Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Volebaum Here with the holiday season upon us, I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about a common but slightly mysterious baking ingredient,
Speaker 1: cream of tartar. Despite its name, it isn't creamy. It's
Speaker 1: not made of dairy at all. It's also not used
Speaker 1: in tartar sauce. It's actually a byproduct of the wine industry.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into that later, okay. Cream of tartar
Speaker 1: is a dry, mildly acidic powder most commonly used in baking,
Speaker 1: but also in candy making, cleaning products, and other kitchen
Speaker 1: jobs like whipping up fluffy eggs. It's like having lemon
Speaker 1: juice or vinegar in a powder format, but it's flavorless.
Speaker 1: In baked goods, cream of tartar is employed as part
Speaker 1: of chemical leavening agents. Leaveners are the stuff you add
Speaker 1: to help make baked goods nice and light and fluffy.
Speaker 1: In general. These are compounds that will create carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: bubbles in your dough and giving it a physical lift
Speaker 1: and expansion. Then the heat of the oven sets the
Speaker 1: dough around those bubbles. This is what's happening in yeast
Speaker 1: phrased dough. The yeasts are microorganisms that produce carbon dioxide,
Speaker 1: but sometimes you don't want to muck around with yeast
Speaker 1: because it takes a couple hours to work, and that's
Speaker 1: where chemical leveners come in. Modern chemical leveners are made
Speaker 1: by combining baking soda aka sodium bicarbonate with an acid
Speaker 1: and then getting them wet. That's because when baking soda
Speaker 1: interacts with an acid and a moisture, a chemical reaction
Speaker 1: occurs that instantly forms carbon dioxide bubbles. When manufactures package
Speaker 1: baking soda with a dry acid light cream of tartar,
Speaker 1: it makes it super easy for the user just add water.
Speaker 1: This is what's going on in those fizzy bath bombs
Speaker 1: you may have used, and also in baking powder. Cream
Speaker 1: of tartar is a little bit on the expensive side,
Speaker 1: so these days, a cheaper dry acid is probably at
Speaker 1: work in your back bombs and baking powder. But baking
Speaker 1: recipes do sometimes still call for baking soda and cream
Speaker 1: of tartar, or for baking powder and an extra kick
Speaker 1: from cream of tartar. But wait, there's more. Cream of
Speaker 1: tartar can also help stabilize whipped eggs or whipped cream.
Speaker 1: Its acidity helps the proteins in the egg whites or
Speaker 1: in the cream unfurl and then stick together softly around
Speaker 1: air bubbles without sticking so hard that they go rigid
Speaker 1: and push water out. You may have had that happen
Speaker 1: when you're whipping eggs or cream. You know it'll be
Speaker 1: expanding and peeking up nicely, but then suddenly it'll break
Speaker 1: and go lumpy and wet. A little bit of cream
Speaker 1: of tartar can help prevent that. It also makes cakes
Speaker 1: and meringues look brighter or wider because of two things.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's acidity makes this pigment and flour
Speaker 1: that's normally sort of parchment colored turn clear. And secondly,
Speaker 1: because of that whipping thing, you can get the air
Speaker 1: bubbles in a batter or a meringue smaller, which means
Speaker 1: the particles of cake or meringue are smaller, which means
Speaker 1: that they reflect light just a little bit differently. And furthermore,
Speaker 1: cream of tartar affects the texture of sugar. A sugar
Speaker 1: meaning sucrose likes being in a crystal state and it
Speaker 1: likes clumping up. But when you're making smooth textured candies
Speaker 1: like a caramel or lollipops or shiny icings or nice
Speaker 1: chewy baked goods. You want your sugar to be liquid
Speaker 1: or at the very least like not clumpy. Cream of
Speaker 1: tartar helps because it breaks sucrose down into its components
Speaker 1: glucose and fruititose, which don't crystallize and clump as much.
Speaker 1: And because cream of tartar is lightly acidic, can help
Speaker 1: some kinds of colorful produce retain their color when you
Speaker 1: steam or boil them, basically because those pigments are stored
Speaker 1: in acidic pockets in the produce, so making the whole
Speaker 1: environment morcidic means they get to stay put. A cream
Speaker 1: of tartar is also great for household tasks like cleaning
Speaker 1: the blackening off of aluminum in other metals, or for
Speaker 1: lifting rest and for helping clear drains. But I mentioned
Speaker 1: the wine industry, so let's talk about where cream of
Speaker 1: tartar comes from. A chemical name potassium by tartrate or
Speaker 1: potassium hydrogen tartrate. Cream of tartar is the potassium salt
Speaker 1: form of this acid called tatark acid, which is a
Speaker 1: carboxylic acid which are commonly occurring and typically weak forms
Speaker 1: of acid. Tataric acid is where we get the name
Speaker 1: tartar in cream of tartar. Why cream was added to
Speaker 1: the name is anyone's gas. Tataric acid is a compound
Speaker 1: found in grapes. It's one of the things that makes
Speaker 1: them tart. When this acid is partially neutralized, like on
Speaker 1: the pH scale, it can form up with potassium, which
Speaker 1: is also found in grapes, to create molecules of potassium
Speaker 1: by tartrate. These are pretty soluble in warm water based solutions,
Speaker 1: but will crystallize and settle out of the solution at
Speaker 1: cooler temperatures, especially below about ten degrees celsius or fifty fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: which hey is totally the temperature of the cold cellars
Speaker 1: where wine is stored. In the wine industry, these are
Speaker 1: sometimes called wine crystals or wine diamonds. You may have
Speaker 1: noticed them yourself at the bottom of a bottle of
Speaker 1: wine or in a crunchy little layer on the bottom
Speaker 1: of the cork. They're harmless and not an indicator that
Speaker 1: anything is bad about the wine, and some wine experts
Speaker 1: actually like seeing them as it's a sign that a
Speaker 1: wine hasn't been too heavily processed, but okay, cream of
Speaker 1: tartar is not manufactured by filtering bottles of finished wine
Speaker 1: or scraping crystals off of quarks. It's made by processing
Speaker 1: wine waste, okay, very Basically, when you make wine, you
Speaker 1: let grape juice ferment in a vat or barrel with yeast.
Speaker 1: Then you separate the wine from the lees that is,
Speaker 1: the dead yeast and other sediments by straining or draining.
Speaker 1: As you bottle it. You're left with, yes, a dead yeast,
Speaker 1: maybe some grape solids, and probably sort of a bunch
Speaker 1: of potassium by tartrate that's then washed out and sent
Speaker 1: off and purified and powdered and sold as cream of tartar.
Speaker 1: This production process dates back to seventeen sixty eight and
Speaker 1: Swedish chemist C. W. Shield. Throughout the eighteen hundreds, other
Speaker 1: scientists studied the compound's physical properties, including Louis Pastor, who
Speaker 1: basically invented pasteurization. One of the discoveries that came out
Speaker 1: of this work with cream of tartar is the molecules
Speaker 1: are in fact three dimensional, not two dimensional as was
Speaker 1: thought at the time. Cream of tartar soon became a
Speaker 1: popular ingredient in French cooking and spread from there to
Speaker 1: change the world of baking, along with a few other ingredients, processes,
Speaker 1: and technologies that were being developed around this time, such
Speaker 1: as baking soda, modern ovens, and egg beaters that didn't
Speaker 1: rely solely on arm power, but all of those are
Speaker 1: topics for other episodes. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article Cream of Tartar is a Baker's Best Friend on
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