Not entirely. Cooking with wine does cause some alcohol to evaporate, but a significant amount stays in your food. Even after simmering for an hour, about 25% of the original alcohol remains. The common belief that heat “burns off” all the alcohol is one of the most persistent misunderstandings in home cooking.
How Much Alcohol Actually Remains
The USDA maintains a table of nutrient retention factors that spells out exactly how much alcohol survives different cooking methods. The numbers are higher than most people expect:
- Stirred into hot liquid, no further cooking: 85% of alcohol remains
- Flambéed: 75% remains
- Baked or simmered for 15 minutes: 40% remains
- Baked or simmered for 30 minutes: 35% remains
- Baked or simmered for 1 hour: 25% remains
- Baked or simmered for 1.5 hours: 20% remains
- Baked or simmered for 2 hours: 10% remains
- Baked or simmered for 2.5 hours: 5% remains
So a quick pan sauce where you deglaze with wine and serve minutes later retains most of its alcohol. A long-braised beef stew cooked for two and a half hours still holds onto about 5%. Cooking always results in some loss, but never total removal.
Why Heat Alone Doesn’t Remove All the Alcohol
Pure ethanol boils at about 78°C (173°F), which is lower than water’s boiling point of 100°C (212°F). This leads many people to assume that once a dish reaches a simmer, the alcohol simply boils away while the water stays behind. That’s not how it works in practice.
When alcohol is dissolved in water (and every wine, beer, or spirit is mostly water), the two liquids form what chemists call an azeotrope. In this mixture, alcohol and water evaporate together at roughly the same rate. As your sauce bubbles away, you’re losing water and alcohol simultaneously. The key insight: if there’s still liquid water in your food, there’s still some alcohol in it too. You can’t selectively boil off just the ethanol while keeping the water.
This is why time matters so much. The longer you cook, the more total liquid evaporates, and the alcohol concentration gradually drops. But it’s a slow, steady decline rather than a sudden disappearance.
Flambéing Barely Makes a Difference
The dramatic flame of a flambé looks like it should incinerate the alcohol. It doesn’t. Research testing a vodka-spiked caramel sauce found that igniting the dish removed less than 15% of the alcohol, and that loss was essentially the same whether the sauce was lit on fire or simply heated without ignition. The flame burns off alcohol vapor above the surface but barely touches the ethanol dissolved in the liquid below.
The USDA data confirms this: flambéed dishes retain roughly 75% of their starting alcohol. That dramatic tableside fire is mostly for show.
What Affects How Much Alcohol Stays
Cooking time is the single biggest factor, but it’s not the only one. The size and shape of your cooking vessel matters more than you might think. A wide, shallow pan exposes more surface area to the air, allowing alcohol (and water) to evaporate faster. A deep, narrow pot traps more liquid and retains more alcohol. If you’re making a reduction and want to minimize alcohol content, use the widest pan you have.
Stirring also helps. Agitating the liquid brings alcohol from the bottom of the pot to the surface, where it can evaporate. The USDA data actually tracks stirred and unstirred preparations separately. Baking a dish without stirring for 25 minutes leaves about 45% of the alcohol, compared to 40% for a stirred dish simmered for just 15 minutes.
Temperature plays a role too. A gentle simmer removes alcohol more slowly than a vigorous boil, simply because less liquid is evaporating per minute. Whether you have a lid on the pot matters as well, since a covered pot traps the vapor and limits evaporation.
How Much Alcohol Ends Up in a Serving
Context helps here. Most cooking wines range from about 11.5% to 13.5% ABV. A typical recipe might call for a cup of wine in a braise that serves six people. If you simmer that dish for two and a half hours, only about 5% of the original alcohol remains, spread across the entire pot. Starting at roughly 12% ABV in the wine, the dish’s total alcohol content drops to around 0.5% or less, which is the threshold the U.S. uses to label a beverage “nonalcoholic.”
For most adults, this trace amount is negligible. A ripe banana or a glass of orange juice can contain comparable levels of naturally occurring alcohol. A generous portion of a long-cooked stew isn’t going to produce any noticeable effect.
Fortified wines like Marsala, port, or sherry start at 15.5% to 25% ABV, so they contribute more alcohol to a dish. Recipes using fortified wines with short cooking times can retain meaningful amounts.
Who Should Be Cautious
For anyone avoiding alcohol entirely, whether for medical reasons, recovery from alcohol use disorder, or religious practice, the science is clear: typical cooking methods cannot completely remove ethanol from food. As food scientist Scott Rankin of the University of Wisconsin–Madison puts it, if water still remains in the food, so does ethanol. Even trace amounts may be a concern for some individuals, and the only way to guarantee zero alcohol is to skip the wine entirely.
Good substitutes exist. Broth adds savory depth, vinegar provides acidity, and grape juice or pomegranate juice can mimic some of wine’s fruity complexity. For children, the same logic applies. A long-cooked dish will contain only trace alcohol, but a quick sauce or an unbaked dessert made with spirits can retain significant amounts.