in it, as I’ve heard in the past, so it wouldn’t be pleasant to drink (although I rarely consume alcohol as it is).
If it’s not good enough to drink, it’s not good enough to cook with.
Stranger
As you noted, the added salt is the main difference.
I prefer to just use wine I would drink but this can cost less and work too.
In my early cooking days, I cooked using cooking wine. I won’t go as far as @Stranger_On_A_Train and give an absolute that if it isn’t good enough to drink it’s not good enough to cook with. If nothing else, because I’ve seen people drink wine and other alcoholic drinks that would make me forcibly vomit!
But for me, the salt is what kills it. Using cooking wine even in small amounts (I just did a nice cream and sherry sauce on chicken yesterday!) means needing to watch the salt in everything else, and even then, it may end up extra salty.
For me, even at the $2 price point, I’d pass and go with my go-to option for cheap and cheerful wine. A 500 mL mini-Bota box. I get the Sauv Blanc at a consistent “sale” (for the last 6 months at least from Kroger) price of $4. It’s not amazing, though I don’t mind decent Box wine, but it’s actually drinkable according to my wife. And it takes up a fraction of the space a 750mL bottle would at half the cost.
In a more wine forward dish though, spend a bit more. But the Bota works fine for a deglazing, sauce base, or other option where cooking wine would otherwise be the “budget” option.
Sample from Target, with the same sort of “sale price” my Kroger uses, so widely available:
‘Box wine’ is fine for cooking with; it isn’t as if your reduction or sauce is going to capture the nuances of the wine as if it is bottle. But ‘cooking sherry’ is just awful, and even accommodating for the additional salt imparts adverse flavors versus just a cheap bottle of Chardonnay or Merlot. Generally you are only adding 1/4 cup of wine to a sauce, and it is something complimented by the wine you intend to drink, anyway, so you might as well open the bottle and use the top pour to cook with and let the rest of it breathe while you finish the sauce.
Stranger
I love the 500ml boxes of wine for cooking. If i don’t use the whole box, i just close it up and it fits nearly on the condiment shelf in the fridge, where it keeps surprisingly well.
I think i am currently using the “black box” brand.
I buy mini bottles of white wine for cooking - the ones you get on airplanes. Proper wine, just in petite form! That way, it has just the amount I typically need, and doesn’t suffer from sitting around for too long.
Red wine, I just open a proper bottle and drink the rest!
I have a bottle in which I pour any leftover/dregs from any bottles/boxes
of red wine I consume. I use this occasionally for cooking.
I have never tried “cooking” wine, but I just looked up a random
one in google and found this - Cooking Ruby Red Wine :
Ingredients:
Reduced Alcohol White Wine, Sugar, Natural Flavouring, Acidity Regulator: E334 Tartaric Acid, E330 Citric Acid, Preservatives: E202 Potassium Sorbate, E223 Sodium Metabisulphite , Vegetable Extract: Black Carrot, Natural Colour, Grape Tannin, Salt
No thanks !
Pretty much nailed it in one. There’s a reason you never see online chefs using it.
You and me both. I also love a really good Port.
Isn’t this stuff intended to be for use in cooking when a recipe calls for wine, but the cook isn’t a regular wine drinker - it supposedly keeps for longer or for infrequent use, whereas an opened bottle of wine would go off?
I mean, I think a better solution to that is probably just to freeze regular wine in ice cube trays or other small containers and use that in portions, but cooking wine has been around for a long long time, maybe since before everyone even had a freezer at home.
Honestly, boxed wine, tightly sealed in the fridge, keeps fine for cooking. I rarely drink wine, but i like to cook with it. So any leftover from a recipe goes in the fridge until the next recipe. The stuff tastes okay to drink after weeks, too, although i imagine it’s lost some of its subtler notes.
We are a vanishing breed. I like a certain kind of sherry, and it’s sometimes hard to find in the larger bottle. Or find at all.
If you’re interested in trying a really decent Port for a reasonable price, try Taylor’s Ten Year Old Tawny.
I like Taylor the best!
Many years ago, my wife was cooking something that called for wine in the recipe. So, in spite of the fact that we had a few bottles of fine wine already, she went and got some cooking wine from the supermarket. The result was not what we expected, and it wasn’t very good. We wondered if it was the salty cooking wine.
Next time she tried that recipe, we tried a bottle of cheap plonk from the liquor store. Much better result, and we never used cooking wine again; only the real thing. We decided that even the cheapest real wine was better than any cooking wine.
A second to this. While some of the dates on the boxes are clearly aspirational, we’ve had the full sized boxes last a good 3 weeks (and that was with semi-frequent use!) without the flavor noticeably decreasing. The minis are good for about 3-ish glasses (maybe one more serving if you’re using very little wine in a dish) for at least a week I’d say. Again, that’s on white wines, which I find to be more enduring than Reds, but that may just be my palate talking.
I generally keep 2-3 of the mini’s in the house at all times. First if there’s one of Those days for the wife, and she wants a glass or two to relax. More though, because you’ll have that urge for a wine-based dish and it’s already on hand. Using it up isn’t a problem, because, well, it’s right there and drinkable, or even if not, with the minute pressure of having it available it isn’t exactly hard to think of another dish you might make using the rest in that same week!
I remember after the earthquake in 1964 that the liquor shelf was empty of everything but cooking wine. My mother and my friend’s mother only managed a half glass each before tossing it out. Even desperation couldn’t make that stuff palatable.
Yup, you should avoid cooking wine because you can’t control the salt, and it’s got weird preservatives.
It’s more nuanced than that. Personally, I lean more toward “if it’s good enough to drink, then don’t waste it in cooking.” It comes down to your taste in wine, and the specifics of why a particular wine might be bad.
Corked wine, oxidized, starting to turn to vinegar, or some off flavors? Definitely don’t cook with it. Off dry when it should be a dry wine, or acid levels not quite balanced? Great for some recipes, not great for others. Lacking depth and structure? Fine for cooking.
I’m assuming you’re from the Anchorage area? (Maybe you’ve mentioned it before, and I forgot about it.)
I’m also assuming that salting that wine is a way to dodge certain alcoholic beverage laws, taxes, etc.?