Mulled wine is essentially cooked, so the alcohol is driven off and the end product alcohol-free. Are Muslims allowed to drink it?
More generally, are Muslims allowed eat something cooked in wine / beer / cider / whatever? For example, if I serve beef stew and the sauce is made with red wine, is that okay?
Mulled wine is just heated, not cooked. Pretty much all the alcohol is still there.
I’d say no, because of what cher3 said. It’s not cooked and not boiled, just slowly heated. There is definitely still alcohol in it.
I’m not Muslim, but I’ve lived in Muslim countries. I’ve been told that they should not eat food with cooked wine or other alcohol in it. I wasn’t told this by an imam, but just observant muslims when we were preparing a pasta dinner. I asked this specific question about having cooked the alcohol out, but they felt it still would not be allowed.
First, I agree with cher3. Mulled wine recipes call for the wine to be gently heated, and generally not for more than an hour or so.
Second, alcohol does not “cook out”. Cite. True, after a rolling boil for a long time, MOST of the alcohol will evaporate, but not all. It’s hardly of concern to most people, even diabetics, if something simmers for a long time with a half a cup of sherry, but Muslims aren’t concerned with reducing their alcohol intake for health reasons, but eliminating it completely for spiritual reasons.
When I’m being my most pedantic, I wonder if they also avoid store bought orange juice and bananas, which also contain minute amounts of alcohol naturally.
Even when alcohol is cooked in a dish, very little is evaporated away. Imagine the wine you add to a dish is water. How long would it take to boil away all the water in your dish? The alcohol will boil away a little quicker, but you’d have to boil away almost all of the water as well. Unless you cook your spaghetti sauce, mulled wine, or rum cake down to a burnt crust, there’s still alcohol in it.
I really doubt that you can make something ‘alcohol-free’ by mulling it unless you do it for a really really realy long time.
No.
A quick check suggests that there is some difference of opinion among Muslims concerning use of alcoholic ingredients in cooking, whether or not the alcohol is gone. Apparently, some authorities suggest that even if the alcohol is driven off by the cooking, the alcohol still touched the food, rendering it no longer halal.
Mulled wine is a Cristmas drink.
I doubt if that’s relevant. I would think that Muslims would happily eat Christmas cake as long as it was otherwise halal (e,g., it did not have any alcohol in it). And mulled wine isn’t confined to Chriustmas, in any case.
Mulled wine is generally associated with C(h)ristmas today, but was originally just a way to make spoiled wine palatable.
I dispute this. When an alcohol/water mixture is heated, it will boil at a lower temperature than water. The alcohol will evaporate first, having a lower vapor pressure. As the alcohol evaporates, the boiling point of the mixture rises. When the boiling point reaches °212, there is essentially no alcohol. Yes, there may be a few stray molecules. Yes, some water will evaporate before it reaches °212. But most of the alcohol will be gone, while most of the water remains.
I’m just interested about why you mentioned diabetics there. Diabetics don’t avoid alcohol (or at least my girlfriend certainly doesn’t!)
Hm… I think this calls for a cite from both sides. If I remember correctly ethyl alcohol averages to have about 5x the evaporation rate of water. However, how that compares to vaporization rate at boiling temperature I do not know.
Alcohol makes blood sugar very wonky. To simplify things greatly, the liver puts a greater priority on metabolizing alcohol than on elevating glucose levels in the blood (which is part of its regular job.) This can lead to dangerously low blood sugar levels very quickly. On top of that, the effects of alcohol (not in sherried chicken, but in drinking) often mask low blood sugar and confuse the diabetic further.
More information on alcohol and diabetes here.
If a person is a well-controlled diabetic then moderate drinking may be OK, but she should check with her doctor, of course.
I used it as an example because it’s one of the few common conditions for which alcohol might be seriously *medically *contraindicated, not just disliked or avoided on preference.
Since it seems (somewhat) relevant to the conversation, I’ll ask my question here. In the movie The 13th Warrior, the muslim character refuses an offer of mead, saying:
“I can taste neither the fermentation of wheat nor of grape.”
The offering character laughs and responds, “Honey…It’s made from honey!” The muslim considers for a moment, shrugs, and accepts the drink.
It’s patently obvious that this is just a silly Hollywood scene, and no observant muslim would accept alcohol based on this kind of technicality. But I’m still curious about the prohibition and its origin. So a two-part question:
Here are some quotes from a random english translation I found online
The prohibition against fermented grapes or grains comes from Hadith not Koran.
I am not Muslim nor am I qualified in the subject, so anybody who is, feel free to correct me.
Probably a sect of Sufism.
In a high school class I once taught we made some homemade ice cream. (It was educational! We were studying heat exchange.) As the ice cream began to thicken and the churners slowed, one of my students came up to me with a disappointed look on his face and said, “I just realized I can’t eat any of the ice cream.” He then explained that he was Muslim and that it occurred to him that the vanilla extract we used to make the ice cream contained alcohol. Being pretty ignorant of the Muslim strict prohibition against alcohol, I tried to reason that it amounted to about three drops of alcohol diluted through 2 quarts of milk, cream, and sugar, and that he was likely to consume similar trace amounts of alcohol all the time without realizing it. He still declined.