How to Cook with Wine

After having a nice dinner with your friends or family, in front of some good quality wines, one of them maybe hasn’t been finished and you don’t know what to do with it. You’ve been asking yourself maybe how long does red wine last once opened, but you certainly don’t want to waste it.

Well, in this case, there is a good solution for you, so you won’t have to throw it away and that is to use it for cooking. In fact, there are countless dishes, whose taste might be even more enhanced, thanks to a nice red or white wine, added to the mix. But how to do it? And most importantly, how to choose which wine to use, such as a white or red one, in order to complement the taste of your dishes and not overpower it, with the wrong choice of wine.

How to Cook with Wine

Cooking with wine is not certainly a secret, since it has always been done for centuries, to enhance the flavor of some dishes or even to give them a new and exciting taste. It is also a great way to finish some leftover wine, no matter how good it is. So after you have found the answer to the good question ‘can you freeze wine?’, you can unfreeze it and use it in your favorite dishes. However, choosing the proper way to incorporate this powerful ingredient into your dishes is not easy.

Usually, when you are using wine for cooking, the best solution to use is to incorporate it into your starting mix, when you are frying some nice onions or garlic pieces with oil so that you can make the alcohol boil and leave your wonderful taste. Another great way to use it is also to mix it, in order to create some sauces: for example, risottos can become ten times more flavourful if, when you are cooking the condiments or the rice with the broth, you can add a little bit of wine, and let it simmer during the cooking time. The basic rule that you should be following, while cooking with wine, is only one: the wine itself must always be more acidic and, most importantly, sweeter than the food itself.

White wine for cooking: Bianco dei Leoni

Whenever you have to cook something and use wine in its mix, usually it is considered mandatory to use a glass of white wine because it has a slightly lighter taste than a strong and flavorful red wine and can be paired up, at least according to common knowledge, to much more dishes and food combination. However, this doesn’t mean that you should only use your trustworthy Bianco dei Leoni white wine, whenever you’re cooking. On the contrary, you should learn how to differentiate wines and food tastes, in order to choose wisely.

For example, white wine is much more preferred to use, while cooking, for deglazing your pan or to create nice sauces, that might enhance the taste of lighter dishes. In particular, there are many food pairings and taste that you might use when using a cooking white wine. Most of the time, white wine can be used with fish dishes, mussels, or light-intensity meats, such as chicken. You can also use it to create some interesting mixes with some kind of vegetables, to give it more importance. Another important pairing that can be made is certainly with cheeses and light cured meats, to not overpower their tastes.

Red wine for cooking: features

Just because a nice red wine can be much stronger or can have a much more complex taste, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be used to cook a delicious meal. On the contrary, some full-bodied red wine can do wonders to a dish whose taste must be missing something. Moreover, everyone knows that the answer to the question ‘Is red wine good for you?’ is definitely a positive one, so why not enhance our dishes and bring some tasteful red wine notes also to our food?

Red wine are definitely, by definition, much more bodied than their counterparts, so you should definitely let it simmer and steam more, in a way that their alcoholic part can be much more diffused and their full tastes cannot overthrow the other tastes. According to favorable pairings, red wines can be mixed with stronger red meats, cured meats and cheeses, but also with some vegetables that require stronger tastes, to be paired with, so that they can be complimented nicely.