Although you might not normally think of drinking a wine with dessert (unless of course, we’re talking about dessert wines), fruit and wine make a natural pairing.  They play off each other perfectly: the fruit really brings out the sweet, fruity flavors in the wine, and the wine helps bring out the tartness, acidity, and more subtle tastes (like spice flavors) of the fruit.

This recipe involves marinating fruit in a simple syrup made with sugar and wine instead of water.  Since it needs time in the fridge to chill and let the flavors meld and work together, this is a great make-ahead dish.  If you’re outside grilling or hosting a summer party, this is perfect, because you can just pull it out of the fridge when you’re ready for it.  And it’s adaptable; easy to change to suit whatever fruits you have an abundance of.  Try it tonight!

Here’s what to do:

1.  Make a simple syrup.  You might want to vary the sweetness depending on the fruit you’re working with.  A good starting point is 1 and 1/2 cups wine to 1/2 cup sugar.  Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring until all the sugar is dissolved.  Let it boil for 2 minutes, then let cool.

Note: You can use red or white wine here.  White wine is better for a mixed fruit dessert, because it doesn’t overwhelm.  But try red wine with fruits with stronger flavors, like strawberries, plums, or pears.  Even peaches are delicious in red wine!  Experiment and play to your tastes.

2.  Cut your fruit into bite-sizes pieces.  You can use anything you like here, and you use a variety of fruits for different flavors, colors and textures, or just one for a simple but elegant dessert.  Some kinds of fruit that work particularly well are: watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries, peaches, grapes, and oranges.

3.  Toss the fruit in the simple syrup.  Use enough to coat generously but not so much that there’s a pool of liquid in the bottom of the bowl.

4.  Cover the bowl tightly (or  put in a lidded container) to prevent oxidation.  Let the mixture chill for a few hours so that the flavors can meld.

5.  Remove the dessert from the fridge.  For a great touch, toss with fruit-friendly herbs (mint is great, basil or lemon verbena would be divine too), and serve.  Enjoy outside on the porch or patio.  Be thankful for summer, fruit, and wine.

Now, maybe you’ve thought that making your own vinegars sounds fun and cost-effective.  Maybe you have a gallon or so of vinegar ingredients doing their thing in your pantry.  Maybe you’ve started to wonder: what am I going to do with all this vinegar?  Well, here are just a few ways you can use homemade vinegar in the kitchen:

• Vinaigrette: In a few tablespoons of vinegar, dissolve salt (and, if you like, a little dijon mustard and/or minced garlic or shallots).  Slowly stream in olive oil to taste, only a few drops at a time at first, whisking all the while.  This is a tasty, healthy salad or veggie dressing.
• A splash of vinegar in a sauce or glaze wakes up the flavors without adding salt or fat.
• Vinegar is a great dieting tool–sprinkle it on foods to add taste at only 2 calories per tablespoon. Vinegar also dulls the appetite and gets rid of cravings for sweets.
• Use vinegar as a marinade.  Vinegar, since it’s acidic, breaks down tissue, making your meats super tender.  Splash some vinegar (and herbs, if you’d like) into a bag with your meat and let it hang out for a few hours or overnight.
• If you get stains from fruit on your hands, remove by wiping with vinegar.
• Love poached eggs but have a hard time keeping them from falling apart while cooking?  Add a splash of vinegar to a barely simmering pot–vinegar helps the whites coagulate.  Crack eggs into small individual bowls, and gently tip into the water one by one.  After 3 minutes or so, you’ll have perfect poached eggs.
• Use wine vinegar to deglaze a pan.  After browning meat in oil or butter, remove all but a tablespoon of fat.  Crank up the heat and pour in a splash of vinegar.  Boil and scrape away at the bottom of the pan to loosen all those tasty brown bits.  Add stock or even water, and finish with a pat of butter for a delicious and easy pan sauce.
• Fish and chips!  Enough said.
• Use in place of lemon.  (Both are intended to add acid to a dish.)  Add 1/4 teaspoon vinegar for a tablespoon of lemon juice.
• Sprinkle wine vinegar and olive oil over a sub sandwich for a flavorful, healthy alternative to mayo and mustard.
• Have white coffee cups stained from coffee or tea?  Wipe out with white vinegar to remove the stains.
• Stinky kitchen?  Boil a quarter cup of white wine vinegar with a little water.  Let the smell circulate around the kitchen and it will remove smoky, fishy, or any other nasty smells.
• Clean vegetables with 2 tablespoons of vinegar in a gallon of water.
• Add a dash of vinegar to a canned soup or sauce to wake up the flavors and make them taste fresh.

