It depends – on how much alcohol you use, how long you cook it and, perhaps, how long you’ve been sober.
Many people believe that if you pour lavish amounts of red wine into your coq au vin, the alcohol all burns off with cooking, leaving only the lovely taste. Wrong. Some of the alcohol burns off, but lots – from 10 to 85 percent, doesn’t, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
In a study published in 1992 in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Rena Cutrufelli [cq] found that, depending on how and how long the food is cooked, varying amounts of alcohol remain. Cutrufelli is a supervising nutritionist at the USDA’s Nutrient Data Laboratory, part of the Agricultural Research Service.
If you flambe something, say, bananas with rum, to make a fancy dessert, 75 percent of the alcohol remains. If simmer that hearty wine-soaked chicken stew for two hours, only 10 percent remains. If you add alcohol to a recipe, don’t heat it and store it overnight, 70 percent remains. If you simply stir alcohol into hot liquid, 85 percent remains. (For more information, visit www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp.)
Though recovering alcoholics are understandably fearful of even the tiniest traces of alcohol in food, a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract in a batch of chocolate chip cookies is probably trivial. The extract contains 40 percent alcohol, and if you bake the cookies for 15 minutes, only 40 percent of the alcohol remains, Cutrufelli said.
The biggest danger of cooking with alcohol, especially for people in the first months or years of sobriety, is having a tempting, open bottle of booze in the kitchen, said Dr. Mark Willenbring [cq], director of the treatment and recovery division of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Vanilla extract, he said, probably poses much less danger of relapse than the alcohol in mouthwashes and cough syrups. But recovering alcoholics taking Antabuse (disulfiram) may experience the same unpleasant nausea and flushing from eating food cooked with alcohol as they would from a drink.