Thank you for this. I’m not using sodium citrate to make cheese but I am using it in a homemade dish soap and rather than spending $20 for premade sodium citrate I thought I would make my own
Sodium citrate is one of the ingredients in the WHO (World Health Organization) recipe for oral rehydration solution, important for the treatment of diarrheal ailments, and it was the only ingredient I "thought" I didn't have when I went to mix up a batch recently during a bout with a nasty stomach bug. Turns out I had the makings of it in my cupboard after all! You can buy the electrolyte solution at the pharmacy for USD $4 to $6 per liter (and you need two or three per day at least, if you're really sick) or you can make it yourself at home for pennies, so thank you for your very clear explanation and precise measurements. I'll be mixing up a batch of this to keep on hand in case I need it again.
Mr Webber, I followed your recipie to the letter, except that I used tap water instead of pure water. It worked out perfectly however, as I have just made an amazing cheddar sauce. Thanks so much for sharing. PS your scientific approach is much appreciated.
Okay, I just made this using the same ingredients and it went alright. I accidentally burned some of it near the end because I thought it wasn't dry yet. Here are some tips: 1. Use distilled or deminiralized water. 2. Do not use a non-stick pan, use stainless steel or copper and make sure it is *very* clean. 3. Do not apply too much heat, let the water evaporate slowly. 4. Keep stirring when the crystals start to form, it has a tendency to stick. If it does stick to the pan and you can't get it off: Turn down the heat, dissolve with water and try again.
I made this last night. Used it to make a cheese sauce for broccoli and maybe nachos. I followed your directions to the T. It worked out great. You weren't kidding about the wait time for the bicarb to stop reacting with the acid. Luckily, I was meal prepping, so I could stir it periodically while doing other stuff. I did a 50/50 mix of liquid to cheese. Did 750g cheese to 750ml of beer and 36g of sodium citrate. I also diced and sautéed three poblano peppers. The poblanos really put it over the edge. It was a super hit in the house. We are enjoying it with lunch the next day right now. It reheats really well too.
Followed these instructions, but on low heat while constantly stirring and got a nice fine powder (like table salt). There were a few larger chunks/sheets that I forced through a sieve to get them into a fine powder, but this method worked perfectly. I have yet to try using it though. Hopefully, it will turn out well for mac and cheese! FYI - 1 teaspoon measures about 4g after I weighed it.
Just tried this. Did half size as that was all the citric acid I had. Took a couple of hours from when I turned off the heat when it was a paste, to when it got dry enough that I could pound it in a mortar and pestle to a fine powder, but other than that extra step, I followed the recipe and it worked great!
Thank you for this. So I figured it should be possible to make a cheese sauce with just lemon, bicarbonate and cheese, and I calculated the ingredients according to your data: ~175g of cheese, the juice of 1 medium lemon and 4g of bicarbonate. I'm sure this mix on low heat will make a nice fluid (hopefully elastic too) cheese sauce, the flavor and scent tho... I guess I'll just have to give it a try. It wouldn't be the first time I hear of mixing lemon or lime juice with cheese, so... If it works well then nice, cause it's not like one can find sodium citrate or even citric acid at every supermarket; at least not where I live. Check below for updates. The numbers: According to different sources on the internet: Lemon juice contains anywhere between 4% and 8% of citric acid, and on average 5%. One medium-sized lemon has about 4 tablespoons of juice (3 in small ones, 5 in big ones). Your bicarbonate to citric acid ratio is 97:74. *A medium sized lemon contains 4 tablespoons(15ml) of juice, which are about 60ml. *There are 3g (5%) of citric acid in 60ml of lemon juice: 60x5/100=3. *To keep the bicarbonate and citric acid ratio we need about 4g of bicarbonate: 97x3/74=3.93 (It's funny how close this number is to 4, almost as if the sodium citrate formula originated from a natural recipe very similar to mine, as if I had reverse-engineered it, haha) *For the sake of simplicity I'm assuming the rest of the juice to be water, even if it's not and must have other residue than citric acid, so: 60-3=57ml of lemon "water". Quite obviously I'm also assuming the rest of components are not going to affect the bicarbonate reaction significantly. After all it's an acid-base reaction and citric acid is the acidic part in there, no? *Our resulting sodium citrate is 3g of citric acid plus 4g of bicarbonate: 3+4=7g of sodium citrate. *Given sodium citrate should be a 2-3% of the cheese and water mix (and you used 3% in your example by the end): 7x100/3=233g of cheese and water. Note: As per your example by the end, the sodium citrate proportion is added to the 100% of cheese and water mix, and it's not part of the 100%. *Our original part of water is 57ml or grams, so: 233g-57g=176g of cheese. And GO FIGURE! Turns out this is roughly the same ratio of water and cheese you give by the end of the video! You said: 400g of cheese and 125g of water. 