Suggestions to use up some crap red wine?

useruser

I have a few bottles of pretty rough red wine that is just about undrinkable. Do you have any suggestions to use it up? (as a marinade perhaps?)

rediguana

The consensus seems to be to avoid using wine in cooking that you wouldn't otherwise drink. If it's that bad it must be cheap. Just bin it, don't prolong the agony.

If you must use it for cooking, make Coq au Vin (Chicken in wine). http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,,605460,00.html It doesn't look easy, admittedly, but it would be a cracking meal, I'd say.

useruser

rediguana wrote:

The consensus seems to be to avoid using wine in cooking that you wouldn't otherwise drink. If it's that bad it must be cheap. Just bin it, don't prolong the agony.

Thanks Rediguana, I'm pretty much of the same opinion, if all else fails perhaps I can clean the toilet with it. I'm wondering if perhaps there might be some kind of meat curing recipe that calls for crap wine though?

Schlemm

Pears in (crap) red wine is also nice, if you can get good pears.
http://www.myhouseandgarden.com/recipes/Pears_in_red_wine.htm

jazoo

if jt was winter you could have made a nice mulled wine with cinnamon sticks,brown sugar and oranges and lemons and boil it up, you could still do that but put more orange juice into it cool it down and use for summer punch served on ice, maybe put some summer berries into it

useruser

Hmm., Sangria perhaps..

bonkey

Pfeffer. Works with any red meat - not just venison.

As for the "if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it", a lot depends on what you're willing to drink.

I know a lot of people who are *very* picky about their drinking wine. I don't use their tastes for judging if I can cook with it.

Similarly, I'll quite happily cook with wine I've left open for a couple of days and which is no longer to my drinking taste. In fact, quite a lot of my cooking wine comes from that direction.

If the wine is genuinely corked, though, then I wouldn't cook with it.

edengarden

Don't throw out your wine. Check out this fantastic recipe - tried and tested, its great on cold day and the recipe is so amusing aswell. http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/misc/recipes/casserole.html

He uses "Half a pint or so of truly awful white wine. I expect the recipe would work fine with adequate wine too, but the stuff I used was verging on the undrinkable". I have used bad red wine for this recipe and it was just as tasty!

antoniosicily

it depends on what you cook, I would use it to shade the flavour of the meat before putting the tomato sauce; you can even get good results with white wine while cooking rice; remember to have an high fire when you use it, if you do it wrong you can trash rice, meat and sauce

tSubh Dearg

rediguana wrote:

If you must use it for cooking, make Coq au Vin (Chicken in wine). http://observer.guardian.co.uk/life/story/0,,605460,00.html It doesn't look easy, admittedly, but it would be a cracking meal, I'd say.

Coq au Vin is actually surprisingly easy to cook really. But don't use crap red wine in it as it shows. A good Pinot Noir is the best. You really can taste the difference based on my many attempts.

Miss Fluff

If you wouldn't drink it, I wouldn't ruin good food my cooking with it either. What kind of wine is it?

You could always give it as a "gift" to someone you really despise.

antoniosicily

Miss Fluff wrote:

If you wouldn't drink it, I wouldn't ruin good food my cooking with it either. What kind of wine is it?

Sorry but I can't understand this statement. It depends on what you cook, if you use the wine to shade the flavour of the meat before putting the sauce, even if it's crappy, it works fine (we are not talking about fuel..). I wouldn't drink vinegar but I use it when I mix salad, and vinegar is just wine. Same for crappy wine.

Miss Fluff

If it is deemed "undrinkable" why the compulsion to use it in the first place. Of course a cheeky little €200 bottle of vintage isn't required for cooking, but neither is rot-gut that you wouldn't wet your lips with. Just as easy to use a bit from the bottle your drinking from.

rediguana

This thread began three weeks ago. It's hard to imagine the wine has improved during this time.

It all boils down to standards. But, personally, I wouldn't use bad wine as an ingredient any more than I would stale bread or spotty potatoes. I guess that's why my food always tastes so great (!)

rockbeer

antoniosicily wrote:

I wouldn't drink vinegar but I use it when I mix salad, and vinegar is just wine. Same for crappy wine.

Vinegar is meant to taste a certain way, and it works as a dressing when balanced with other ingredients. Bad wine might just be a bit rough and vinegary, but it might actually have bad flavours that will taint whatever you add it to.

There's wine that's just not very nice, and then there's wine that actually tastes poisonous.

It's hard to generalize, but although I wouldn't go as far as to say I would never cook with wine I wouldn't drink, I'd have to have a good reason to add those flavours to my recipes.

The Sweeper

The MIL keeps a bottle of wine on the side for cooking. At the moment it's a bottle of Wolf Blass Eaglehawk Merlot, something I'd happily drink (a lot of ). Now she keeps it stoppered and stores it in a cool dry place, but she continues to use it until the bottle's empty, which can take a few weeks.

I've always been a firm believer that a fresh glass of whatever I've just opened to drink is what goes into what I'm cooking, but during the week I made a bolognese sauce and decided "Right, time to test the theory". The Wolf Blass had been open about 10 days.

Smelled okay, nothing too vinegary on the nose. So into my bol sauce I sploshed it.

The upshot was simple. The sauce was still good - rich and meaty - and did have some of the nice edges that red wine brings to it, but it had a sort of subtle, muddy undertaste of what was basically stale wine. Of course then I could taste nothig else.

Upshot for me: I'll go back to using a glass of whatever I'm drinking in what I'm cooking.

rediguana

I use those VacuVin stoppers when I open a bottle and don't finish it. But the additional lifespan it adds onto a bottle can be measured in days, not weeks.

If I open a bottle and don't finish it, I make it my business to either drink it or use it in cooking over the next 3-5 days. Winemakers put a lot of effort into keeping their precious wine away from oxygen (save for the miniscule gaseous exchange that a cork will allow) and microbes etc. Sulphuric Acid (Sulphites) is used to prevent oxidisation. So, for the inexpensive wines that people are referring to in this thread, exposing the wine to air for days / weeks will cause a marked deterioration in quality.

The world certainly won't end if you use substandard wine in cooking. And it does depend on what you're willing to drink, as someone pointed out. But if you're trying to optimise a recipe, and make the best version of it that you can, using stale, vinegary or just disgusting wine will do nothing to enhance your creation. Quite the opposite.

Minder

Pour all bottles into a big pot and reduce........and reduce.......and reduce until you have a syrupy thick reduction.

Taste - if it is still crap, dump it (it should feel less like throwing out two bottles of red wine)

If it is okay - keep in the fridge and add to gravys or sauces that need red wine - just add less.

rediguana

Minder wrote:

Pour all bottles into a big pot and reduce........and reduce.......and reduce until you have a syrupy thick reduction.

Taste - if it is still crap, dump it (it should feel less like throwing out two bottles of red wine)

If it is okay - keep in the fridge and add to gravys or sauces that need red wine - just add less.

Stop - you're making me hungry.

cornbb

Chuck it into any red meat dish that is left stewing for a prolonged period, e.g. beef stew, stroganoff, spaghetti bolognaise etc.

Hagar

"Life is too short to drink bad wine" - French proverb.

Bin it and move on.

b0bbie

what you can do is pour it into and ice cube tray or bags and freeze it. Then every time you make a gravey you pop in 2 ice cubes(of wine) and it makes the gravy really nice.