Alcohol Removal Time

While I was on the plane back from Ireland I caught an episode from the first season of Beer Geeks which I thought was an acceptable show, but not especially well put together. There were a couple of gaffes in the episode, one of the worst was regarding cereal mash and decoction, but that is fodder for another discussion.

In it I seem to recall during the dish preparation segment the discussion of cooking off the alcohol. We see this crap all the time on cooking shows and it takes longer to accomplish than most people think.

Here’s the reality:

And the study behind it (minus the table):
http://albertorojo.com/BlogsTN/VinoEvaporacion.docx

That’s interesting. All these years I had always heard it has a low evaporation point and cooked off fast. I imagine that is still true for a flambéed sauté etc. I had always thought that recovering alcoholics were being a bit overly cautious when not consuming cooked dishes with alcohol but that might not be true.

Flambé retains 85% of the alcohol, if you cook it for 15 minutes it is down to 40%, even after an hour 25% of the alcohol remains.

Why would you want to get rid of alcohol?  :o

Seriously??
If there was a way to remove the alcohol from beer and still have it truly taste like beer, I’d be all over it!  I love beer, but I hate feeling drunk.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to get the all or most of the alcohol out without adversely affecting the flavor.
There are a few N/A beers I’ll buy from time to time which are minimally tolerable, but they still come up very short in the flavor department.

Most people recite the old line that cooking removes the alcohol which it does not. As to wanting it gone, I don’t care if it is gone or it stays, it is all about the flavor of the dish!

so should bakers remove extracts from their cookies, cause there is alcohol in those too, to the tone of 35% but cookies bake for 8 mins, But I would just me pointing out the obvious…

True, but the amount used is less than half a ml per serving. 36 cookies use 1 tsp or 5ml of vanilla extract.

Now I want a cookie…

Check out a bottle of peppermint extract. We had it in the restaurant for specialty cocktails. I want to say it was around 95%, and not 95 proof. At one point it was called for in a kids milk shake recipe: oops

Kids in Belgian used to drink 2% beer at lunch (or so I heard).  Now they drink Coca Cola.  I don’t think that’s an improvement.