What’s the goal and why adding something like vodka if you’re just going to cook it out anyway? Why add it if it’s all going to evaporate in the end?
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After the alcohol burns off in the still-remaining vodka liquid, you get a new, well-paired food flavor/taste (and even texture) without getting grandma and toddler, and you and everyone drunk. It becomes a non-alcoholic flavor-enhancer and ingredient.
Alcohol dissolves things (we’re especially thinking about flavour compounds) that water can’t easily dissolve, and help those things get into your flavour receptors.
Alcohol also has its own taste and flavour which might be desired to balance a dish by adding some piquant bitterness.
Lastly, not all of the alcohol cooks out. This is a misconception. You would need to boil a dish almost completely dry to boil off all of the alcohol. Even after several hours of simmering some will still remain.
Alcohol can extract flavors out of foods that water can’t in situations where you don’t want to add fat. E.g. adding some wine to your tomato sauce gets flavors out of the tomato that simply cooking them wasn’t, spreading it out into the sauce and making it taste more… tomatoey. The alcohol can cook off after that because its job is done now.
You don’t add pure alcohol. You add wine or some kind of alcoholic beverage, which contains flavours and other stuff more than just alcohol.
The majority of recipes aren’t using the alcohol for the alcohol. Using wine brings depth and additional flavour, vodka can help elevate flavours already in the recipe eg: herbs & spices.
Beer in batter makes it lighter and beer in a steak pie or stew can give you an incredible amount of depth quickly
In the case of vodka, certain compounds will only dissolve into alcohol, creating a solution and flavour compounds that wouldn’t occur otherwise. In the case of things like wine or brandy, the alcohol burns off but much of the flavour compounds remain, adding complexity and depth to the dish.
I had heard that foods that contain tomato or red peppers benefit from the addition of alcohol because some of the substances in peppers and tomatoes react with alcohol to form new flavorful compounds that you just can’t get without exposing the food to both alcohol and heat.
It seems to work. Maybe it’s the placebo effect, but my tomato sauces taste better when there’s alcohol involved in the recipe.
First of all, alcoholic beverages like wine or whisky bring flsvors that may pair well with the rest of the ingredients. Secondly, ethanol may dissolve some organic compunds that water cannot allowing them to be more easily detected.
PD: When cooking, a part of the alcohol remains
A few reasons.
Lots of ingredients have components that are alcohol soluble, so in vodka penne for example the vodka can easily extract flavors from the herbs and spices which then meld with the rest of the dish when the alcohol evaporates.
Sometimes it’s used as a deglazer e.g. white wine added to a pan after cooking meat helps get all the tasty crispy bits off the bottom to mix into things.
Sometimes the high rate of evaporation is a positive, pie crusts cooked with alcohol can be flakier and crispier since it evaporates out more quickly than other liquids.
Beer is also useful in casseroles and stews as it adds a lot of flavour, and most of the alcohol is boiled away.
If you watch the top chefs on TV, they usually make a point of getting rid of the alcohol as it gives the food an off-taste that isn’t very pleasant.
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