Food - Drink
Why You Should Reconsider Buying Cooking Wine At The Grocery Store
By MEGGAN ROBINSON
When cooking with wine, you shouldn't buy a bottle that is so expensive that it's a waste of money not to drink it straight, but it should still be good enough to enhance your meal. Different wines are also suited for different dishes — you wouldn't want to use a Moscato in a recipe that calls for dry wine — but there’s one type of wine you should never use.
So-called "cooking wine" might seem like a good option if you’re not familiar with wine, but Food Network says that this ingredient is not something you'd want to cook with, much less sample on its own. Cooking wine is chock-full of preservatives and very high amounts of sodium that will ruin the balance of flavors in your dish.
Home Cook World notes that most cooking wine contains 8% of its weight in salt, meaning a 750-mL bottle would have about 22,000 mg of sodium. That number goes way over the recommended daily amount of salt, and your food deserves a wine that is drinkable on its own, not a salty imposter that isn't really anything like true wine.