Does the alcohol go from beer or wine when you cook with it?

Freiheit

Hi quite a simple question, if I roast with beer, or or add wine to a stir fry, does the alcohol go?. I do drink a little bit, but if I used half a pint bottle of beer in a roast, I wouldn't like to be consuming that over dinner
danku
K

Krusty_Clown

I believe alcohol evaporates at 78'C, so if you are simmering/roasting/stewing over that temperature for a while, you will eventually burn off the alcohol.

Tom Dunne

It evaporates. The boiling point of alcohol is lower than water, as far as I know.

the beer revolu

I always believed so but apparently, quite a bit can remain depending on how the dish is cooked. I'm lead to believe that some amount almost always remains.
There are other posters here more knowledgeable on this - it has come up before.

OP, I assume you're talking about putting it in gravy? For arguments sake let's say half of the alcohol remained (unlikely, to be that high, I'd say). You're hardly going to consume all the gravy, right? So divide the amount of alcohol by 2 to allow for what's evaporated off and divide again by the number of servings of gravy. You'd be left with a very small amount of alcohol per serving.
I reckon the above is a worst case scenario so unless dealing with an allergy or severe alcoholism triggered by tiny traces of alcohol, I wouldn't worry about it!

huskerdu

Agree with the above. Alcohol does evaporate at 78, but you need to leave the lid off, so it doesn't end up back in the gravy / stew.
Even the best distillation techniques do not remove all the alcohol. That's why "alcohol Free" wine or beer is actually about 0.5% proof.

hfallada

It evaporates. Even hard core muslims cook with wine as the alcohol burns off fairly easily.

the beer revolu

hfallada wrote: »

Even hard core muslims cook with wine as the alcohol burns off fairly easily.

I seriously doubt that.

duploelabs

Urban/kitchen myth that alcohol 'cooks off', yes it evaporates at 78 but due to other processes at work you don't get rid of all of it, even if you flambe

stevenmu

There's a great chart at http://homecooking.about.com/library/archive/blalcohol12.htm that shows how much alcohol remains for different cooking methods/times. It's quite surprising how much alcohol actually does remain for all but the longest cooking times.

syklops

Freiheit wrote: »

Hi quite a simple question, if I roast with beer, or or add wine to a stir fry, does the alcohol go?. I do drink a little bit, but if I used half a pint bottle of beer in a roast, I wouldn't like to be consuming that over dinner
danku
K

A half a pint of beer is about 90 calories. You'd have difficulty finding 90 calories in a standard roast with gravy, roast potatos etc etc.

Yes some of the alcohol boils off.

rubadub

The common misconception is that the 78C figure means it boils off easily & entirely. Pure ethanol will boil at 78C, a mixture of alcohol and water does not. If you hold it at 80C it will not be boiling and the alcohol does not just separate out and boil off on its own. If this was the case then distillation would be a lot easier.

Here is a graph showing what happens.



If you look to the first vertical red line on the left it is showing that when a solution of 15% alcohol is boiled the vapour coming off is 60%. If this 60% was collected and re distilled the vapours come off at 80%. We are sort of going in reverse. If you have wine at 15% and boil alcohol off then at the start it comes off at 60%, but now your liquid is no longer 15%. As the liquid % drops lower you will see the vapour % get lower and lower.

People distilling whiskey etc in countries where legal to do so will typically throw out a lot of alcohol, since it is not worthwhile collecting it beyond a certain point. They might brew to 12% and throw it out when 1 or 2%, this would depend on the drink they are making and several other factors.

syklops

People distilling whiskey etc in countries where legal to do so will typically throw out a lot of alcohol, since it is not worthwhile collecting it beyond a certain point. They might brew to 12% and throw it out when 1 or 2%, this would depend on the drink they are making and several other factors.

This is called the tops and the tails.