Article in the New York Times today about something that has always consumed me a little.
She pretty much concludes that cheap wine works fine in most dishes, replete with anecdotes about her own cooking, celebrity chef’s cooking, and blind taste tests.
She does a taste test of Risotto al Barolo where the dish made with Two Buck Chuck comes out ahead of the dish made with the $70 Barolo.
Thought others might find it interesting.
I used to use jug wine for a lot of my cooking. Now, I tend to use box wine. I’ve always thought the effect of the quality of wine on a dish was overrated, even in wine-y dishes like Coq au Vin.
However, I find some inexpensive wines quite acceptable for everyday purposes. They may not have rich, amazing flavors. But they are drinkable & fine for cooking.
But some cheap wines taste nasty. (As do badly handled better wines.) Down the drain they go.
There’s definitely a line somewhere separating cheap from undrinkable.
“Cooking wine” usually has salt in it, you wouldn’t drink that. A gallon jug of wine that’s been open for 3 weeks is probably oxidized and nasty, you wouldn’t drink that either. Two Buck Chuck, if offered to you at a party, would probably be accepted and drunk even if you wouldn’t buy it for your own cellar.
Anyway, when you pay $70 for a wine, you’re paying for subtle improvements over cheap (but drinkable) wine, which are clearly going to be destroyed when you boil it up with rice.
I, too, use boxed wine to cook w/, as well as drink. While I love to taste a wonderful expensive wine, I just plain can’t afford it, and the thought of spending even $20 on a nice bottle, just to pour a cup or more into a recipe, does not compute w/ me.
I figure that since I willingly drink the boxed wine, I’m not breaking the “don’t cook w/ it if you wouldn’t drink it” rule.
It’s a subtle kind of snobbery and one-upmanship, or at least it can be - for some people, this is a way of saying “Look, I have so much money that I can afford to buy expensive wine just for cooking”, or “I love wine so much, and I am so knowledgeable about it, that I wouldn’t dream of admitting inferior products into my household”.
Thing is, yes, you shouldn’t generally cook with spoiled wine, or wine that is so nasty it’s nearly poisonous, but cooking with wine changes it quite a lot anyway - in ways that don’t necessarily depend on how good or expensive it was at the start. Most people probably wouldn’t drink wine after it had been subjected to equivalent treatment as it will get when it’s used in a recipe. Cheap wine is just fine for cooking, as long as it’s nominally palatable and isn’t actually spoiled.
I think it depends on how impactful the flavor of the wine is to the overall dish. Cheap wine works well in dishes where you’re using, say, a half cup to deepen flavor in a broth or sauce with other robust flavors present. For example, I’ll use cheap red wine in a stew and cheap white wine in mac & cheese.
Good wine should be used where wine is the key flavor. For instance, good red wine for my favorite wine-soaked pears and cherries dessert is far superior to the same recipe with inferior wine.
That was always my thinking, too, but she makes a strong argument against that in the recipe for risotto al barolo, a pretty wine-heavy dish, a whole cup of it for flavoring a typical risotto.
I buy the little bottles (airplane size) of Glen Ellen (or whatever else is around) red and white and use those for cooking. It’s just the right amount for a potful of stew, or sauteing some scallops, etc. And you don’t have to worry about the leftover going bad.
I use cheap wine, usually out of a box, for cooking whenever I don’t happen to have a little wine leftover in the fridge (which is rare.) We usually have a box of red and a box of white on hand exclusively for cooking. When I cook with boxed wine, I almost always pour myself a glass. It’s perfectly drinkable and perfect to cook with. The only wines I won’t use are ones that have just been in the fridge too long and and/or are extremely oxidized, I’ll just dump them, as I’ve noticed they do add that sherry character to a dish.
I was speaking to a sommelier of one of the better restaurants here in town last night. This actually came up and he said in every restaurant he’s worked in they’ve used big boxes of wine like Franzia, etc. for cooking.
The thought of someone using a $70 bottle of wine to cook with just made my stomach hurt a little.
This reminds me of an email joke; think they’re making fun of Martha Stuart, but it goes something like: “When you have leftover wine, simply put it in ice cube trays and freeze it, then you can just pop into whatever recipe you want”
The Non-Martha response was: “Leftover Wine?!?!?!”
I would agree w/ the above post if you didn’t drink wine, but the boxes keep the wine fresh for months (if they last that long).
I think cheaper wine is fine for cooking, if that’s all your using it for. I don’t cook much with wine, but when I do, I get something I like to drink, because I’m only going to use maybe a cup of it in the recipe, then the rest is, well, glug glug glug.
The key for good cooking is to pick inoffensive wines. Wines that have serious off notes are going to suck for cooking no matter what. But wines with no distinguishing merit are perfect. Two buck chuck fits the bill for me and that’s what I always use. I’ve also never found a problem with leaving wine in the fridge for a month or two before cooking. Who cares if it oxidises, cooking is only going to oxidise it more.