Welcome to another edition of What's for Dinner, my first diary contributed to the series. Tonight, let's discuss the different ways to use wine in recipes, other than marinating the chef. Wine can add great depth of flavor to any number of savory recipes (and several desserts). Equally important, the remainder of the bottle can be consumed with the meal. After all, as wine critic Matt Kramer once noted, "Food is the meaning of wine."
The first question you might have is, "What wine should I cook with?" The traditional answer is, "Whatever wine you will be pouring with the meal." This makes some sense, insofar as the influence of the wine in the recipe may echo the flavors of that in the glass. Of course, that may depend on how much of the bottle you need for the recipe; it's one thing to splash 2 oz. into a pan to deglaze it for a sauce, and quite another to devote half a bottle of Chateau Highfalutin' to a marinade. If you've pulled out a special (i.e., expensive) bottle to impress a date, find a cheaper version of the same grape to cook with. Try to avoid cooking with heavily oaked wines--those buttered Louisville Slugger flavors never seem to mesh with whatever else is in the pot. I'd recommend against drinking the oak monsters, too, but to each his own.
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