The Best-Selling Wine On Amazon Isn't For Drinking

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While you'll find plenty of non-alcoholic wine for sale on Amazon, the top-seller still has its full booze content, but with a twist. Morita's organic sake has plenty of flavor and comes in a sizable 16.6-ounce bottle, but it's actually made for cooking, not drinking. What is sake? It's a simple white wine that's made from special varieties of rice.

This particular type of sake is known as ryorishu, cooking sake that brewers make to have a broad flavor profile to match and improve a wide number of dishes. The key difference between cooking and drinking sake is that ryorishu tends to have added salt and far less sweetness. While you may add red wine to bolognese for more acidity or white wine to fish for floral flavors and sweetness, Morita's product delivers umami. It also tends to be quite mild compared to other cooking alcohols, lacking the harsh, astringent qualities you may associate with strong alcohol.

At less than a dollar an ounce, this might be one of the best deals on Amazon. Morita has an almost 350-year history of brewing sake in some form, and while its drinkable products may be more famous, its cooking ingredients are no joke either. Morita's masterchef sake brewer has won gold medals for his products for eight years in a row at the Annual Japan Sake Awards. Made with nothing but organic rice, malted rice, and salt, Morita somehow manages to draw a lot of complexity out of this brew with very few ingredients.

Cooking with sake is quite similar to cooking with light, dry white wines. Ryorishu may have a great balance of flavors, but it's also quite delicate, so you'll want to focus on using it during food prep or with compatibly mild ingredients. Unlike white wine, sake maintains its flavor for up to a month after opening, so don't feel like you have to use all of it in one go.

While you don't have to replicate Japanese recipes exactly, you should always take inspiration for how ryorishu is traditionally used. It's great at removing any potent tastes and odors from meat or fish, which can be a huge boon if you work with gamey meat like goat or venison. While marinating, rather than cooking, foods with bourbon or red wine may make the flavors a bit overwhelming, sake is a great way to easily impart complexity. It's relatively low alcohol content combined with its soft, but well-rounded, flavor profile means it plays well with other ingredients without stealing the spotlight.

If you want its flavor to really shine through, try pairing it with mild seafood. Clams steamed in sake is a particularly popular dish because not only do the two ingredients pair beautifully together, but the steaming process helps reduce the alcohol and become part of a more flavorful stock. Ryorishu is also great at deglazing pans to make a quick and easy sauce when you've been sauteing hearty vegetables, like sweet peppers, zucchinis, and mushrooms.