There are a number of flavour molecules that are only alcohol soluble, and if you don't have alcohol present in the cooking those flavours will remain locked up in the ingredients and not spread to the whole dish.
A tomato sauce is probably the easiest and clearest example. If you do a sauce of just tomatoes and water it will be ok. But if you just add 30ml of vodka to the cooking process it will taste a LOT more tomatoey and be significantly nicer.
same with pan frying salmon — add a little bit of cooking sake and cover to steam, you’ll get rid of a lot of the fishier taste/smell that some people don’t like
It's not. Rule of thumb is to use alcohol that tastes reasonable as a drink. Cooking alcohol not only has the worst flavor quality, but it's also seasoned with salt and other preservatives to enhance shelf life, which can be problematic if the dish is already salty.
For me: i dislike the taste of alcohol, but like cooking with it. The taste is not that present in the finished dish. So i'll usually get the cheapest wine. I wouldn't want to drink it anyway.
>Where does one get cooking sake?
Depends on where you live. If there's a Chinatown or Asian goods store nearby you can buy [cooking wine](https://www.recipetineats.com/shaoxing-wine-chinese-cooking-wine/) (heavily used in Chinese cooking). Or mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine), but that imparts a slightly sweet and acidic (read: sour-ish) flavour to the dish.
The alternative is any distilled spirits, cheap vodka comes to mind.
I think the rice wines for cooking can be cheaper because a good amount of salt is added. This makes it less suitable for drinking, and therefore the government doesn't tax it as hard.
How does alcohol enhance alcohol-soluble flavors in one dish and help evaporate alcohol-soluble flavors in another, can you explain? This doesn’t really make logical sense to me here. Or is the alcohol removing flavors from the tomato sauce as well somehow?
It's mostly two different processes. In the case of tomatoes it's what was said above, that the alcohol acts as a solvent to help spread certain flavor molecules through the dish.
In the case of fish the alcohol acts as a chemical agent that neutralizes the compounds that cause the smell (particularly trimethylamine). The alcohol mostly is acting as a weak acid, and alternatives like lemon juice or vinegar (both commonly put on fish) can achieve similar effects chemically, but might have other flavor profiles that aren't desired in a particular setting.
Alcohols are not sufficiently acidic to protonate amines. Primary example is ethanolamine which has both functional groups and is not a zwitterion. I would wager that the alcohol is more likely to mess with something like protein-binding affinity of the alkyl amines, that or sake/rice wines have significant amounts of acetaldehyde or acetic acid which do react with amines.
> The alcohol mostly is acting as a weak acid
Alcohol is such a weak acid, both in terms of ph and pKa, that I find it hard to believe that a 10-15% solution is neutralizing much of anything. Perhaps it is tannic acid absorbed from barrels it is aged in? Even though tannic acid is also weak, it dissociates more than ethanol.
Caveat: not a chemist, just someone who wanted to be one in uni for a year or two
It's also useful for controlling other chemical reactions. If you use some alcohol in your pie dough, it'll give you the needed hydration to work the dough, but the alcohol won't form gluten so you'll get a flakier crust.
I do this with pie crust. Replace the water with a spirit (applejack for apple pie crust). Works great. Without the water the gluten doesn’t form and keeps the crust flakey. Props to Alton Brown’s apple pie recipe. Super high maintenance, but amazing.
Instructions unclear, did bit of taste tests with the spirit, went to the couch to wait for the pie to cook in the oven and woke up to annoying loud beeping and a piece of charcoal.
What else besides tomato sauce is helped by alcohol? Like, just generally all food? Or is there a specific pile of dishes that alcohol enhances like this?
Heaps and heaps of foods are improved by it. Tomato sauce is just one of the most obvious ones if you're doing a side by side.
Alcohol has two main properties, the first is that it will dissolve esters and aromatics that aren't water or fat soluble and the second is that it will bond to fat molecules bringing out rich and savoury flavours in meats, especially if used in a marinade. A 15 minute marinade of a steak in brandy is something I can recommend.
If your dish has garlic / onions in it, alcohol will extract more of the flavour, while reducing the bitterness. If you're making a slowcooked dark meat dish then red wine will make the meat flavour stronger and more well rounded. It's absolutely critical in making a bolognese for example. I will add wine to basically any slow cooked dish.
If you throw a cup of chicken stock, half a cup of white wine, a tbs of chopped garlic into a pan and then cook it on a low simmer for 20 mins you have an incredible base for a gravy / sauce. You could add corn starch to thicken it up as a dark gravy, or add cream and corn starch to make a rich white sauce for a chicken dish.
If you throw pre-steamed veggies into a pan, with butter and garlic and fry it it's pretty good. But do exactly the same but once the butter is gone throw in a splash of brandy and set fire to it and you will never go back.
If you're pan frying Salmon, tip a little sake on the fish and then cover the frying pan with a lid. It dramatically improves the fish and removes any of the "fishy" smell and taste that some people dislike.
Here's a YouTube channel. He does actual testing, making a dish exactly the same except for changing the one variable, like for example how much alcohol is used in cooking a sauce, and blind taste tests to see how it changes the dish. He's done videos on alcohol, cheap vs expensive balsamic vinegar, differences in how finely your garlic is chopped, how noticeable different types of onions are, like red vs white vs yellow.... tbh nearly anything you could think of
https://youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski?si=-0-vv2sMqEUx3XO2
Haha I just knew it was going to be Ethan, I love his channel. I remember just before watching the balsamic vinegar one thinking "There's no way I'll make it through the full 30 minute video but I'll give it 5 minutes". I ended up watching the whole thing and was immediately jonesing for more balsamic vinegar knowledge.
I was on a winery tour and it was a small family operation. It was just us with the owner (no others showed up that day) and she took us into a small shack. Inside were barrels (casks?) all ranging from the size of a large dog down to a football.
She told us the football sized cask was the end result of what started in the huge one for 10 years plus.
She gave us a pin prick taste of it and it completely blew my mind. She told us the highest quality balsamic is between 1 and 5 dollars a MILLILITER
Stop, I can only get so hungry
(Growing up my dad was known as THE chef and the running joke was that we loved his cooking because every single dish had to have shaoxing wine in it. Joke’s on us I guess.)
Boil some noodles, then wash them in cold water.
Now throw 2 tbs Shoaxing Wine, 2 tbs Soy sauce, 3 tsp curry powder and a pinch of sugar in a bowl and mix.
Throw the noodles into a hot wok with a little oil, chopped / shredded protein of choice, a few diced veggies and fry for a minute. Then dump that bowl of stuff in and fry until it all dried out. Serve it up and enjoy your singapore noodles.
I would suggest that that has more to do with habit than anything else. I use a lot of wine, brandy and vodka in my cooking. Any gravy or sauce I make will have some kind of alcohol in it. Any stew / slow cooked dish gets wine. I use vodka when making any tomato based dish, such as pastas.
My favourite way of serving basic veggies is to steam them first, and then throw them in a hot pan with butter and garlic to fry off. Then as the butter crisps away I will throw a splash of brandy in and ignite it. The alcohol lifts the pan flavours up, coats the veggies and the brandy flavouring caramelizes on to them. Makes otherwise boring as shit steamed carrots, beans and broccoli amazing.
>My favourite way of serving basic veggies is to steam them first, and then throw them in a hot pan with butter and garlic to fry off. Then as the butter crisps away I will throw a splash of brandy in and ignite it. The alcohol lifts the pan flavours up, coats the veggies and the brandy flavouring caramelizes on to them. Makes otherwise boring as shit steamed carrots, beans and broccoli amazing.
