seno

i’ve been struggling a lot lately with this. currently approaching 6 years sober but recently i’ve become fixated on extracts. i love pastries and cakes (who doesn’t!?) but in the last few months i’ve found myself paranoid about baked goods with vanilla and almond extract. i have no desire to drink and am terrified of alcohol, so much so that i think i worry that eating something made with vanilla extract somehow compromises my sobriety date or something. i ate some vanilla strawberry birthday cake earlier today that i am certain had vanilla extract in it. i felt confident in the moment that it was no big deal but now am consumed by thoughts about it, thinking about how there was surely vanilla in the cream cheese frosting etc.

id love some thoughts about this, support, things to consider, etc. thank you.

Dee74

Hi and welcome Seno

I'm pretty self aware about what I eat or drink, but vanilla essence baked into something has never worried me - its never caused me to crave more alcohol.

I've never knowingly has almond extract, but I may have unwittingly, without repercussions.

If you're worried about it tho - thats valid.
We all have to set our own boundaries.

I'd maybe try to find other flavour sources that don't make you feel you're compromising your recovery?

D

VikingGF

Can a recovering alcoholic safely eat food made with vanilla extract, wine, etc.?

November 2, 2004 by Judy Foreman, Fitness Journalist, taken from her website- I was curious about this, also.

“It depends – on how much alcohol you use, how long you cook it and, perhaps, how long you’ve been sober.

Many people believe that if you pour lavish amounts of red wine into your coq au vin, the alcohol all burns off with cooking, leaving only the lovely taste. Wrong. Some of the alcohol burns off, but lots – from 10 to 85 percent, doesn’t, according to the US Department of Agriculture.

In a study published in 1992 in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Rena Cutrufelli [cq] found that, depending on how and how long the food is cooked, varying amounts of alcohol remain. Cutrufelli is a supervising nutritionist at the USDA’s Nutrient Data Laboratory, part of the Agricultural Research Service.

If you flambe something, say, bananas with rum, to make a fancy dessert, 75 percent of the alcohol remains. If simmer that hearty wine-soaked chicken stew for two hours, only 10 percent remains. If you add alcohol to a recipe, don’t heat it and store it overnight, 70 percent remains. If you simply stir alcohol into hot liquid, 85 percent remains. (For more information, visit www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp.)

Though recovering alcoholics are understandably fearful of even the tiniest traces of alcohol in food, a teaspoon or so of vanilla extract in a batch of chocolate chip cookies is probably trivial. The extract contains 40 percent alcohol, and if you bake the cookies for 15 minutes, only 40 percent of the alcohol remains, Cutrufelli said.

The biggest danger of cooking with alcohol, especially for people in the first months or years of sobriety, is having a tempting, open bottle of booze in the kitchen, said Dr. Mark Willenbring [cq], director of the treatment and recovery division of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Vanilla extract, he said, probably poses much less danger of relapse than the alcohol in mouthwashes and cough syrups. But recovering alcoholics taking Antabuse (disulfiram) may experience the same unpleasant nausea and flushing from eating food cooked with alcohol as they would from a drink.”

Caramel

Actual vanilla pods are often used to flavour sugar, milk etc., so a vanilla flavour may not necessarily have come from "extract".