Chef at Home

Methocel and the aroma of corked wine often go hand and
hand. This affinity to a terrible aroma and smell has led us to often overlook
it on the shelf of ingredients on hand. Thankfully a fine chain of events has
happened. First, we are putting the finishing touches on our book and therefore
are knee deep in everything. Second of all we still make time to read.
Unfortunately, we were preoccupied when this article on wine, written by Harold
McGee , first came out and had to wait until recently to read of using plastic
wrap to cure corked wine from the adventures of Cooking Issues and
Harold McGee.

The essential quote is here:

“Mr. Waterhouse said that the obnoxious, dank flavor of a “corked” wine,
which usually renders it unusable even in cooking, can be removed by pouring
the wine into a bowl with a sheet of plastic wrap.

“It’s kind of messy, but very effective in just a few minutes,” he said. The
culprit molecule in infected corks, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, is chemically
similar to polyethylene and sticks to the plastic.”

The idea
mulled in our head because we have certainly poured a number of corked bottles
down the drain.

As we said,
we are doing a lot of writing and cooking. The trigger was the article.
Something about the aroma of corked was bothering me. I was refining our
Methocel recipes. I came across that stupid corked aroma.

Ah ha!!!!!
Let’s see if the old corked aroma plastic wrap trick works with Methocel. I
took our base, wadded up some plastic wrap and mixed the two together. Slowly
it went away. The aroma, that obnoxious taste was no longer there. Methocel
with the addition of the cure is now high up on the list again.

Leave a Reply