There are dozens of uses for vinegars in your kitchen and the rest of your home. These are just a start….share your favorites in the comments!

Flavored vinegars have really become popular in the last few years.  They are simply bottled vinegars that fresh herbs and spices have been allowed to steep in.  The vinegar, given time, really draws out the taste of the flavorings, and takes on a whole new level of flavor and complexity.  Flavored vinegars can be used in place of regular vinegar to any recipe, adding a special zip of flavor.  For example, instead of a plain vinaigrette on your salad, why not try something like an orange-basil white wine vinaigrette or a red wine raspberry vinaigrette?  Flavored vinegars are good, but flavored vinegars made using homemade wine vinegars are incredibly delicious.

The process is a little time consuming, but simple.  Think of making flavored vinegars as similar to canning.  The more important (and boring) step is ensuring that the containers you’re using are totally free of bacteria before you close them up.  Even the tiniest bit will ruin the batch, so you have to be very careful.  You’ll want to disinfect your containers right before you bottle your vinegars, to minimize the chance they’ll be exposed to something nasty.  First, wash all the containers you’re going to use, along with their lids (good options are canning jars, screw-capped bottles, and corked bottles with brand-new corks).  Next, immerse them in boiling water for at least 10 minutes.  While this is happening, bring your vinegar to a boil in a separate pot.

At this point, you should have already laid out the herbs and spices you want to use.  You can use basically any kind of herb or spice in vinegar, so get creative!  Herbs can be used whole, which makes for a pretty presentation.  Garlic makes a great addition to almost any vinegar–just peel the cloves and drop them in whole.  To get you started, here are some herbs and spices that make great vinegars:

tarragon

basil

chives

cilantro

rosemary

lemon or orange zest (cut into long strips for the best presentation)

dill

whole peppercorns

chili peppers

You can make a vinegar with just one addition, such as spicy chili vinegar, or a combination, such as rosemary garlic vinegar. If you’ve made both red and white wine vinegars, you have a choice on which to use.  Use white wine vinegar for subtler flavors like citrus and the delicate herbs like basil, and red wine vinegar for the heartier flavors like peppercorns and rosemary.  Play to your tastes and get creative!  Add the herbs and spices you want to use to the bottle first, then, using a funnel, carefully pour in the hot vinegar.  Seal the container (for an extra fancy touch, pour melted wax over the top), and let the vinegars steep in a cool dark place for at least three weeks to let the vinegar really take on the flavors of the herbs.

These vinegars are so fun and personal (and tasty) that they make incredible gifts.  Store-bought gourmet flavored vinegars be very costly.  But they are simple to make at home, and very inexpensive.  If you’re giving vinegars as presents, leave herbs whole for the best effect, and put a pretty tag on the bottle with the name of the vinegar.  One bottle of your homemade flavored vinegar makes a great gift for a dinner party host.  A small basket of a few choice vinegars makes an incredible Christmas gift.  But consider yourself warned–homemade flavored wine vinegars are so delicious that you might not want to give them away!

1.  Buy a ceramic or glass crock.  At least a one gallon size is best–this seems excessive, but you’ll want enough room to add lots of extra wine, and you don’t want to be limited in how much vinegar you can produce–small bottles of your homemade vinegar make great gifts!  Make sure your crock has a spigot to make bottling your vinegar easy.

