Cooking with alcoholic beverages – Validating a mathematical description of the loss of ethanol in liquid dishes

Abstract

For liquid foods, the concentration of alcohol diminishes throughout cooking as a power law function of the volume. The exponent, β, governing the steepness of the concentration decay is so far only determined for food of fixed composition. Results for a systematic study of the effect of common food components are provided. The results support the power law function as a universal model for loss of alcohol and indicate that food components slightly enhance volatility of alcohol as seen by higher values of β. The results provide insight for the professional chef as well as the industrial practitioner.