Marsala wine is made with local white grape varietals including Grillo, Inzolia, Catarratto, and Damaschino although it can also be blended with red grapes. As with all fortified wine, Marsala is supplemented with a distilled spirit — in this case, it's usually brandy.
Despite its popularity as a dry and semi-dry cooking wine, a high-quality Marsala can also be an excellent sweet wine. It's increasingly common to see it served as an aperitif to whet the appetite or as a delicious digestif to sip after a meal. Since there is such a range of Marsala styles, the flavors can range from brown sugar and nuts to more complex and pronounced notes of honey, dried fruit, and licorice.
This high ABV is just one reason why Marsala is most often served in small portions. That said, it's worth noting that some wines going by the Marsala moniker especially the cheaper versions available at local grocery stores are not real Marsala wines.
Read the wine label to ensure the bottle you buy has the proper designation and actually comes from Sicily. As with all winemaking , the fermenting begins once the grapes are harvested and crushed. Depending on whether the winemaker wants a sweet or dry Marsala wine, the fermentation process will be disrupted for fortifying i. If the wine is fortified before fermentation is complete, there will be more residual sugar, thus producing a sweeter wine. If the winemaker adds the spirits after fermentation has finished, the result will be a drier wine with lower sugar content.
Due to the fortifying process, Marsala wine lasts months after opening. Although it won't go bad if you keep it in the cupboard longer than six months after opening, it will start to lose its flavor and fragrance. It's best to store Marsala in a cool, dry place much like you would olive oil. As noted, Marsala comes in a variety of sweetness levels and is classified by its color and age.
Here's a breakdown of what this all means. When it comes to Marsala wine, color is key. Here's a rundown of the various hues of this Italian favorite along with some tasting notes. The final classification for Marsala wine is age.
While younger wines are almost always used for cooking, older bottles are ideal for sipping before or after a meal. Home Marsala Wine: Dry vs.
Marsala Wine: Dry vs. By Darcy Lenz August 18, Pin FB More. Eating healthy should still be delicious. In most chicken Marsala dishes, it's also customary to lightly dredge the cutlets in flour before browning them. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this: The flour can help act subtly to thicken the final pan sauce, but it can also slightly dull the sauce's flavor. The flour also speeds browning by providing a drier and therefore more browning-prone surface than the chicken itself, but it's the flour that's browning, not the chicken.
That's a mixed blessing. Faster browning is good, since chicken cutlets are thin and cook through rapidly—the quicker you can brown the exterior and get them out of the pan, the better. But since the flour is browning more than the chicken itself, your fond won't be as flavorful as it would be if it was just the plain chicken protein making contact with the pan. That being said, I still prefer the flour step.
If the cutlet is dredged lightly, the flour doesn't affect the sauce's flavor enough to sacrifice the insurance it gives against overcooking, especially with a lean protein like chicken breast, which can quickly take on the consistency of cardboard. On top of that, the flour coating changes the texture of the cutlets themselves, giving them a silkier exterior, not unlike the effect of velveting meat in Chinese cooking.
To me, that silky exterior is an essential quality of chicken Marsala. The good news is that right after browning the chicken and removing it from the pan, it's time to brown the mushrooms, which offers ample opportunity to build up a fond. Mushrooms, it's important to remember, do not brown quickly: They're loaded with moisture and have to dump it first before any real browning can begin.
Being patient and waiting until all that mushroom liquid has cooked off and the slices turn a deeper chestnut color is essential to getting a good, rich flavor in the final dish. Otherwise it'll taste like steamed mushrooms, and that's not a good thing. As soon as the mushrooms are browned, I add minced shallots and cook them just until translucent.
Now it's time to deglaze the pan. Deglazing means adding liquid to stop the browning and scraping up the fond to enrich the liquid with flavor. But before we do that, we want to make sure our liquid component is just right. In the case of chicken Marsala, the liquid is made up of chicken stock and Marsala wine. If you've ever eaten a good pan sauce in a restaurant, you've probably noticed that it has a viscosity similar to heavy cream.
Bad versions, meanwhile, are thin and watery. The secret is gelatin. See, good restaurants make stock from scratch , and when they do, they make sure it's loaded with plenty of natural gelatin from the chicken's connective tissues. As the pan sauce reduces, that gelatin concentrates, thickening the liquids to a perfect, glaze-like consistency.
Unfortunately, store-bought stock, which home cooks often rely on, has no gelatin.
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