Yes, I cook with white wine a lot, and the simple reason is, it’s just a very convenient
source of sweetness and acidity. Most foods are enhanced by some sweet and sour, and white
wine goes with most foods. It just doesn’t contain any really strong or particular flavors
that would clash with other flavors.
Well why not cook with grape juice?
It’s too sweet. White wine is perfectly balanced between sweetness and acidity.
Why not just cook with vinegar?
I freaking love vinegar, I cook with it all the time, but it’s just a lot more sour
than wine, and I generally use it in things that don’t need some additional moisture.
When I need to add some sweet and sour and some moisture, I reach for wine.
And a lot of times in cooking, you just need some liquid. Any liquid. For soups, for stews.
Could be water, could be stock. But in most things where I would use stock, I tend to
use white wine plus this: liquid chicken bouillon.
A carton of stock is just animal solids plus water. The bouillon is basically just animals
solids. So why not take the water out of the equation and have animal solids plus wine?
Why not cook with any sweet and sour liquid that doesn’t have alcohol in it? Are you
just a lush?
You’re not gonna get drunk off of food cooked with wine, and I’m gonna prove it to you
in an upcoming video. Alcohol itself can be a really good thing to cook with. Harold McGee
in his essential book “On Food and Cooking” writes:
“[Alcohol] provides a third kind of liquid—in addition to water and oil—into which flavor
and color molecules can be extracted and dissolved, as well as reactive molecules that can combine
with other substances in the food to generate new aromas and greater depth of flavor.”
This why people put vodka into tomato sauce, even though vodka is just alcohol and water.
It has no flavor. It’s just there to extract flavors from the tomatoes. Let’s test that.
Half a can of crushed tomatoes goes into a pan with a pinch of salt and I’ll cook that
for 10 minutes. In a bowl it goes. Other half goes in with a pinch of salt and an ounce
of vodka. Cook that for 10 minutes and into a bowl. Vodka tomatoes are on the right. The
virgin tomato sauce tastes fine. The boozy tomato sauce tastes noticeably better. Just
fuller, more complex.
Alcohol can also be useful in making pastry. You have to add a certain amount of liquid
to the dough in order to make it come together into a ball that you can actually work with.
But if you add too much water, it’ll react with the wheat proteins and create gluten,
the stuff that makes bread chewy. You generally want pastry to be crumbly, not chewy.
Alcohol will make the flour wet, so you can shape it, but it won’t react to make gluten.
So the pastry dough I made with wine in my chicken pot pie video not only had the lovely
sweet and floral qualities of said wine, it was also more crumbly as a result. At least
in theory. I’m a little bit skeptical of my own reasoning here, just because wine is
only has about 12 percent alcohol, I’m not sure that’s enough to make a difference.
Still tastes good though!
Isn’t wine expensive?
Dude, this is $3 at Kroger. Is it good? Not really! But the things that make a good wine
really good are generally relatively subtle. You’re not gonna notice the micro, in most
foods. You’re just gonna notice the macro — the sweetness and the acidity. If those
things are in check, then you’re gonna be fine.
OK, you’re selling me here. What kind of wine should I use?
Not a sweet wine, unless the recipe calls for it. No Sauternes, no Gewurztraminer. Pinot
Grigio is a classic grape for cooking wine, and it’s generally what I use. Really good
all-purpose kitchen wine. The sweetness and the acidity — the macros — those are in
check.
Why not use red wine instead of white?
Sometimes I do. I usually drink red, for sure. When cooked, red wine has this lovely meaty,
dark, strong flavor that can be really, really nice. But red wines also have a lot more tannins,
which means they can get bitter and astringent when you cook them way down. If we put some
Malbec in a pan and reduce it to a glaze — that tastes real intense, and not in a totally
good way. If we reduce some Pinot Grigio — that tastes like sour candy.
Lots of the things I cook with wine are already pretty meaty and intense, like my bolognese
sauce. To my taste, red wine in that sauce is overkill, I’ve tried it. White wine balances
the dark, meaty flavors with brightness and sweetness. In general, white is really good
at waking up flavors, it just kinda livens up everything.
For what it’s worth, I think really started to enjoy my cooking and my drinking a lot
more when I released myself from the orthodoxy that red wine must always go with red meat
and white wine must always go with white meat. To quote the great chef Grant Achatz:
“There are no rules. Do whatever you want.”
OK OK, but I don’t drink alcohol. Not at all. So, what can I use instead of white wine.
Probably lots of things, but for white wine in particular, the first thing that comes
to mind is this: white balsamic vinegar. It’s a sweet vinegar, too intense on its own. You’d
want to use it in combination with water or stock, so let’s do a little experiment.
Yeah, I’d say use one part vinegar to seven or eight parts water or stock. But honestly,
I wouldn’t measure it. I’d just splash a little into the food, cook it for a minute,
taste it, see if I like it, repeat, etc.
But keep in mind, this vinegar, like most vinegar, is made from wine and therefore has
some trace amounts of alcohol in it. But then again, so do many of the foods you eat, including
some that you might not expect. And that is going to be the subject of next Monday’s
video.