…How are whiskey barrels made?
Brought to you by the wondrous world of The Internet, this YouTube video offers a five minute behind-the-scenes look at how modern whiskey barrels are made. Next time you sip and savor that beautiful caramel-colored Kentucky booze, take a moment and raise your glass to those tireless machines crafting the perfect wooden barrels for your perfectly aged whiskey.
More often than not, we’ve opened a bottle of red to make a lush wine sauce but have instead found ourselves getting sauced on the wine. It happens. Red wine is an excellent dinner companion to many of our favorite dishes, like this veal ragu, and makes dark chocolate taste even better (is that possible?). But the red stuff is good for more than simply drinking. We’ve compiled a list of the many ways to consume red wine without having to drink it down. You could…
1. Turn Wine Into Vinegar: Might not be as useful as turning water into wine, but still good to know. Unless you go to a bougie fine foods store, the chances of you coming across an excellent red wine vinegar is slim to none. Luckily, you can turn the leftover wine from a bottle you like (on the rare occasion that there is any leftover) or an entire bottle that you love into a complex, mellow, and delicious vinegar to drizzle on salads etc. Instructions here.
2. Make Red Wine Ice Cubes: On that rare occasion where you can’t finish the last bit of wine in the bottle, pour it into an ice cube tray and freeze it. Then keep them on hand for whenever you’re feeling fancy and want to make a red wine pan sauce. We’d probably get extra thrifty and freeze some left over chopped herbs in the wine cubes for a frozen sauce ready to go. Here is a play by play. These boozy ice cubes are also perfect for plopping into your summertime sangria.
3. Shake It Like A Red Wine Salt Shaker: Salt is no longer just pepper’s counterpart. There is currently a serious revolution going on in the food world when it comes to good ol’ salt. There’s Maldon sea salt, truffle salt, pink Himalayan salt and so on and so forth. So why not make your own red wine salt and be the fanciest of pants. Plus it looks really pretty- especially on a hunk of Camembert. Recipe for Red Wine Sea Salt.
4. Boil Pasta In It: Seriously. This is a thing. You also end up with the most beautiful color of pasta in existence- but it does require quite a bit of wine. This process works best with spaghetti or similar noodles. Apparently it was introduced to the food scene by Italian chef Alessandro Giuntoli when he was at Osteria del Circo, in New York City. Thanks, Alessandro. Try this: Red Wine Spaghetti with Broccoli.
5. Use It To Poach Fruit: Fruit poached in red wine makes for an extremely classy yet oddly simple dessert. Peaches, apples, and pears are perfect for this dish because they are firm… and delicious. You can also use white wine with this recipe, but it just won’t look as good. One of our favorite versions.
6. Make It Into Butter: Butter tends to make everything better. Butter mixed with red wine tends to make everything awesome. Just reduce the wine, mix it in with some butter, shape that into a log and refrigerate. Simple as that. This compound butter is easy to make and it will make your steamy steak look sexy. Try this one with porcini mushrooms.
7. Enjoy It In Lollipop Form: Heather, the genius behind the blog Sprinkle Bakes, managed to create a recipe for red wine lollipops. That’s right, red wine in candy form. Finally, lollipops that are acceptable to be consumed by housewives everywhere.
8. Bake Up A Batch Of Red Wine Cupcakes: Literally two of our favorite things combined into one. Red wine has always gone well with chocolate, so red wine with chocolate cupcakes shouldn’t be too far of a stretch. If you’re a total wino – whip some red wine into the frosting. Boozy baking for the win. Make these ASAP.
9. Enjoy It In Gelato: Perfect for the summer when you want something cold and creamy, but also crave red wine. Make a batch for every kind of red you like. Who needs a wine cellar when you could have an entire freezer filled with red wine gelato? Give us a pint of this stuff and we declare it a very happy hour indeed.
10. Get Ready For This Jelly: No need to relegate the PB & J to your childhood lunch box. Red wine jelly is amazing because a.) you get transform the PB & J into an appropriate adult snack b.) because now you have a perfectly acceptable form of consuming red wine at lunch time. We personally think it would taste best when spread on some crusty French bread, topped with a layer of Brie, and grilled to perfection. Recipe here.
Here at Underground Eats HQ, we have an immense love for good food, good drinks, and pinning pictures of good food and good drinks. Follow us on Pinterest to keep up to date with our events, stories from our blog, and delicious things you could (and should) be consuming.
When 5pm rolls around, there’s nothing like a good cocktail. Here are some of our Happy Hour go-to’s that we enjoy slinging back. You can find all the recipes here.
Cheers!
3. Pisco Sour
4. Manhattan
5. Caipirinha
6. Bramble
HOW TO GET A JOB IN THE BEVERAGE INDUSTRY
Here’s a fun fact for you:
I’d like to take this Winetology Wednesday to share the details of a very exciting campaign launched by Mutineer Magazine. I was invited to be an Advisory Board Member, which I translate as a Drinks Career 101 Booze Prophet, spreading the good news of potential employment to all who are unemployed or underemployed. And if you are underemployed, you know what I mean—like the time I worked a very respectable full-time job at a play-publishing house in the Flatiron, raking in about $1,000 a month, living in Astoria, Queens. I used to fret over buying M&M’s, let alone $5 bottles of wine, and admittedly it was two-buck chuck that got me through it all.
And no one told me how to get myself into the wine industry. I had to start a clandestine operation bringing wine to the people, then spend 5 months of my adult life living with my mother-in-law, away from my wife, working harvest, just to kind of figure it all out.
It’s common knowledge that we tend to eat with our eyes first. Aesthetically unpleasing dishes rarely make it off the plate and into our mouths. Lucky for us, bevies of designers/art directors/artists/generally creative people have been fusing their talents with food to produce some insanely cool looking eats. Even luckier for us, everything on the following list is, in fact, edible. You can look at your pretty cake and eat it too.
Pantone x Food
The Pantone color matching system is part of every designer’s essential toolbox. Some creative designers have taking matching to a whole different level. Graphic designer and illustrator David Schwen puts together complementary food pairings such as eggs and bacon, instead of color pairings, in this project he did on Instagram. Emilie Guelpa, a French art director, created a series of Pantone tarts for the food magazine Fricote. She even managed to get them all coded to the exact pantone color.
Chocolate That is Literally Out of This World
The chocolate boutique inside the Righa Royal Hotel in Japan, L’éclat, has created incredibly beautiful chocolate replicas of the planets in our solar system. Venus tastes like lemon cream, Earth tastes like cacao, and just in case you were wondering, Uranus tastes of milk tea. If you purchase the entire set, they will apparently throw the sun in for free.
I Can’t Believe It Is Butter
Toast is definitely a blank canvas for a variety of spreads, but none match the creativity of this. The Japanese artist Shoko Mansunaga uses only edible elements and all natural food colorings to masterfully craft butter spreads into abstract designs on toast. That’s a breakfast definitely worth waking up for.