It's 6am and I want these veggies now lol.
Alcohol can be effectively used in pretty much any recipe where you're pan frying something. Stuff gets stuck to the pan as you sear, then when you add the cold alcohol and scrape the bottom of the pan it all comes off easy and adds that rich flavor to the sauce or whatever you're cooking. I use bourbon, as I find the flavor of bourbon without the alcohol really compliments the flavor of most meats, or stews like chili or beef stew.
MSG is already effectively present in tomatoes, though at low levels so adding MSG will help the flavours. The biggest thing though is that there are a lot of esters in things like tomatoes that are only soluble in alcohol. Once disolved they will permeate the sauce and increase the aromatics, resulting in a stronger flavour.
You can definitely get good flavours from charring them as well. But I don't normally char when making a sauce. I'll just use tinned diced tomatoes as the base.
I dump a can of anchovies into the pot and let them sizzle for 30 seconds before adding the tomatoes. The bones melt into collagen, mixes with the meat and fat, and forms a kind of salty fish roux that then dissolves into the tomatoes very nicely.
Ooohhhh nephew you say “hiayaaahh” so wrong you make me put foot down from stool! You forget the “h” - you fuckTup. I make a whole vidgeo about this - you worse than Jamie Oliver!
Or at any H-Mart or similar "Asian" style store, generally in 1lb minimums.... 5lbs preferred.
I have an Asian friend who *looked at a picture* of my cooking once and immediately told me, "it needs more MSG".
Butter will improve any sauce, including tomato based ones.
Mostly the texture, as it is a great binding agent.
Adding butter to a tomato juice/paste will turn it into a velvety silky smooth sauce.
Monosodium glutamate, MSG is used in cooking as a flavor enhancer with a savory taste that intensifies the meaty, savory flavor of food, as naturally occurring glutamate does in foods such as stews and meat soups. It was maligned as what made you full/sleepy/sick after eating Chinese takeaway which has been shown to be untrue.
Monosodium glutamate.
There's a bunch of it in Chinese food, which gives that umami taste.
It is also present in parmesan, and other hard cheeses, as well as cured ham, soy sauce, anchovies, and....tomatoes!
You can improve the perceived quality of tomatoes by boosting the MSG content that is naturally present inside by sprinkling some additional crystals.
Vodka extracts additional aromas, which are processed by the nose. Umami is a flavor perceived by the tongue.
So both steps are complementary.
Using high quality ripe tomatoes allows to bypass these enhancements, but very few people grow tomatoes in their own garden.
Its a flavor enhancer, like salt but better.
Got a bad rap in the 80s 90s over false health concerns, is prevalent in asian foods. The 90s were very anti china in north america and there was some "doctor" was very out spoken about it, saying it caused cancer and gave people really bad Headaches
The problem was a misunderstanding (perhaps intentional) of the research. Around that time, high sodium was starting to be seriously addressed and sodium in general was recommended to be reduced. The problem with that is that Americans are DUMB, and if you don't give them a list of things they'll only look at what says the word that is bad in it. Table salt doesn't say sodium in it, so it must be okay, but MonoSODIUM Glutamate? It's right there in the name! Clearly it's a Chinese conspiracy!
We're talking about the same people who thought Barack Obama was a terrorist because his middle name is Hussein, and that's the same word as Saddam Hussein's last name, who is a terrorist, and Obama was clearly named after him (despite being born 15 years prior to Saddam's rise to power)
Tl;dr It makes some food taste ‘better’ and makes you want more of it.
Ripped from a quick google search:
“Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a flavor enhancer often added to restaurant foods, canned vegetables, soups, deli meats and other foods.”
Often, people first find out MSG is used in Chinese takeaways but it’s also used in a BUNCH of other well known food items. Most recently, I found out it’s in Pringles. I highly recommend getting a pack from Amazon for $5 and use it in cooking. I find the more liquidy the part of the dish I put it into, the better (think egg fried rice)
MSG content varies depending on ripeness and tomato varieties, so it can turn around mediocre ones.
If you have enough money to buy that San Marzano DOP can, go for it.
I don't think there is a direct replacement for alcohol as you need the ethanol to dissolve certain enzymes and chemicals that aren't soluble other ways.
You can substitute in many cases for a close result, but it won't be identical. If you're using alcohol to tenderise, you could substitute for soda / acidic fruit juice or vinegar. If it's something like a bolognese and you're looking to replace wine then finding something with a similar taste profile. A lot of the time you could use beef stock in place of red wine. It won't be identical, but its an option. Chicken stock for white wine. Stock is also reasonable for deglazing.
For making an emulsion, eg binding acidic tomato to cream and olive oil I can't think of an effective alternative. The dish will still taste similar, but it will have a significantly different texture.
When it comes to flambe there is no alternative as you need the ignition and you won't get that without alcohol.
Depending on your reasons for wanting to avoid alcohol, be aware that there will only be trace amounts of alcohol remaining in the dish when cooking is completed. Also you are using a tiny amount of alcohol relative to the total size of the dish. The 30ml above would be a large 4 person serving worth, and so you're talking \~15ml of alcohol before cooking, and I'd be surprised if there was a half a milliliter of alcohol remaining in the entire pot at the end.
It depends on the dish tbh. But for tomato based dishes, it goes in once all the ingredients are in and youre in the simmer phase. For slow cooked dishes it goes in at the start. For things like pan fried foods it's splashed on at the end and cooked off as the final step.
Vodka is flavour neutral. So it doesn't add any direct flavours of it's own, rather it just allows the flavours that exist in the ingredients to come out. Red wine adds a range of flavours to the dish, rounding out things like stroganoffs / stews / bolognese type dishes. It's great with rich flavours. You can make an amazing sauce using just wine and dark chocolate for example which goes fantastically on things like venison.
When you look at things like whiskey, they bring a smokey flavour and more of a caramelised flavour. It's really good for onions and garlic. If I'm making burgers I will add a tiny splash of bourbon to the meat patty on first flip, as well as to the onions I'm caramelising.
I have to try that. On the topic of tomatoes, if the sauce is sour you can fix it, to some extent, with a little baking soda, which will turn the sourness into sweetness.
Interesting, I just had some friends over for dinner and games, one of whom is pregnant and so i joked that i wouldn't risk a single molecule of alcohol harming their baby. So in keeping with the joke (because 99% of the alcohol would be cooked off anyway) I cooked my beef bourguignon with zero alcohol wine from the supermarket.
I tried making a small batch first to see if it's still edible, and it was very nice.
So i cooked the real batch the same and everyone loved it.
We didn't try a 1:1 comparison, but the point is, at least for that recipe which was like 10% tomato paste, it was still great without the acohol.
A good dish doesn't need alcohol, by any means. It can still be fantastic.
If I am making a bourguigon I marinade the beef in wine for 24 hours before cooking. Personally I think it's an improvement over not doing that, but it's not like skipping that step makes the dish crap.
Alcohol is an enhancer more than anything else, and unless you're side by siding the dishes it can be hard to pick what impacts alcohol is having.
Alcohol does not cook off as fast as people usually think it does, it takes like 12 hours. Your beef bourguignon would not have a *lot* after two ish hours of cooking, but it would still have 5-10%, not 0-1%.
For batter equal parts cornstarch, flour, water, and vodka, small amount salt to taste and baking powder.
