| All wine will be acidic. That is one of its attractive properties in fact. And dry white wine will usually have the most apparent acidity because it doesn't typically have the tannic structure of reds. So adding wine to a dish will make that dish slightly more acidic, although not in the same way that vinegar would. So without tasting the dish, I don't know how "sour" it was. IF it was close to vinegar, then your wine was off. We drink wine every day and almost always use a little in a sauce, so it's hard to say what you did wrong. However, here are some suggestions: First, make sure you use a good pan. I always use cast-iron because it can really take high heat. If you are using white wine and/or cream, you can get an enameled cast iron pan. You can use stainless steel, but make sure it has a very thick aluminum bottom. Do not use something like aluminum because it will turn your sauce gray. Use the wine to deglaze, not to cook the meat. I am not sure how you typically deglaze your pans, but the most common way is wine or stock or both. In other words, cook the meat or whatever you are cooking, and when finished, remove from the pan. Those brown bits remaining are the key to a good meal. Pour off any excess grease, turn the heat WAY up, and just before the stuff starts blackening, pour in a little bit of the wine. Stir it around, making sure you pick up all the carmelized bits, adjust seasonings, remove from heat, and pour over the meat. So if you were making chicken or veal or pork, you can use a white wine and add a bit of Dijon mustard if you want. Do not use more than a quarter cup of wine or so. You can add some HEAVY cream as an alternative to mustard. Or replace a bit of the wine with some good stock. Or add a few tablespoons of butter. If you use red wine, eliminate the mustard or cream. If you want to reduce your wine, that is a different procedure. Pour the bottle into a wide pan and cook over slow heat until the liquid is reduced to about a cup. This will make a very thick kind of syrup, much more concentrated than whole wine, and you can add a tablespoon to your sauces. In fact, make a good veal stock and then do exactly this. Reduce 6-8 cups to only one cup, concentrating it. Then when you deglaze your pans, at the very end, add a spoonful of this to your sauce. It sounds like you left the meat in the pan (you said it was half-cooked) and then you poured in the wine and continued cooking. This is essentially making a stew - lots of liquid and the meat is cooking in the liquid. You get liquid from the meat, liquid from the vegetables, and liquid from the wine and you will have WAY too much liquid and way too much wine. If you want to do something like that, OK, but you need to work differently. That is the same principle as coq-au-vin, or chicken in wine, which is famous in Burgundy. The idea is long, slow cooking with lots of evaporation and it is better to make it a day ahead. They usually use an inexpensive pinot noir, but some of the best and most expensive restaurants in Manhattan use Carlo Rossi by the jug and nobody complains. Finally, a word about cooking wine. Do not buy the wine on grocery store shelves in small bottles labeled "cooking wine". That is usually crap. Instead, do like you did - buy an inexpensive bottle of real wine. Many people say that you should only use good wine for cooking - wine that you would drink. I would not drink a $7 chardonnay. Price does not always equate to better wine, but I drink wine every day and taste several thousand a year and I can tell you that under $10, it is a real challenge to find wine that I would care to drink. Between $10 - $25 is our average daily bottle, and well over $25 once or twice a week. But I am not going to pour a $75 cabernet into my cooking pot. And whatever anyone tells you, neither will the great chefs of the world. That $7 chardonnay, or better - sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio, will do just nicely, thank you. Once a wine has been reduced and blended with meat juices, seasonings, etc., nobody is going to identify that 1947 First Growth and cooking with it is just stupid. So feel free to use the inexpensive wines for cooking. You might want to avoid the more tannic and/or woody wines - e.g. the wines that taste slightly green and have wood chips used for oak flavoring, but otherwise, anything goes. Use an inexpensive grenache, a spicy blaufrankisch, a fruity zin, a young and earthy Rioja, or whatever strikes your fancy. As to your question of why a DRY wine - how much sugar to you want in your food? You can in fact cook with a sweet wine and if you are looking for that effect, it can be nice. Maybe pan-sear a duck breast and then deglaze the pan with a Sauternes into which you might have added some orange zest and juice. That could work. But you understand that your sauce will be sweet. And in 90% of the cases, you do not want sweet. So to sum: 1. Deglaze the pan AFTER the food is cooked.
2. Use a little wine/liquid and a very high heat so that most of it evaporates.
3. Add cream or butter at the very end, after #3, and don't cook too long - just until it thickens.
4. Use a wine fit for human consumption, not grocery store cooking wine, but you don't need to go overboard because the subtleties of an expensive wine are going to be lost anyway.
5. Whites - crisp dry wines with little oak are the most versatile; reds - something not too tannic or woody generally is the most satisfactory. |
