Re: Which wine?

Kent <kh6444@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

When you braise beef with wine, as when making Boeuf Bourguignon, the
alcohol fraction goes to 0%.

This has been proven to be wrong.

from http://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/phaseeqia/nonideal.html

They are talking about distillation. Cooking is different.

The standard "explanation" that alcohol boils at a lower temperature
than water, and that therefore the alcohol will boil off before the
water does, does not actually hold water, let alone alcohol, in the
context. In a mixture, water and alcohol do not boil independently of
each other and do not evaporate independently of each other, either.
There will always be more alcohol than water in the vapours - that is
why the percentage of alcohol decreases with the length of cooking - but
the process is very much less efficient than a lot of people realise.

I have referred you to the FAQ, which is quoting the results of the
study by E. Augustin et al., done for the USDA. They have made
measurements in actual real-life conditions. Among other things, the
study examined burgundy-laden dishes similar to boeuf bourguignon and
coq au vin and discovered that anywhere from 5% to 49% of alcohol
remained in the cooked dishes. Temperatures, cooking times, covered or
uncovered cooking vessels, form of cooking vessels (wide and shallow, or
narrow and tall) all influenced the rate of alcohol evaporation.

As I said, this all has been discussed numerous times on rfc by, among
others, Shankar Bhattacharyya, who is certainly more than just competent
enough and who has done his own experiments. Here is one of his
meta-posts on the subject:
<http://groups.google.com/group/rec.food.cooking/msg/fb5d127f43c234ff>.

Victor
.

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