13

White Wine for Cooking Should Always Be Dry, Right?

You are to cook something that requires white wine, for instance a really good risotto, Hollandaise sauce or steamed mussels. But which wine should you choose? “The one that you drink while making it” is often a good, and indeed common, answer. Although enjoyable, the problem with this recommendation is that it doesn’t stand up to scientific criteria. The universal rule seems to be that white wine used for cooking should be dry. The classic encyclopedia on food and cooking, Larousse Gastronomique, also supports this:

There are certain general rules on the use of wine in cooking. Whatever its color, the wine must be clean and without harsh, aggressive taste…. White wines used for cooking are usually dry and rather acid…

The 21 kg, five-volume Modernist Cuisine, which otherwise explains the science behind every thinkable and unthinkable aspect of cooking, simply states in its recipes: “White wine (dry).” With no further comment or discussion on the nature of the wine. These are quite authoritative sources on knowledge about food and cooking, and they are usually credible sources when it comes to explaining why, rather than just stating that. But, in this case, it seems that they just accept a claim about cooking without asking whether it is actually correct or generalizable, and no clear distinctions seem to be made across various dishes. Such claims immediately stir our curiosity. When someone says “do so” or “don’t do that,” our reflex reaction as curious researchers of kitchen activities is to investigate, and perhaps try the exact opposite just to see what happens. Dry wine for cooking, is that so? In all recipes, always? How come?

Making a quick internet, food book, and recipe search reveals that this claim is widespread; although, all sources aren’t that orthodox or strict. The dryness of a white wine is directly related to its level of sweetness, the amount of sugar in the final product. A dry wine is a wine with low degree of sweetness. In this sense, the ultimate dry drink would be plain water because it contains no sugars at all. Dryness in wine is therefore not about its acidity. The amount of residual sugar in the wine is a quantitative measure of how dry or sweet a white wine is; however, wines with the same amount of sugar per liter might appear quite different depending on other characteristics, such as acidity, mouthfeel, oakiness, and so forth.

Although our printed, high-credibility sources do not say anything about the why-issue, the almighty literature has some suggestions. Some would advise against sweet wines because they will add sweetness to the dish; others claim that higher sugar content in the wine might lead to caramelization reactions in the pan. Heating sugar by itself produces caramel-like flavors, while heating sugar in the presence of proteins (from meat, milk, flour etc.) will result in Maillard reactions to give nutty, roasted, or caramel-like flavors such as those of bread crust, browned meat, fudge, and so forth. Both these reactions also give brown color. These hints are valuable for us in our experiment as we can monitor possible appearance of these characteristics by our sensory evaluation. However, these explanations are not actual explanations but simply claims themselves in need of justification and elaboration. On the other hand, it is quite common in many savory dishes to add some sweetness for the sake of flavor. Many chefs add a pinch of sugar to their risotto, tomato sauce, or stew to balance and fine tune the flavor. Why use a dry wine and then add sugar? Could we simply have uses for a slightly sweeter wine?

Other claims about white wine in cooking:

–  The wine should have a relatively high level of acidity.

–  The wine should not have an oaked character as it can impart unwanted bitterness.

–  The flavor profile of the wine should resemble the flavor profile of the food.

–  One should use the same wine in the food as in the glass. ×

A key live source to knowledge on white wines in cooking is Norwegian Guro Helgesdotter Rognså who wrote her doctorate on emulsion sauces, Hollandaise sauce in particular. Hollandaise is a classic French sauce based on butter, egg yolk, and white wine or lemon juice. Working with top chefs during her doctoral work, she collected experience on professionals’ choice of white wine for cooking this sauce. She confirms that there is considerable variation and disagreement among chefs on the choice of wine. In her own experiments they tested fairly sweet wines without noticing much of a detectable difference in flavor. This, she says, could be due to the complexity of the dish masking the rather small difference in wine sweetness, an effect called the “mixture suppression effect.” Also, the high fat content of the sauce may mask minor flavor differences. The claim that oaked wines would impart bitterness did not come clearly through in her studies, but oaked wines gave a certain spicy note to the sauce.

