Vodka is known for its pretty bland taste, most of the time, right? But… it is a key ingredient of penne alla vodka. Does the vodka give much taste to the dish, or is it the process of adding alcohol to the onions that changes the taste of the dish? I have tried the dish a few times with some vodka I had in my place, and was pretty pleased with it, although the taste of vodka was quite faint. Would I notice much difference if I tried it with some better vodka, such as Stolichnaya (qhich actually tastes a bit like gin…)?
The quality of the vodka is pretty much irrelevant. Don’t waste good booze on a pasta dish.* The alcohol is for bringing out the flavors of the tomatoes and other ingredients.
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- Keeping in mind that you should never cook with something you wouldn’t drink. But top shelf booze is a waste if it’s going into anything that is going to be heated a lot or that has strong other ingredients.
Yeah, from what I remember reading about it, there are certain flavor compounds in tomatoes that come out in alcohol, hence the vodka. I’ve never made the dish myself or tried it side-by-side with the same sauce sans alcohol, so I can’t speak from experience what the difference in taste is.
It’s mostly about solubility.
The solute is the food product, in this case the tomatoes, cheese, onions. The solvent is the liquid added, the heavy cream, vodka and water from the tomatoes.
*Note: this this wildly over-simplified since just about every ingredient is a complex system of different molecules that are made up of both solutes and solvents. *
Broadly speaking, in cooking, there are 3 classes of solvents: oil/fat, water and alcohol. Some flavor compounds dissolve out of food readily in fat, others in water and others in alcohol.
In penne alla vodka, the theory is that the vodka dissolves alcohol soluble flavors into the sauce that would otherwise remained trapped in the food. Again, this is overly simplified but gets at the point.
There’s also a possibility of a chemical reaction occurring between molecules in the food and the ethyl alcohol in the vodka to create new compounds that express as different flavors. Lastly, the alcohol could contribute to the denaturing of the proteins or the breakdown of carbohydrates but typically the heat of cooking does that fine by itself.