Pregnant women can still tuck into a boozy coq au vin – as long as the pan lid was left on loosely while cooking, say scientists

Pregnant women can still tuck into authentic coq au vin and other dishes cooked with alcohol – as long as the chef leaves the lid on the pan loosely.

That’s according to scientists who have shown that this way of cooking – compared to without the lid on or with it fully on – has a dramatic effect on reducing the concentration of alcohol in the meal.

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How much the dish is reduced is affected by the cooking temperature and the size of dish. How much alcohol is added at the start also make a difference, they found.

Mothers-to-be have been left fearful of accidentally breaking current guidelines to avoid any alcohol during pregnancy by eating meals that include a red or white wine sauce or a meal laced with beer.

Now a team of Denmark has determined a loose lid allows the alcohol to evaporate more rapidly from the saucepan than from water left uncovered.

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They have also offered reassurance by providing an example of how much alcohol can be typically left in a meal.

In an experiment using 150ml of beer they found the meal contained just 2ml of alcohol – about a seventh of a unit of alcohol which they say pregnant women are ‘able to handle’.

Because of confusing advice about how much alcohol is safe for women to drink in pregnancy, the Chief Medical Officers for the UK recommend the safest approach is not to drink alcohol at all to keep risks to your baby to a minimum.

Drinking alcohol, especially in the first three months of pregnancy, increases the risk of miscarriage, premature birth and your baby having a low birth weight.

Drinking after the first three months of your pregnancy could affect your baby after they’re born.

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The risks are greater the more you drink. The effects include learning difficulties and behavioural problems.

Why you need to place the lid loosely

We all know that boiling alcohol reduces the concentration, but many of us would expect removing the lid would help more of it escape.

But the scientists say the opposite is true.

Doctor Pia Snitkjaer, of the Department of Food Science at the University of Copenhagen, said: ‘By boiling hard, the volume will decrease rapidly.

‘By placing a lid on the saucepan, there is a kind of reverse distillation where the alcohol disappears even more rapidly from the saucepan than the water.

‘This is because alcohol is more volatile than water and thus can more readily evaporate.

She said the lid doesn’t sit tightly on the saucepan, allowing the steam to escape under the lid so that the alcohol evaporates, while the water condenses more preferential on the colder lid and runs back into the pan.

As it cooks, more and more alcohol escapes under the lid, while the contents of the saucepan will contain a higher percentage of water.

‘But if you do not want the food to boil down too much, you can keep adding water as water evaporates, which will also lower the alcohol content both by dilution and evaporation,’ she added.

How much alcohol remains in a dish depends on three factors: whether it is cooked with or without a lid, how much the dish is reduced, and, obviously, how much alcohol is added from the start.

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As well as the cooking temperature, the size of the dish matters too, because this affects how quickly the sauce was reduced, evaporating more alcohol.

How much alcohol is left behind?

Dr Snitkjaer carried out an experiment using 900mls of veal stock plus 150ml beer or wine.

She discovered that with this ratio the alcohol concentration starts at around two per cent but drops to 0.2 per cent after half an hour of cooking.

She said: ‘One should remember that you typically eat only one tenth of a litre of sauce.

‘If we, for example, assume that you eat 100ml of sauce, with a concentration of two per cent volume it corresponds to an intake of 2ml of alcohol.

‘There are 15ml in a unit of alcohol, so a pregnant woman would also be able to handle it.’

Good news for slimmers

We all know that alcohol is calorific and Dr Snitkjaer said that labels on ready-prepared meals containing alcohol are ‘misleadingly high’ as they refer to the amount before the alcohol was cooked.

She said: ‘How many fewer calories there are depends on how much alcohol is evaporated.

‘One gram of alcohol gives about seven calories, so every time you evaporate one gram of alcohol, you have seven fewer calories in the saucepan.

‘It would be nice to be able to say precisely what this means for a tomato soup, a meat dish etc.’

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