What Einstein Kept Under His Hat: Secrets of Science in the Kitchen by Robert L. Wolke Page A
Authors: Robert L. Wolke
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20 percent milk fat. Example: Kraft Olive and Pimento Spread.
• Pasteurized process cheese product: Any process cheese product that contains less than 20 percent milk fat. Examples: Kraft Singles, Velveeta.
• Imitation cheese: Made from vegetable oil. Minimum milk fat: zero percent. In a glass by itself is Cheez Whiz Cheese Dip or Cheese Sauce. After whey, its most abundant ingredient is canola oil. Milk fat? Less than two percent.
• Orange glop: Not an official FDA classification, but the name I give to the stuff they pour over nachos, French fries, and hot dogs in places I wouldn’t eat in.
. . . And consumers are supposed to think they’re all simply “cheese”?
AMAZING DEGLAZING
When I make a sauce by deglazing the pan with wine or stock after sautéing meat, the result is usually too thin for my taste, even after I reduce it. So in accordance with French culinary custom, I “finish” the sauce by adding a “nut” of butter and whisking it in lightly, whereupon the sauce magically thickens. Adding any other fat, such as olive oil, doesn’t do that. Why does butter do it?
....
C alling butter a fat is like calling a truffle a mushroom. Butter’s magic arises from its uniqueness, not only in its history and renowned flavor but in its composition. Butter contains a relatively large amount of water, and it’s the water that gives butter its unfatlike properties, such as being able to bring a sauce together and frothing up when heated in a sauté pan. I’ll get to these two phenomena later, but first, a little background.
Butter is a complex blend of fat (by law, at least 80 percent in the United States and 82 percent in the European Union) and water (16 to 18 percent), plus 1 or 2 percent protein (mostly casein) and, if salted, 1.5 to 3 percent salt, which both kicks up the flavor and wards off rancidity. A touch of a fat-soluble yellow-orange pigment is often added, especially in the winter, when cows of most breeds produce paler fat because their diets are devoid of carotene-rich, new-growth vegetation. The pigment, used also to color cheese, is annatto ( achiote in Spanish), from the seeds of the South American tree Bixa orellana .
Fats and water won’t ordinarily mix. But in butter, the milk’s fatty part (the butterfat) and watery part (the buttermilk) are combined in what appears to be a homogeneous mass. On a microscopic scale, we would see that the water is in the form of tiny globules (measuring less than 0.0002 inch), dispersed uniformly throughout the sea of semi-liquid fat like so many poppy seeds in a Jell-O mold. Such a stable configuration of two liquids that won’t ordinarily mix is called an emulsion. (See p. 378.) Butter is a water-in-oil emulsion.
Seemingly paradoxical is the fact that butter is made from cream, an emulsion with precisely the opposite structure. Cream consists of microscopic fat globules dispersed throughout a watery liquid: an oil-in-water emulsion. When cream is churned into butter, the mechanical action breaks open the surfaces of the tiny fat globules so that they can coalesce—first into rice-sized grains, and ultimately, after being squeezed and kneaded, into a continuous mass incorporating microscopic globules of water.
But, you say, butter is mostly solid fat, not a liquid oil. Actually, it is both. For one thing, in chemistry, the same word, fat , is used whether the substance happens to be solid or liquid at room temperature. Moreover, the milk fat in butter is partially in the form of a sea of soft, almost liquid “free fat” and partially in the form of solid crystals. Butters that have been churned at different temperatures and then cooled and tempered differently (much as a pastry chef tempers chocolate to control its fat crystals; see p. 435) wind up with different ratios of free fat to crystals, and hence with different degrees of
• Pasteurized process cheese product: Any process cheese product that contains less than 20 percent milk fat. Examples: Kraft Singles, Velveeta.
• Imitation cheese: Made from vegetable oil. Minimum milk fat: zero percent. In a glass by itself is Cheez Whiz Cheese Dip or Cheese Sauce. After whey, its most abundant ingredient is canola oil. Milk fat? Less than two percent.
• Orange glop: Not an official FDA classification, but the name I give to the stuff they pour over nachos, French fries, and hot dogs in places I wouldn’t eat in.
. . . And consumers are supposed to think they’re all simply “cheese”?
AMAZING DEGLAZING
When I make a sauce by deglazing the pan with wine or stock after sautéing meat, the result is usually too thin for my taste, even after I reduce it. So in accordance with French culinary custom, I “finish” the sauce by adding a “nut” of butter and whisking it in lightly, whereupon the sauce magically thickens. Adding any other fat, such as olive oil, doesn’t do that. Why does butter do it?
....
C alling butter a fat is like calling a truffle a mushroom. Butter’s magic arises from its uniqueness, not only in its history and renowned flavor but in its composition. Butter contains a relatively large amount of water, and it’s the water that gives butter its unfatlike properties, such as being able to bring a sauce together and frothing up when heated in a sauté pan. I’ll get to these two phenomena later, but first, a little background.
Butter is a complex blend of fat (by law, at least 80 percent in the United States and 82 percent in the European Union) and water (16 to 18 percent), plus 1 or 2 percent protein (mostly casein) and, if salted, 1.5 to 3 percent salt, which both kicks up the flavor and wards off rancidity. A touch of a fat-soluble yellow-orange pigment is often added, especially in the winter, when cows of most breeds produce paler fat because their diets are devoid of carotene-rich, new-growth vegetation. The pigment, used also to color cheese, is annatto ( achiote in Spanish), from the seeds of the South American tree Bixa orellana .
Fats and water won’t ordinarily mix. But in butter, the milk’s fatty part (the butterfat) and watery part (the buttermilk) are combined in what appears to be a homogeneous mass. On a microscopic scale, we would see that the water is in the form of tiny globules (measuring less than 0.0002 inch), dispersed uniformly throughout the sea of semi-liquid fat like so many poppy seeds in a Jell-O mold. Such a stable configuration of two liquids that won’t ordinarily mix is called an emulsion. (See p. 378.) Butter is a water-in-oil emulsion.
Seemingly paradoxical is the fact that butter is made from cream, an emulsion with precisely the opposite structure. Cream consists of microscopic fat globules dispersed throughout a watery liquid: an oil-in-water emulsion. When cream is churned into butter, the mechanical action breaks open the surfaces of the tiny fat globules so that they can coalesce—first into rice-sized grains, and ultimately, after being squeezed and kneaded, into a continuous mass incorporating microscopic globules of water.
But, you say, butter is mostly solid fat, not a liquid oil. Actually, it is both. For one thing, in chemistry, the same word, fat , is used whether the substance happens to be solid or liquid at room temperature. Moreover, the milk fat in butter is partially in the form of a sea of soft, almost liquid “free fat” and partially in the form of solid crystals. Butters that have been churned at different temperatures and then cooled and tempered differently (much as a pastry chef tempers chocolate to control its fat crystals; see p. 435) wind up with different ratios of free fat to crystals, and hence with different degrees of
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