Cooking alcohol: how many calories are lost?

Question

Google fails me.

I'm curious how many calories are burned away when you cook various kinds of alcohol...wines, liquors, beers (including lite beer).

Asked by marienbad

Answer

It depends on how much alcohol there is relative to other things--sugars primarily, as they are about the only calorific part of most alcoholic beverages once the alcohol is gone (alcohol is the most calorific part for sure). You can use the alcohol proportion by volume (ABV) to approximate a little.

Assuming equal amounts of each:

Spirits don't leave much calorific stuff behind at all after the alcohol is gone because they're mostly alcohol. Alcohol by volume is between 40 and 60 percent in most cases.

Wine leaves a bit more, as there is more unfermented sugar remaining in the beverage you buy, but there's still not a heck of a lot. It depends on how dry the wine is. Alcohol by volume is between 10 and 20 percent mostly.

Beer can leave quite a bit, as many have significant amounts of unfermented/unfermentable sugar. This can be where ABV lets you down for estimating--high alcohol beers are also often high in unfermentable sugar too, so when the alcohol goes you're still left with quite a few calories. ABV can be anything from 4 to 20 percent, with the majority clustering around 5 percent. Lite beers are usually pretty low in alcohol and also pretty dry, meaning low residual sugars too.

A gray area is liqueurs and the like. Many are fairly high in alcohol by volume, but also heavy on sugars.

I should also point out that in many cooking applications, the calories added by the alcoholic beverage are fairly negligible, given the small amounts used relative to the number of servings. Even a Boeuf Bourguignon or Coq au Vin with a whole bottle of wine in it doesn't have all THAT much wine per serving--that whole bottle gets broken down into 6 or more servings, so each person gets less than a glass worth of alcohol-free wine calories. That probably averages something like 40 extra calories per serving.

Answered by bikeboy389

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Calories pre-cooked vs cooked

Question

When I look for the calorie count of ground beef, for example, I see 480 for 8oz 85% lean ground beef. Fair enough. But this site shows 34g of fat, precisely 15% of the 8oz I started with. Seeing how much liquid is left in the pan, I imagine some of the fat had to have melted out. Yet, I'm unable to find a site that will at least hint at a better estimate based on the cooked product. Another site shows cooked calori/fat count but the fat calories are actually higher for 8oz than with the uncooked from the first site. Clearly, I'm missing something. I was expecting to find a pre-cooked count, then a post-cooked with a warning "based on medium well" orsimilar. Obviously the cooked products won't be identical.

Answer

You can easily calculate a maximum calories difference, and not so easily approximate an actual difference.

If you measure the weight of your meat pre- and post-cooking, you can regard the difference as the maximum amount of fat that has been lost from the meat. Multiply that difference by the number of calories per same unit, and you will have a good idea of the maximum difference in calories.

If you want a more exact number, catch all the drippings and try to determine the percentage comprised by fat. You could boil your drippings for some period, and what is left should be (mostly) fat. That seems like an awful lot of work, but you may be able to do it once and decide that for your purposes whatever you came up with on that one calculation is good enough to apply universally.

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