Cooking with alcohol: the ins and outs
Just a splash of amaretto in the tiramisu, or letting your stew simmer for hours with dark beer. How much alcohol is left after you’ve finished cooking? Is it safe to serve the dish to children and pregnant friends?
Alcohol can give your dish that little bit of extra flavor, but how do you handle it when there are children at the table? With these answers from the Voedingscentrum, you can be sure you’re doing the right thing:
Heating, chilling, flambéing
If you leave a stew on the heat for at least two hours, 90 percent of the alcohol evaporates. Take the stew off the heat within fifteen minutes, and 40 percent has evaporated. Made tiramisu and put it in the fridge? If you chill a dessert or sauce, 10 to 15 percent of the alcohol evaporates. Do you think flambéing burns off all the alcohol? Think again: 75 percent of the alcohol remains in the dish.
Safe?
The safest way to serve the dish is therefore to use a small amount of alcohol and leave the dish on the heat for two hours. There will then be almost no alcohol left in it. Want to be completely safe? Just leave out the alcohol altogether, and you won’t have to worry at all.
Also read:
