While most of us enjoy a glass of wine with a good meal, it’s easy to forget that wine can be just as delicious in the meal too -- especially red wine.
Red wine dishes are popular all over the world. From the rich red wine sauces of France, made with Bordeaux or Burgundy to the earthy Tempranillo-based stews of Spain, to American BBQ sauces, spiked with a spicy Zinfandel. Cooking with red wine makes it easy to bring authentic flavors into your own kitchen.
Recreating the traditional flavors of different countries is a wonderful way to explore the world from the comfort of your own kitchen, but cooking with red wine has another benefit. It brings others into the kitchen with you.
An open bottle of wine is an invitation for friends and family to join in the cooking process. Then, taking the same bottle that went into the red wine dish to the dinner table creates a feeling of elegance and sophistication your guest will not soon forget.
Apart from the social benefits, red wine recipes take advantage of the food-enhancing properties of this go-to ingredient.
As the wine cooks, its sweetness and acidity become more concentrated in the dish. A dish that has a nice balance of these tastes is more likely to be delicious.
Tannins in red wine can have a bitter flavor, but when the wine is cooked with meat, it’s astringency is subdued, as the tannins bind with the meat proteins.
Red wine can also be a key component in a marinade. Marinading meat with an acidic liquid will soften the protein, making it more tender. When that acidic liquid is wine, it’s rich, complex flavors are also absorbed into the meat.
While the acidity in the wine does help with tenderizing, too much of a good thing is, well, a bad thing. Marinading the meat in a wine-based marinade for too long, like overnight, can actually change the texture of the meat, making it slightly mushy. Three to four hours is usually enough time to allow the meat to benefit from all the good things a wine bath can offer, without any of the bad things.
We all know that wine contains alcohol. That alcohol evaporates though when it’s cooked, so it’s important to add the wine early enough in process to make sure the alcohol is almost entirely cooked out.
So, tonight, pour yourself a glass of wine while you’re pulling together dinner. Just make sure to save enough to cook with too!
What Does Red Wine Do to Meats?
Wine is a versatile ingredient in cooking, but when it comes to meat dishes, cooking with red wine is especially beneficial.
Red wine recipes that call for marinating meat are usually trying to achieve two important things: flavor and tenderize.
Acidity in the wine tenderizes the meat and makes it easier for the marinade to soak in, adding flavor. Making the meat more tender means tougher, less expensive cuts of meat can be used in place of more expensive cuts. Who doesn’t like saving a little money while enjoying a delicious meal?
Red wine recipes that use wine to create a sauce for the meat take advantage of the natural pairing between red wine and meat.
Red meat tends to be fatty, and red wine can cut through the fat of the meat, bringing out more of its fruity flavors. So, you can see how they are a match made in culinary heaven.
How Long Does Wine Take To Cook Off?
While cooking does reduce the alcohol in wine, it takes longer to eliminate all traces of alcohol than you might think. It could take up to 3 hours of cooking to eliminate all the alcohol from red wine dishes. A study from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Nutrient Data lab concluded that food baked or simmered in alcohol for 15 minutes still retains 40 percent of the alcohol. After an hour of cooking, 25 percent of the alcohol remains, and even after two and a half hours there's still 5 percent of it.
How much alcohol burns off in red wine dishes in a certain amount of time depends on two things- the temperature of the heat and the surface area of the pan. So, cooking at a high heat in a wide pan will cook off the alcohol faster.
Because of this, cooking with wine in a slow cooker will not likely burn off much of the alcohol. The temperature in a slow cooker doesn’t get hot enough to cook down the wine and burn off the alcohol.
Is it Okay to Use a Cheap Wine?
There is an old saying, “never cook with wine you don’t want to drink.” We agree. Still, there are some bargain wines out there that are delightful to drink, so it’s not as much about the cost as it is the quality.
When you’re cooking with red wine, you’re burning off the alcohol to get rid of that sharp alcohol bite. But the rest of the flavors in the wine will remain intact. That means that if you’re using an old, oxidized bottle of wine in the dish you’ve worked so hard to make perfect, it is going to taste like an old, oxidized bottle of wine that you’d never even consider drinking. Not the flavor most of us are going for in our red wine dishes.
For that reason, always taste the wine you’re about to cook with. Whether it’s cheap or expensive, it should be worth drinking before you start cooking with it. That said, if you’re opening a very expensive bottle, you might not want to dump it all into your Dutch oven, so perhaps there’s a less expensive option hanging out in your wine rack that you could use while you enjoy drinking the good stuff.
Now that we’ve convinced you that red wine is wonderful to cook with, now it’s time to pop the cork with recipes like Slow-Cooker Beef Bourguignon, Skillet Coq au Vin for 2 and Chicken Cacciatore with Red Wine.