How do you feel about feeding vanilla sauce to children?
Wine, yes – it gets oxidized. Rum and bourbon, not so long as the bottle is capped tight enough to prevent evaporation, for the same reason vanilla extract keeps.
Both of the big box booze stores here, BevMo and Total Wine, sell spirits in 50ml ‘airliner’ bottles. The selection is poor but if it’s used as an ingredient almost anything will do.
Heh. I had to reread this several times. A box wine lasts us (two people) a few days. We drink it with meals, as well as using it for cooking.
Being outraged by the sloppy journalistic standards of the New York Post could be called lazy outrage. They practically invented sloppy journalism.
It would never occur to me to refrain from cooking with wine because children will be eating it, unless the parent specified it before I began cooking, an event which has so completely not happened that I didn’t even know it was a thing.
I love this phrasing. It’s like an old Douglas Adams quote, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
This whole thread has reminded me that my parents, rather unfashionably for the 1970s, used to serve very rare beef to us as children. They told us the blood was actually red wine in the gravy to stop us being squeemish about it.
That’s exactly what I’ve thought the entire time I’ve been reading this thread.
So, I asked about this in a chat with a couple of Mormons. One said that he doesn’t cook with alcohol, but he eats food other people cook that was cooks with wine and beer and stuff. He says that he had a vodka sauce once that he really disliked because it tasted like alcohol, but something like wine in the cheese sauce at The Melting Pot is fine. Another said much the same, and also offered that he’s never heard a Mormon asking about the ingredients to avoid that. He lives in Utah, and knows a lot of Mormons. He volunteered that he knows a Muslim who does inquire about whether restaurant food was prepared with wine. He’s also scrupulous about avoiding pork, but less careful about non-halal meat.
A woman who isn’t a Mormon brought up The Melting Pot, because she has a Mormon friend who asks them to make their cheese sauce with broth instead of wine.
So there are some people who don’t consume food that was prepared with wine. They aren’t common in the Mormon community, but they exist. They do also exist in the Muslim community. And they know that it’s a common practice, and ask about it.
It’s not outrageous that a parent might neglect to mention that kind of non-fatal dietary concern in the sort of semi-emergency that led to their kids being babysat. What’s outrageous is being so upset afterwards to make a fuss, instead of saying something like, “Gee, I really appreciate your caring for my kids last week. But I just found out that there was wine in the meat sauce. And I prefer not to give my kids foods prepared with wine. If it comes up again, could you please give my kids something that doesn’t have wine or other alcoholic beverages in it? Again, thanks so much for helping out, and I know I should have mentioned it. Let me know if there’s something you need that I can help out with.” That’s what a normal, non-asshole, might say, if the wine really bothered them.
The Canadian Medical Association published in his journal in 1926 an article according to which white bread has an alcohol content that varies between .04 and 1.9 %. Nobody refrains from offering white bread to children or muslims or fundamentalist christian denominations as far as I know, so I must conclude that those small amounts of alcohol are medically irrelevant. Many things have alcohol naturally and sometimes alcohol forms in your stomach or gut by simple fermentation.
I wonder whether I should post that in the “random facts” thread as a fact that nobody seems to know. Anyway, I’ll stop reading here now after almost 40 posts (this will be the 170th), so if someone has later pointed that out I excuse myself for the repetition but the arguments are getting circular and reiterative.
Yeah - I’ve even wondered about NA beers, whose ETOH content is not 0%.
But I suspect most people who have intentionally chosen sobriety “have second thoughts about” all manner of things that might never occur to someone who has never had an issue w/ alcohol. I’ve got no problem being around alcohol or drinkers, but to my palate, wine/beer/booze does not sufficiently add to the flavor of any food such that it would even occur to me to add it as a ingredient.
I have an unsophisticated palate, and am far from an epicure. I wonder if I would be able to tell the difference between 2 sauces that were identical other than 1 had wine. And even if I COULD tell the difference, I doubt I’d think the one was so much better that I’d start adding alcohol to my cooking.
There’s a chicken liver pâté that I make. The original recipe called for a minuscule amount of cognac, which I usually include. The last time I made it, we were out of cognac (hangs head in shame) so I left it out. My gf and I could both tell the difference, and we each prefer it with the cognac.
Yeah - I’m sure some people could tell the difference and prefer one. I basically consider food “fuel”, and it it is healthy and tastes “good enough”, that’s enough for me.
I imagine that in a side by side taste test most people could tell. It adds a distinct quality. I use white wine in some fish sauces and red wine mainly in beef marinades and in tomato-based sauces.
Some do advertise as 0.0%, like Heineken and Lozma (Polish.) Most are just under 0.5% I still get carded for all of them, though.
Were you zero when you became a member here 23 years ago??
Absent a physiological difficulty, you almost certainly could tell the difference, and choose one as being preferred. That still doesn’t mean you will value that difference as being worth any effort on your part.
I forget if you’re in the US or not, but in many places there’s just a “card everyone” policy. And if you’re using the self check-out, it’s gonna beep at you and wait for someone to check your ID. Some places will even scan it.
I’m in the US, in NJ, but they don’t card everyone and most grocery stores don’t have liquor.
Some friends (my age, in their 50s) from Australia were visiting Tennessee and one didn’t have her ID with her and they wouldn’t serve her at a distillery tour. That certainly surprised her! They have quite a different set of liquor laws in Australia…
I mean, especially if you’re talking about something like coq so vin or beef burgundy where the wine is so much of the flavor.
But back to bolognese — my daughters, both under 10, will conplain that something is off when I make it without wine. It’s infuriating as I can’t get anything past them and I have to make things exactly the same every time. Once I tried subbing Bel Gioso domestic Parmesan for the imported stuff I normally buy, to save some money. Nope. Did not work. Had to use it up all by myself.