Wine plays an important role in my family’s holiday celebrations, mostly because we can’t be bothered to drink it at any other time. My parents have a modest wine cellar — ok, a plastic wine organization cube from Target — overflowing with the spoils of dinner parties and gifts from people who clearly don’t know them very well. When the family reunites for Christmas or New Year’s dinner, my mother, who hates wine, says, “Why don’t we open a bottle of wine?” We delegate the selection to my father, the family sommelier. He chooses a bottle at random. Then we all drink, pronouncing it “okay,” “gross,” or “rubbing alcohol-like.”
That is all I have to say about drinking wine.
Cooking wine is another story.
The secret to finding a good wine to cook with is not to think about it all that much. If you can actually tell the difference between dishes that use expensive wine and those that use cheap wine, your cooking is too bland. The New York Times backs me up on this.
My favorite cooking wine is mirin (Japanese rice wine). It’s sweeter than mijiu, the Chinese version, and can be purchased for about $6 per huge plastic bottle. You can also pay more for swankier glass-bottled versions, but you’ll be wasting your money
Do not let the word “Japanese” constrain your use of this delicious product. Just about anything is better marinated in mirin; its sweetness makes it especially good for shellfish, as you will see if you follow the recipe below.
If you don’t like everything as sweet as I do, any leftover white wine will serve for seafood, and any red wine for red meat. (I generally don’t marinate chicken in wine.) The only wine bad enough to ruin a dish is the kind actually marketed as cooking wine, since it must contain enough salt to put off even the most desperate teenager.
Mirin-ade for Shrimp
For about 1/2 lb. shrimp.
- 1/4 cup mirin
- 1/8 teaspoon salt
- pinch pepper
- optional: pinch cumin
- optional: 1/2 teaspoon garlic
- optional: pinch ginger powder
1. Stir all ingredients together in bowl.
2. Coat shrimp, cover, and let sit at least 1/2 an hour.
3. Drain off marinade before cooking shrimp, unless you also want to use it as a sauce.
