Any difference in cooking wine and regular wine?!
Any difference in cooking wine and regular wine?
Answers: Cooking wine is a very poor quality wine that is almost so poor you should make vinegar from it. The company adds tons of salt to it and blends many different wines to the batch being produced.
I have been cooking professionally for 25 years and was always taught "if you can't or won't drink it then don't cook with it". I live by that rule every day I cook a dish using any type of alcoholic beverage including wine, beer, and hard alcohols. Quality and drinkability definatly make a difference in the finished dish. Take Marsala for instance, you can buy a big 1 gallon bottle from a food service store like United Grocers for about $10.00 that tastes just ok. Or, spend $12 to 15 on 2 bottles of good quality Marsala from Italy and make your dish out of this world. Cooking wine has had salt added to it. I know of no other difference. Cooking wine isn't something you'd WANT to drink (salty), and you wouldn't want to use an expensive bottle of regular wine for cooking. Other than that, it's all the same.
I never buy cooking wine, I always use drinking wine, there's more of a variety and you can find exactly the flavor you're looking for. Yes. Cooking wine is a very poor product -- a mass-produced wine not fit for drinking. They add salt to it so it's no longer a beverage but is now an ingredient. Don't buy it!
Use the same or similar wine in cooking that you would serve with the meal. Julia Child made it plain in her Coq au Vin recipe -- don't cook with a wine you wouldn't be proud to serve to your guests!
The only expception to this rule is Chinese Rice Wine, used in Chinese sauces, and this is a fine product for its purpose, but not otherwise drinkable. I don't know the differences, but I have heard never to use "cooking wine", use real wine. Don't cook with anything you would not drink.
Look at the label of the cooking wine. SALT!!!
Use a cheap box of wine for cooking. You meals will taste better.