Shaoxing wine

Vin de Shaoxing

What it is

Shaoxing has brewed rice wine in clay jars sealed with lotus leaf and mud for centuries, and the custom of nü'er hong is still told there — a jar buried when a daughter is born, opened at her wedding. What matters in a kitchen is the ageing: oxidised and amber, the aroma sits closer to a dry sherry than to sake.

In the kitchen

Buy the drinkable bottle, not the one labelled cooking wine — that one is salted so it can be sold as a foodstuff, and it takes the seasoning of the dish out of your hands. Splash it down the side of a hot wok so it flashes off.

Goes with

Ginger Spring onion Soy sauce Pork belly Chicken Star anise Brown crab

Same species

Akazu Arborio rice Rice paper (bánh tráng) Basmati rice Black glutinous rice Black rice

Also used with

Pekin duck Dried shrimp roe Sea cucumber Huamei Dried oyster Duck tongue

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