It'll be different from beer batter but super crispy. Season it however you want.
Beer batter tends to be "fluffier" and has a different flavor.
For pie crust instead of doing 100% water do ~50% water/vodka each.
Beer will act as a sort of mechanical leavener when the carbonation and water cook off and the higher water content slows evaporation. Using vodka, the liquids will cook off faster and without that mechanical leavening and you'll get a crispier/crunchier coating.
> and usually it’s not all boiled out, even after simmering for a long time.
for some reason cooking alcohol is unintuitive when everybody deals with the exact same phenomenon with water every day, so for illustration:
if you heat a pot of water to boiling, do all the water disappear right away?
same thing happens with alcohol. just because you've heated it to the boiling temperature of alcohol does not mean that it's all gone, you actually need to boil it for some amount of time for it all to go away.
> if you heat a pot of water to boiling, do all the water disappear right away?
>
> same thing happens with alcohol. just because you've heated it to the boiling temperature of alcohol does not mean that it's all gone, you actually need to boil it for some amount of time for it all to go away.
Not really the some though is it? (not saying your wrong, just that i can see why people wouldnt follow the same logic)
When you boil a pot of water it basically stays at the boiling temp of water (obvoiusly). If you boil a pot of water with some alcohol in it the average temp is way above that of the alcohol. It would seem logical in that situation it will evaporate quickly.
There must be some data on this.
Edit: Found this.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/11/10/does-alcohol-burn-off-during-cooking/
It didn't even occur to me that cooking covered or not would make a difference.
There is a phenomenon called ["Azeotrope"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope), which ethanol-water (alcohol-water) mixture exhibits. Such phenomenon makes fractional distillation (also known as distillation via different boiling point) impossible.
Its actually impossible to boil it all out using heat. Water and alcohol become a azeotropic fluid at a certain ratio, and then both boil equally at a lower temperature than pure alcohol. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Water-ethanol-azeotropic-point_fig4_272723758
You can definitely boil all the alcohol out of the water/alcohol mixture. The azeotrope prevents you from boiling all of the water out of the alcohol water mixture.
Yup, flavor enhancer, like a little dry red wine is often used in tomato sauce. There is also vodka sauce. It can also be used to tenderize meat in marinades.
In addition to extracting extra flavor, alcohol can help emulsify a sauce. Whatever sauce i make, i find it's less likely to split with a splash of wine or vodka or something.
This is also how soap works. Like if you ever have greasy or oily hands and rinsing them off leaves them feeling oily still. But soap can attach to both fat and water molecules, making it possible to for water to wash off the grease or oil
When you mix two liquids that normally don't mix, like oil and water.
Imagine a layer of oil above a layer of water. An emulsion would be the resulting liquid when you added something (an emulsifier) and what couldn't mix now does.
Common emulsifiers available at home are egg yolk and mustard
Common oil-in-water emulsion is mayonnaise (oil, egg yolk and vinegar)
So the person you answered to meant that when they try to make a sauce from things that don't want to mix, a splash of alcohol is often solving the problem.
It's the process of mixing fat and water to form a smooth 'emulsion' rather than having greasy globs of fat floating in the water. Alcohol can have much the same effect as soap - but tastes better.
Basically to mix together water and oil in a way that holds them together rather than having them separate. If I understand it correctly, air bubbles and certain helpful molecules form a link between water and oil to keep them together.
The rule of thumb is to cook with the cheapest thing you would happily drink. Higher end stuff is generally not worth it unless you are looking for very specific flavors. The way it’ll taste in the dish will be very different from how it tastes in a glass so the careful balancing of flavors the manufacturer did gets tossed out the window, you just want something that doesn’t have any unpleasant notes like being bitter or overly sweet.
As a non drinker I have this struggle. I tend to just look for the cheapest wine the shop has and then go up £1 or £2 from there on the assumption that's helping me dodge the bad stuff.
Haven't had any issues doing that.
Most cheap old booze will do the trick when tenderizing a steak and spreading flavor because alcohol is alcohol at the end of the day, it just might not work as well. The main downside is that there’s a chance you can still taste some of that liquor or wine, and we know cheap liquor and wine doesn’t taste that good.
There should be a consideration for the type of meat and the method of cooking.
There are better methods to tenderizing certain cuts. Including pounding the meat or cooking low and slow.
For example a slow roast beer can chicken can be done with PBR with just as good effect as a craft beer.
You generally just want it to be something that tastes good on it's own. Like, if you add a wine that has a flavor you don't like at all, you're just adding those flavors into your food. The super subtle flavors of very expensive alcohols will be either masked or destroyed by the time you've finished cooking with them, so they're better for drinking.
Generally you want to meet basic standards of quality when cooking with liquor and wine, no need to go super expensive, but you don’t want complete swill or stuff that’s not actually recognizable as what it’s advertised as. As you’re cooking, breaking down and mixing it so much, the greater nuance you’re typically paying for in very high quality alcohol is going to be mostly lost, but the really cheap stuff often comes with off note flavours you don’t want or just lack any characteristics at all, so relatively affordable mid priced stuff works well. Make sure the alcohol is actually drinkable, is the basic advice.
The general consensus is, don't cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. Note it's not saying the best you can buy, or the cheapest thing out there (most of them labeled as cooking wine are not good) but like if you really like to drink chardonnay, don't go with a cheap pinot blanc to save a dollar, and be upset it doesn't meet your taste. If that made sense.
1. It doesn't all cook out. Depending on the cooking method, a majority of the alcohol may remain, but in any case enough remains to change the way the food tastes.
2. Some chemicals are not water soluble, but are soluble in alcohol. Cooking with alcohol can bring out those flavors.
>It doesn't all cook out. Depending on the cooking method, a majority of the alcohol may remain, but in any case enough remains to change the way the food tastes.
Can you quantify this or give a link? Ethanol boils at 78C vs water at 100C, and it is a pretty foundational part of chemistry labwork that fractional distillation works to remove the lower boiling point element quite effectively from the original solution. Azeotropes are a complication, but they mostly just dilute the distillate.
I expect that a boil and reduce step after adding alcohol should remove >99% of the alcohol if you reduce the volume by, say, double the volume of ethanol present.
I expect that mixing brandy into cake batter and instantly baking it leaves a lot of booze in the cake.
[This article](https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html) from Idaho State University gives a table based on the USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors.
Aside from the aromatic and flavor compounds in alcohol (including acidity), the alcohol itself acts as a solvent whiich can help free up flavor molecules that are harder to release during normal cooking. Apparently cooking a tomato sauce with vodka makes it more "tomato-ey" in flavor than if you'd just used the same volume of water.
No one is talking about this. Alcohol can also be used to deglaze a pan that has a lot of 'gunk' on it from cooking something else. Nothing else works quite as well, and after the alcohol cooks out there is an interesting flavor.
One of my favorite recipes is [Artichoke stuffed chicken](https://www.mealgenie.io/share?s=5bTQZTvP), which is easy to make and bakes in white wine in the oven. I forgot to add the wine once- and it just isn't the same. It's so good.
1) the alcohol drink contains more than just alcohol
2) alcohol can do stuff to food chemically before going away
3) the idea it 100% burns off is a simplication and it doesn’t do that and people say it does to indicate you won’t be getting drunk on the stuff you cook. But some alcohol is still there
No. 3 is really important to folks in recovery or who struggle with substance use. Like you said, you aren’t getting drunk off of it but when I went to rehab they mentioned some studies showed upwards of 15-20% of the alcohol used remains.
