Tips and Tricks: How to Keep White Wine for Cooking
I don’t know about you, but I generally don’t like to use wine that I enjoy drinking for cooking. Being a poor, under-aged college student, wine isn’t always the easiest to come by and if I do want to get a bottle of wine for cooking, it’ll generally be one of the cheapest wines available. Unfortunately, since I am unwilling to drink this wine, it usually goes bad before I have time to use the entire opened bottle. Hey, I have somewhat high standards for a college student!
After brainstorming and stumbling around websites, I learned that wine has a high enough water content to freeze. I decided “wine cubes” were the answer and got some cheap ice cube trays and a very, very cheap bottle of chardonnay ($3.40, I kid you not!). A quarter cup of wine filled two cubes for the trays I got, but check yours just in case. I filled two trays with about a half of a cup left over. Although it would have been easy to just drink it, I saved the rest for crock pot chicken later in the week.
I let it freeze over night, and today broke them out to store in a plastic bag. I simply don’t have room in my freezer for two extra ice cube trays that need to be carefully placed, but if you do, just leave ’em in there! Instead, I cut squares of plastic wrap and wrapped two cubes inside each square, then threw them in a freezer safe gallon size bag.
So easy! Now I have three cups of wine in the freezer divided into nice quarter cup portions to use any time I need. And best of all, they’ll keep for months. No wasted wine here!
What a great idea!
Brilliant!