Now that you know just how helpful and delicious a dash of liquor in your food can be, start testing its powers in your own kitchen. Add some booze to your next marinade or rehabilitate bad wine and use it in a cake.

If you’re worried about the alcohol content of your cooked food, don’t. Most of it burns off during cooking. NPR explains that alcohol turns to steam around 78° C (174° F). Meanwhile, water does the same at 100° C, so bringing your food to a simmer means the booze will evaporate into thin air, leaving behind only delicious flavors.

Make Homemade Ice Cream More Scoopable

Perhaps the most frustrating quality of ice cream is exactly what makes it such a great summer treat: it’s frozen. Pulling out a carton of tasty homemade ice cream can result in disappointment when the delicious dessert is so frozen you can’t scoop any out.

With its inability to freeze, booze is a great solution for tough ice cream. Vodka, for example, has enough alcohol to lower its freezing point to below what most standard freezers can produce.

Former Chez Panisse pastry chef David Lebovitz, author of The Perfect Scoop, suggests adding a few tablespoons of liquor to DIY ice cream to ensure that it stays soft enough to scoop easily.

Keep Grill Steaks & Other Meat Toxin-Free

Cooking meat at high temperatures is a great way to remove any bacteria present. Yet there’s more than bacteria hiding in your pork chops—turns out grilled meat also contains cancer-causing carcinogens. Chemistry professors and researchers at the University of Porto (Portugal) and Vigo (Spain) discovered that carcinogens called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) form while your meat is browning on the grill.