Cooking with 2 buck chuck--New York Times

Lovely article in today's Times testing the truth of the "gospel" that you should never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink.

After cooking four dishes with at least three different wines, I can say that cooking is a great equalizer.

I whisked several beurre blancs — the classic white wine and butter emulsion — pouring in a New Zealand sauvignon blanc with a perfume of Club Med piña coladas, an overly sweet German riesling and a California chardonnay so oaky it tasted as if it had been aged in a box of No. 2 pencils.

Although the wines themselves were unpleasant, all the finished sauces tasted just the way they should have: of butter and shallots, with a gentle rasp of acidity from the wine to emphasize the richness. There were minor variations — the riesling version was slightly sweet — but all of them were much tastier than I had expected.

Yes, this was indeed an eye opener. Like you and, I suspect, most LTHers I have adhered strictly to the "if it's not good enough to drink then it's not good enough to cook with" rule. However, having once destroyed a beautiful bourguigon with a terrible wine, I can attest that there are certain limits to everything - bad flavors do not cook away. The good news is that there are now so many very palatable wines that are reasonably priced that both drinking and cooking needs can be met with the same wines.

Believe me, my mom never adhered to that rule This is just vindicating her use of grocery store wine for the past couple decades.

Right, I mean common sense says that really rank wine would make rank food, but the world is full of $6 bottles of acceptable wine at this point.

For me, though, the question is, is there any reason why one shouldn't cook with leftover bottles, that is, the bottle you opened a month ago, didn't drink all of then, and have kept vacuum-plugged since then? At least I've never tasted anything I'd remotely consider oxidation or whatever in a dish, even if I'd taste it in the same wine in a glass at that point.

I cook with Chuck all the time. Maybe for something more delicate, I'd use something a little better, but for a slow cooked short rib or pot roast recipe or to beef up a bolognese, I find that a $3 bottle of cab does just fine.

I was initially surprised at the prevalance of "boxed" wines in many restaurant kitchens, but they're easier to store and are vacuum packed so they stay fresher longer. Some of them are quite good. Black Box Merlot and Banrock Station Chardonnay are very drinkable and in a reduction they're very good indeed - The Banrock is about $16 for 3 litres.

And Sysco / ChefEx, the supplier of nearly everything imaginable w.r.t. food, has been selling wine reductions for a couple of years under the brand name Todhunter Foods. They're ten-fold reductions in volume and are available in "Burgundy" "Chablis" and "Port" varietals. They're also becoming very popular, as they are a real timesaver. I'm pretty sure they've been a part of a sauce on a plate in our collective recent past...

I keep a bottle of miscellaneous red wine dregs around -- anything that doesn't get finished goes in. It's gotten a little skunky, but otherwise I've never ruined a dish with a spash from the "Mixed" bottle.

For something where wine is the primary flavor, requiring a cup or more, I'll start with a bottle of something inexpensive but not awful, like 2BuckChuck. The Beef Burgundy mini pastries I made at Xmas started with a bottle of Chuck's Gamay and were awesome.

I learned my lesson using a more expensive bottle of Cab to make these purple-colored beef tamales from a cookbook I have. Oh sure, it was fine, but MrsF was furious that I'd "wasted" the good stuff.

The Ramon's don't drink much wine at home (we prefer whisky:) ).

For dishes that use red wine I buy those four packs of small bottles when they are on sale and keep them in the pantry. For white, I keep a bottle of vermouth which lasts in the pantry quite along time. I've bought enough more expensive wine, to use half in a dish, and waste the other half that I do not intend to do so again.

-ramon

gleam wrote:Believe me, my mom never adhered to that rule This is just vindicating her use of grocery store wine for the past couple decades.

If she'd adhered to the rule, she'd never have cooked with wine at all! (Or she'd cook with three sips and then get too sleepy.)

For me, the small bottles of Kendall Jackson-type wine, about a cup per little bottle, work great for recipes that only call for a small amount, without having to open a whole bottle. But then there are those nights when I want the rest of a full bottle after using just a smidge in the recipe!

I can't speak for the author's palate in the NYT article, but it would be folly to say the Charles Shaw Cabernet is not a drinkable wine. Sure, Charles Shaw is not a first cru Bordeaux, but people aren't buying this wine up in incredible quantities exclusively because of it's price.

If that we're the case, there'd be a huge run on Mad Dog 20/20 beyond the homeless/college set. It's truly a decent drinkable wine, as are most of the Shaws.

So this leads me to wonder about the other wines from the article and whether or not there's a bit of an underlying falllacy that the wines cooked with in the article aren't good just because of price point, reputation or Moskin's subjective palate. The article would be more compelling to me, if she had other tasters verify at the outset that the wines to be tested were universally deemed bad.

I.E, the ultimate conclusion of the article is more likely that cheap wines or slightly unbalanced wines are fine for cooking, which is a lot different conclusion than "cheap undrinkable swill is fine for cooking".