cooking with beer

Hopefully one of your enlightened folk can shed some light on this for me...

I'm watching my carb intake, and recently made the Cowboy's Chili recipe (after reading post #2). What happens to the carbs in the beer ? Do they stay in the recipe and need to be counted, or is cooking with beer like cooking with wine, where most of the calories (I've been led to believe) cook out with the alcohol ?

Thanks !

Celia

The carbs stay in the final dish. I assume the calories do too.

Darn. :) Thanks Peter !

Celia

Who Cares!!!???


rwj

You do. You don't want me cooking YOUR chili recipe with low carb blonde beer. That would lead to another "on the doorstep with a bottle of bourbon, a Bible and a shotgun" moment... :D

No, I don't want you using low-carb beer in my chili! But you misunderstand me Celia. Don't worry about the carbs. Eat and be happy.

rwj

The carbs stay in the final dish. I assume the calories do too.

Alcohol is one of the carbs and it cooks off, so the carbs should be less.

Yes, but how much less? Here's 2 sites that list the carb content for various beers: realbeer.com and carbs-information.com .The curious thing is that non-alcoholic beer has a higher carb count than beer with alcohol. I was unable to find any data showing how much of the carbs in beer was because of the alcohol and how much was from other ingredients. In any case, the total carb contribution from the beer, per portion consumed, should be low.

OK - so doing some math in my head and finding another website that informed me that 1 gram of alcohol has 7 calories, one can guestimate that a 12 oz. bottle of 5% alcohol beer has about 18 grams of alcohol, or about 125 calories from alcohol. So, if the bottle contained 175 calories before cooking off the alcohol, then there would only be about 50 calories worth of carbs left.

Howie, Peter, thank you ! I'm going to stop worrying about it, it doesn't seem to be significant. Maybe I should just avoid serving the chili with a bowl of white rice... :D

Howie is the closest. There are about 75 calories from alcohol in a bottle of beer, and they all cook out any time you're making something that simmers for an hour or more.

To figure out how much remains, just subtract from the calories in the beer. Guinness is an excellent cooking beer, and a whole bottle only adds 50 calories.

Enjoy your chili without guilt.

Walt

Cheers, Walt. :)