Alcohol as a recipe ingredient

lthames0810

Do any of the calories in alcohol cook off in the cooking process? I made bourbon chicken (including a quarter cup of bourbon!!) in my slow cooker and the calorie count for a 100 gram serving is disappointing. I guess I'm hoping (wishing) for an adjustment that can be applied to alcohol as a recipe ingredient.

janejellyroll

I do not make adjustments for alcohol when I cook with it. Some of the alcohol does cook off, but not all of it. Is 2 ounces of bourbon really that much of a calorie hit for the overall recipe?

lthames0810

It's only 120 calories. You're right. I guess the finished dish is very dense, or something. I put one ladle full in a bowl to have for lunch today and it looked like less than one cup, but weighed 218 grams for over 400 calories. I was surprised.

The brown sugar in it actually did far more damage than the bourbon. If I make it again, I'll cut way down on that. I thought it came out too sweet, anyway.

I was just wondering if there is any standard adjustment for cooking with booze.

Jthanmyfitnesspal

I think the alcohol would be totally gone after a few hours of slow cooking. (In that case, I kind of wonder what's the point of adding it.)

lthames0810

Jthanmyfitnesspal wrote: »

I think the alcohol would be totally gone after a few hours of slow cooking. (In that case, I kind of wonder what's the point of adding it.)

For flavor. Definitely not for nutrition.

acpgee

I've asked this question on the boards and never got a satisfactory answer. I make coq au vin where the wine boils off for few hours.

lynn_glenmont

lthames0810 wrote: »

It's only 120 calories. You're right. I guess the finished dish is very dense, or something. I put one ladle full in a bowl to have for lunch today and it looked like less than one cup, but weighed 218 grams for over 400 calories. I was surprised.

The brown sugar in it actually did far more damage than the bourbon. If I make it again, I'll cut way down on that. I thought it came out too sweet, anyway.

I was just wondering if there is any standard adjustment for cooking with booze.

Are you sure you haven't made a mistake in calculating the calories in your dish? Did you weigh the finished recipe, and use that to figure out the serving the size?

I ask, because when you say "ladle full," I'm picturing something on the soup-y, stew-y side, which means a lot of liquid (water is part of pretty much every liquid humans consume, and water is very heavy, and very low in calories). I know you say it had a lot of brown sugar in it, but a typical non-diet cola is only 38 kcal per 100 g.

And if it wasn't soupy, then presumably it's mostly chicken. According to the USDA database, pulled chicken with bourbon sauce is only 138 calories per 100 grams (so still a good bit below the roughly 2 kcal per gram that you're reporting).

lthames0810

It was a very thick stew consistency. Almost fork edible. I did weigh the finished product and I did a quick scan of the other ingredients when I rechecked the bourbon calories. I don't know. I very well may have made a mistake. In addition to the bourbon and brown sugar, there was honey and apple juice. Like I said before, too sweet for my preference. I'll have to modify and redo the recipe entries.

HDBKLM

If it were me I'd count all the alcohol calories, though that is largely just because I figure it's better to overestimate than to underestimate. That said, there is information on the web about alcohol burning off that I've found informative. I'll summarise my recent Googling but do your own research to confirm your sources: in something like a flambé don't expect your alcohol to cook off that fast. If you cook low and slow for a long time like in a stew then yes, the alcohol does tend to eventually burn off. BUT slow cookers actually differ from low and slow in, say, a Dutch oven on the stove, because the heat you cook at is SO low that you basically never cook without the lid tightly affixed. As a result, even if some alcohol hits its evaporation temp (which is indeed lower than water evaporation temp) it just collects at the top of the lid then drips back down. For that reason, some recipe websites actually specify that if you are going to cook a particular recipe in a slow cooker rather than on the hob, then use half the liquor, wine, or whatever. They don't care about calories, they think that you'll be left with too much alcohol flavour that'll ruin the taste of the recipe.

apullum

Whether or not the alcohol in a recipe cooks off has a lot to do with cooking time and temperature--that is, does the dish spend enough time in a temperature range hot enough for the alcohol to evaporate? For a stew in a slow cooker, there is probably not much alcohol left when the dish is done. However, alcoholic drinks may also have sugars that do not evaporate when the alcohol itself is gone. The calories from sugars in the drink will still be in the dish.

You can't assume that all the calories from the alcohol are gone, so I would just use the original amount of alcohol in the recipe calculation. The worst case scenario is that you'll slightly overestimate the calories in the finished dish.

Sources: https://www.oasas.ny.gov/admed/fyi/fyi-cooking.cfm, https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/9955/cooking-alcohol-how-many-calories-are-lost