Flambé, used as a noun, describes food that has had brandy or another liquor poured over it and set alight. This culinary term is also used as a verb, where to flambé a dish means to pour brandy or other liquor over it and set it on fire. This flashy technique, also called flaming, used to be reserved for certain deserts like Bananas Foster, Cherries Jubilee, or Crepes Suzette. But what does flambéing do? What effect does it have on the food?
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I’ve already tackled the question of whether all the alcohol burns off through cooking. You may have already read that it does not, but this doesn’t mean you’re going to have loads of alcohol in your food. Most chefs and even home cooks are convinced that flambéing removes more alcohol than heating alone.
Since this technique is often done tableside at restaurants, one of the main purposes is spectacle and flash. However, when cooking with alcohol, you’ll often see professional chefs starting huge fires in their pans in the kitchen. These chefs think there are good reasons to set alcohol on fire when cooking. There probably is not.
The reason chefs do this is that they believe setting the on fire will help burn off more of the alcohol or burn it off more quickly and greatly affect the taste and texture of the finished dish. Tackling the former first, the problem with this assumption is that once the alcohol is burning it is already ‘leaving’ the food.
For ethanol to burn it must evaporate to become a gas and mix with oxygen. When you light an alcohol-containing dish on fire, it is the evaporated alcohol, just above the pan, mixed with oxygen, that is burning. The flames do not do very much to enhance the evaporation of alcohol. You can remove more alcohol through a short simmer and skip the dangerous fire.
So, it is the heating of the food that removes alcohol through evaporation. Burning the evaporate has very little effect on this process. Yes, the flames are quite hot but they do not add enough heat to the surface of the pan to enhance alcohol evaporation significantly. This already happens at a lower temperature than water. Other than looking flashy, the effect of the flame is negligible.
And the scientific evidence bears this out as we shall see below. According to USDA data, if we compare adding alcohol to food and flaming it to just simmering it for 15 minutes, we see a startling difference. 75% of the alcohol is retained through flaming while only 40% is retained after a 15-minute simmer. This data does not help us determine the effect of simmering while flaming, but even if we achieved another 10% reduction, this would only be equivalent to cooking for around 40 to 45 minutes and we’d still be left with 30% of the alcohol. 1
This is all just extrapolation and I’ll get to more direct evidence later. The point is that the claim that flaming removes all the alcohol is just plain false. To remove almost all of the alcohol, you’d need to simmer a food for quite a long time, up to 2.5 hours.
But Does Flambéing Affect Taste?
The answer is probably not. Again, it is the alcohol vapor that is burning above the food. The food itself is not on fire. While the flames are quite hot, as mentioned, they do not impart enough heat to the surface of the food to affect a Maillard reaction or cause caramelization. When you see a culinary torch being used to brown sugar, the flame is being applied directly the the surface of the sugar crystals.
Some do claim that flambéing food affects the taste but this is disputable and most people cannot tell the difference between a flambéed and a non-flambéed dish.
The Los Angeles Times conducted an informal taste test and claimed the opposite, saying:
Flambéing food is a spectacular, showy event — a crowd-pleaser for all ages. Adults remember campfire games or an aunt’s recipe for steak Diane; kids think Mom’s secretly been moonlighting with the circus.
But the fireworks aren’t just visual: Flambéing actually benefits the food, adding complexity to a dish and altering the flavor profile in wonderful ways. 2
That is quite a statement. Wonderful ways? The mistake is in believing that you are igniting the food inside the pan.
Igniting a cup of Cognac and pouring it over a dish looks very pretty, but that’s not flambéeing. Add the alcohol to the sauce, however, and ignite it inside the pan, and you’re changing the chemistry of the food, not simply pouring your grandfather’s good VSOP over an already finished dish. The flavors meld, making them deeper and richer, sweeter and less harsh. 2
None of this is remotely true. You cannot light liquid ethanol on fire. Therefore you cannot light the food on fire inside the pan. Simply burning the evaporated ethanol vapors as they leave the pan cannot be assumed to have any significant effect on the flavors inside the pan.
For their taste test, the Los Angeles Times prepared two identical batches of caramelized apples and added bourbon. They ignited one batch and let it burn until the flame died. They simmered the other dish until ‘the alcohol burned off.’ No information was given as to how they determined all the alcohol was cooked off.
The claimed results? Startling! The flambéed dish was ‘deeply flavored, nuanced, and balanced.’ They could taste the bourbon but not the alcohol.
The non-flambéed dish tasted of plain old caramel sauce and was not as pleasing in a number of ways, including being thicker and more “cloying.”
And here is where the verbal wrench enters the works. According to the results, the flambéed caramel sauce tasted caramelized and the non-flambéed just tasted like caramel. Curious. What is caramel if not caramelized? How can something taste like caramel and not be caramelized? Face-palm.
As scientific evidence goes, this gives us little to show that flambéeing has a significant effect on the evaporation of alcohol and the final result of the dish. Mechanistically, it would not seem to. What we need is more sciency science.
Effects of Heating and Flaming on Chemical and Sensory Changes During Flambé Cooking
Rarely is the title of a scientific paper 3 so straightforward that I can use it as a heading in an article but this experiment was rigorously designed to find out 1) whether flambeeing burned off more alcohol and 2) whether it produced browning and sensory changes (i.e. Maillard/caramelization, flavor changes). This paper, by Christine Jansen, et al. was published in the International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science.
