Red Wine Cookery

It’s nice that it is braising season. My house always has a lot of wine hanging around. The fridge, the counters, the shelves are often cluttered with bottles. I try to keep the red consolidated in a 3L bottle to reduce the number of wine bottles hanging around, I go through white wine in cooking faster so don’t tend to need a big bottle. Entering the season we filled that and also had a 1.5L bottle full as well. It’s fine, seriously not a problem, braising is the only way I can cook meat with any sort of confidence and the wine will be put to good use. Braising in wine makes me feel very smart and incredibly practical, easily using leftover bits and bobs and producing something in its own sauce that can also freeze. Cub and I talk about pantry management almost as much as anything else, an unmanaged pantry can feel like an overwhelming mess. It’s also incredibly helpful to see your store of food complexly when it is snowing and you have no desire to leave the house.

a holiday pot roast that glamorously uses an entire bottle of wine

Which I guess is where I was when I decided to make this Alsatian red wine cake. I got Gabriel Kreuther’s new cookbook because in my imagination of the place the cuisine really suits the food available in Chicago right now. I think I was really just thinking about cabbage and pork, which is not incorrect but it is obviously incomplete. I don’t typically go for cookbooks from fancy restaurants, but my friend Sammie recently mentioned this Alsatian soup her boyfriend made for their holiday and I bent my own rule.

Kreuther describes Alsace as deeply green, dotted with vineyards and farms, sharing a border with both Germany and Switzerland. There is a lot of blending of influence in Alsace, in the food and the wine. He says, “Alsace has always been spiritually its own place, neither French nor German, nor Swiss, but a mixture of all. It has no official border. We like to say that, from a culinary standpoint, it combines the finesse and subtlety of French cuisine with the discipline of German and Swiss cultures…” In the wines there are grapes shared between France and Germany like Riesling and Gewurztraminer, though the approach to vinification is so different that one would be unlikely to confuse the two. Most of the grapes grown in Alsace are white wine grapes which make it most common to drink white wine with the pork-rich cuisine. Looking through the book, thinking about Sammie and Riley, I really wanted to make a rich long cooked soup in a crock sealed with a flour and water paste.

However, the cake was the only thing I had the ingredients on hand for and the motivation to make, very happy to relieve the kitchen of some of the red wine. I was a little nervous, like this unsulfured counter wine was going to make a disgusting cake. There are some rules about cooking with wine, like never use a wine to cook that you wouldn’t yourself drink when first open. And if the wine has gone undrinkable it’s not bad to use but you have to cook it enough to move away from its raw state. I wasn’t sure whether the oven would be enough of a transformation, I once made a mousey pan sauce that I will never forget. But the temptation to find a new thing was too great to resist so I went for it.

I’m not a great baker, as I’ve said before. I accidentally broke all of the eggs in the house making this which feels like the product of doing something unnatural to me. Worse though, is the project was started without enough butter. And like I suggested might happen to you it was snowing and not possible emotionally to cross the street for some butter. So I made butter from the leftover cream in the fridge, not something I always have on hand but when I do it is too much. Making butter was so amazing because unlike the cream it did not have to be thrown away after being pushed to the back of the fridge for a month or whatever. And you get buttermilk to make soda bread. Another pantry management tool.

Anyway, the cake is pretty good, fits my standards of the kind of cake worth making (good plain, better with cream AKA appropriate for breakfast, lunch or dinner). Gabriel Kreuther recommends making muscat mousse of all things to go with this! I will make that but will have to open a fresh bottle of wine for it. Muscat usually doesn’t live long in this house.

Traditional Red Wine Cake adapted from Gabriel Kreuther in The Spirit of Alsace: A Cookbook

230g very soft butter, plus extra for the pan

250g all purpose flour

1 tbsp cocoa powder

15g baking powder

½ tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp salt

90g chocolate, shaved or cut in small pieces

250g sugar

1 tsp vanilla

3 tempered eggs

1 ¼ cups “full bodied wine” (I used a rich Gamay/Pineau d’Aunis blend from the counter)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and butter and flour a 9 ½ inch springform pan or bundt tin. If you only have a 9 inch cake tin that’s fine, I used that, just know that this recipe makes more batter than you will use.

2. In a bowl mix the flour, cocoa, baking powder, nutmeg and salt. Then add the chocolate, mix well.

3. Using either a hand mixer or a stand mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until it’s well combined and fluffy. Kreuther suggests 8 minutes should do it.

4. Once combined mix in the eggs one at a time. Beat on high for 5 minutes once all the eggs are incorporated.

5. Take the bowl and add ⅓ of the wine, mixing using a rubber spatula. Then add ⅓ of the dry ingredients. Keep alternating until your batter is well mixed.

6. Add the batter to the prepared pan and bake for 45 to 50 minutes.

7. Let cool before turning out.

8. You can make an icing by combining 200g confectioner’s sugar with 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 3 tablespoons of water or wine. I didn’t do this.