[Sca-cooks] champagne reduction

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Stefan li Rous:
>Adamantius gave us instructions on reducing champagne:

<snip>

>This sounds interesting, but about how long should we expect this to 
>take for say a bottle?
Approximately 5 minutes? 25? an hour?

Less than half an hour for room-temperature champagne, I'd say. I 
didn't clock it.

>Is there some advantage of using champagne? Or you just like that 
>particular taste?

I like it, there's probably some kind of cachet ("ooooh, 
champagne!"), and it seems to be a somewhat traditional addition to 
expensive commercial truffles, but I've never seen a recipe for the 
combination, so I made this up. The flavors appear to be unusually 
compatible.

>  The bubbles are all going to boil away. For instance, does starting 
>with a sweeter wine make a difference compared to a dry wine?

Sure. Think of the sweeter versus the dry wines, the lighter versus 
the heavier ones, and consider that in a reduction, everything in the 
wine that isn't water is what is in the reduction. So, for example, 
if I were to reduce a can of Budweiser, all that's left is a _small_ 
amount of horse urine. If I were reducing, say, a fine port, I'd end 
up with more syrup.

However, that said, chocolate truffles are probably an ideal use for 
cheap champagne, which may have less of what makes it good, or more 
of what makes it bad, than good champagne, but all of it is going to 
be in competition for your taste buds' attention with a lot of rather 
powerful chocolate. In the finished product you can taste the 
champagne fairly clearly. There may be people who can discern brand 
and vintage of champagne in a chocolate truffle, but even though I 
have quite a sensitive palate, I'm not one of them. ;-)

>  Reduced mead would probably be very sweet. Like Hippocras I wonder 
>if this is a good use for a so-so wine.

Yes. I was concerned to find, in searching for cheap champagne for 
this project (not wanting to use the bottles of Dom Perignon or Moet 
that vendors keep giving my lady wife, for cooking), that my usual 
Cheap Cooking Champagne Brands (like Freixenet, Codorniu, or Korbel) 
weren't cheap any more (Cordorniu wasn't there at all), and I 
couldn't bring myself to get the $3.99 Asti-Spumante, either. I think 
I settled on a medium-priced (actually quite cheap, but not 
rock-bottom) bottle of something called Saint-Hilaire. I wasn't 
familiar with it, but the guy behind the counter recommended it as a 
good product and a good buy, but didn't bat an eye when I said I was 
going to boil it down to a syrup for cooking... the small sip of the 
Saint-Hilaire that I tried when I opened the bottle didn't kill me; 
it was actually surprisingly good for an under-$10-a-bottle champagne.

As for a mead reduction, I can only say a sweet mead would be sweet; 
a dry one, less so. I like meads that are like dry champagne, but 
most people seem to prefer a sweet one, figuring there's not much 
point to mead that isn't sweet like honey. In response to this I can 
only shrug and ask, "Who likes dry grapes?" In other words, why is a 
direct, linear relationship written in stone?

Other than that, I really don't know what to say: if someone gives 
you a bottle of inexpensive champagne, you probably won't say, "Oh, 
good, now I can make some truffles!" On the other hand, if you are 
making them, there's probably not much point to using expensive 
champagne. Nobody's going to taste them and say, "Mmmmm, Moet-Chandon 
'75!"

Adamantius