Fah. It’s fine. I wouldn’t necessarily use it for Coq au Vin but in most recipes it works perfectly well.
I don’t drink wine, but I like it to cook with. I asked the guy at the liquor store how long could I keep an opened (and corked) bottle of red wine (on the counter,) and he said indefinitely. I didn’t ask about white wine. I usually refrigerate white wine. I usually buy the little Gallo bottles of wine - they come in about 1 cup bottles. Most recipes call for 1/4-1/2 cup usage. Someone brought me some Zinfandel at Thanksgiving which I just opened. I also had a bottle of Merlot which was opened at Thanksgiving and seemed to do just fine.
Sorry for the hijack, but how long can both types (red and white) last, and do they need refrigeration?
I’ve bought a couple of boxed wine varieties in recent months that were decently drinkable, even. You can still get the cheap swill, of course, but there seems to be a trend of offering better (and commensurately more expensive) wines in boxes, or little foil-like containers that remind me of a cross between a milk carton and those “fruit juice” things (1% real juice!) parents administer their kids to keep them highly sugared at all times.
I bought cooking wine once, but I don’t think I would do so again absent other options. I have a hard enough time not oversalting dishes that I cook (realizing dumbly, after the fact, that I probably didn’t need to add extra salt on top of all those bouillon cubes and pieces of salt pork) so adding the oenophile’s equivalent of soy sauce to my pantry will only complicate matters.
Plus, you really can’t drink it. I tried.
Wonder if he was taking your question a bit too literally. In my experience, red wine begins to turn sour after just a few days—certainly unpleasant to drink. I don’t know if the vinegary smell/taste would affect the food, but I’d be a bit afraid to try it (unless the recipe called for red wine vinegar).
If you want something for longer-term storage, the boxed wines use a vacuum-sealed bag that (at least according to the claims on the packaging) keeps wine fresh for weeks.
Which is why cooking wine works for people who don’t drink a lot. I just opened a 1-litre bottle of white wine I was given a couple years ago. I’ve had two glasses. At this rate, I might finish it by mid-March but I know it’ll be going vinegary before then so I’ll have to hunt up some recipes for it.
Refrigerate any leftover wine, red or white. Use them within a week. Even with the preservation method I use (gas and tight cork/fridge), I find most wines (excluding fortifieds) are off within 4 or 5 days.
If they are just for cooking, you could probably get 2 weeks out of them, just keep in mind that they will be oxidized, and you’ll be intensifying that oxidized wine taste in your dish.
They most certainly do not last indefinitely.
For the most part I stick to the ‘don’t cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink’ school of thought. I’ll drink cheap wine, I won’t drink oxidized wine, so I usually keep a box of red and a box of white in the cupboard for cooking. Although there is one exception I’ve made - Peaks of Otter Winery’s ‘Kiss the Devil’ Chili Pepper Wine. Not for drinking, great for cooking.
They do make another Chili Wine for drinking though. ‘Chili Dawg’ - Interesting to say the least.
Ey, at home we don’t like whiskey but 12-year-Chivas stew is yummy!
In Spain “cooking wine” simply means “wine that’s better for cooking than for drinking” (for example some wines are too sweet for most people’s tastes, but very good as marinade), do they really put salt in them in the US?
Wine lasts for months if you make sure it’s keeping the cork wet or if the container is otherwise sealed (the boxed wine mentioned by a poster, for example). It should be kept outside the fridge.
ok… I can’t really comment on the merits of cooking wine vs. drinking wine- except to say we mostly drink beer or Capt. Morgan Rum around here so there is not alot of good wine to be had at our humble abode. However, this is absolutely the BEST pork chop recipe I’ve come across and it incorporates white cooking wine.
Seriously… it’s like crack for pork lovers
I just wanted to add…
Whoever decided that bacon, white wine and scallions were a good idea is a genius.
OH MY GOD… A GENIUS…
But doesn’t cooking wine go bad just as quickly as drinking wine? The salt won’t prevent oxidation, which is the main reason wines “go bad”. If it doesn’t, then it also has some sort of other added preservative, which I’d likely rather not put in my food anyway.
I wonder about this as well—seems I recall sniffing some aged (several months) back-pantry-forgotten cooking wine and it smelled similar to regular old wine that had gone bad. Salty and vinegary… might be good to sprinkle on potato chips, I guess.
Well, I’m screwed because I don’t like the taste of wine (cooking or drinking kind). I originally bought the cooking wine because it was on sale and I thought I’d like to try it. I’m just digging myself in deeper here, aren’t I?
However, it seems that not only do I have something which probably won’t make my meal taste any better, the chances are high that I wouldn’t like the meal even if I used REAL wine.
Well… generally speaking, I cook with the same wine I drink. However, you can make perfectly serviceable dishes with cooking wine, especially if it’s a type that you generally don’t drink (think sherry and marsala). Sure, you can go spend 10 dollars and get a full-sized bottle of marsala, or you can spend $3.50 and get a 12 oz bottle of cooking marsala at the grocery, which does just fine for something like Chicken Marsala.
I wouldn’t use it in a dessert that needs Marsala, though. The salt would more than likely mess the flavor up.
And to whoever said “there’s nothing magical that would make bad wine taste good in cooking it”, well, you’re right, but the process of cooking does drive out a lot of the aromatics along with the alcohol, thereby reducing a good wine to something much more similar to cooking wine when all’s said and done, since the majority of wine’s flavors are due to volatile aromatic compounds (think esters & the like) that don’t last long. That’s why wine tastes kind of flat the following day- it’s not so much oxidation at that point, as the volatiles evaporating.
I always use regular wine
One way to preserve wine for longer than a couple of days is to freeze it. You can freeze it right in the bottle as long is it is not full. I have done this in the past and a month later the thawed wine is very drinkable and better than if it had sat in the fridge for several days. It will throw a sediment when in thaws, buy you just don’t drink that part.