What’s the point of cooking with alcohol?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

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.