Cooks who want
Substitutions give same flavors
to steer clear of alcohol in dishes can make flavorful substitutions.
What if you don’t drink alcoholic beverages, for whatever reason, and the ingredient list on the recipe for coq au vin includes 1⁄4 cup brandy and half a bottle of red wine? Or, a few minutes in, the risotto recipe says, “Toss in one glassful of dry white wine”? Or, to make the batter for an “authentic” fish and chips, you’ll require a bottle of beer?
Many people — including those who cook and eat — don’t drink, for reasons of health or religion or culture or temperance, or because they don’t want to feed the coq au vin sauce to the baby.
Just as I used to find many ingredients in nonWestern cooking not only out of my league but also out of my pantry, I suspect that many cooks new to this country find it difficult to use wine, beer, spirits or liqueurs to make many a Western preparation.
So, sadly, they just avoid cooking that way.
And there is the matter of caution. I know folks who eat vegan or vegetarian who blanch — to use a cooking term in a second meaning — if they discover that a spoon or spatula that prepared their food merely touched a bit of beef. I respect their blanchedness.
It’s a common assumption that the heat of cooking rids a dish of any alcohol introduced into it. That’s only partially true.
According to the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 75 percent of the original alcohol by volume of the liquid used will remain, for instance, in a flambeed dessert; 25 percent in a dish that has been simmered or braised for one hour; and 5 percent in the same dish after 21⁄2 hours. (Those percentages for braising are guaranteed if the pot has been covered while cooking, the norm.)
Those numbers won’t work for a lot of folks.
I’ve been preparing many recipes for months now substituting completely alcohol-free liquids for the same quantities of beer or wine, both red and white. (I don’t cook much with spirits or liqueurs, so I haven’t, for example, had to pull a shot of espresso to sub out for “2 teaspoons Kahlua.”)
Except for a wee worry, once in a while, to adjust a recipe allowing for higher levels of sweetness in the liquids that I’ve used, the substitutions have worked very well indeed. I counter the added sugar, for taste mostly, with a small amount of acidity (a squeeze of lemon juice or a splash of rice vinegar).
It helped to think about the role wine or beer played in the original recipe. It added flavor, of course, but also the very important crispness of fruity acidity or carbonation. So, I sought out fruit juices or other beverages that mimed those same qualities.
You will find online many charts about nonalcoholic liquid substitutes in cooking. I certainly haven’t tried them all, but I’ll tell you what has worked well for my cooking after trying many different sorts of juices or liquids:
Red wine: Cup for cup, I use R.W. Knudsen Just Tart Cherry juice. It’s a splendid proxy, and no person at my table for whom I’ve cooked a boeuf bourguignon or oxtail stew could guess that I didn’t use red wine.
White wine: In equal measure, I’ve had great luck with “light” (lower sugar level) apple juice or, in a pinch, regular apple juice. It’s pretty interesting how cold apple juice smells just like a Mosel riesling — or is it the other way around?
Beer: And get this: Add a teaspoon of malted milk powder to sparkling apple juice or low-sugar-level ginger ale, and you’ll swear you’re in beer country. Ergo, “beer” batter success, including the bubbles.
This recipe is from my mom, who in turn took it by hand from chef Claude Peyrot, proprietor of the restaurant Le Vivarois in Paris. She attended a cooking class of his while there in the 1980s. The original recipe calls for braising the meat in a red Burgundy, Gevrey-Chambertin. bsjpost@gmail.com