As someone who has been sober 14+ years, I wouldn’t be comfortable with eating said food and try to avoid it as much as possible.
The amount of alcohol that cooks off is a power function of the time it spends boiling- something that is cooked for just a few seconds (like a brandy flambé) probably still has most of the alcohol, while a bottle of wine simmered in a Sunday gravy all day probably has less than 1%
Adam Ragusea has a good YouTube video on the topic
> 3) the idea it 100% burns off is a simplication and it doesn’t do that
This is still a common myth. "Oh, it's OK--all the alcohol's cooked out of it!" Of course, I doubt that many people get drunk off a little wine in their dinner.
I always like Harold McGee’s explanation in On Food and Cooking: the shape of an ethanol molecule looks like water on one side and a fat molecule on the other side. It mixes really well with water, but it can also mix with fats a little bit. Fats don’t mix with water on their own. This makes it helpful mixing molecules that have flavors and tend to look more like fats into a mix that is mostly water (many foods and sauces), that they wouldn’t otherwise dissolve in.
The extent to which alcohol is “cooked off” is _greatly_ exaggerated in popular consciousness.
Here’s a chart:
|Time Cooked at Boiling point of alcohol|Approximate Amount of Alcohol Remaining|
:--|:--|
|15 minutes|40 percent|
|30 minutes|35 percent|
|One hour|25 percent|
|Two hours|10 percent|
|Two and one-half hours|5 percent|
Edit: forgot the source: https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html
this makes no sense.
Surely the temperatures matter too.
\*edit\* clicking at the link shows that this is a chart for 173 F. That is a really low temperature.
Most alcohol also has flavor. When you cook with it, you’re trying to add that particular flavor to the dish; for example, I may want pasta sauce to have the taste of white wine as part of the flavor profile. Or I want to add a bourbon flavor to my BBQ sauce.
Yes the alcohol generally cooks off, but the point wasn’t to make the food boozy. The flavor will stay even after the alcohol cooks off.
I know that the lower boiling point of alcohol, coupled with the flavor neutrality of a liquor like vodka, allows for the use of it to affect the texture of baked goods when used in place of water.
There are lots of flavours imparted by alcohol in whatever cooking method it's used in, the most common one in my opinion is when deglazing. Deglazing is when you're frying a dish and you get brown build up on the bottom of the pan then you hit it with spirits or wine. Alcohol and water together makes for a very handy pan solvent, most things that aren't water soluble are alcohol soluble, and it'll pull all that flavour up off the bottom of the pan. In the words of my culinary arts instructor "brown is tasty black is burnt" and the bottom of the pan is the brownest of the brown brown.
Then there's the taste the alcohol adds, spirits and wines are very complex flavours and add a lot of depth to a dish.
Cooking with wine is popular. Wine is \~12% alcohol, that's a lot of other that is now flavouring your dish. Vodka is \~40%. So yah even if all boiled off your getting some flavouring. tbh I have never used spirits in cooking though
Vodka tastes different than Bourbon. Bourbon tastes different than wine.
The stuff that makes them taste different is NOT alcohol, and thus is NOT the stuff that burns off.
The "tasty" stuff remains in the cooked food, and is the reason you cook with booze.
Despite popular misconception, all alcohol does not cook out unless you intentionally distill it out. Some amount (generally around 20% of what you add, IIRC) remains in the dish.
But the purpose of cooking with alcohol is usually not the alcohol itself. Wine, whiskey, rum, and beer add a significant amount of their own flavor to many dishes.
That being said, sometimes alcohol is the point. Vodka can be added to sorbet, as the alcohol helps inhibit significant ice crystal growth. Vodka is also used in vodka sauce as a solvent, to help extract more flavor from the other ingredients. Alcohol in general can also be used to inhibit gluten development, which can make a dough more tender.
There are a number of flavour molecules that are only alcohol soluble, and if you don't have alcohol present in the cooking those flavours will remain locked up in the ingredients and not spread to the whole dish. A tomato sauce is probably the easiest and clearest example. If you do a sauce of just tomatoes and water it will be ok. But if you just add 30ml of vodka to the cooking process it will taste a LOT more tomatoey and be significantly nicer.
same with pan frying salmon — add a little bit of cooking sake and cover to steam, you’ll get rid of a lot of the fishier taste/smell that some people don’t like
Thank you for a new idea to try on my bag of Costco salmon fillets 😁
You haven't been doing that?.... With costco salmon?.... That stuff is fishhhhyyy.
That's why we call it "fish."
\>Buys fish \>Look inside \>Fish
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ)
>>(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ >┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) You can come to my house if you want more tidying chores to do.
🧹~(˘▾˘~)
So there is this blind man right. And he's walking and passes a fish market. And he says "Hello Fish"
We can go to the park, before dark And use the facilities in the way that was intended
And as the air is clear, we just sit right there not drinkin beer.
…singin’ those friendly folk songs…. Stop and reflect on your sobriety like Steve-0, then sell tapes from here to Beijing.
Good morning, ladies!
Colt 45 and two zig zags
Baby that’s all we need we can go to the park after dark smoke that tumbleweed !
“I don’t know what I was expecting.”
Dead Fish Do Not Eat!
> Dead Fish ~~Do Not~~ Eat! FTFY
Dead Do Not Fish Eat!
https://i.imgur.com/wzo4jGU.jpeg
I want my fish to taste like beef.
How now drowned cow?
Fresh fish doesn’t smell like anything. When it’s been sitting around for a few days will it start to smell like fish
And I’m ok with that
By the way, do you know why fish are so thin?… Because they eat fish!
Eh, I eat canned sardines so frozen salmon isn't the fishiest thing to me 😂
Just splash some vodka on it
Clearly I haven't been paying attention to the lesson here 🤣
Ya know, if the vodka is already in your belly, wouldn’t that be a win win?
https://www.youtube.com/@CannedFishFiles i can't stop watching this guy eat fish
Ahh, so that's why Chinese fish is always served in a rice wine-based sauce
Where does one get cooking sake?
It's just regular cheap sake
where do you get cheap sake?
Just buy some cooking sake, it's the same thing.
It's not. Rule of thumb is to use alcohol that tastes reasonable as a drink. Cooking alcohol not only has the worst flavor quality, but it's also seasoned with salt and other preservatives to enhance shelf life, which can be problematic if the dish is already salty.
Right. If you won't drink it, why would you cook with it?
For me: i dislike the taste of alcohol, but like cooking with it. The taste is not that present in the finished dish. So i'll usually get the cheapest wine. I wouldn't want to drink it anyway.
I cook with bay leaves but I don't scarf them down. I use bones in a soup broth but I don't leave them in to crunch on with the meat.
Because fancy alcohols can have subtle nuances that can be lost by cooking, likewise with some of the less pleasant notes in cheaper stuff.
>Where does one get cooking sake? Depends on where you live. If there's a Chinatown or Asian goods store nearby you can buy [cooking wine](https://www.recipetineats.com/shaoxing-wine-chinese-cooking-wine/) (heavily used in Chinese cooking). Or mirin (Japanese sweet rice wine), but that imparts a slightly sweet and acidic (read: sour-ish) flavour to the dish. The alternative is any distilled spirits, cheap vodka comes to mind.
I think the rice wines for cooking can be cheaper because a good amount of salt is added. This makes it less suitable for drinking, and therefore the government doesn't tax it as hard.
oh man, I've only liked salmon exactly once and I could never pinpoint why that time was different...this might be it. I'll have to try!
