Does wine really boil away in sauces? Chef tests it – and is amazed

A splash of wine often adds a little extra flavor to sauces. The alcohol adds a special flavor and eventually evaporates—right? Galileo chef Benedikt Faust conducts a test to determine how many minutes it takes for wine to completely evaporate in sauces.

To do this, he prepares four different sauces: 150 milliliters of a full-bodied, dry red wine is added to the pan. Also, butter, honey, and broth. The remaining ingredients can partially bind the alcohol. The result: It evaporates more slowly. The boiling point of alcohol is 78.3 degrees Celsius, at which point it gradually evaporates.

The chef removes pan one from the heat after ten minutes, pan two after thirty minutes. He cooks a third portion of sauce for an hour. "There really shouldn't be any alcohol left in there," he is certain. At the end, he simply pours the wine into the sauce for two minutes. "Now I'll pretend I forgot to add the alcohol."

The four test sauces are packaged airtight and sent to a special laboratory run by brewery experts at the Technical University of Munich, who are tasked with determining the residual alcohol content in the sauce. And the results surprise even the chef: In fact, only a small amount of the alcohol has been evaporated.

The 10-minute sauce still contains 72 percent residual alcohol, and after 30 minutes, just under half. Even after an hour, just under 30 percent remains. Even less surprising: The sauce into which the chef poured the wine for a few minutes still contains 96 percent residual alcohol.

Although all sauces contain only small amounts of alcohol after cooking, children and pregnant women should avoid them.