How to substitute wine in cooking?
Is this a religous belief issue? You can use a sparkling type of wine-non-alcoholic. You can get unfermented wine from homebrew stores-It will be very sweet as the yeast eats the sugar to make alcohol. If you have wine and wish to de-alcohol it. Simply-pour it in a large bowl and freeze it. Then scrape it out of the bowl and put small amounts in a paper towel lined salad spinner and spin it. The alcohol will not freeze well and fall through. Cooking alcohol actually reduces the alcohol content greatly. It would take a lot of cooking alcohol to create any ill effect on you. Brandy or Sherry will burn easily-use caution and take a lighter to it to burn the alcohol out.
That all depends on the amount needed in the cooking: a couple tablespoons, no big deal, you can sub out lemon juice, or water, depending on the dish or the final flavor profile of the finished product….. HOWEVER, if you’re making say, a Beef Burgundy, then you’re going to encounter a major problem……that dish requires an ENTIRE bottle of red wine……. I don’t recommend the bottled “essences” as they taste “chemical” if cooked and in the finished product….. Cooks Illustrated, my culinary bible, recommends Fre by Sutter Vineyards, it’s a dealcoholized wine, with an alcohol content of 0.9% total alcolol.
What all of these posters are not getting is the simple fact that wine is acidic .It is the acidic component the wine that acts as a solvent to both extract flavor and add a “tang” to your finished product Any non acidic substitutions won’t do nor will overly sweet low acid juices. So wine has a pH of about 3.5 and vinegar has a pH of about 2.