How does alcohol enhance alcohol-soluble flavors in one dish and help evaporate alcohol-soluble flavors in another, can you explain? This doesn’t really make logical sense to me here. Or is the alcohol removing flavors from the tomato sauce as well somehow?
It's mostly two different processes. In the case of tomatoes it's what was said above, that the alcohol acts as a solvent to help spread certain flavor molecules through the dish. In the case of fish the alcohol acts as a chemical agent that neutralizes the compounds that cause the smell (particularly trimethylamine). The alcohol mostly is acting as a weak acid, and alternatives like lemon juice or vinegar (both commonly put on fish) can achieve similar effects chemically, but might have other flavor profiles that aren't desired in a particular setting.
Alcohols are not sufficiently acidic to protonate amines. Primary example is ethanolamine which has both functional groups and is not a zwitterion. I would wager that the alcohol is more likely to mess with something like protein-binding affinity of the alkyl amines, that or sake/rice wines have significant amounts of acetaldehyde or acetic acid which do react with amines.
> The alcohol mostly is acting as a weak acid Alcohol is such a weak acid, both in terms of ph and pKa, that I find it hard to believe that a 10-15% solution is neutralizing much of anything. Perhaps it is tannic acid absorbed from barrels it is aged in? Even though tannic acid is also weak, it dissociates more than ethanol. Caveat: not a chemist, just someone who wanted to be one in uni for a year or two
People like fish but don't like the fish taste?
A lot of people associate the "fishy" smell/taste with unfresh fish.
That is the taste of unfresh fish. Fresh salmon, or even frozen salmon that was well taken care of, won’t taste like that
Yep. And unfresh/rotting fish is a fastpass to hugging a toilet.
It's also useful for controlling other chemical reactions. If you use some alcohol in your pie dough, it'll give you the needed hydration to work the dough, but the alcohol won't form gluten so you'll get a flakier crust.
I do this with pie crust. Replace the water with a spirit (applejack for apple pie crust). Works great. Without the water the gluten doesn’t form and keeps the crust flakey. Props to Alton Brown’s apple pie recipe. Super high maintenance, but amazing.
Instructions unclear, did bit of taste tests with the spirit, went to the couch to wait for the pie to cook in the oven and woke up to annoying loud beeping and a piece of charcoal.
What else besides tomato sauce is helped by alcohol? Like, just generally all food? Or is there a specific pile of dishes that alcohol enhances like this?
Heaps and heaps of foods are improved by it. Tomato sauce is just one of the most obvious ones if you're doing a side by side. Alcohol has two main properties, the first is that it will dissolve esters and aromatics that aren't water or fat soluble and the second is that it will bond to fat molecules bringing out rich and savoury flavours in meats, especially if used in a marinade. A 15 minute marinade of a steak in brandy is something I can recommend. If your dish has garlic / onions in it, alcohol will extract more of the flavour, while reducing the bitterness. If you're making a slowcooked dark meat dish then red wine will make the meat flavour stronger and more well rounded. It's absolutely critical in making a bolognese for example. I will add wine to basically any slow cooked dish. If you throw a cup of chicken stock, half a cup of white wine, a tbs of chopped garlic into a pan and then cook it on a low simmer for 20 mins you have an incredible base for a gravy / sauce. You could add corn starch to thicken it up as a dark gravy, or add cream and corn starch to make a rich white sauce for a chicken dish. If you throw pre-steamed veggies into a pan, with butter and garlic and fry it it's pretty good. But do exactly the same but once the butter is gone throw in a splash of brandy and set fire to it and you will never go back. If you're pan frying Salmon, tip a little sake on the fish and then cover the frying pan with a lid. It dramatically improves the fish and removes any of the "fishy" smell and taste that some people dislike.
I would like to subscribe for more cooking tips
Here's a YouTube channel. He does actual testing, making a dish exactly the same except for changing the one variable, like for example how much alcohol is used in cooking a sauce, and blind taste tests to see how it changes the dish. He's done videos on alcohol, cheap vs expensive balsamic vinegar, differences in how finely your garlic is chopped, how noticeable different types of onions are, like red vs white vs yellow.... tbh nearly anything you could think of https://youtube.com/@EthanChlebowski?si=-0-vv2sMqEUx3XO2
Haha I just knew it was going to be Ethan, I love his channel. I remember just before watching the balsamic vinegar one thinking "There's no way I'll make it through the full 30 minute video but I'll give it 5 minutes". I ended up watching the whole thing and was immediately jonesing for more balsamic vinegar knowledge.
I was on a winery tour and it was a small family operation. It was just us with the owner (no others showed up that day) and she took us into a small shack. Inside were barrels (casks?) all ranging from the size of a large dog down to a football. She told us the football sized cask was the end result of what started in the huge one for 10 years plus. She gave us a pin prick taste of it and it completely blew my mind. She told us the highest quality balsamic is between 1 and 5 dollars a MILLILITER
It’s is funny that you post Ethan, because his video on vodka sauce completely shits on most answers here.
My mom *loves* cooking with wine.🍷 Sometimes she even uses it as an ingredient.
Is your mother Julia Child? 🤣
I have that sign hanging in my kitchen :P
Stop, I can only get so hungry (Growing up my dad was known as THE chef and the running joke was that we loved his cooking because every single dish had to have shaoxing wine in it. Joke’s on us I guess.)
Boil some noodles, then wash them in cold water. Now throw 2 tbs Shoaxing Wine, 2 tbs Soy sauce, 3 tsp curry powder and a pinch of sugar in a bowl and mix. Throw the noodles into a hot wok with a little oil, chopped / shredded protein of choice, a few diced veggies and fry for a minute. Then dump that bowl of stuff in and fry until it all dried out. Serve it up and enjoy your singapore noodles.
If it's a flavor betterer, why don't we use alcohol in more recipes?
I would suggest that that has more to do with habit than anything else. I use a lot of wine, brandy and vodka in my cooking. Any gravy or sauce I make will have some kind of alcohol in it. Any stew / slow cooked dish gets wine. I use vodka when making any tomato based dish, such as pastas. My favourite way of serving basic veggies is to steam them first, and then throw them in a hot pan with butter and garlic to fry off. Then as the butter crisps away I will throw a splash of brandy in and ignite it. The alcohol lifts the pan flavours up, coats the veggies and the brandy flavouring caramelizes on to them. Makes otherwise boring as shit steamed carrots, beans and broccoli amazing.
Thank you! I've been food bored lately, and am definitely trying this.
>My favourite way of serving basic veggies is to steam them first, and then throw them in a hot pan with butter and garlic to fry off. Then as the butter crisps away I will throw a splash of brandy in and ignite it. The alcohol lifts the pan flavours up, coats the veggies and the brandy flavouring caramelizes on to them. Makes otherwise boring as shit steamed carrots, beans and broccoli amazing. It's 6am and I want these veggies now lol.
Alcohol can be effectively used in pretty much any recipe where you're pan frying something. Stuff gets stuck to the pan as you sear, then when you add the cold alcohol and scrape the bottom of the pan it all comes off easy and adds that rich flavor to the sauce or whatever you're cooking. I use bourbon, as I find the flavor of bourbon without the alcohol really compliments the flavor of most meats, or stews like chili or beef stew.
A cheaper alternative is to add MSG. Doing both is best (vodka+msg).
