Ovens to Betsy

An unfamiliar concept

January 27, 2008 on 8:58 pm | By ovens2betsy | In Food Musings | 2 Comments

A while back a fellow chef posted a question to our personal chef message board: “What do you do with leftover wine?” Hmmm… “leftover wine”… It’s a concept that escaped me at the time.

🙂

 

At Christmas we received a bottle of White Zinfindel. This normally is not a wine we enjoy — we’re more partial to dry reds — but we decided to give it a go. As expected, it was far too sweet, but worse, it lacked any character. However, I just couldn’t bring myself to pour it down the sink. There MUST be some way to salvage it.

With New Year’s now upon us — which brought a renewed commitment to eating healthier — I picked up some salmon and kale. I love both sweet and savory preparations for salmon, so I thought the White Zinfindel might make for an interesting sauce. I first seared the salmon on one side and finished it off in the oven. I then sautéed some shallots in the same skillet and deglazed with about a cup and a half of the wine. I let that reduce to about half a cup, then swirled in some Moutarde de Violette (a violet mustard I picked up in Paris) and a bit of butter. I was quite pleased with myself!