mad kitchen science
at work i make soups a lot. last week i was making two at one time, in identical pots. one soup gets finished by pouring a bunch of lemon juice into it at the end, the other does not. spaced out, i poured a pint of lemon juice into the wrong pot and ruined a soup-pot full of expensive ingredients.
what to do?
i thought about it for a while and, ignoring other people's advice to just turn it into a lemon soup of some kind, thought harder: soup tastes bad now -- why? to much lemon juice. what is lemon juice? mostly water and citric acid. so soup is too acidic. how do you get rid of acids? aha!
every american school student who's made it through the fourth grade knows that baking soda reacts with vinegar and makes a volcano. lemon juice will work just as well.
solution: add baking soda to soup!
it totally worked, and blew the minds of my fellow cooks, who looked on in horror as i poured baking soda into the soup pot. all that remained of the overbearing lemon juice taste was a very faint lemony taste, which i presume was the non-citric acid component of the lemon juice.
the reaction goes something like this:
C6H8O7 + 3NaHCO3 => 3CO2 + 3H2O + Na3C6H5O7
the large product on the right side is trisodium citrate, which has a salty, mildly tart flavor that was not very pronounced.
the only tricky part to this procedure was not adding too much baking soda -- add too much and all the acid is gone but then there's unreacted baking soda floating around in the soup tasting gross. a pH meter and a titration setup would have been ideal but just slowly adding it worked pretty well.
this was extra fun to do at the hippy-ish vegan place i work 'cause all the people who eat there are into the ancestral earth spirits of their food and what local farm it came from but really they just got served molecules.
what to do?
i thought about it for a while and, ignoring other people's advice to just turn it into a lemon soup of some kind, thought harder: soup tastes bad now -- why? to much lemon juice. what is lemon juice? mostly water and citric acid. so soup is too acidic. how do you get rid of acids? aha!
every american school student who's made it through the fourth grade knows that baking soda reacts with vinegar and makes a volcano. lemon juice will work just as well.
solution: add baking soda to soup!
it totally worked, and blew the minds of my fellow cooks, who looked on in horror as i poured baking soda into the soup pot. all that remained of the overbearing lemon juice taste was a very faint lemony taste, which i presume was the non-citric acid component of the lemon juice.
the reaction goes something like this:
C6H8O7 + 3NaHCO3 => 3CO2 + 3H2O + Na3C6H5O7
the large product on the right side is trisodium citrate, which has a salty, mildly tart flavor that was not very pronounced.
the only tricky part to this procedure was not adding too much baking soda -- add too much and all the acid is gone but then there's unreacted baking soda floating around in the soup tasting gross. a pH meter and a titration setup would have been ideal but just slowly adding it worked pretty well.
this was extra fun to do at the hippy-ish vegan place i work 'cause all the people who eat there are into the ancestral earth spirits of their food and what local farm it came from but really they just got served molecules.