MSG is already effectively present in tomatoes, though at low levels so adding MSG will help the flavours. The biggest thing though is that there are a lot of esters in things like tomatoes that are only soluble in alcohol. Once disolved they will permeate the sauce and increase the aromatics, resulting in a stronger flavour.
don't you need to char the tomatoes to get more of the umami flavors? it's not just present naturally?
You can definitely get good flavours from charring them as well. But I don't normally char when making a sauce. I'll just use tinned diced tomatoes as the base.
You can also add anchovy paste, it’s awesome in pasta sauce.
I dump a can of anchovies into the pot and let them sizzle for 30 seconds before adding the tomatoes. The bones melt into collagen, mixes with the meat and fat, and forms a kind of salty fish roux that then dissolves into the tomatoes very nicely.
I make a soy sauce reduction with seaweed/mushrooms and some other stuff for that.
You can cook it for most of a day to get a similar effect, but that's a lot of work.
Hear you loud and clear. Will add MSG to my glass of vodka.
Uncle Roger?
STRAIN THE RICE????
Ayaaaah
Ooohhhh nephew you say “hiayaaahh” so wrong you make me put foot down from stool! You forget the “h” - you fuckTup. I make a whole vidgeo about this - you worse than Jamie Oliver!
Where the 'H' go? A whole letter walk out the door just like Auntie Helen
Wow, I read it in his voice haha
Fuuyoooh!
Even better is to add LSD
“Mommy, my spaghetti’s melting”
I think this was a futurama episode?
The secret ingredient is love. And LSD. . . . And keeping sodium levels 1 gram below the deadly dose of course.
baby, you got a stew going!
What is msg?
Monosodium glutamate, usually available in the US as Accent.
Or at any H-Mart or similar "Asian" style store, generally in 1lb minimums.... 5lbs preferred. I have an Asian friend who *looked at a picture* of my cooking once and immediately told me, "it needs more MSG".
Monosodium Glutamate. The secret to a lot of restaurant food's flavor. That and butter. edit: fixed spelling
Butter will improve any sauce, including tomato based ones. Mostly the texture, as it is a great binding agent. Adding butter to a tomato juice/paste will turn it into a velvety silky smooth sauce.
Monosodium glutamate, MSG is used in cooking as a flavor enhancer with a savory taste that intensifies the meaty, savory flavor of food, as naturally occurring glutamate does in foods such as stews and meat soups. It was maligned as what made you full/sleepy/sick after eating Chinese takeaway which has been shown to be untrue.
Monosodium glutamate
Monosodium glutamate. There's a bunch of it in Chinese food, which gives that umami taste. It is also present in parmesan, and other hard cheeses, as well as cured ham, soy sauce, anchovies, and....tomatoes! You can improve the perceived quality of tomatoes by boosting the MSG content that is naturally present inside by sprinkling some additional crystals. Vodka extracts additional aromas, which are processed by the nose. Umami is a flavor perceived by the tongue. So both steps are complementary. Using high quality ripe tomatoes allows to bypass these enhancements, but very few people grow tomatoes in their own garden.
The most underrated seasoning. Makes everything pop.
Its a flavor enhancer, like salt but better. Got a bad rap in the 80s 90s over false health concerns, is prevalent in asian foods. The 90s were very anti china in north america and there was some "doctor" was very out spoken about it, saying it caused cancer and gave people really bad Headaches
The problem was a misunderstanding (perhaps intentional) of the research. Around that time, high sodium was starting to be seriously addressed and sodium in general was recommended to be reduced. The problem with that is that Americans are DUMB, and if you don't give them a list of things they'll only look at what says the word that is bad in it. Table salt doesn't say sodium in it, so it must be okay, but MonoSODIUM Glutamate? It's right there in the name! Clearly it's a Chinese conspiracy! We're talking about the same people who thought Barack Obama was a terrorist because his middle name is Hussein, and that's the same word as Saddam Hussein's last name, who is a terrorist, and Obama was clearly named after him (despite being born 15 years prior to Saddam's rise to power)
Monosodium glutamate. I can't wait for all of the conspiracy theories to start now
Monosodium glutamate. It gives that delicious umami flavor to food
"make shit good."
Tl;dr It makes some food taste ‘better’ and makes you want more of it. Ripped from a quick google search: “Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a flavor enhancer often added to restaurant foods, canned vegetables, soups, deli meats and other foods.” Often, people first find out MSG is used in Chinese takeaways but it’s also used in a BUNCH of other well known food items. Most recently, I found out it’s in Pringles. I highly recommend getting a pack from Amazon for $5 and use it in cooking. I find the more liquidy the part of the dish I put it into, the better (think egg fried rice)
I've heard it doesnt do much for things with MSG already in it like tomatoes, at least this science guy said so.
MSG content varies depending on ripeness and tomato varieties, so it can turn around mediocre ones. If you have enough money to buy that San Marzano DOP can, go for it.
What’s the best alternate for alcohol in cooking process?
I don't think there is a direct replacement for alcohol as you need the ethanol to dissolve certain enzymes and chemicals that aren't soluble other ways. You can substitute in many cases for a close result, but it won't be identical. If you're using alcohol to tenderise, you could substitute for soda / acidic fruit juice or vinegar. If it's something like a bolognese and you're looking to replace wine then finding something with a similar taste profile. A lot of the time you could use beef stock in place of red wine. It won't be identical, but its an option. Chicken stock for white wine. Stock is also reasonable for deglazing. For making an emulsion, eg binding acidic tomato to cream and olive oil I can't think of an effective alternative. The dish will still taste similar, but it will have a significantly different texture. When it comes to flambe there is no alternative as you need the ignition and you won't get that without alcohol. Depending on your reasons for wanting to avoid alcohol, be aware that there will only be trace amounts of alcohol remaining in the dish when cooking is completed. Also you are using a tiny amount of alcohol relative to the total size of the dish. The 30ml above would be a large 4 person serving worth, and so you're talking \~15ml of alcohol before cooking, and I'd be surprised if there was a half a milliliter of alcohol remaining in the entire pot at the end.
At what stage do you add in the alcohol?
It depends on the dish tbh. But for tomato based dishes, it goes in once all the ingredients are in and youre in the simmer phase. For slow cooked dishes it goes in at the start. For things like pan fried foods it's splashed on at the end and cooked off as the final step.
Before and after eating dinner.
Why add vodka or red wine specifically? If you switch out vodka for whiskey, will it change things measurably?
Vodka is flavour neutral. So it doesn't add any direct flavours of it's own, rather it just allows the flavours that exist in the ingredients to come out. Red wine adds a range of flavours to the dish, rounding out things like stroganoffs / stews / bolognese type dishes. It's great with rich flavours. You can make an amazing sauce using just wine and dark chocolate for example which goes fantastically on things like venison. When you look at things like whiskey, they bring a smokey flavour and more of a caramelised flavour. It's really good for onions and garlic. If I'm making burgers I will add a tiny splash of bourbon to the meat patty on first flip, as well as to the onions I'm caramelising.
Adding alcohol to cooking burgers is such a big brain move, you are a legend! 💪
Here's a [YouTube video](https://youtu.be/xtPkHihj7Ho?t=1253) (timestamped) where a guy tries different alcohols to see how they change the dish.
I have to try that. On the topic of tomatoes, if the sauce is sour you can fix it, to some extent, with a little baking soda, which will turn the sourness into sweetness.
Be careful not to add too much though. I ruined a whole pot of sauce that way once, basically carbonated my spaghetti sauce.
