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Cheese melting guide
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Sodium citrate is amazing. It’s an emulsifier, which allows the fat to stay bonded with water. Normally the fat and water separates as soon as the cheese melts, and you end up with chunky or gritty cheese sauce. So we use an emulsifier to allow the two to mix smoothly.
Natural emulsifiers are fairly common, but tend to have issues in regards to cooking. For instance, egg yolks contain an emulsifier, but it will scald and denature when it gets hot… Wine also has an emulsifier but has the same issue.
This is why fondue recipes call for wine. It allows the fondue to melt smoothly, and the double-boiler fondue pot ensures the fondue never gets hot enough to denature. It’s also why baking calls for eggs, to allow the oil and water to mix together long enough for the flour to begin cooking.
And the nice part about sodium citrate is that it has a much higher heat tolerance. It’s also a very “dense” emulsifier. In other words, a little bit of sodium citrate will go a long way. You don’t need to worry about accidentally burning your cheese sauce and making it clumpy. (You can still burn the cheese, but it won’t destroy the texture.) If you’re ever making queso for tex-mex, a scoop of sodium citrate will ensure it stays wonderfully smooth.
If you don’t want to bother with the $5 bag, (which honestly you should just go ahead and get, but whatever…) then you can make a dirty form at home with lemon juice and baking soda. Combine the two, and the resulting product is trisodium citrate. Basically, take a squeeze of lemon juice, and stir baking soda in until it stops fizzing. Now you have something that tastes vaguely lemony, but will melt cheese like a motherfucker. Lab grade sodium citrate doesn’t have that lemony flavor, so it won’t skew the flavor of your dishes.
Most salts have fairly high heat tolerance or burning temperatures compared to things like sugar, probably why sodium citrate works well for this task while use of other biological emulsifiers such as soy lecithin do not. Although, many cheeses have lecithin added during the creation process.