For cooking or drinking?
For cooking I use cheap...Paramount I think is the brand currently in my cabinet....for drinking I like Dry Sack.
I sometimes like a cream sherry to drink....but mostly use dry for cooking.
Linda c

I did mean cooking (I'll try the Dry Sack), but I'm also interested in drinking it now that you said that! Cream sherry, that sounds interesting. I can't envision that. What's it like?

I use Taylor Dry Sherry for cooking. I tried cream sherry for drinking and didn't like it at all.

There is such a huge variety of sherry....that to say you didn't like cream sherry is like tasting a tangerine and saying you don't like fruit.
Try Harvey's Bristol cream for a nice cream sherry....and it's also wonderful in a crab bisque!
Linda C

Here is a link that might be useful: a little bit about sherry wine

Many thanks!

One review for Harvey's said: "...It's easily accessible, with a nose of brown sugar, hazelnut, and roasted almond, flavors of honey, butterscotch, morel mushroom, and a surprisingly smooth, long finish..." certainly has my interests piqued!

Here is a link that might be useful: Snooth's website

By all means, though, avoid any wine that's labeled 'cooking'. In most instances cooking wines are bad wine to begin with, to which they add a ton of salt, thereby rendering it undrinkable (and therefore not subject to the high tax rates that alcoholic beverages are subject to).

Basic advice: don't cook with any wine you don't find at least palatable. As it cooks, whatever flavors (good or bad) will concentrate. Now, if all you're doing is blopping an ounce in a cream soup, then it doesn't make sense to shell out big bucks for a wonderfully rich oloroso--but it would matter whether or not the sherry was on the dry side, like a fino, or a richer cream sherry. The link Linda provided is a good intro.

I don't like sherry. Period!

Agreed, never use any type of "cooking wine" You will find that the nutty rich medium sweet flavor of an Amontillado will compliment most dishes. I attach one here for your consideration. That symbol in front of the Sherry should be one half of a cup.

POULET PARISIENNE

3 Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breasts, cut into �" strips
6 Strips Bacon, cut into �" strips
3 Cloves Garlic, minced
8 ounces fresh White Mushrooms, sliced
1 Cup Frozen Pearl Onions
� Cup Amontillado Sherry
1 Can Cream of Chicken Soup
1 Cup Milk
Salt and Pepper

Saut� the Bacon until the fat is rendered and the Bacon is crisp. Remove from the pan. Season the Chicken Strips with Salt and Pepper to taste and saut� in the hot Bacon Fat until cooked. Remove Chicken to a plate and keep warm. Adding more Olive Oil as necessary, saut� the Mushrooms until cooked, add the Pearl Onions, stir to combine. Deglaze the pan with the Amontillado and stir up the brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the Bacon and Chicken back to the pan. In a small bowl, combine the Soup and Milk and stir until smooth. Add to the pan, stir to combine. Bring up to temperature and taste to correct seasonings. Server over Egg Noodles or Rice.

Steve

ditto what arley said.

I also ditto it. It's why I prefaced my question with "I don't drink sherry, so I've no clue where to start..."

(((big giggle)))

:)

I use whatever brand I can find unless it's too expensive. Problem is that I have a devil of a time finding sherry around my town. Evidently no one around here drinks the stuff. Neither my neighborhood package store or grocery store have it in stock and Wal-Mart doesn't have it. So that leaves me traipsing clear across town, from the southern boundary where I live all the way to the extreme north side thru a gazillion stop lights, to look for it at three other possible locations. Maybe they'll have a lone dusty bottle or, more likely, they won't have any at all. Last time, I settled for cream sherry. Since sherry is a must have for teriyaki sauce I reasoned that it really didn't matter if the wine was sweet.

And, of course, we can't have a discussion of sherry without a mention of it as a plot element in a famous short story:

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as best I could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

--'The Cask of Amontillado' by Edgar Allan Poe

Here is a link that might be useful: cask of amontillado

The image Poe creates in my mind of the jingling bells only at the end still gives me total shivers! EW!

"No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!"

Amontillado is good in she crab soup.....should we go searching for that cellar???

I tried Harvey's Bristol Cream at an outdoor tailgate-type brunch this past weekend. It seemed similar to (but also IMHO inferior to) my favorite Madiera, Blandy's Medium Dry "Rainwater". I brought a bottle home from a trip to the island of Madiera, and then found out that the local grocery store carries that exact one as one of the two Madieras they stock.

In addition to becoming my go-to aperitif, it also adds wonderful depth of flavor to various sauces and soups.

Since sherry is a must have for teriyaki sauce

Now that's a first for me, I make mine with mirin, soy sauce, brown sugar and maybe some ginger.

Madiera, port and sherry are all fortified wines. That is, a dosage of brandy is added to the fermenting wine to raise the alcohol content. That has the effect of arresting the fermentation as well as having some preservative effect as well. Depending on when the brandy is added, there is some residual sugar left in the wine. Thus madieras, ports and sherries all range from bone-dry to sickly sweet. Madiera has some unusual names to describe the sweetness: rainwater, sercial, malmsey.