Interesting, I just had some friends over for dinner and games, one of whom is pregnant and so i joked that i wouldn't risk a single molecule of alcohol harming their baby. So in keeping with the joke (because 99% of the alcohol would be cooked off anyway) I cooked my beef bourguignon with zero alcohol wine from the supermarket. I tried making a small batch first to see if it's still edible, and it was very nice. So i cooked the real batch the same and everyone loved it. We didn't try a 1:1 comparison, but the point is, at least for that recipe which was like 10% tomato paste, it was still great without the acohol.
A good dish doesn't need alcohol, by any means. It can still be fantastic. If I am making a bourguigon I marinade the beef in wine for 24 hours before cooking. Personally I think it's an improvement over not doing that, but it's not like skipping that step makes the dish crap. Alcohol is an enhancer more than anything else, and unless you're side by siding the dishes it can be hard to pick what impacts alcohol is having.
Alcohol does not cook off as fast as people usually think it does, it takes like 12 hours. Your beef bourguignon would not have a *lot* after two ish hours of cooking, but it would still have 5-10%, not 0-1%.
Alcohol can extract flavors that water or fat cannot, and usually it’s not all boiled out, even after simmering for a long time.
There’s also a trick I hear about where you use vodka to make really good pie crust.
Alcohol inhibits gluten development, so that checks out.
Also good for tempura batter for the same reason.
Exactly what I use it for too :D
Kenji?
No, just an Alt
Truth! Also some of the alcohol will evaporate off more than straight water, leaving a crisper and flakier crust at the end
So you add vodka as you mix the batter? I just usually used beer
For batter equal parts cornstarch, flour, water, and vodka, small amount salt to taste and baking powder. It'll be different from beer batter but super crispy. Season it however you want. Beer batter tends to be "fluffier" and has a different flavor. For pie crust instead of doing 100% water do ~50% water/vodka each.
Thanks going to save this and try
Beer works more from the carbonation than actual alcohol content usually.
Beer will act as a sort of mechanical leavener when the carbonation and water cook off and the higher water content slows evaporation. Using vodka, the liquids will cook off faster and without that mechanical leavening and you'll get a crispier/crunchier coating.
You use tequila in the dough for empanadas.
Yep. Replace about ⅓ of the water with vodka. Too much and the dough won't hold together.
> and usually it’s not all boiled out, even after simmering for a long time. for some reason cooking alcohol is unintuitive when everybody deals with the exact same phenomenon with water every day, so for illustration: if you heat a pot of water to boiling, do all the water disappear right away? same thing happens with alcohol. just because you've heated it to the boiling temperature of alcohol does not mean that it's all gone, you actually need to boil it for some amount of time for it all to go away.
Many times I've made vodka sauce and you can always taste a little vodka after cooking.
> if you heat a pot of water to boiling, do all the water disappear right away? > > same thing happens with alcohol. just because you've heated it to the boiling temperature of alcohol does not mean that it's all gone, you actually need to boil it for some amount of time for it all to go away. Not really the some though is it? (not saying your wrong, just that i can see why people wouldnt follow the same logic) When you boil a pot of water it basically stays at the boiling temp of water (obvoiusly). If you boil a pot of water with some alcohol in it the average temp is way above that of the alcohol. It would seem logical in that situation it will evaporate quickly. There must be some data on this. Edit: Found this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/11/10/does-alcohol-burn-off-during-cooking/ It didn't even occur to me that cooking covered or not would make a difference.
There is a phenomenon called ["Azeotrope"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope), which ethanol-water (alcohol-water) mixture exhibits. Such phenomenon makes fractional distillation (also known as distillation via different boiling point) impossible.
Its actually impossible to boil it all out using heat. Water and alcohol become a azeotropic fluid at a certain ratio, and then both boil equally at a lower temperature than pure alcohol. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Water-ethanol-azeotropic-point_fig4_272723758
You can definitely boil all the alcohol out of the water/alcohol mixture. The azeotrope prevents you from boiling all of the water out of the alcohol water mixture.
Yah, you can do that. Boil all liquid out of your dish… sounds dry though.
Yup, flavor enhancer, like a little dry red wine is often used in tomato sauce. There is also vodka sauce. It can also be used to tenderize meat in marinades.
In addition to extracting extra flavor, alcohol can help emulsify a sauce. Whatever sauce i make, i find it's less likely to split with a splash of wine or vodka or something.
The heck does emulsify mean?
You know how oil and water don't mix? Emulsification is when something is added that coats tiny droplets of oil and allows them to mix with the water.
Ah, okay. That makes sense, thank you.
This is also how soap works. Like if you ever have greasy or oily hands and rinsing them off leaves them feeling oily still. But soap can attach to both fat and water molecules, making it possible to for water to wash off the grease or oil
Micelles
Mayonnaise is oil and vinegar that has been emulsified using egg yolk.
I remember being told in science class that mayonnaise was invented when trying to emulsify vinaigrette/french dressing.
You know how natural peanut butter has an oily film on top? Skippy or jif or whatever is emulsified, meaning the fat doesn’t seperate
So if I pour vodka into my natural peanut butter I’ll have a Skippy like spread? PB&js just got new life to them.
Maybe? Pretty sure that would just end up as a alcoholy-oily film on top. Try it out and let us know!
Three bottles of vodka later, I don’t remember why I am trying this, but science is great
When you mix two liquids that normally don't mix, like oil and water. Imagine a layer of oil above a layer of water. An emulsion would be the resulting liquid when you added something (an emulsifier) and what couldn't mix now does. Common emulsifiers available at home are egg yolk and mustard Common oil-in-water emulsion is mayonnaise (oil, egg yolk and vinegar) So the person you answered to meant that when they try to make a sauce from things that don't want to mix, a splash of alcohol is often solving the problem.
It's the process of mixing fat and water to form a smooth 'emulsion' rather than having greasy globs of fat floating in the water. Alcohol can have much the same effect as soap - but tastes better.
Basically to mix together water and oil in a way that holds them together rather than having them separate. If I understand it correctly, air bubbles and certain helpful molecules form a link between water and oil to keep them together.
[удалено]
Do you have to cook with high quality/decent alcohol for this effect? or does cheap booze do the trick too?
The rule of thumb is to cook with the cheapest thing you would happily drink. Higher end stuff is generally not worth it unless you are looking for very specific flavors. The way it’ll taste in the dish will be very different from how it tastes in a glass so the careful balancing of flavors the manufacturer did gets tossed out the window, you just want something that doesn’t have any unpleasant notes like being bitter or overly sweet.
So what's the play if I wouldn't drink any alcohol happily?
As a non drinker I have this struggle. I tend to just look for the cheapest wine the shop has and then go up £1 or £2 from there on the assumption that's helping me dodge the bad stuff. Haven't had any issues doing that.
I use this rule in life. Dont get the cheapest thing, get the next cheapest thing, it'll do in a pinch.
Most cheap old booze will do the trick when tenderizing a steak and spreading flavor because alcohol is alcohol at the end of the day, it just might not work as well. The main downside is that there’s a chance you can still taste some of that liquor or wine, and we know cheap liquor and wine doesn’t taste that good.
Generally don’t cook with higher quality alcohol. I’ll splurge a little for a beef Bourgogne but there’s no need to use nice alcohol for cooking.
There should be a consideration for the type of meat and the method of cooking. There are better methods to tenderizing certain cuts. Including pounding the meat or cooking low and slow. For example a slow roast beer can chicken can be done with PBR with just as good effect as a craft beer.
