I’ve been wanting to do this research for a while now. A huge amount of restaurants in most non-Muslim countries do use alcohol in cooking food, and because this could be very limiting at times, they usually insist that “all of it is gone” because of the heat. so I thought of taking a more scientific approach to that claim.
First, to measure the “allowable limit of alcohol to drink”, I looked at things that are naturally halal like fruit juices. Orange juice for example, has around 0.1% naturally occurring alcohol by volume (that’s ethanol, the same alcohol used in all types of alcoholic drinks).
When stored (even in a fridge), it can reach up to 0.4% by volume..
It’s also important to note that any alcohol content that is less than 0.5% by volume (or 0.39% by weight) is likely to be metabolized as you drink it, so the effect of the alcohol is always neutralized by the rest of the drink/food, i.e no matter how much you drink, as long as you're drinking 200 times more of something else, you'll never get drunk. Many countries consider any drink with less than 0.5% alcohol by volume as “non-alcoholic”, and they can serve it to minors.
(Source: Paul Davis research on ethanol in citrus fruits http://quezi.com/14067)
Now the food:
Generally, the alcohol content that is retained in food varies based on how it was cooked, but the important numbers are for simmering (most saucy meat dishes) and baking (most deserts)..
simmering chicken is usually around half an hour, so that leaves 40% of the alcohol intact, meat could take more to simmer.
Baking however usually takes longer, and usually anything that bakes longer than 2:30 hour has less than 5% left..More alchol is retained when flaming (like grilled steak), which tends to be around 75%Finally the worst of all would be adding to boiling water, which is usually the case with soups, and that retains 85% of the alcohol content.
(source: the research done by FDA and Idaho university, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooking_with_alcohol)
Of course the amount of wine used and it’s type depends on the dish, but generally people use:
Red wine is preferred with meat. ( 15% ABV on average)
White wine is preferred with seafood/chicken. ( 13% ABV on average)
Brandy or heavy desert wine is preferred when baking sweets. (40% ABV on average)
(Source: alcoholic contents in wine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume, cooking preference with wine: http://whatscookingamerica.net/WineInCooking.htm)
Using the information above, here are some case studies:
One case study for deserts, is the delicious Zuccotto cake, which we used to eat before we knew it had alcohol in it.
According to this recipe(http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/zuccotto-recipe.html) the Zuccotto cake is baked for 3 hours with 1/4 cup of brandy.
Brandy has 40% ABV, that’s 24 milliliter out of the 60 that are 1/4 a cup.
Cooking for 3 hours retains less than 5% of those 24 ml, which is around 1 milliliter of alcohol in the finished cake.
to put that into perspective, that’s the equivalent of alcohol in 500ml (1.5 cup) of 2 week old Orange juice (i.e. super market OJ), or 3 cups of freshly squeezed juice.
According to the recipe, this recipe yields 8 to 10 servings, so each serving would contain the alcohol content of around 50 ml of OJ.
it’s also worth noting, that the alcohol by weight ratio (since we can’t measure the volume of the cake) is 0.13% (the ingredients of the cake measure around 26 ounce, which is 737 gram. We’re not going to account for weight loss due baking to keep things simple, 1 ml of alcohol is approximately 1 gram) which is way bellow the 0.39% alcohol by weight limit.
Another would be creamy white wine sauce, which according to this recipe (http://www.cooks.com/recipe/tz0aj8qv/wine-cream-sauce.html) has 1/4 cup (15 ml) white wine, which is 2 ml alcohol before cooking. After 15 minutes of simmering (according to this recipe 11 to 18), the alcohol retained would be around 50% of that which is 1 ml.
So this produces 1 cup of sauce (60ml) which will have 1ml of alcohol, (1.5% by volume, less than that by weight since it’s a cream based sauce), which is too much if you’re drinking the sauce. But since most people don’t really drink the sauce, we can safely say that the sauce usually accounts for less than third the dish by weight (it’s usually even less), then the entire dish would have less than the 0.39% limit.
Also, this dish would have the equivalent of 1.5 cups of OJ.
Finally the last case study would be flame alcohol, one very famous dish is bourbon glazed steak. this recipe (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/bourbon-street-rib-eye-steak/) recommends a 2/3 cup of bourbon whiskey (40% ABV), which is 16ml alcohol. Because it’s flamed, 75% of the alcohol will be retained, (also it's marinated and sotred overnight, so that's another 70%) so that’s a total of 8.4ml of alcohol in a 6 ounce steak (assuming that the steak absorbs 100% of the marinate, which never happens)… that’s 5% by weight, which is a lot. 8 ml of alcohol is equivalent to drinking 4 liters of OJ, so in order to safely metabolize the 8ml, you need to consume the equivalent of 4 liter of OJ, in this case you’re only consuming 170 gm.Of course the actual alcohol content would be far less since the steak didn't absorb the entire marinate, but since I have no way of measuring this, I'll just assume the worst.
Conclusion:
It highly depends on the recipe, but since it’s impractical to do this calculations while eating outside, I would recommend avoiding soup and grilled items with alcohol, and if you want ot be extra safe, you could also avoid sauces with alcohol that you don't know.
Most baked desserts with alcohol are ok to consume, but if you want to be absolutely safe you can do the calculation yourself for the dish you want to have.
A large portion of simmered food with alcohol (like protein with a wine based sauce) are also safe to consume, but these generally have higher alcohol content than desserts, so you might want to be cautious.
However if you want to be 100% safe, you can do these calculations for the dishes you’d like at your favorite restaurant (ideally at home, before going there), and then decide for yourself.
Finally a good rule of thumb when it comes to judging things on the fly would be:
Baked > simmered > flamed > soup
beer > white wine > red wine > liquor
dry food > moist food > liquid food
more cooking time > less cooking time
more cooking time > less cooking time
