How-To: Use Bad Wine, Cooking with Wine

Over the summer, we bought a few bottles of wine on discount. We opened the first bottle, and decided we didn’t like it, and the remainder have sat in our wine rack since. They weren’t horrible, or corked, but with all of the good wines out there, we couldn’t be bothered to finish them off. But we couldn’t just throw them away. So they have sat there, gathering dust, waiting on a time where they might come in handy. And with the holidays, they we finally came up with a use: cooking wine.

They say you shouldn’t cook with any wine you wouldn’t drink. That means that if you can skip using Cooking Wine from the grocery store, you probably should. But who wants to waste a good bottle of wine in cooking? The Riesling we had on hand was drinkable, but was always at the bottom of the list, so it made sense to use it for some holiday cooking, for dishes that needed a bit of added liquid and that could stand a bit of acidity. I did a bit of research, and came up with a couple of recipes: Chicken and Mushrooms in White Wine Sauce, and for Thanksgiving, I made Wine Butt Turkey.