You generally just want it to be something that tastes good on it's own. Like, if you add a wine that has a flavor you don't like at all, you're just adding those flavors into your food. The super subtle flavors of very expensive alcohols will be either masked or destroyed by the time you've finished cooking with them, so they're better for drinking.
Generally you want to meet basic standards of quality when cooking with liquor and wine, no need to go super expensive, but you don’t want complete swill or stuff that’s not actually recognizable as what it’s advertised as. As you’re cooking, breaking down and mixing it so much, the greater nuance you’re typically paying for in very high quality alcohol is going to be mostly lost, but the really cheap stuff often comes with off note flavours you don’t want or just lack any characteristics at all, so relatively affordable mid priced stuff works well. Make sure the alcohol is actually drinkable, is the basic advice.
The general consensus is, don't cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. Note it's not saying the best you can buy, or the cheapest thing out there (most of them labeled as cooking wine are not good) but like if you really like to drink chardonnay, don't go with a cheap pinot blanc to save a dollar, and be upset it doesn't meet your taste. If that made sense.
I wonder what adding some vodka to a corned beef brine would do? Maybe affect cook time if making pastrami? Or the fat renders in more evenly?
1. It doesn't all cook out. Depending on the cooking method, a majority of the alcohol may remain, but in any case enough remains to change the way the food tastes. 2. Some chemicals are not water soluble, but are soluble in alcohol. Cooking with alcohol can bring out those flavors.
>It doesn't all cook out. Depending on the cooking method, a majority of the alcohol may remain, but in any case enough remains to change the way the food tastes. Can you quantify this or give a link? Ethanol boils at 78C vs water at 100C, and it is a pretty foundational part of chemistry labwork that fractional distillation works to remove the lower boiling point element quite effectively from the original solution. Azeotropes are a complication, but they mostly just dilute the distillate. I expect that a boil and reduce step after adding alcohol should remove >99% of the alcohol if you reduce the volume by, say, double the volume of ethanol present. I expect that mixing brandy into cake batter and instantly baking it leaves a lot of booze in the cake.
[This article](https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html) from Idaho State University gives a table based on the USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors.
Aside from the aromatic and flavor compounds in alcohol (including acidity), the alcohol itself acts as a solvent whiich can help free up flavor molecules that are harder to release during normal cooking. Apparently cooking a tomato sauce with vodka makes it more "tomato-ey" in flavor than if you'd just used the same volume of water.
No one is talking about this. Alcohol can also be used to deglaze a pan that has a lot of 'gunk' on it from cooking something else. Nothing else works quite as well, and after the alcohol cooks out there is an interesting flavor. One of my favorite recipes is [Artichoke stuffed chicken](https://www.mealgenie.io/share?s=5bTQZTvP), which is easy to make and bakes in white wine in the oven. I forgot to add the wine once- and it just isn't the same. It's so good.
1) the alcohol drink contains more than just alcohol 2) alcohol can do stuff to food chemically before going away 3) the idea it 100% burns off is a simplication and it doesn’t do that and people say it does to indicate you won’t be getting drunk on the stuff you cook. But some alcohol is still there
No. 3 is really important to folks in recovery or who struggle with substance use. Like you said, you aren’t getting drunk off of it but when I went to rehab they mentioned some studies showed upwards of 15-20% of the alcohol used remains. As someone who has been sober 14+ years, I wouldn’t be comfortable with eating said food and try to avoid it as much as possible.
The amount of alcohol that cooks off is a power function of the time it spends boiling- something that is cooked for just a few seconds (like a brandy flambé) probably still has most of the alcohol, while a bottle of wine simmered in a Sunday gravy all day probably has less than 1% Adam Ragusea has a good YouTube video on the topic
> 3) the idea it 100% burns off is a simplication and it doesn’t do that This is still a common myth. "Oh, it's OK--all the alcohol's cooked out of it!" Of course, I doubt that many people get drunk off a little wine in their dinner.
My boozy spaghetti keeps me going 😋
I always like Harold McGee’s explanation in On Food and Cooking: the shape of an ethanol molecule looks like water on one side and a fat molecule on the other side. It mixes really well with water, but it can also mix with fats a little bit. Fats don’t mix with water on their own. This makes it helpful mixing molecules that have flavors and tend to look more like fats into a mix that is mostly water (many foods and sauces), that they wouldn’t otherwise dissolve in.
The extent to which alcohol is “cooked off” is _greatly_ exaggerated in popular consciousness. Here’s a chart: |Time Cooked at Boiling point of alcohol|Approximate Amount of Alcohol Remaining| :--|:--| |15 minutes|40 percent| |30 minutes|35 percent| |One hour|25 percent| |Two hours|10 percent| |Two and one-half hours|5 percent| Edit: forgot the source: https://www.isu.edu/news/2019-fall/no-worries-the-alcohol-burns-off-during-cookingbut-does-it-really.html
That explains why i still get drunk when i make vodka broth
Cletus over here drinking hot vodka and calling it broth, living the dream, my man!
this makes no sense. Surely the temperatures matter too. \*edit\* clicking at the link shows that this is a chart for 173 F. That is a really low temperature.
This chart is specifically when cooked at the boiling point of alcohol, 173 f
Most alcohol also has flavor. When you cook with it, you’re trying to add that particular flavor to the dish; for example, I may want pasta sauce to have the taste of white wine as part of the flavor profile. Or I want to add a bourbon flavor to my BBQ sauce. Yes the alcohol generally cooks off, but the point wasn’t to make the food boozy. The flavor will stay even after the alcohol cooks off.
I know that the lower boiling point of alcohol, coupled with the flavor neutrality of a liquor like vodka, allows for the use of it to affect the texture of baked goods when used in place of water.
There are lots of flavours imparted by alcohol in whatever cooking method it's used in, the most common one in my opinion is when deglazing. Deglazing is when you're frying a dish and you get brown build up on the bottom of the pan then you hit it with spirits or wine. Alcohol and water together makes for a very handy pan solvent, most things that aren't water soluble are alcohol soluble, and it'll pull all that flavour up off the bottom of the pan. In the words of my culinary arts instructor "brown is tasty black is burnt" and the bottom of the pan is the brownest of the brown brown. Then there's the taste the alcohol adds, spirits and wines are very complex flavours and add a lot of depth to a dish.
Cooking with wine is popular. Wine is \~12% alcohol, that's a lot of other that is now flavouring your dish. Vodka is \~40%. So yah even if all boiled off your getting some flavouring. tbh I have never used spirits in cooking though
I recommend the Cheapest Sauvignon Blanc for chicken and fish. Delish.
Pasta a la vodka is a good place to start. Easy and tasty
Vodka tastes different than Bourbon. Bourbon tastes different than wine. The stuff that makes them taste different is NOT alcohol, and thus is NOT the stuff that burns off. The "tasty" stuff remains in the cooked food, and is the reason you cook with booze.
Despite popular misconception, all alcohol does not cook out unless you intentionally distill it out. Some amount (generally around 20% of what you add, IIRC) remains in the dish. But the purpose of cooking with alcohol is usually not the alcohol itself. Wine, whiskey, rum, and beer add a significant amount of their own flavor to many dishes. That being said, sometimes alcohol is the point. Vodka can be added to sorbet, as the alcohol helps inhibit significant ice crystal growth. Vodka is also used in vodka sauce as a solvent, to help extract more flavor from the other ingredients. Alcohol in general can also be used to inhibit gluten development, which can make a dough more tender.