Question:
Will cooking vodka reduce its calories?
?
2011-05-14 03:24:00 UTC
I make my own tasty vodka sauce and I'm trying to figure out the nutritional information by compiling by ingredients. I wanted to find out if straight vodka has the same calories as vodka that has the alcohol cooked off (the vodka cooks for about 30 minutes). Thanks!
Four answers:
anonymous
2011-05-14 10:28:01 UTC
One ounce of vodka has about 65 calories. Vodka contains no fats, carbohydrates, protein, fibers, sugar or cholesterol, so what exactly does vodka contain? A small amount of water, and: ethyl alcohol. Since water has no calories, the approximately 65 calories per ounce of vodka come from: the alcohol itself.



So what happens when you "cook off" vodka? You place the vodka over high heat and shortly, the alcohol begins to evaporate. What does this mean in terms of the calorie content of the vodka still in your saucepan? It means there are fewer calories.



HOWEVER, here is the catch: there is also less vodka in your saucepan. In fact, if you boiled off all the alcohol in vodka (and the water in vodka), you'd be left with an empty saucepan. Not only this, but ALL the flavor of vodka is in the alcohol itself. Less alcohol = fewer calories, but, less calories = less vodka itself = less taste. If you heat vodka until the alcohol begins to evaporate, you are not left with a "more potent" or "more flavorful" essence of vodka in the pan.



Vodka is not like other wines and spirits used for cooking: if you cook red wine (which contains sugar and starch), you end up with a delicious and thick "red wine reduction" that may, at some point, contain no alcohol at all. When cooking with sherry, rum, or scotch, it is also possible to "cook off" the alcohol (and alcohol's calories) and still be left with something flavorful in the pan. Not so with vodka: in vodka, the alcohol IS the flavor.



What does this mean for you and your tasty vodka sauce? It means that if you normally use 1 cup of vodka per batch of sauce, there is no way to add 1 cup of "cooked off" vodka that will be any different in calorie content than vodka straight out of the bottle. You could pour 1 cup of vodka into a saucepan and "cook it off" for 30 minutes, but if you measured the vodka in the saucepan after you were done cooking it, it would be less than 1 cup, and therefore less than your recipe calls for. And, you would have just wasted the vodka you cooked off by pumping it into the air-- breathe deep! (If the vodka in the saucepan is still 1 cup, that would mean you didn't have it on high enough heat to cook any alcohol off, which would mean you also did not cook off any calories.)



However, since you are interested in overall calories and nutritional information, it may be worth noting that research suggests consumption of alcohol actually increases metabolic rate significantly, meaning the body actually burns more calories when alcohol is ingested. So while adding vodka to your sauce may increase the calorie count, it might also step-up the metabolism of the person eating your sauce, causing them to burn more calories than they normally would have.
Someone
2011-05-14 10:33:04 UTC
Just so you know, not all the alcohol will cook off, just to let you know. Open pot boiling should cook off about 90% based on this website

http://4theycallmemommy.blogspot.com/2008/02/does-alcohol-cook-off-entirely.html



I say this will require research. How many of the calories in Vodka is from alcohol. Now figure out exactly how much alcohol has cooked out (90%), so say 90% of the alcohol calories are left.



Here's another link for Vodka calories, which has a couple more links at the bottom of the article.



http://www.naturmeds.info/sources-of-calories-in-vodka.html



Or you do the old fashioned route, and make the sauce, then find the calories of the sauce once fully prepared. No idea how to do that.
anonymous
2011-05-14 16:23:26 UTC
So yes, the less alcohol in the mix, the fewer calories in the mix.
anonymous
2011-05-14 13:34:27 UTC
There could be as much as 50% of it left. This very question is addressed entertainingly in the book below.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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