Whats the point of cooking with alcohol, like vodka, if the point is to boil/cook it all out? What is the purpose of adding it then if you end up getting rid of it all?
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Aside from the aromatic and flavor compounds in alcohol (including acidity), the alcohol itself acts as a solvent whiich can help free up flavor molecules that are harder to release during normal cooking. Apparently cooking a tomato sauce with vodka makes it more “tomato-ey” in flavor than if you’d just used the same volume of water.
I always like Harold McGee’s explanation in On Food and Cooking: the shape of an ethanol molecule looks like water on one side and a fat molecule on the other side. It mixes really well with water, but it can also mix with fats a little bit. Fats don’t mix with water on their own. This makes it helpful mixing molecules that have flavors and tend to look more like fats into a mix that is mostly water (many foods and sauces), that they wouldn’t otherwise dissolve in.
vodka is a bit different in that it doesn’t really have a flavor of its own but wine or beer can be used as the base for a good sauce that really isn’t hard to make. Cooked chicken? whatever spices you already threw in the pan plus enough $3 white wine to cover the bottom (not with any depth but more than ‘a splash’) simmer it down until it thickens and boom better food. Throwing some beef in the slow cooker? Crack open a cold one (for personal consumption) while putting your spices in – now open a second beer and dump that in instead of water. Don’t think of it as ‘alcohol’ think of it as a series of ingredients that happens to have alcohol as part of it.
1) the alcohol drink contains more than just alcohol
2) alcohol can do stuff to food chemically before going away
3) the idea it 100% burns off is a simplication and it doesn’t do that and people say it does to indicate you won’t be getting drunk on the stuff you cook. But some alcohol is still there
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