2.  Obtain a vinegar starter, commonly referred to as a mother.  A mother is a combination of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria.  It uses oxygen from the air to turn alcohol into acetic acid.  A mother is a weird cloudy mass that sits at the bottom of your vinegar crock.  Although it looks unappetizing, it won’t hurt you, and you can easily strain it out of your vinegar with a coffee filter if you want to.  You can get a vinegar mother from a beer and wine-making supply store, from the internet, or from a vinegar-making friend.

3.  Put the vinegar in the crock, then add diluted white wine in the ratio of 2 parts wine to 1 part water.  The less you add, the more quickly it will turn to vinegar.  2 cups wine to 1 cup water is a good start.  The better the wine is, the better the vinegar will be, because good wines have a variety of complex flavors, which will translate to an interesting, full-flavored vinegar.

4.  The best thing about vinegar making is that you can use those half-empty bottles that have been taking up space in your fridge.  Since the alcohol in wine starts to turn into acetic acid when you open it, wine a little past its prime simply has a jump-start on becoming vinegar!  Because of this, vinegar-making is very cost-effective.

5.  Cover the top of your crock with a cheesecloth and attach it firmly with a rubber band.  This keeps out insects, but lets in the oxygen that makes the process happen.

6.  Add small doses of white wine once a week or so.  (Or whenever you have a half-empty bottle sitting around.)

7.  Wait at least 12 weeks, then taste-test.  If it smells like vinegar and tastes like vinegar, it’s ready!  Bottle it using a funnel.  Any vinegar left in the crock (be careful to leave the mother, too), you can continue to use to make more vinegar.  Just keep adding more white wine!  Use your vinegar to make sauces and vinaigrettes, and a million other tasty dishes.

You’ll find that homemade vinegar has a much different taste than store-bought–it’s fuller and richer, and doesn’t have as much harsh bite to it.  You can use it in endless ways in the kitchen, and it makes great gifts.  Check our next post for a description of how to take your homemade vinegar by making pretty and delicious flavored vinegars.

16th century wine press

I love to cook with wine.  But I admit it, sometimes, pouring a cup or a bottle of perfectly good wine into the cooking pot can seem a little sacrilegious.  Is using your good wine in your food worth it?

In a word, yes.  Wine imparts a richness and depth of flavor that is simply hard to come by any other way.  When making sauces, soups, or stews, many recipes call for you to deglaze the pan.  This takes place usually after some meat has been browned (cooked at high heat in some kind of fat until the skin is crispy).  The meat is removed, most of the fat is poured off, and the heat is turned up high.  A generous splash of wine is added, and as it boils, the cook swirls and scrapes with a wooden spoon or spatula, getting the little browned bits unstuck from the bottom of the pan and incorporating them into the dish.  Tons flavor resides in those little brown bits, and deglazing the pan incorporates their taste into the finished dish.  You can use stock or even water for deglazing, but wine adds a rich, unctuous flavor that can’t be replicated by anything else.

Wine isn’t just used for deglazing.  A splash of wine added to a reducing sauce gives it that same deep, rich flavor that we desire when we’re cooking and eating.  The next time you make tomato sauce, try adding a splash of wine (usually half a cup to a full cup) before letting the sauce simmer and reduce.  You’ll be amazed at the richness and flavor it adds.

Wine is also great for marinating meat.  A red wine marinade is a natural partner for beef, as the tannins in the red wine interact favorably with the meat’s fats.  The acid in wine really breaks down the connective tissue in meat.  This means that marinating a tougher cut of meat in wine can really tenderize it, as well as adding flavor to it.  One of my favorite cuts to use this technique with is flank steak.  Flank steak is a thin, tougher cut, but it packs a lot of flavor.  Best of all, it’s inexpensive, usually comes in pieces big enough to feed an army, and sliced thinly, the leftovers make great steak sandwiches.  Try seasoning a flank steak with salt and pepper, and throwing it in a large Ziploc bag with a few garlic cloves, a splash of olive oil, and enough wine to thoroughly soak it.  Let it hang out in the refrigerator for several hours, turning every once in a while to make sure the wine is evenly distributed.  Then simply grill and serve.  This steak is great paired with the same wine used in the marinade.

