I’m a foodie more than ever now that I am learning about wine. The two combined make for more interesting conversation and deeper contemplation than the wine alone. Sometimes wine even goes into the food rather than at its side. I recently tried a dry sparkling wine which was not to my taste. To my surprise, though, it was a really good addition to my bread dough.
No, really, this wine had a yeasty quality which I didn’t even notice until the yeast in the wine brought out the yeasty-ness of the bread dough. Of course. Yeast is used in the secondary fermentation processes associated with sparkling wines. The two complemented each other in a way that is hard to describe: you just have to make a regular bread dough, then try again with a dry sparkling wine. Then you’ll know what I mean.
My motivation was this: the acid in wine was meant to react with the milk, souring it to make bubbles, and thus, give more rise to the bread. This is especially critical when I adapt a loaf by adding ground flax seed or oats, which make a loaf heavier than it would be using just white flour. You can use vinegar, of course, or even apple juice or something like that. I’ve used red wine, and the chemical effect was the same, but not the complementary quality. Instead of tasting and smelling as though it was meant to be there, the red wine just smelled and tasted strange.
A natural conclusion would be that a yeasty wine would go really nicely with a slice or two of fresh bread, and would likely cut through the fatiness of thickly-spread butter. You may even want to consider separating your wine rack according to wines you drink and wines you cook with, overlapping in the middle to include bottles which you drink and cook with, or drink from while cooking. I wouldn’t advise the last option lest something other than the steak gets seared.
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