Second Helping
Q: Wine burns off during cooking A: Well, sorta…
Second Thoughts…
Cooking with wine methods
Braises
Cooking over low heat for many hours, a braise pairs a tough cut of meat such as pork or beef with vegetables and submerges it in wine to slowly break down the meat’s muscle fibers and infuse it with flavor.
Deglazing
After cooking on a stove, the bottom of stainless steel pans will be coated with small browned bits of food. The French call this “fond” – we call it “free flavor.” Using any liquid, particularly wine, will dislodge the fond and “deglaze” the pan. Deglazing makes the beginnings of a quick and flavorful pan sauce – usually chicken broth is followed after the wine. Continue cooking until the liquids evaporate and forms a thick sauce.
Soaking
Dried foods – usually fruit but also mushrooms – can be soaked in wine to reconstitute and absorb the wine’s flavor, such as in many fruit breads. When using mushrooms the absorption is two-fold – the mushrooms absorb the wine’s flavor, but the wine also absorbs the mushroom’s essence. Use the mushrooms and then straining the soaking liquid for a potential sauce.
Reductions
Reductions on menus sound elaborate, but what’s elaborate about pouring wine into a saucepan and heating it over low heat until it cooks down into a syrup? This most often happens with red wine, but this technique works with dessert wines also, said Paul Childress, a Master Sommelier with Ben Arnold Beverage Company in South Carolina. White wines, he cautions, tend to be more acidic and have less sugar content – sweeter whites such as Rieslings or Zinfandel would boast better results than, say, Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc.
Drinking wine’s often considered a no-no in weight loss circles, and even post-weight alcohol needs to be treated with care. First there’s the calories: alcohol has seven calories per gram, with fat only being higher calories-per-gram. Then there’s the bad tendency to get tipsy and then, suddenly, grabbing a greasy poboy sounds like a great idea.
For all the pitfalls of drinking alcohol, cooking with wine is less explored. Many cooks say that wine’s alcohol burns off quickly in cooking. This suggests that wine is essentially free flavor, since the calories burn away with the alcohol.
But there’s no free pass on calories when you use wine for cooking. The USDA Table of Nutrient Factors, published in Dec. 2007, listed various cooking methods according to how much alcohol they actually removed. The amount of alcohol retention varies from 95 to a mere 5 percent.
The actual calorie amounts per ounce vary with individual wines, but the USDA also provides averages for common wine types. Considering that the highest alcohol content a wine may have is 28 proof, or 14 percent of its volume, a little math is required to figure how many calories wines adds to your dish.
There are several cooking methods that involve wine, and we give an approximate breakdown on how many calories are burned in each cooking method. With this additional information, does cooking with wine remain a viable healthful eating strategy?
Braises
Given the length of time most braises cook – anywhere from two to five hours – the vast majority of the alcohol content will evaporate.
Using this Red Wine Braised Short Ribs recipe (http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/red-wine-braised-short-ribs.aspx) as an example, a 750 ml bottle of Zinfandel has 650 calories on average — 105 ml or approx. 44 grams of which is alcohol.
Alcohol is 7 calories per gram, meaning 308 calories from the Zinfandel are from alcohol. After five hours or slow cooking, only 5 percent of these calories would remain — 293 would burn away.
So 357 calories would remain, divided among four-six servings isn’t horrible (about 90 calories). But the amount of fat you skim from the braise will effect its calories.
Deglazing
Typically you would only use about one ounce of white or red wine to deglaze a pan. That’s about 24 calories on average, about 14 of which are from alcohol.
Pan Sauces are generally fast, which means 95 percent of the alcohol calories would remain — you’ll basically lose a calorie from cooking.
Offering tremendous flavor for 19-23 calories, deglazing with wine boasts an excellent cost-to-benefit ratio.
