Do you know a non alcoholic alternative for white and red wine in cooking?
We normally use red and white wine because we are convinced that the alcohol evaporates entirely in the boiling of the sauce. However, sometimes we use wine vinegar mixed with a little lemon juice. This would be used with poultry or a strong fish such as mackerel or tuna. Also, we use Angostura (10 per cent) mixed with Worcestershire sauce (20 per cent) and vegetable stock (70 per cent) if the need is for some piquancy. Such as with roast beef. Finally, we sometimes “melt” an Indian chutney into the sauce and a good example is Sharwood’s Bengal Spice. It is very aromatic, a little sweet but also sharp. Good with light meats such as pork, turkey or veal, or with a vegetable meal.
No, and I’ll tell you why not. Red and white wine are generally used in cooking for the flavour, not for the alcohol. When used in marinades they are generally boiled to remove most of the relatively harsh alcohol flavour; when used in sauces, the heat of the sauce boils off all but a trace of the alcohol anyway. Sometimes the alcohol helps to tenderise tough cuts of meat. (Despite what people say above and despite the fact that the boiling point of pure alcohol is relatively low, the cooking process never evaporates all of it.) There are no substitutes for wine in recipes that call for wine; grape juice is too sickly and too sweet, while vinegar and verjuice are too sour. Water is not a substitute at all, because it’ll just make your food watery and tasteless. Most recipes that involve wine or alcohol (i.e. peppercorn sauces for steak, white wine sauces for fish, bolognese sauce for pasta) just won’t be as good if you use something else. There are plenty of delicious recipes that don’
