I thought it had the same amount of alcohol, do not ask me why I thought it had the same amount of Alcohol!
Cooking pasta with vodka
- Thread starter PandaBear
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True, but Charles Shaw is also just $3.50 for 750ml. Even if I throw away half after 2 meals it is still cheaper than those $3 Sutter Homes.
About "cooking wines", or any cooking alcohol. The reason they have salt is likely for tax reason outside of US. Some countries tax their alcohol to discourage alcoholism, and if they salt the wine for cooking then they don't need to tax it.
1) It helps make the meat less gamey. You can also use ginger, chilli pepper, white pepper, etc, but it does break down some of the gamey meat's odor.
2) It help dissolve and evaporate the aromatic compound of food, and it does help tomato flavors and smells in blind test.
3) It helps emulsify oil in water, so it goes well with cheese and cream as well.
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Always use Vodka and fresh cream in my pasta sauce. Trader Joes is fine and cheap too. Always impressed with their offerings for the money, used to serve 2buckChuck all the time when we had family gatherings. Always got positive comments about it.
Yes cooking wine is essentially denatured alcohol.
The alcohol boils off but the flavor remains. Ever had a red wine sauce? Cookies with rum flavor? The alcohol boils off but the flavor lingers. It's the same with vodka, presuming you use vodka that has a flavor. Many do: citrus, honeysuckle, cranberry, peach, cucumber, etc. Some cooks put gin in tomato sauce.
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What is the vodka flavor?
So this one I picked up for cooking seems to have a white wine like aroma, perfect for me as I'm really just using it to emulsify and to add grape flavor as a wine substitute. Not bad for $10-11 / 750mL
Someone taught me how to cook certain Chinese foods and insists that I need to use Shaoxing cooking wine - especially for braised pork belly. Usually it's really cheap and labelled as not suitable as a beverage, and ostensibly wasn't taxed. But once I found something that had almost the same label, but a slightly different label color, and it didn't say it wasn't a beverage. It also had the standard warning on the label about the dangers of alcoholic beverages. I tried sipping it and it was dreadful to drink, but was OK as a cooking wine.
Alcohol won't completely evaporate in food. At least not that much faster than water present in the food.
I remember once I was going to a free concert where BYO alcohol was allowed but had to be in cans or plastic. I had booze but wanted a little bit more and got some Barefoot Wine in a 187 ml plastic screwtop bottle at a Walgreens. Stuff was drinkable. Nothing spectacular, but still drinkable. But the craft beer I brought was much better drinking.
It was a huge pain though since they didn't allow coolers. Everything had to be in clear plastic bags, where I found one and dropped my beer and some reusable cold packs in there. It looked really weird and didn't insulate at all.
Sure it's almost all ethanol and water, but it's the other stuff that can make for minor differences that can be noticeable. There are measurable amounts of other alcohols and compounds that might not be distilled out.
Despite distillation and multiple filtering, it is not possible to produce 100 % ethanol. The obtained solution with a minimum ethanol content of 96 % also contains trace amounts of other compounds such as esters, aldehydes, higher alcohols, methanol, acetates, acetic acid and fusel oil (Regulation, E. C. N. 110/2008; Hu et al. 2010).
I'm sure if you really want to you can get close to 100% but it would be super expensive and not worth it. For cooking it is almost pointless. For extracting aroma (i.e. making fragrance) that small amount of water may be a problem.
As far as cooking goes, if I am really picky I would probably need to buy a $3.50 Charles Shaw every week and keep it in the fridge, but I am sure I will have to toss most of it away before I am done, and to be honest, I'm more comfortable with just tomato flavors instead of wine, so far Vodka is working pretty well in most of what I want to do. Maybe I'll soak some sun dry tomatoes in a small jar of vodka before cooking with it, who knows, it may be the best thing ever.
From my understanding that highly refined vodka has very little flavor. Hence using it in mixed drinks. I think that potato vodka came about because Russia and Poland has lots of potatoes and they used what they had.
Correct, those are the carryover products from the distillation. But as a whole there are far fewer congeners in vodka than some other distilled spirits such as whisky or especially brandy. Those give you a much worse hangover as they are more toxic.
Ethanol forms an azeotrope so the highest concentration you can achieve with distillation is around 95% (Everclear). To get anhydrous EtOH you have to use a drying agent and that's not permitted for beverages, only laboratory products.