Soaking
Soaking will vary wildly dependent upon how whether the soaked food cooks, and how long it cooks for, and exactly how much liquid is absorbed into the dried food. Absorbing the entirety of the alcohol — a la a fruit bread — will pack on calories. But frankly, if you’re eating fruit cake the alcohol calories are the least of your concerns.
In our tests we found reconstituting dehydrated mushrooms didn’t require much more than an ounce or two of wine, place it in the same territory as deglazing.This had the added beneift of flavoring the mushrooms and also a mushroom-infused wine to be used for another layer of flavor.
Reductions
Using this red wine reduction recipe as an example (http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Red-Wine-Reduction-102585), the red wine is roughly 950 calories. The Port contains a whopping 1185 calories per bottle and contained 19 percent alcohol (it’s technically a dessert wine, which is a different classification based on alcohol percentage). This recipe calls for an hour and a half of cooking, which would remove approximately 45 percent of the alcohol.
After the all the math involved, about the wine’s about 530 calories and the port 996. About 1526 calories, and that doesn’t account for any other ingredients. At tablespoon at a time, this reduction’s at least 47 calories per tablespoon. But tablespoons can add up and require thoughtfulness in how its used.Using a scant amount of a finishing sauce or to infuse wine flavor into dips, drinks or desserts wouldn’t kill anyone.
Sticking with one wine and bypassing dessert wines, reductions are more reasonable. Reductions may be kept in the refrigerator for a few days, but that’s a lot of reduction to go through a few tablespoons at a time.
A note on the math | First we took 14 percent (the average alcohol percentage in most wines) of each cooking style’s common serving size, then converted each unit of measure into grams and multiplied by 7 (the amount of calories per gram of alcohol). Having the alcohol calories confirmed, we deducted the percentage of alcohol that would be burned away from cooking, according to USDA nutrient retention reports. Finally, we adjusted the total calories by the alcohol calories that faded in cooking. The result is a more accurate view of how many calories are added to dishes.
Sources | For approximate wine, we consulted the USDA’s Nutrient Data Laboratory Database. What that wouldn’t tell us, we checked www.dietbites.com/calories/wine-calories.html.
Hi Russ,
I think your logic is flawed. Your assumption is that the alchohol and water content of the wine will evaporate at the same rate. Physics tells us otherwise. Vodka will become a solid at around -16.5F or -30c, where water turns solid at 32F or 0C. Water boils and becomes a vapor at 212F or 100C, where Vodka boils at 173F or 78C.
Still, in most cooking processes, the length of time of heating or flambeing is not sufficient to remove all the alcohol. There will be a trace amount of alcohol in the sauce. Not quite the amounts you proport though.
Thanks!
Hey there, thanks for the comment!
At the time I wrote this story, The USDA data I tracked down when I worked on this story focused solely on the retention rates of alcohol, bearing its evaporation points in mind. So the differences in alcohol/water evaporation are largely sidestepped from that data. It's a nonissue.
*Laughs* If there were any error involved, its my calorie calculations. I checked, spoke checked, and double checked my math with various nutritionists on my math before running that story live. It's entirely possible my calculations were off … I'll resend the numbers to another nutritionist source and make sure the numbers are accurate. If it turns out they're incorrect, I'll post a comment and change it in the text ASAP.
It's important to me these numbers are accurate, particularly as they inform our recommendations for different uses with wines. I cook with alcohol quite a bit, mainly with pan sauces and the occasional reduction used sparingly.
Hey there, wanted to give you an update. I checked with a third nutritionist last week from a internist office in Washington and they are vouching for my numbers.
I think the big thing with this is I'm not counting the total calories of the dish — I just pulled some online examples to provide an idea. The biggest thing to take form this is wine is not quite the "free flavor" its made out to be and requires some care when using. It can add tremendous flavor to dishes, but stick with deglazing or moderate amounts of reductions.
I'll keep checking with the various nutritionists I come across just to make sure this is on-target.
This is super-helpful (even if it changes my menu for tonight). Thanks so much for doing the legwork.