Using Cooking Wine

Cooking wine is sort of a holdover from prohibition. People who grew up thinking Alcohol is Evil didn't want to have any in their homes. But they wanted those delicious flavors in cooking. Cooking wine seemed to be a reasonable compromise.

In essence, cooking wine is really bad wine that then has lots of salt added to it. This makes it pretty much undrinkable by anyone looking to 'get drunk'. However, being a combination of bad wine and lots of salt, it also is pretty much nasty for adding into food too! If you wouldn't want to put something in your mouth in the first place, do you really want to put it into a dish that you heat - meaning its (bad) flavors are now really concentrated down?

Using cooking wine is, simply put, a way to harm a perfectly good recipe. There's really no reason at all to use cooking wine instead of regular wine. If you're worried about youngsters getting into your wine, put it into a high cabinet. Or put it into a locked cabinet! There are probably MANY other much nastier substances in your house that should be locked up if you're worried about this sort of thing. But deliberately cooking with a nasty substance can literally ruin your recipes. You rarely save any money by buying cooking wine, either.

If you have a recipe that calls for wine or cooking wine, use a real wine from your local wine shop. All of the wines used in cooking should be found there quite easily. If your recipe calls for cooking wine and you go with normal wine, be sure to taste your recipe after adding the wine to see if you should also add in some salt, too. Some common types of cooking wine are:

Sherry

Sherry is a fortified (brandy-added) wine from the south of Spain. Because it's fortified, you can keep a bottle around for months after you open it, as long as you keep it sealed and cool. It usually has a rich, sweet flavor.

Marsala

Marsala comes from Sicily, which is the island at the toe of Italy's boot. It's a wine fortified with brandy and comes in red and white varieties, tho the red is the most popular type. It's a rich, sweet flavor and is used very much in Italian cooking, especially Chicken Marsala .

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Cooking With Honey-Useful Facts And Tips

Cooking with honey gives you a never-ending list of possibilities and recipes due to the many practical functions honey could serve. Here I list you seven:

Honey

1) enhances browning and crisp -- great for glazing roasted and baked foods to promote surface browning.

2) is a flavour enhancer -- an always welcomed natural sweetener for hot teas and cold beverages.

3) provides texture and feel -- an excellent addition in pastries and cakes making.

4) prolongs shelf-life -- a natural preservative for pickles and sauces.

5) retains moisture -- an essential ingredient for providing the moisture in rich cakes and prolonging the moisture retention.

6) is binding due to its viscosity -- a brilliant ingredient that aids shaping of desserts such as pastries, puddings, and cakes.

7) adds colour -- contributes a delightful golden hue to sauces, dressings, jellies, and frozen desserts.

And there are several tips on cooking with honey which I believe you will find very useful:

1. As a general guide, when using honey recipes, use less of honey because it is almost twice as sweet as sugar. Replace one cup of sugar for half a cup of honey, and because honey is hygroscopic (meaning it attracts water) , reduce the amount of liquid in the recipe by 1/4 cup for each cup of honey added.

2. Give longer time for beating and more vigorous beating000007D0 compared to sugar recipes, and when baking with honey.

3. Add 1/2 teaspoon baking soda for each cup of honey used. This will neutralize honey's acidity and help the food rise.

4. Reduce the oven temperature by 25 degrees Fahrenheit. Honey batter becomes crisp and browns faster than sugar batter.

5. When using honey in jams, jellies, or candies, increase the cooking temperature just a bit to allow the extra liquid to evaporate.

6. The floral variety of the honey should be considered when cooking with honey since honey will impart some of its flavour.

Source: http://www.benefits-of-honey.com/cooking-with-honey.html

R. Tan is the owner of the website benefits-of-honey.com which is a rich honey resource community specially built for all the honey lovers and fans in this world. She has packed this website with a wide range of quality contents on honey based on her knowledge and experience with honey, so as to promote its invaluable benefits which she believes could bring many positive spin-offs in everyone's daily life.

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