Question for ECH

[Chief Uwachiquen]

I could see that, I've never had it happen to me personally but I usually wash my hands/spoon before I check something a second time. Although I did discover that nasty bit about saliva and dairy products. At one point I was thirsty, craved milk, didn't want a whole glass, so I just drank some out of the jug. Then it expired several days before it should have. Lesson learned, there. And I understand why people bitch about people who drink out of the jug, aside from the implications of backwash.

[East Coast Hustle]

what, exactly, are the "implications" of backwash?

also, there are lots of reasons for milk to expire before it's date. being kept in the door/front of the fridge and having been bought from Wal-Mart are the two most common.

and perhaps this would be a phenomenon I would notice if I kept cream sauces on hand in the fridge for several days but honestly, who makes a huge batch of bechamel to keep in the fridge? most people make what's needed for the meal they intend the sauce to be served with.

anyway, until someone can produce a scientific citation, I'm still calling bullshit.

[LMNO]

I'm working without direct citation, but I'm thinking this may be a correlation/causation thing.

[East Coast Hustle]

Yeah, I'm thinking along those lines too. There are ALOT of reasons why a cream sauce emulsion can break, and many of those reasons don't even boil down (no pun intended) to operator error.

Starchy sauces breaking usually does boil down to operator error, but it's a melange of exceedingly common errors.

and when you get into veloutes and bechamels (which are both dairy AND starch based), well, you're exponentially increasing the chances for any little thing to fuck up.

to increase chances for success, try these tips:

1) whisk faster. No, faster than that, even.

2) for cream sauces, make sure the cream (or milk or whatever) is at room temperature first. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Add the heated liquid TO THE CREAM off of any heat source a little at a time and slowly whisk it in. This tempers the cream and allows you to re-add the mixture to the rest of the heated liquid without breaking or curdling the cream.

3) for starchy sauces, you're still not whisking fast enough.

4) use a roux, as cooked as you can get away with given the nature of the sauce (dark sauces should get dark roux). Or, if you're serving all of the sauce right then and there, consider using a cornstarch slurry. This will settle out eventually but it will not "break". Xanthan gum works amazingly well, but it has a distinctive and not always pleasant flavor if you add too much, and "too much" can be as little as a quarter-teaspoon, so play with it first to get a feel for it before you use it to thicken the gravy at christmas dinner. (note: xanthan gum is absolutely invaluable for people with wheat or gluten allergies)

5) whether you're adding the liquid to the roux in the pan or adding the roux to the liquid in the pot, add a little at a time and make sure it's whisked in completely and smoothly before you add more.

6) when thickening with starches, boiling liquid is not your friend. Simmering liquid or hot liquid that is no longer boiling is your friend. ESPECIALLY if the sauce involves a combination of starch and dairy.

7) when reducing a cream sauce, you want it boiling but not boiling as rapidly as humanly possible. you also want to keep a close eye on it because there is a very fine line between "reduced enough to coat a spoon" and "reduced into a broken, greasy, oily mess", and that line is not always apparent until it's already too late. REMEMBER: even after you turn off the burner, whatever you're heating is going to continue to cook for a little while until it cools off.

[Triple Zero]

regardless of the saliva thing, that is some great advice right there, thanks RCH!

[East Coast Hustle]

My pleasure! At risk of sounding arrogant, I am a muthafuckin sauce wizard, yo.

RCH,
can make a hollandaise with his eyes closed and no double-boiler.

[Chief Uwachiquen]

Nice advice! When I was talking about the implications of Backwash I was referring to people being squicky about drinking after other people. And it could very well have been bad timing, not sure. I never trust Wal-Mart for most of my shit anyway. Doubly so after I worked there.

I've got a question about sauces, well, kind of. It's more gravy related, but if a recipe tells you to add X amount of flour for Y amount of grease how do you determine the amount of grease without pouring it out of the pan, or should you? 'Cause most of the time with the recipes I've done it's been with the meat staying in the pan with the gravy.

I love cooking but I'm kind of retarded in some regards because I learned from watching/helping my Grandma and my own experimentation.