I don’t set much store by those chefs that advocate using only high-quality wine for cooking.  I think that the flavors are so diluted by the flavors added by the food, and changed by the chemical processes that occur during cooking, that spending a lot of money on wine that you’re just going to dump in the pot is kind of a waste.  You do want to use decent wine that you would drink—avoid those cooking wines sold in the grocery stores—they are highly acidic, and have tons of preservatives, which simply don’t taste good.  They are often also highly salty, which can alter the flavor of the food you’re cooking so much that you ruin the taste.

Cooking is a great way to use a good wine that’s been sitting around for a day or two.  Its optimal drinking window has passed, but that doesn’t meant that all those great flavors should go to waste.  Don’t use a wine that tastes vinegary or rancid, or your food will taste that way too.  But something a little past its prime should be fine.

Cooking with wine isn’t just for the experts.  There are lots of simple ways to incorporate it into your dishes.  And when you’ll do, you’ll find that wine adds so many wonderful, subtle flavors that you’ll never want your kitchen to be without it again.

It’s not like sherry has always been denied a place in the bar.  In the 70s, twice as much was exported as is today.  It comes from the far south of Spain, near a town called Jerez.  Here extreme summer heat meets cool Atlantic breezes, creating the perfect sherry-making environment.  The soils in the region are chalky and preserve moisture well.  There are three grapes grown here for Sherry-making: Palomino, Pedro Ximénez, and Moscatel.  Approximately 90% of the grapes grown for sherry are Palomino grapes, which produce a very neutral, crisp wine, a blank canvas upon which production paints sherry’s distinctive flavors.

In production, the wine is put in barrels (called “butts” in sherry-making).  A large amount of space is left in the top of each butt, giving yeasts the opportunity to collect, grow, and add their flavors to the final product.  After fermentation, brandy is added.  This step was originally introduced in the 1400s, so that the sherry wine wouldn’t rot during the long, hot voyage to the New World.  Now, it’s the essential step in the process, and what makes sherry a “fortified wine.”

Sherries come in a variety of styles.  Some are dry and light, some heavy and sweet.  The two main types are Finos, which are very dry with a light body, and Olorosos, which still fall on the drier side but are much heavier and more flavorful.  Also available are Manzanilla, Palo Cortado, Sweet Sherry, Cream Sherry, Pedro Ximénez, and Amontillado, (yes, the Amontillado made famous by Edgar Allen Poe).

Sherry is currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity.  Many wine experts think it’s under-appreciated.  Sherries pair well with cheeses and desserts, or as aperitifs.  They are usually served in copitas, small, tulip-shaped glasses.  This shape is ideal because of the sherry’s high alcohol content–the small opening of the glass limits the alcohol fumes that reach the nose, allowing other flavors to come through (and the small size keeps you from drinking too much).  If you’re willing to give sherry a try with fresh taste buds, pick one up today!  If you don’t like it, you can always use it for cooking–many soups and sauces, especially tomato-based ones, call on sherry to add richness and depth of flavor.

Homemade red wine vinegar is very different from the store-bought stuff.  Even expensive store-bought vinegars are often rushed through fermentation, making them highly acidic and lacking in flavor.  Homemade vinegar, by contrast, has a milder, more rounded taste that is great for deglazing a pan, incorporating into a sauce, and of course, for making a great vinaigrette.

