I have access to a lot of Asian and specifically Chinese grocery products where I live (Austin). However, a thing that's never been made clear to me by anything I've read or watched is whether the commonly-used "cooking wines" are really intended to be obtained as "cooking wine".
In Western cooking, "cooking wine" is generally considered unusable; if I'm making a European wine sauce I'll of course use "real" wine, like wine that I'd be willing to drink.
Is that the case for Chinese "cooking wine"? Should I look for drinkable wine, or are recipes designed around the "cooking" versions that generally have a lot of added salt?
Best Answer
That depends on the wine.
Generic "rice wine" usually means something like sake. Chinese recipes often use Shaoxing wine, which is a drinkable dark/sweet rice wine. If it's a Chinese recipe, and it calls for just "rice wine", you may need to guess at the flavor expected. If the sauce should dark & sweet, then Shaoxing, if it's supposed to be light or acidic, sake. Chinese, Japanese and Korean folks also cook with Plum Wine, which should be called for specifically.
All of these wines are drinking wines, and you'd no more substitute the cooking variety than you would with wine made from grapes. As with grape wine, "cooking" rice wines are really just poor quality wine that's been salted to make it undrinkable.
Except there is one cooking wine that you should use specifically: Mirin. Mirin is a sugary sake made for cooking, and recipes that call for it expect that sweetness. If you have to substitute regular sake, you'll need to add sugar to the recipe.