Any more complicated is beyond our ordinary people's explanation. There is complicated chemical knowledge in it.
But in fact, whether it is beer or other alcoholic products, it mainly depends on the chef's skill. If you are not proficient in cooking, you can't make the best ingredients in the world.
Wine is one of the indispensable seasonings in the kitchen. Although I don't drink at all, I love cooking with wine. Many people have all kinds of doubts when cooking with wine:
What role does wine play in cooking?
How to use alcohol?
Can people who don't drink cook with wine?
How to determine the amount of wine when cooking?
Is it necessary to buy expensive wine for cooking?
How to remove the bitterness and astringency of beer and red wine?
How to preserve wine after opening it? ....
Next, I will answer these questions in detail with a long article of nearly 5000 words, so that everyone can have a preliminary understanding of the use of alcohol. It's a little long, but it's worth reading patiently.
In cooking, the main function of wine is to remove fishy smell, enhance flavor and coordinate flavor. But this description is really general. What is the method of removing fishy smell and enhancing fragrance? What's the difference between onion, ginger, garlic, anise cinnamon and geranium? How to match the ingredients? This article will give you a preliminary understanding of the use of wine.
The first part: the use and function of alcohol.
Alcohol has a pungent and irritating taste, and it is slightly medicinal, which will make the taste of food rough. Therefore, before cooking with wine, we must first make clear a premise: the purpose of cooking with wine is to make use of the aroma substances contained in wine and the special properties of alcohol (ethanol), not to get alcohol itself.
Since you don't want alcohol to remain in the dish and affect the taste, you must find a way to remove it. There are two main ways to go, one is volatilization, and the other is transformation.
The higher the temperature, the longer the heating time, and the easier it is for alcohol to evaporate. Therefore, in most cases, you can add wine when the temperature in the pot is the highest, which can quickly volatilize most of the alcohol and leave the aroma components in the wine. For example, when stewing meat, you can add wine after frying leeks, ginger and garlic; You can add wine after the braised fish is fried; Home cooking is to put the raw materials into a pot and stir them evenly before adding wine.
The word "in most cases" is just for the sake of rigor. In fact, you can pour the wine at the right time and at the highest temperature in the pot under any circumstances. In order to make the alcohol volatilize more completely, it can be added 2 ~ 3 times along the pot. If the dosage is large, you can cook the food before adding it to concentrate some water.
The only exception is a long slow stew. At this time, there is no need to lose volatile alcohol in advance (note that it is possible, not impossible), so that alcohol can react with other substances in the process of slow stewing to generate brand-new flavor molecules. This is conversion, and the most typical reaction is esterification of alcohol and acid. For example, if a large amount of yellow wine is added to braised pork, the wine will slowly combine with fatty acids (and other acids) in fat meat to form aromatic esters, which will eventually play a role in relieving boredom and enhancing fragrance.
However, no matter how it is volatilized and forwarded, it is impossible to remove alcohol 100%, and there will always be about 4%-49% residue. Considering that the amount of alcohol added to cooking is usually calculated by using a spoon, this residue is not a big problem for ordinary people. However, people with severe alcohol allergies may not be able to enjoy the rich taste of alcohol.
The aroma substances of alcohol come from all aspects of brewing. Raw materials laid the flavor foundation of wine, and microbial fermentation and subsequent ripening process also brought hundreds of flavor substances (aldosterone esters, etc.). ), so that the flavor of wine is more complex, full and balanced.
Different varieties, different fermentation and cellar storage time, different strains, different technologies and different brands of wine naturally have different flavors. There is no need to spend a lot of money to buy the best wine for cooking. Ordinary "better" wine is enough. A bottle of brewed wine, with fresh ingredients, no unnecessary addition, rich aroma and moderate price, is an excellent cooking wine.
Liquor mainly provides sweet taste, sour taste (oxidized organic acids) and umami taste (fermentation products such as succinic acid and glutamic acid) for dishes, and the sweet taste and sour taste of different liquors vary greatly. A small amount of sour taste has the function of "improving taste", but too much sour taste will affect seasoning. So if you are struggling with how much wine to add when cooking, one factor to consider is the balance of acidity.
Yellow rice wine and wine are both sour, so their maximum addition = the maximum acidity you can tolerate. Add a small amount to taste first, and if you think you can add more, then have some more (I have a high acceptance of sour taste and usually use a large amount). Some recipes will specifically indicate that when cooking steamed buns or scalding meat, do not add cooking wine, which will make the finished product taste sour. Whether to follow such instructions depends on your taste.