[East Coast Hustle]

fortunately for you, what you are doing when you make pan gravy is essentialy making a roux out of flour and the meat fat that's in the pan, and though in general you want a 1:1 ration, with rouxs it doesn't have to be exact. A good rule of thumb would be to add flour slowly and whisk it intensely until you've got a nice thick uniform paste. If you're gonna screw up one way or the other, you're better off adding a little too much flour than you are adding too little. Too little flour won't give the excess fat anything to bind to so your gravy will turn out greasy. Too much flour would have a negative effect on the emulsion if you were storing it for a week or more, but let's face it, if your pan gravy is any good it's not going to last that long.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Amylase is the enzyme that breaks down starches:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amylase

An anecdote about small amounts of amylase:
http://iso9001manual.com/blog/tag/yogurt/

There are a number of other enzymes in our digestive systems, including our saliva, that break down various components of our food, which is why saliva-contaminated food spoils faster.

http://www.beta-glucan-info.com/digestive_enzyme_facts.htm

I am guessing that you are more careful about saliva contamination than you think you are, possibly due to years of training and basic sanitation consciousness.

[East Coast Hustle]

the science is certainly solid and I'm not debating that human saliva jump-starts the digestion process (that's what it's there for, right?)

I'm just saying that if you drool in your gravy or use a half-cup of spit to make your cornstarch flurry, you might have a problem. There's nothing there that says the tiny amount of saliva on your pinky (that's probably mostly dried up since you usually taste it every minute or 2 after you make your adjustments and stir and, again, unless you're slobbering on yourself 60 seconds will air-dry most of the saliva from your finger) will curdle your cream sauce sauce in a few days. The linked article was about yogurt, which makes sense since yogurt contains active cultures. I'm guessing that the amylase will have a greater effect quicker than it would in a heat-pasteurized cream sauce, though it's also worth noting that in the linked article the separation of the yogurt still took weeks and their problem was related to amylase-contaminated sugar which was, presumably (and hopefully) a much more prominent ingredient in their recipe than human saliva was.

so yeah, I still don't think double-dipping with the pinky is likely to be a real problem in the average person's every-day culinary life.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

the science is certainly solid and I'm not debating that human saliva jump-starts the digestion process (that's what it's there for, right?)

I'm just saying that if you drool in your gravy or use a half-cup of spit to make your cornstarch flurry, you might have a problem. There's nothing there that says the tiny amount of saliva on your pinky (that's probably mostly dried up since you usually taste it every minute or 2 after you make your adjustments and stir and, again, unless you're slobbering on yourself 60 seconds will air-dry most of the saliva from your finger) will curdle your cream sauce sauce in a few days. The linked article was about yogurt, which makes sense since yogurt contains active cultures. I'm guessing that the amylase will have a greater effect quicker than it would in a heat-pasteurized cream sauce, though it's also worth noting that in the linked article the separation of the yogurt still took weeks and their problem was related to amylase-contaminated sugar which was, presumably (and hopefully) a much more prominent ingredient in their recipe than human saliva was.

so yeah, I still don't think double-dipping with the pinky is likely to be a real problem in the average person's every-day culinary life.

If it has a chance to dry off in between, if the recipe is near enough to boiling, or if some time has passed, I would suspect there would be no problem. But, in gravies and sauces that were finished cooking, I have had thinning and separation issues when someone has tasted from a spoon and put it directly back into the sauce, usually within about 20 minutes... this can be a problem when you're serving a large meal in courses. It's also strictly an amateur mistake... experienced cooks aren't going to contaminate a fully-cooked recipe with fresh saliva.

It's especially foul when someone has gotten saliva (usually from an eating utensil) into yogurt, pudding, or a cold dairy-based sauce like tzatziki.

[East Coast Hustle]

from now on, if I end up at a party at someone's house that's a douche, I'm gonna secretly lick the yogurt and/or sour cream in their fridge.

[East Coast Hustle]

what does 60C translate into in Freedomheit(tm)?

[Rumckle]

140 ish

[East Coast Hustle]

well, that explains why I've never heard of it. By the time a sauce cools to 140, it's already done and all taste adjustments have been made while the sauce was still at a temperature (above 140F) that denatures amylase.

and since hot food should ALWAYS be served at 140F or above, this explains why it's more likely to happen to yogurt or pudding that's already chilled and set.