From: sbhattac@rnd.GBA.NYU.EDU (Shankar Bhattacharyya)
Newsgroups: rec.food.cooking
Subject: Re: Alcohol in cooking, help
Date: 22 Dec 92 08:00:44 GMT
Organization: NYU Stern School of Business

In article <1992Dec21.193845.10786@i88.isc.com> claudiak@i88.isc.com (Claudia Kale (STG)) writes:

>I seem to remember that earlier this year, a food chemist posted a
>reply to question very similar to Michelle's (was this you Shankar?).

Yes, that was I. But I just posted on a single experiment, done because
it was easier to just up and do the measuring than to go look in the
library.

Carol Miller-Tutzauer posted an account of a systematic study into how much
alcohol remains in various kinds of food. I presume that that was the same
study that Wes Voss has summarized today. I haven't read the study. I
expect I'll get around to it some time, but I'm already persuaded of
the results.

>He replied that once in the course of his work, he had actually
>prepared a traditional beef burgundy (with *surprise!* burgundy) and
>analyzed the product for alcohol content. He found a significant
>amount of the alcohol had *not* evaporated, despite the stew having
>been simmered for a couple of hours.

Actually, it had nothing to do with real work. I'd become curious about
this during an earlier discussion on the net, and decided that what the
hell, this was easy to check out. So I waited till I next made a beef
burgundy, and set some aside in the freezer for analysis as and when we
next ran alcohol analyses. So, given that we were doing the analyses
anyway, my work was limited to a total of 20 minutes.

About 20% of the alcohol remained, as an absolute rock-bottom estimate.
This accounted for just the alcohol in the drainable portion of the sauce.
It does not account for what was left adhering to the meat, so the actual
amount of alcohol left had to have been quite a bit higher.

Measurements were industry standard.

The dish wasn't just simmered. Simmering covered, by the way, pretty much
guarantees that almost none of the alcohol will go away. After the
simmering, I thickened the sauce at a rolling boil. Gary Heston pointed out
to me that that was not necessarily the best way to eliminate the alcohol.
He is right, of course, but that was close to kitchen practice, so the
results are probably applicable to most kitchens. I had not given it a
whole lot of thought until he raised the subject. You can't sneak stuff by
Gary. He catches these things.

The expectation that the alcohol all goes away is common. I held that
belief for all of my life, until I decided to check this out, and I
certainly had enough background to make judgments about this sort of
thing. But it has been conventional wisdom for a long time, and I had
accepted it without any great thought.

Once you realize that this expectation is wrong, if you actually go back to
first principles and think about it with a little care, you realize that
chemists have been making loony assumptions about this for a century. It
simply does not survive ten minutes of careful thought on the subject. It
is unreasonable to expect that all of the alcohol will go away, indeed,
even that the overwhelming majority will go away. That's a sobering
thought, that trained people have been cheerfully accepting this loony idea
for so many decades. I didn't exactly re-evaluate my assumptions; I just
did a measurement, and was flabbergasted by the results.

No chemist in his or her right mind has ever considered the idea that
flambeeing removes much of the alcohol, by the way. That is simply too
wild an idea. I knew that was wrong when I was twelve years old, and it
would be silly to suggest I actually knew any chemistry then, so it must
have been extremely widely known for me to have come across it.

- Shankar