How much alcohol is left in your food after you cook with it? Short answer: Almost all
of it, or almost none of it, depending on how you cook it. Let us to the science building,
and consult with my colleague Dr. Garland Crawford, chemistry professor at Mercer University.
“According to the literature, depending on what you’re looking at and some of your
technique you’re using, what we do know is there’s always going to be some amount
of residual alcohol left.”
This stands in contrast with what many of the world’s great chefs erroneously believe,
including my beloved Marco Pierre White:
"We've put the second batch of Sauternes, brought it up to the boil."
“You want no reduction of the second Sauternes?”
“No, just brought to the boil. Just to burn off the alcohol.”
Yes, alcohol boils off at a little lower temperature than water. But that doesn’t mean it boils
off instantaneously. I mean, think about it. When you bring a pot of water to a boil, does
water suddenly just go "poof" and vanish?
Nah, evaporating alcohol takes time and heat, and it’s mostly gonna be a function of volume.
By how much volume do you reduce that alcohol? If you only reduce a little bit, there’s
gonna be a lot of alcohol left in the finished product, says science.
In a 1992 study, researchers cooked a bunch of hilariously old-fashioned recipes from
the “Pillsbury Kitchen's Cookbook,” 1979\. Found it on eBay.
So here, they made Cherries Jubilee. A tablespoon of cornstarch mixed with a 16-ounce can of
cherries. A quarter cup of brandy when in, and then they flambéed it.
“Beautiful.”
Total cooking time of the booze was 48 seconds. And how much of the alcohol was left at the
end? 77 to 78 percent!
“And the alcohol burns off so quickly.”
Yeah, not that quick, Gordon. But it does burn off a lot faster than water.
“It reduces by what we call a power function, which means there’s an exponential piece
to it. So it actually is a multiplying effect, as you reduce it by a greater volume.”
That is why the same researchers had a very different experience when they cooked a “Pot
Roast Milano” with one cup of nice Burgundy in it. So ‘70s. Look, it says to serve it
with spaghetti! They simmered that pot roast for 2 and a half hours, and how much alcohol
from the wine was left at the end? Just 4 to 6 percent.
So what does this mean for you? Are you gonna get buzzed off your food?
“Chances are probably pretty small. As it turns out, even with the parentages of alcohol
that are in many of the cooked-down solutions, you’d have to take in a lot of that in order
to have an effect.”
For example, even those super-boozy Cherries Jubilee only had 2 grams of alcohol per serving
in the finished product. One beer has like 14 grams. 2 grams isn't gonna do anything
to you.
“Your body is able to metabolize alcohol at a pretty steady rate. We predict about
10 grams an hour or so.”
And let’s consider food that’s been cooked a lot longer. Garland did the math on that
Pot Roast Milano and found that…
“In order to get the same effect as a beer, we’d need about 25 pounds of pot roast to
have that same effect.”
That’s a lotta pot roast.
But let’s say you’re a person who, for whatever religious or moral reason, fully
abstains from alcohol. Should you also abstain from a long-simmered sauce like my bolognese
with white wine it? Even though the alcohol content is probably down to almost nothing
by the end?
If you don’t want to consume a single ethyl alcohol molecule, then yeah, you shouldn’t
eat my sauce. But, I’ve got even more bad news for you, because you’re probably consuming
similarly small quantities of alcohol all the time. Why? Because alcohol is in bread.
Anything fermented. Yeast make booze, it's what they do.
In 1926, two chemists at Cornell College in Iowa, quote, “collected 12 samples of ordinary
bread from bakeries and housewives’ ovens, and after chemical analysis found that the
alcohol content in this prosaic food varied from .04 to 1.9 percent.”
That means that some of that bread was technically in violation of the prohibition law that was
in effect in the United States at the time.
Here’s some more recent research.
In 1998, scientists at the University of Washington analyzed the alcohol content of a bunch of
store-bought baked goods, like Wonder Bread and Twinkies. Yes, Twinkies have alcohol in
them. These scientists were trying to figure out if a person could blow a false-positive
on a breathalyzer test if they had a mouthful of Twinkie, which is a pretty fun scenario
to imagine.
“Hey, my taxes pay your salary!”
Look back over here at Garland’s math. That pot roast that had the wine in it? It has
ONE THIRD of the alcohol of Wonder Bread. You would get drunk from Wonder Bread three
times faster!
But that would never happen of course, because you’d throw up before you ate enough pot
roast or Wonder Bread.
According to my own calculations, you have to eat about 1,400 Twinkies to equal one beer.
“That’s a big Twinkie.”
Now look, I’m no theologian, I’m not gonna try to connect all the moral dots for you,
but here’s something that I would think about if I was a person whose religion told
me to abstain from alcohol. I might ask myself, what’s the reason behind that? Is it because
the ethyl alcohol molecule is just inherently bad? Or is it because my religion doesn’t
want me to get intoxicated? Because when I get intoxicated, I become disinhibited, and
therefore less likely to follow all of the other moral tenants of my religion!
That’s what I might think about, but as always, you do you, friend. You know, maybe
you just don’t want to buy wine because you don’t want to support that industry,
or you don’t want to be tempted by the bottle as it stares at you from the cupboard.
Me, I’ll continue to put cheap Pino Grigio in just about everything I cook.
What’s that? You want me to put you on Lucky Charms?