To evaluate the effects of flaming, they began with a simple vodka experiment, comparing both heated-and-flamed to heated but not flamed:
In this work, the effects of heating and combustion were decoupled by preparing model flambé (heated-and-ignited) systems alongside similar systems which were heated but not ignited. In a simple flambé systems consisting only of vodka, we observed a 24.7% loss of ethanol in the heated-and-ignited treatments and a 34.7% loss in the heated-not-ignited systems. 3
So, in this experiment, more ethanol was removed through simple heating than through flaming, 34.7% compared to 24.7%.
They then used a caramel sauce containing butter, sugar, and vodka:
In a model caramel sauce containing butter, sugar, and vodka, no significant difference in ethanol loss was observed between the ignited (13.2%) and not-ignited (14.1%) 3
This part of the experiment confirms what I predicted, above. Igniting alcohol has very little effect on the removal of ethanol from a dish. Furthermore:
In both systems, the majority of ethanol loss was due to heating rather than combustion. 3
It’s all about the heat. Flaming does not enhance the removal of alcohol through the combustion process itself.
Above, I mentioned that the flames add very little heat to the surface of the food. This question was examined, as well:
Maximum surface and flame temperatures were then measured in the vodka system by thermocouples. While maximum flame temperatures up to 532 °C were observed during 15 s of flaming, the maximum temperature at 1 cm above the pan surface was 67 °C, below temperatures typically required for significant Maillard or caramelization reactions on this time scale. 3
They also found little effect on browning in the ignited portions:
No significant difference was observed in Hunter lightness (L) values between heated-and-ignited and heated-not-ignited treatments for the butter–sugar–vodka system, suggesting that the effect of flambé on browning was minimal. 3
Food panelists were able to tell the difference between the plain vodka that had been heated and ignited and the vodka that had not. In one case, a panelist was even able to tell the difference between the heated but non-ignited vodka from controls, even when the lost water and ethanol were re-introduced. This is probably not surprising,
But, as for the caramel sauce, none of the panelists were able to tell the difference between the heated and ignited versions.
This means that a lot of cookbooks need to be updated and corrected because so many of them claim the opposite. And, we can disregard the less than rigorous evidence from cooking experiments done by Cooks Illustrated, which showed a whopping 79% alcohol reduction when a Steak Diane was flambéd. preparation of Steak Diane. 4
A previous experiment from 1992 showed that 92% of the alcohol was retained during a flambé preparation. 5 While this same experiment claimed that the flames exceeded 500° F, which is well beyond that needed for Maillard reactions or caramelization, there has been little chemical or sensory evidence to confirm claims of the flambé’s effect on sensory characteristics. Therefore, I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the present study.
Conclusion: Does the Flambé Technique Do Anything Useful?
Many changes that occur during flambé can be ascribed to heating rather than ignition and flaming. While ethanol and water losses were greater in heated-and-ignited samples, the majority of the loss appears to be due to the heating process.
Thus, extended heating of the spirit following flambé is expected to minimize any changes resulting from flaming. Sensory differences were apparent between ignited and not-ignited samples in one discrimination test, but both ethanol loss and sensory differences between the treatments are obscured when butter and sugar are included in the recipe.
There was no evidence of browning as a result of ignition and flaming, likely because surface temperatures were below the boiling point of water.
While part of the appeal of flambé in a restaurant setting may be its theatrics, in culinary settings where flambé is not practiced in front of the customer it may be safe to partially or fully dealcoholize a large amount of spirits using gentle heating without ignition during preparation steps.
This dealcoholized spirit could then be used in the recipe and the flambé step and its inherent dangers avoided. 4
Key Summary Points For “What is the Purpose of the Flambé?”
- Flambéing is the practice of pouring liquor over a dish and igniting it.
- Many chefs believe flambéing removes more alcohol than heating alone and enhances the flavor, but scientific evidence disproves this.
- In a simple vodka experiment, more alcohol was removed through heating than through flambéing, 24.7 percent, compared to 34.7 percent through simple heating.
- In a caramel sauce, flambéing had no significant effect on alcohol removal compared to heating alone.
- The flames from a flambé do not impart enough heat to the surface of the food to effect browning or caramelization of the food.
- Taste tests showed little to no difference between flambéed and non-flambéed foods.
- The main purpose of flambéing appears to be spectacle rather than any meaningful culinary effect. Chefs could achieve the same alcohol reduction through gentle heating without the risks and showmanship of flambéing.
- United States. USDA. Nutrient Data Laboratory, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center (BHNRC), and Agricultural Research Service (ARS). USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors Release 6. Dec. 2007. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.
- Scattergood, A. (2005, December 28). Let the sparks fly. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-28-fo-flambe-story.html
- Hansen, Christine E., et al. “Decoupling the effects of heating and flaming on chemical and sensory changes during Flambé Cooking.” International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, vol. 1, no. 2, June 2012, pp. 90–95, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijgfs.2013.04.001.
- J. Olson. Is flambé just for show? (Editor. C. Kimball) In: Cook’s Illustrated vol. May/June, America’s Test Kitchen, Brookline, MA (2004)
- J. Augustin, E. Augustin, R.L. Cutrufelli, S.R. Hagen, C. Teitzel. Alcohol retention in food preparation. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 92 (4) (1992), pp. 486-488