White Wine in Sauce?

[Mylegsbig]

Helllo there..im going to cook some rigatoni tonight, with chicken beast, olive oil, white wine, mushrooms, and sundried tomatoes.

Question is this, how do i incorporate the white wine?

What i was going to do is this

get some olive oil going, throw in some roughly chopped garlic. sautee it for a bit. then throw in the mushrooms. sautee those. then throw in the white wine and let that cook for a bit?


No idea how i should do this....... Also, is it okay to sautee the sundried tomatoes with the shrooms?

[Alix]

Why don't you do the chicken in a frying pan and deglaze it with the white wine? Then let it reduce a bit and toss in the other stuff. Just my thought. That is how I would do it.

Edit: Oops, missed the bit about the tomatoes. I would do the chicken and mushrooms (and onions and garlic), take them out of the pan, deglaze with the white wine and reduce a bit, then put everything in then.

[jennyema]

I would add the wine to the tomatoes so that the alcohol in the wine can do its magic on the tomatoes.

I would cook the chicken, then cook the onions and mushrooms in the same pan. Then I would degalze with a bit of wine, add the tomatoes and some more wine. Simmer until most of the wine is cooked off. Taste for seasoning. Finish with butter.

[Haggis]

If you wanted to do the sauce seperately it might be best to add the wine after sauteeing the garlic. This is for two reasons; a) it allows the alcohol to cook off, and b) it will allow the wine to reduce, concentrating the flavours.

Adding it after the mushrooms and tomatoes will impede both of the above mentioned things.

But Alix also suggests a good thing in creating the sauce in the same pan with the chicken that way you can incoporate any pan juices into the sauce, creating a richer more flavoursome sauce that will enhance the chicken's flavour.

This works best in a stainless steel frying pan as it allows proper fond (the little sticky brown bits of meat that are really desirable when making a sauce) to develop. Non-stick cookware does not really facilitate this.

Just in case you don't know what 'deglazing' is, this is a quick rundown. After you cook your chicken remove it from the pan and keep it warm. If there are alot of pan juices either reduce them by cooking off the excess liquid or pour the excess out. Add your wine (mindful of the flames) and garlic and scrape the frying pan (with a wooden/silicon utensil) to collect all the little bits of fond (this is the deglazing part). You can then continue on as normal.

[Mylegsbig]

thanks so much guys.

[jennyema]

But you really don't want the alcohol in the wine to cook off alone. You want it to cook off in combination with the other ingredients, as alcohol brings out flavor components in them that cannot be released by water or oil. Especially tomatoes. Cooking foods in wine releases those flavors while at the same time cooking off part of the alcohol (some will remain) and concentrating the wine flavor.

"Remember that some flavors dissolve in water and some in fat. Alcohol dissolves both fat and water and some things that don't dissolve in either fat or water. Patricia Wells, the famous Paris restaurant critic, once asked me why a little vodka makes such a difference in the taste of a tomato sauce. Vodka doesn't have much taste, and the sauce was boiled for 20 minutes after the vodka was added, so a lot of it boiled off. There must be a flavor component in tomatoes that dissolves in alcohol . Once the alcohol has dissolved the flavor and pulled it out into the sauce, it doesn't matter what happens to the alcohol ; it has done its job.

It doesn't take much alcohol to dissolve and to release flavors into a dish - the 2 tablespoons of dry Sherry in the shrimp bisque recipe might not seem like much, but it is enough to dissolve and to release all kinds of flavors. For a real treat (even if it is low-fat), try this shrimp bisque."

Food scientist Shirley O. Corriher is the author of "CookWise" (William Morrow, 1997).