5 Easy Ways To Cook With Wine

Cooking with wine sounds like something best left to people with tweezers and tasting menus, but it’s actually one of the easiest ways to make your food taste better. No new recipes and no stress here, just a few simple tricks and a splash of the good stuff.

In today’s article, we’re going to be looking at how you can use wine to improve your cooking and add a touch of sophistication to those bachelor-coded dishes you’ve been scrounging up from whatever you just happen to have lying around in the kitchen. No, I’m not throwing shade at you or anything, I get that you’re probably dog tired after a long day of work, and so that’s why we’re going to keep things easy.

I know cooking with wine looks and sounds fancy, but the reality is much less complicated. You’ll know that by the end of this article, but nobody else needs to. Let them go on thinking it’s an endeavour as strenuous as it is opulent, because that only makes you look better when you pull it off anyway.

Here’s the kicker as well: you don’t even need to learn some new recipes; you can pretty much just take what you’re cooking now and instantly improve it with a bit of wine. Before we get into how to do just that, some important tips to keep in mind are that you only want to use wine you wouldn’t actually mind sipping yourself. So if it’s just a bit flat, for instance, but it’s been sitting in proper storage for a few days, then yeah, you’re good to go. If it starts to taste like vinegar, then let’s use our best judgment there. Alright, let’s get into it.

1. Deglazing
First up we have deglazing, and no, that doesn’t mean retracting comments of excessive, sycophantic praise or anything of that nature. While deglazing sounds like something that belongs on an episode of Masterchef and certainly not in your kitchen, where you’re huddled over the stove pan-frying yet another slab of chicken breast with all the flavour of curdled cardboard, the truth is a lot more forgiving than that.

So you know those brown bits stuck to the bottom of the pan after you cook your meat, veges, and what have you? If you added some wine to that, scraped it a bit, and then let it simmer, guess what? You’ve just deglazed. Yes, it really is that simple.

Then you take that stuff and just drizzle it all over what you’ve just cooked. If you want to kick things up a notch, you can start adding some extra elements to it. Throw in some butter for something richer and thicker, or add some cream if you want a creamy sauce-type situation. But why stop there? You can pour in some stock to get even more flavour if you like, or, if you’re going for more complexity, you can sprinkle in some garlic, mustard, herbs—whatever you want, really. The world is your oyster, my friend; remember that always.

2. Slow-Cooked Stews & Braises
Moving on from something quick and easy, we’re going low and slow with some slow-cooked stews and braises. For these, just a splash of wine will go a long way to adding some welcome depth to your dish, not to mention the acidity in it works really well to balance out any fatty meats that might otherwise make your dishes feel too heavy.

You won’t even taste it (depending on how much you pour in), but you’ll notice that there’s something different, and better, about your stew this time around. A good rule of thumb to keep in mind here is to spring for a red if you’re cooking up something richer and heavier, while a white would be more apt if you’re fashioning something lighter or more aromatic.

3. Pasta
In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been keeping things simple, and that’s about to continue because Heston Blumenthal I am not. And since we’re keeping things simple, what could be simpler than pasta? Yep, wine doesn’t just go alongside your pasta, it can go in it too. And, again, you don’t even have to be precise about it or anything; just a splash or two of the good stuff will have your meal going from struggle to stunner.

So what wine does to your pasta is it adds a touch of brightness to it, keeping it from tasting flat. This comes in especially handy for your creamier or more carb-heavy dishes. To start using wine in this way, you can begin by adding it to your aromatics, so like your garlic, onions, etc.

Just sautée them as you normally would, and then once you’ve done that, add in a splash of wine and let that simmer for a bit. After that, you build your sauce on top of this base, and voila, some fancy pants monocle-wearing pasta that took you about three seconds longer than it normally would to make.

4. Wine In Your Marinades
So far we’ve been talking about what wine can do for your food flavour-wise, but did you know it can change the texture too? Truly, a wondrous and versatile discovery is fermented grape juice.

Just as the acidity in wine can soften the fattiness of your meat in a stew, it also happens to be great for tenderising meat. Besides this benefit, it’s a useful addition to your marinades because it also helps carry the flavours of your rub deeper into the food, properly infusing it from the inside.

When using wine in a marinade, the same wisdom applies as when you pair it with dishes—you generally want to stick with a red for beef, and a white for your lighter meats. You don’t even have to leave it in for long; just a short while is enough to make a noticeable difference. It really is one of the easiest ways to make meat more flavourful with next to no effort.

5. Desserts & Sweet Treats
Alright, let’s take an unexpected turn for this last entry and explore how you (yes, you) can start using wine in your desserts. By now, we already know that wine’s great for improving our savoury dishes, but chances are you didn’t think about adding it to your sweet ones, and that would be a mistake because using it this way could really turn out to be the creative game-changer that you need.

Unlike the other foods we talked about, for desserts, you won’t be pouring a splash of the stuff in, but rather cooking it down to a syrup or a glaze instead. You can also have it infused into fruit. It might sound a bit odd at first blush, but try it out, and you’ll love the depth and dimension it adds to proceedings.

To make a syrup, all you have to do is put some wine and sugar in a pan and then simmer it until it thickens slightly, which should take between five to 10 minutes. Once that’s done, you’ll end up with a pour that goes really well over pancakes, fruit, ice cream, or even cake. A nice offbeat departure from the usual maple syrup, honey, and all the other usual accoutrements.

Another cool thing you could do is poach your fruit in wine, with apples and pears working especially well for this. Just add some wine, sugar, and spices into a pot, throw your fruit in it, and then cook it till it’s soft and all that flavoury goodness works its way in there. Give it a shot, but just know that you might not be able to look at fruit the same way again.

And that really is all there is to it. I told you it wasn’t complicated. Now go forth and cook up some meals that you might actually start to look forward to. Or the next time you have a date over, conspicuously make a show of adding wine into the pan as you cook (bonus points for unnecessary tossing) and watch them fight to keep their hands off you after dinner is finished. Happy cooking!

Opening photo: Freepik