Hi all,

I recently came across a recipe that I wish to try for a lentil bolognese. I’m excited to try it as I’ve been trying to find a recipe I can use my red lentils with, but I’m curious about one thing both with this recipe, and recipes in general.

This recipe calls for the pan to be deglazed with red wine. This is something I’ve seen before in other recipes, though this recipe is the first of which I’m taking an interest in exploring. I’m personally fine with regular red wine, but my concern is that I have a friend who is incredibly cautious with alcohol, and says she’d refuse to eat things if they had alcoholic ingredients.

Putting aside my personal thoughts about that, I was curious if using a non-alcoholic wine would work just as well, or if the alcohol adds certain properties to the wine that make it function better as an ingredient or for deglazing. I’m mainly curious as I hope to invite friends over for dinner in the future, and want to make accommodations where possible, especially if it’s as easy as simply buying a slightly different ingredient.

Thanks in advance!

  • southsamurai
    17•1 month ago

    Eh, for a given value of “works”, it works fine.

    The non alcoholic wines suck though. I don’t even like most reds, and I’d still rather suck down boxed cabernet than drink the non alcoholic stuff. It just tastes meh at best.

    There’s a general rule that you don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink. While it isn’t some kind of rigorous standard where only the finest possible wines are worthy of cooking with, it does mean that if something is decent out of the container, it isn’t going to get better once it’s concentrated.

    So, if you want to try it, try a sip of the stuff straight. If it’s palatable, you’re good to go. There’s very few things that require the alcohol to give the desired results, it’s only mandatory when you’re extracting compounds out of food that can’t be brought out because they aren’t soluble in fat or water. Otherwise, by the time you dilute the alcohol even in something like bourbon across an entire dish, and cook some of the ethanol out, the amount left isn’t going to be detectable in the flavor it’s the other things in wines, liquors, and beers that we use them for.

    For deglazing, the alcohol itself does nothing they you’ll be able to taste at the end. Even the kind of “super tasters” that test things for corporations have trouble detecting the residual ethanol, when they can at all. And there aren’t any substances in a fond that aren’t water or fat soluble, so it isn’t useful that way.

    IMO, you’d be better off skipping the idea of adding grape juice at all. It just isn’t going to do anything worth mentioning. Any stock is going to be better than that. You’re adding more sugar, and that’s going to shift the taste more than deglazing with plain water would. Not necessarily in a bad way, particularly if you then reduce the liquid and let the sugars develop a little, but it’s still further away from the taste of red wine as a deglazing liquid than water is.

    Obviously, taste is subjective, so YMMV, but I’ve dicked around with substitutions over the years for recovering alcoholics, and religious folks. Nobody misses the actual wine unless the entire dish is wine centric in the first place (like beef bourguignon). Most people, if they do notice difference from a version that uses wine will think it’s just the variety of wine changing. If they’re never had the wine version in the first place, it won’t matter at all.