You’ll need a starter, commonly referred to as a mother.  A vinegar mother is composed of cellulose and acetic acid bacteria.  It

A vinegar mother

feeds on a fermenting alcoholic liquid (in this case, red wine), and uses oxygen from the air to turn alcohol into acetic acid.  A mother is a strange-looking, cloudy-whitish substance (see picture), but it can’t hurt you or the vinegar, and it’s easy to strain it out from your product with a coffee filter.

You can make your own mother by leaving out vinegar, uncovered and ideally in a shallow dish, to catch the naturally-occurring bacteria from the air and allow it to cultivate.  But this can be a tough and time-consuming process; it’s easy to start cultivating the wrong bacteria and watch your vinegar attempts rot again and again.  If you want to make it easy on yourself, you can either get a mother from a vinegar-making friend, or you can order one from a beer-and-wine-making supplier.

Besides your mother, you’ll need an earthenware crock with a plastic or wooden spigot.  Bigger is better here–a crock that holds at least a gallon will free you up to make a large quantity of vinegar.  If you think you might want to bottle your vinegar for friends–it makes a great gift–buy a bigger one.

Vinegar-making doesn’t require a specific recipe, but here’s a basic one to get your started: Add two parts red wine to one part vinegar to your crock, and toss in the mother.  Cover the crock with cheesecloth (to keep out insects) and attach it with a rubber band.  Then simply add a couple cups of red wine to the crock twice a week for the next two weeks.  Let the crock sit for about 10 weeks.  When it tastes and smells like vinegar, it’s ready.

The best wine vinegars are made from good wines.  Typically, fruitier, younger wines result in tastier vinegars.  After your vinegar is ready, you can let it age in the bottle for a deeper, richer flavor.  You can even add herbs or spices to make flavored vinegars.

Stop throwing away your leftover wine!  Put it to good use, and enjoy a tasty, homemade red wine vinegar for many meals to come.

Recipe for Hot Mulled Wine:

1 bottle of red wine

3 cinnamon sticks

4 whole cloves

4 whole allspice

2 whole star anise

2/3 cup sugar

Peel from an orange and/or lemon

1/2 cup dark rum or brandy (optional)

Directions:

Combine all the ingredients except the rum or brandy.  Bring to a low simmer and cook for 5-10 minutes.  Do not boil.  Remove from heat and add the rum or brandy.  Strain, serve, and garnish with a cinnamon stick or orange wedge.  Enjoy your mulled wine!

 As the world moves to a greener frame of mind, just recycle wine.  I’ve been in many discussions with clients and friends about the topic of an unfinished bottle.  In my opinion, you have 3 options: drink it, preserve it or recycle it.  For the sake of argument, let’s remove the drink it option and you are left with preserve the wine or recycle it. 

 Use the search word “wine preservation” in Google and you’ll spend the next 24 hours looking at the vast array of wine preservation equipment.  You can spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on dispensing and preservation.  The battle is against oxygen and the oxidation of the wine.  PEK Preservation equipment uses argon gas to displace the oxygen.  The Keeper line of equipment uses nitrogen.  It’s an entirely separate debate on which is better.  You can even consider the inexpensive Vintner System which will allow you to preserve and pour wines by the glass.  These are just a few examples of available wine preservation equipment.  The least expensive option? Cork the bottle tightly and place it in the back of the fridge.  It will keep for about 2 days.  Which ever wine preservation method you choose, it’s likely the wine will lose some of the qualities you noticed when it was opened.

 Personally, I prefer to recycle wine rather then preserve.  Recycle may not be the proper term, but an open bottle of red wine can turn into great sangria for the next party.  The fruit, sugar and higher alcohol content will bring a new life to the wine.  Another idea is to make red wine vinaigrette or other salad dressing.  Use it to deglaze a pan to add richer flavor to a sauce.  A few weeks ago, I used 1/3 a bottle of a great Zinfandel in a slow cooked beef short rib recipe.  Delicious!  You could simply marinade a good steak to add a new dimension of flavor. 

 So whether you choose to drink, preserve or recycle, there are many options available for that lonely, leftover or unfinished bottle of wine.