Cooking with wine is most afraid of bitterness/astringency/excessive odor. Excessive alcohol residue is one reason. As mentioned above, there will always be a certain proportion of alcohol residue in cooking, so when using spirits with high alcohol content, such as white wine, it is advisable to use less. When changing the cooking wine in the menu, we should also consider the alcohol content of different wines.
Another reason is to use bitter wine such as beer and red wine. At this time, we should not only pay attention to the dose, but also need certain treatment methods. (Part II below)
If white wine is used here, you can add 2 ~ 3 times the weight (paella)
Alcohol molecules have many unique properties. It has good water solubility and oil solubility, and is easy to permeate biological cell membrane. So it is like a light dancer, who can extract fragrance molecules and hold hands to shuttle between cells at will.
It can also dissolve odor molecules such as trimethylamine. These odor components are volatile, but sometimes they stay in the cell like nail houses. Alcohol likes to pull them out and dance, and unconsciously volatilizes with them, thus achieving the purpose of removing fishy smell.
According to this property of alcohol, we can add a little wine when curing meat to play the role of 1. Promote the dissolution of flavor molecules; 2. Promote aroma molecules to enter ingredients; 3. The function of removing differences and fishy smell. Don't use too much, it's too wasteful, as long as the surface of the ingredients can be stained with liquid. If the main purpose is to increase fragrance, stamp it; Open the lid for the purpose of removing fishy smell (white wine can also be served directly).
Part II: Selection of cooking wine.
These three wines have a common feature, that is, they are versatile. Whether it's cook the meat, seafood or vegetables, or even simply frying an egg or fried rice, you can combine them casually without scruple, which is surprisingly versatile.
If I had to choose three words, I would use mellow, fragrant and delicate fragrance to describe the difference. Relatively speaking, the personality of yellow rice wine is slightly stronger, and the personality of yellow rice wine is the weakest. When choosing food collocation, you can also imagine their fermentation raw materials in your mind and think about what flavor dishes you want to present.
Yellow rice wine is the most commonly used cooking wine in Chinese food, among which Shaoxing yellow rice wine is the most famous. I believe everyone should be familiar with the taste of yellow rice wine, so I won't try my best to find some illusory words to describe its taste. The older the rice wine, the more fragrant it becomes. No matter what kind of rice wine you choose (such as Huadiao wine and rice wine), you'd better buy aged rice wine. Three years old is the most basic requirement (I always ask myself to be the most basic requirement), and five years old is better. You can also prepare a small bottle for occasional use over eight years old.
When buying wine in the supermarket, I suggest you go to the wine section instead of the seasoning section. Most of the cooking wine in the seasoning area has a light fragrance, which is not suitable for people with goals and pursuits like us.
Liquor is another essential wine in our family. It is generally believed that white wine is suitable for seafood and white meat, but it is actually better than expected, and it is also suitable for all kinds of red meat and vegetables. Especially for some dishes with simple seasoning, adding a small amount of white wine can immediately improve the seasoning height.
Scrambled eggs with pork belly ... you can also add some white wine
If you are not used to cooking with white wine, I strongly suggest you buy a bottle and try it at home. It is best to choose dry white or semi-dry white with low sweetness. If the sweetness is too high, it will be less versatile.
Label the bottle directly, omitting the description of liquor characteristics.
Compared with liquor, cooking with rice wine may be more common in our kitchen. There are mainly China rice wine and Japanese sake, the difference is that China rice wine is fermented at high temperature, while Japanese rice wine is fermented at low temperature only in the center of rice grains, and the finished product has some fruity flavor.
Generally speaking, the acidity of yellow rice wine is not high, and its fragrance is soft, which makes its dosage larger than that of yellow rice wine or wine. Some fermented liquor with high sweetness and low alcohol content can be directly added to the raw material level.
Fried chicken breast with rice wine
Replacing some water/broth with beer in stews can bring unique flavor to dishes. The smell of beer is different from that of white wine and yellow wine, and its alcohol content is very low, so it is usually measured in cans or bottles.
Adding a little draft beer when making fermented cakes is helpful to fermentation and makes cakes more crisp and unique. (I haven't tried it yet)
The most unique thing about beer and the most annoying thing when cooking is its bitter taste. Once I marinated a pot of extremely bitter large intestine with beer, and the taste was really unforgettable.
There are about 30 bitter substances in beer. Although different people are sensitive to bitterness, it is still our goal to reduce the bitterness of beer as much as possible. The first thing is not to choose beer with obvious bitterness. Try not to use bitter beer for cooking, which may bring irreparable disaster and destroy the confidence of cooking.
