I think this whole “cooking wine” idea is some American aberration, I’ve certainly never seen it over here in the Netherlands. I also use the high quality $4 wines for food and drink
Any case, I love wine in tomato sauce. AFAIK, the alcohol helps intensify the taste of tomato*, plus if you use a nice red wine, the wine itself also adds some nice rich taste to the sauce. When I don’t have wine handy, I sometimes use just a little red wine vinegar.
there are also tomato/vodka sauces. Never tried them myself, though.
Oh, pink vodka sauce is divine on pasta! I’ve used various jars and also made it myself.
Question: I’ve read you can just keep a bottle of vermouth (since it lasts forever without going bad?) around to use in place of white wine in cooking. Wouldn’t that really change the taste of a dish, with the sharp herbal taste of vermouth overpowering it?
Part of that is because there are plenty of Americans who don’t drink, but still want to make recipes that use wine. So they aren’t even used to going to a liquor store, and many states in the USA do not allow supermarkets to sell alcohol, and cooking wine apparently doesn’t come under this restriction. I still remember the day my teetotaler mom, somewhere north of 50, told me she had gone into a state store (PA liquor store) all by herself to buy a bottle of wine for a recipe.
The notion that wine doesn’t add flavor is just nonsense, of course. I make an *au jus *for prime rib that requires two bottles of cabernet. If I substituted water or broth for the wine, the flavor would not remotely resemble the same flavor. The only cooking “wine” that we ever use is rice wine vinegar, which is at least appropriately labelled.
I cook with wine, vermouth, and beer at times. I love deglazing a pan with wine. I’m going to try some red in my next batch of chili. I usually use coffee and beer, which is actually quite nice after eight hours in the Crock Pot.
If you want something that will keep, but don’t want the vermouth flavour, get a bottle of sherry or ginger wine. I tend to have one of each in the kitchen just in case - like if my partner isn’t here and I don’t want to open a nice bottle by myself, or if I really don’t need much. And you really should never cook with something that isn’t nice. If it tastes bad to drink, it’ll taste bad in the food. You shouldn’t be able to taste alcohol - that’s what gives a metallic flavour if you under-reduce a sauce, for instance - but you should be able to taste all the other elements of the wine. If you’re not used to judging by taste whether the alcohol’s all cooked off, lean over the pan and take a deep breath. Your sinuses will tell you whether you breathed in water steam or alcohol vapour.