The stage was set for a comparative investigation in one of our informal food workshops. As usual, to avoid mixing the cards by trying to test several things at a time, we chose to isolate one single claim to investigate: “white wine used in cooking should be dry.” We chose a basic risotto as the experimental frame because this can be made as a homogeneous dish without too complex flavor, allowing for ease of comparison in a blind tasting. We picked two wines that were as similar as possible—except for the sugar content, one dry and one semi-dry. To see if it makes a difference whether the dish is cooked with sugar or if a possible difference is solely due to sweetness in taste, we added a third parallel. One risotto made with dry wine, one with semi-dry, and a third where we used the trick of the chefs: prepare the risotto with dry wine and add a pinch of sugar in the finishing step. The size of this pinch was calculated so that we added sugar equal to the difference between the two wines. Hence, the third parallel should contain the same amount of sugar as the one prepared with the semi-dry wine.

As usual, our instruments of analysis were the senses of our workshop participants applied in a blind tasting. We chose to evaluate the three risottos according to taste, that which is perceived in your mouth (and not nose, such as aroma): saltiness, sweetness, bitterness, acidity, and mouthfeel. Finally, the participants were asked to rate them according to liking/preference. Although sugar/sweetness is the main issue, other taste sensations may also be affected by the level of sweetness, as we described in detail in another chapter. The three quite delicious risottos were ranked from “most” to “least” for the various taste characteristics.

The main experience from the tasting was that it was quite difficult to judge the differences between the three parallels. In more than one characteristic, the differences were so marginal that we weren’t certain whether we really could taste the difference or if we had to guess, and we really had to concentrate very hard to notice differences. When differences are small, results become closer to random, or at the worst they might end up skewed when the number of participants is low. Indeed, an important result was that there was not a clear difference in sweetness between the risottos made from the dry and semi-dry wines. And this was in a context where the participants were really concentrated on looking (tasting) for differences, not a dinner or restaurant table with convivial conversation and other distractions to take focus away from small variations in a dish. This corresponds well with the findings by Guro Rognså, who stated that other characteristics of the wine might be just as important as how dry it is.

One result that many in the panel agreed upon was that adding sugar to the dry wine risotto, equal to the difference between the dry and semi-dry wine, did give a risotto that was experienced as somewhat sweeter than the other two. A possible explanation for this is that we used table sugar, sucrose, whereas most of the sugar from the grapes is glucose. Sucrose is comparably sweeter tasting than glucose, so even though the risotto did not have more sugar per gram than the one made with the semi-dry wine, our added sugar might have given higher sweetness due to the different nature of the sugars. However, the differences were still perceived as small across the three samples.

This experiment is one of those cases where no clear result, or an ambiguous result, might still tell us something of value. After this experience, the very clear statements from literature and expert advice about using dry wines for cooking are at least not strengthened. But the experiment has spurred us to consider more of the wine’s characteristics than only its sugar level before choosing. After all, wine also contributes with acidity, bitterness and, in the case of red wines, tannins/astringency. In her PhD thesis, Guro Rongså also states that the type of food plays a key role when selecting the wine type. It would be strong to say that we have falsified the claim of using dry wines for cooking and that it should thus be deported to the land of myths. So, if we want to produce concrete advice for choosing white wine for cooking, further experimentation is clearly required. Anyone interested in embarking on a doctoral degree on white wine in cooking, perhaps?

Basic risotto

Ingredients

½ dl olive oil

75 g shallots, chopped

300 g Arborio/risotto rice

2 cloves garlic, crushed

2 dl white wine

Ca. 8 dl hot chicken or veal stock

Salt and black pepper

60 g grated Parmesan cheese

30 g butter

Procedure

Fry the shallots gently in the oil until soft but not brown. Add the rice and continue on medium heat for about 3 minutes while stirring. Add the garlic and let fry for a short while, without it turning brown. Add the wine and stir while heating until the wine is absorbed by the rice. Add the hot stock little by little while constantly stirring, allowing the rice to absorb the liquid before adding more, until the rice has reached the desired texture (al dente). This might take ca. 20 minutes. If you run out of stock before the rice has reached the desired texture, continue by adding boiling water and stirring the same way.

Remove the pan from the heat, mix in the butter and parmesan cheese. Add salt and pepper to taste.