Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Spatchcock Braised in Red Wine

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

Just a little something I cooked up for dinner. I used American smoked bacon in this dish, which was purchased from Ingredients, a wonderful little deli in the Kenmore Village Shopping Centre (which also sells my favourite Spanish Jamon Iberico!). The spatchcock was from Clancy James, one of my favourite meat retailers, in Taringa.

When cooking with red wine, be sure to use a wine that you would deem as good enough to drink. Most people open a bottle of wine, find that's not quite nice to drink, then use it to cook with instead. Either that, or they think that spending the extra few dollars on a good wine for cooking is a waste of money. Truth be told, I too have been guilty of these more than once in the past.

However, costs aside, cooking does indeed condense the flavours of wines, and if you use wines that have unpleasant flavours (to you), you'll concentrate the 'bad' taste to end up with a pretty nasty final dish. So give it a try, don't scrimp on those extra few bucks when it comes to choosing wines for cooking.

Technorati tags: , , , , , , , , ,

3 comments:

Pussycat said...

Coincidentally, Julia Moskin did a story on what makes a good cooking wine in The New York Times about a month back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/dining/
21cook.html?ex=1177819200&en=6b3165aa3c
902317&ei=5070

(you’ll need a free sub to read it or go to http://www.bugmenot.com/ to skip this)

The article in turn lead to one of those protracted debates that eGullet seems to specialise in:

http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?s=
02237c895dec992ffe5f469297741a64&showtopic
=100554&st=0

(Probably wise to have a drink handy if you intend plough through it.. :)

B&B said...

Gee, thanks! That is a load of info I dug up there at egullet.org.

Can't seem to get through to the NY times article though.. the passwords wouldn't work.. oh well, I'm gonna keep trying anyway.

Cool blog you have there btw!

Pussycat said...

Thanks B&B, we're building up GC slowly (it's sort of like our extended fridge note about eating in Canberra).

Regarding the NYT, subscription is free and while you don't get all the content you do get most of the food/restaurant stuff including Mark Bittman's The Minamalist column, so it might be worthwhile joining up.

PS. Looking forward to more despatches from the north.