Cooking and Grilling with Wine and Beer

April 27, 2021

Cooking, braising and grilling with booze – from white and red wine to different kinds of beer – makes food extra moist, tender and just plain taste better. Whether it’s a sauce for a delicate seafood dish, or a tenderizing marinade for grilling chicken and steak, home-chefs can round out their repertoires with alcohol add-ins and infusions.

Cooking: Which Wine with What?

Gina De Laurentiis’ citrusy Shrimp Scampi from the Food Network stays extra moist during cooking, thanks to juicy chopped tomatoes and a touch of dry white wine. This celebrity chef uses garlic, onion, olive oil and clam juice to help flavor the shrimp, and presents on a bed of couscous cooked in the pureed broth.

The Food Network calls this a date-night dinner: Goat Cheese-and-Mushroom-Stuffed Chicken Breasts. Mushrooms are blitzed in a food processor then sauteed in butter. The chicken breasts are pounded, smeared with goat cheese and the mushroom paste (duxelle) and rolled up, then sauteed in olive oil. The mushroom, butter and white wine combine to make a lip-smacking sauce, which will impress any dinner date!

Credit: Con Poulos

It doesn’t get any richer than this: pan-roasted Veal Chops with Cabernet Sauce. Food and Wine should know how to combine the two, right? And they do. This elegant veal dish is complex, using concentrated veal stock instead of beef stock and flour and is the creation of Chef Robert Wiedmaier for his Virginia restaurant Brabo. For 23 more recipes you can make with red wine, visit Food and Wine.

Braising with Beer

Bon Appetit says braising makes a hero out of weekend cooks – which is what some of us turn into with our demanding work weeks. That said, there are four basic rules for braising with beer. First you’ll need two pieces of essential equipment: a wooden turner with a broad flat end for scraping up all the flavorful bits of browned meat from the bottom of an enameled cast iron Dutch oven – which heats evenly. You’ll want to sear your meat, sauté the veggies like onions and celery in the drippings left behind, deglaze the pot and then braise the meat in the broth.

And for a recipe that turns a grocery store chuck roast into something deliciously flavorful, tender and the stuff of restaurant fare, here’s a recipe from Epicurious for Beer Braised Beef and Onions, to serve over egg noodles, and one from the Food Network for Beer-Braised Pulled Beef sandwiches.

Marinades for Grilling Weekends

Spruce Eats contends that to get the most out of a smoked brisket, you want to layer the flavor and a good marinade should have a healthy measure of acid. That can be anything from vinegar to wine to citrus juice. The acidic properties carry the flavor into the meat and breaks down tough fibers in the brisket making it more tender.

You’ll find marinades here made with red wine, red wine vinegar, Guinness, white and apple cider vinegar, and bourbon. Let the magic happen!

Cooking With Jack is a YouTube site and Jack will show you the “lazy man’s” barbeque marinade: Jack Daniels Marinade in a Bag, which comes in at least three flavors and costs $3 and change.

For more marinades to get you through a summer of grilling, check out Yummly’s collection of the “best marinades ever” for chicken, steak, and pork chops.

Get to Grilling in Southshore!

The grills are coming out in the master-planned community of Southshore, and soon the delicious smells will be wafting hither and yon as we get our grillin’ on! Southshore features new construction from some of Colorado’s top home from Taylor Morrison, Century Communities, Richmond American Homes and Toll Brothers. Come check out the brand new homes and experience Life at the Lake – stunning ranch and two-story designs priced from the $400s.