As long as we are (okay, I am) indulging in oddball literary allusions, let's not forget that fun guy, Richard III, who killed off the little Princes in the Tower of London, and then got rid of his brother George, Earl of Clarence. What does this have to do with fortified wine? Tradition has it that he was dispatched by being drowned in a 'butt of Malmsey'.

What a way to go!

so how much is a "butt"? :)

I was going to suggest Madeira for the people who (like me) don't much like sherry. Madeira tastes the way sherry ought to but doesn't.

But Bob Cville, I'm really surprised that you think Harvey's Bristol Cream Sherry is similar to Blandy's Rainwater Madeira. I find the Bristol Cream much sweeter, and it's not something I'd drink. The Blandy's Rainwater, though, is a favorite of mine. I'm jealous that you can buy it in a grocery store. I live in PA, where the nanny state controls our alcohol, and had to special-order six bottles as a minimum, and some of them were spoiled.

I do use sherry in one dish, Penelope Casas's Spanish roast chicken, which calls for an oloroso (medium-dry) sherry. Dry Sack is okay for this.

I'm no help since I dislike so many alcohols and sherry is sure one of them. Sherry, ick, wine in general, ick, red worse than white. I can bear a few whites at times and most sparklings such as Asti. No brown liqors at all, shudder. Vodka, fine.. gin, ok. I like sweet things [but not sherry, heh] so liquors are generally ok. Lol.. picky, eh?

The butt did make me wonder too Robin so I looked it up. A butt aka pipe, is a unit of casks. Wine would be a butt equals two hogshead, so that would be 126 gallons approximately. They weren't so strict when casks were made individually and handmade. Beer butts were a bit bigger..grins... so you need 3 hogsheads to make a beer butt. Interesting.

So about a 4 foot radius pool that is 4 feet deep? That's a lot of liquor!

Arley: Josephine Tey would disagree with you about Richard III....I have 'The Daughter of Time' and I would be glad to send it to you. [a story: when we were at Hampton Court last summer, they were handing out cloaks for visitor 'dress-up'. I threw one on over my backpack, making me look like a hunch-back - I passed by a Henry VIII and said 'look, I'm Richard the III' and got a good laugh out of the group]

Here is a link that might be useful: 'The Daughter of Time'

Oh, Jessy, I've gone my whole life with Shakespeare's Richard as being the consummate bad guy; don't confuse me with alternative theories that he might not have done the innocent little guys in.

I love the bitter opening lines of the play, even when they're done by Richard Dreyfuss in 'The Goodbye Girl'--he's forced by the director to play Richard as a flamboyant, lisping gay--"Now ith the winter of our dithcontent / Made glorious thummer by this thun of York." I was looking for a YouTube clip of that scene, but apparently no one has posted it.

I love the Josephine Tey book, Jessy. Tudor propaganda!

Yeah Arley I was trying to figure out how to weave that in my post - 'Its winter and I'm discontented' but decided not to LOL, I haven't seen Goodbye Girl but I'll keep it in mind. FYI the theories aren't so alternate!

Drowned in beer, eh? I thought he was killed in battle - 'a horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse' (sorry, Shakespeare again...)

Here is a link that might be useful:

Hey CC I didn't see your post! LOL!

Yes, he died in the Battle of Bosworth Field. What he allegedly did to his brother, though, was to drown him in a cask of fortified wine (a 'butt of Malmsey').

Shakespeare was a scriptwriter, not a historian. (He has a clock chime in "Julius Caesar"--they weren't invented until several centuries later.) So if he used a bit of dramatic license to exaggerate some of the less desirable character traits of Richard, I understand.

'The Goodbye Girl' is typical Neil Simon, and it's worth putting up with Marsha Mason's (his then-wife) somewhat whiny performance just to see Dreyfuss hilariously overact the Shakespeare scene.

Jessy--I make teriyaki sauce with pineapple juice, brown sugar, a little soy sauce, sherry, garlic and ginger. Finely chopped green onions if I have them. That's what I came up with years ago when trying to copycat a dish that I had in a restaurant. Took me a while to stumble onto sherry as being the missing ingredient for the recipe I was trying to duplicate. May be that it's wrong but, what the heck, I like it!

I've never tasted mirin. Will look for it the next time I have to ferret out a bottle of sherry. I've noticed quite a few recipes that call for it. I'm not into wine much at all--slowly starting to use whites & reds for cooking. Don't care to drink it at all. Except for Asti Spumante or a white mixed w/ Sprite for a wine cooler.

I just went to Amazon and did the one click thing!!

cloudy_christine,

In my defense, I only had a small taste of the Harvey's Bristol Cream at the tailgate party, and it was very cold out. :-)
I do agree that the Harvey's Bristol Cream was sweeter than my usual Madiera, but I like the way you put it, They were trying to make something like a Madiera and failed.