Then it is to promote the hydrolysis of bitter substances in beer by heating for a long time. So beer is suitable for stewing, stewing and boiling, and it takes time. Such as beef stew, fish stew, duck stew and chicken stew. According to the stewing time, consider the addition amount.
The longer the heating time, the more complete the hydrolysis of bitter substances in beer (more than 2 hours). However, the bitterness will not completely disappear, and some bitter substances cannot be removed (about 5%).
If one day you accidentally stew a pot of bitter beer in the kitchen and see that there is no other way out except dumping the meat, you can add some alkali to save it, because the condition of dilute alkali can greatly promote the decomposition of bitter acid in beer.
The existence of polyphenols such as tannins makes the use of red wine less extensive than that of white wine. Red wine is mainly used to make something with strong flavor and strong seasoning (what is this word? ) red meat dishes. Of course, it is not absolute. Some people will stew chicken with red wine.
Like beer, to reduce the astringency of red wine dishes, the first thing is to choose red wine that is not astringent. Otherwise, it will easily affect the confidence of cooking.
Astringent taste is not a basic taste, but astringent substances (such as tannin, tea polyphenols and oxalic acid) dissolved in water condense into protein in the mouth (such as protein rich in proline, protein rich in histidine and α -amylase). A certain astringency makes the taste of red wine fuller and thicker. However, my tolerance for astringency can be described as extremely low. Eating a raisin will be carefully peeled off one by one, so the frequency of cooking with red wine is relatively low.
So how to remove the astringency of red wine as much as possible? Teacher Chuan's chemistry class invites you to look at the structure of tannins first:
▲ At first glance, tannins seem to be copied and pasted from a unit structure. Yes, it's like a brick floor. The more tannins, the stronger and more astringent the ability to precipitate protein.
If the "floor" is removed and turned into "bricks" (hydrolysis), the astringency of red wine can be improved to some extent. But "brick" itself is actually astringent, so it is not enough to just tear down the floor (at least for me).
After observation, we also found that tannin has many "-OH" (phenolic hydroxyl groups). This makes it have good water solubility (water: H-OH) and certain acidity (its other name is tannic acid). As mentioned earlier, astringent substances must be dissolved in water to play a role, so we can also "attack acid with acid" from the perspective of reducing the solubility of tannins in water, and add some acidic substances (such as tomatoes) to the solution, so as to reduce the solubility of tannins and not feel so astringent when eating.
It is often said in Jianghu that red wine can resist oxidation. That's true. Tannin is one of the excellent antioxidants.
The antioxidant effect of tannins also comes from phenolic hydroxyl groups. With so many "-OH", the antioxidant effect is excellent. But when cooking, don't expect the "red wine stewed beef" in the pot to have much antioxidant effect. It is more important to remove the astringency.
So the third way to remove astringency is to oxidize the tannins in the pot. We can choose to open the lid and stew, so that food can be exposed to oxygen to promote oxidation.
Liquor mainly plays the role of sterilization and auxiliary seasoning in cooking. Because of the high alcohol content, adding one or two spoonfuls of seasoning is enough. When the temperature in the pot is high, adding liquor is likely to blow up flames, so be sure to pay attention to safety. (The first time I burned it, it almost scared me to death ...)
Liquor also has a good odor removal effect. When you encounter some ingredients or spices with strong smell, you can soak them directly in white wine.
Some people will pickle salted eggs or other side dishes, and finally add a little white wine to the marinade to inhibit the growth of bacteria. I don't think this diluted wine is of any use.
Part III: Other issues
The highest alcohol tolerance of Saccharomyces cerevisiae is about 20%, and the tolerance of other microorganisms to alcohol is much lower than this. Therefore, if the alcohol content is above 20%, there is no need to worry about the safety of storage after opening, and it will be fine after a few years.
The alcohol content of common wines such as yellow rice wine and wine is usually around 10-20%. Under normal circumstances, don't worry, just put it in a cool and ventilated place. But after opening, they will become more and more sour with the action of air oxidation. So cooking with the same bottle of wine at different times may have different tastes. In order to slow down the oxidation and turn sour, many wine labels will recommend lying down to drink.
If you don't use it for a long time, you can put it in the refrigerator. Some sweet rice wine with low alcohol content also needs to be put in the refrigerator. As for beer ... drink it before you run out.
Whether it is Chinese food or western food, it is rare to see recipes flavored with more than two kinds of alcohol at a time. Wine is a very special condiment. Generally speaking, one kind of wine is enough to cook a dish.
But if two kinds of wine are used in a menu at the same time, will it bring 1+ 1≥2, or will it bring 1+ 1 < 2?