Cooking with Wine

Cooking with wine is a great option to make your meal taste better. Personally I cook with wine a lot. A good sauce as an example, tastes so much better if cooked with wine. I usually buy a large piece of Top Sirloin Beef at Costco and then cook different meals with it. A very quick and easy way to get a high quality dinner is to cut the beef into small cube-size pieces and to cook them in a sauce pan. I then create my own sauce following an old family recipe. A large part of the sauce’s secret is to use wine.

Once the wine is added you can literally taste its flavor in the air when the alcohol starts evaporating. The taste of the grapes goes into the beef and the sauce. So, in case you are worried – there will be no alcohol left when the meal is served. The cooking process (hopefully not the chef) takes care of this. What wine do I use when cooking with wine? I prefer white wines for cooking. And it is very important to use a wine that you would also enjoy drinking and not some cheap “cooking wine”.

Wines labeled as “cooking wines” are cheap in price and cheap in quality. These cooking wine are salty and often incorporate additional spices or herbs – which will eventually destroy the flavor of the meal that you are trying to create. Cooking with a good wine is fun as there is always opportunity to enjoy a small glass during cooking, too. I see it as part of the job to “test” the wine upfront to make sure the quality is good.