400x57/176=129,5g of water, very near the 125g of water! Which clearly shows it follows the lemon juice citric acid proportion. It does look like sodium citrate must have come from this natural recipe after all. I will let you all know how it turned out after I try it. Cheers. UPDATE 1: SO HOW BAD DID THIS TURN OUT? Well, it turned out kinda bad, but not for the reasons you may think! And I fixed it :) I squeezed the juice out of a lemon and indeed the measuring cap marked it's a little above 50ml, so probably around those expected 60ml. Couldn't be bothered to measure it exactly. I didn't filter it out any further than what the juicer already did, which left a few pulp traces I can't bother myself enough to care about. I put the juice in the pot and the fire on low, I put all the pieces of cheddar cheese and finally the sodium bicarbonate. The bicarbonate and citric acid bubbled as expected and then the cheese started melting little by little. After a while the cheese presented some lumps, so I raised the fire a little and kept stirring until they cleared a bit. Then I put it back on low and waited a while until the cheese showed a hardened layer at the top. Stirred again and the lumps were mostly gone. I served, not without difficulty (! :D). Texture (the problem): The resulting cheese "sauce" was way too thick, more like a heavy paste. Scent: I'm still unsure if it's from my hands (yes, I washed them after), or from the cheese sauce itself but I seem to notice some lemon scent. Nothing too strong but definitely noticeable. Not very disconcerting or unappealing. Flavor: I don't think I would be able to tell there's lemon in this if I was served without knowing the ingredients, I swear. After a while of putting up fight to dip the nachos in this thick paste, I had enough and thought this cannot be the way it was supposed to be. I got the chemical formulas of trisodium citrate, citric acid and sodium bicarbonate, and started trying to balance them. I just lack the knowledge to adjust this, but I guess some of the byproducts must need some water to be balanced and I think one of them is CO2, but I don't know the rest. The thing is, most probably this needs a higher proportion of water. So I went back to the drawing board (that's the kitchen in this case), put the remaining cheese paste on high, added just a bit of water (about 20ml) and stirred until I got a liquid thing. Transferred back into the serving plate and I could experience a better sauce this time. The sauce is really elastic as opposed to those cheese sauces made with white sauce (a roux). The flavor is intense enough but not as much as one may think, perhaps because the lemon might be neutralizing part of the fats and taste? Anyways, as it cooled down it became thicker again, so the next time I will try with a much higher proportion of water to start with, because after all, when all the water needed by the reaction is used up, you can just evaporate the remaining water, and until I figure a better proportion, I'd recommend you guys to try this just adding some more water from the beginning, say 50ml-100ml more, and do just that. Until the next update, if any, and beyond!
I would suggest a small change for the next time you try this, add the sodium bicarbonate to lemon juice before you add in the cheese to get the sodium citrate to form before hand, see if it will make any difference in the texture.
Adam Ragusea has a Queso Blanco recipe that works this way, using lime juice and sodium bicarbonate to get lime flavoured sodium citrate, then using that to emulsify a cheese sauce.
Hey Gavin! Have you tried or heard of the cheese spread "obatzda"? Its a traditional dish originating from the part of germany I live in. You simply add 200g camembert, 50g butter, 100g cream cheese, a tablespoon of sweet paprica powder, some salt/pepper and about 100g of diced onion into a bowl and use a fork to make it into a chunky spread, then enjoy it with bread or crackers sprinkled with chives! (Fun fact, people used to make this in the time when there was no refrigerators and they had to use up the cheese)
Thanks much for this. Just making the citrate now - it takes bloody ages for the reaction to end, doesn't it! I do hope I can get it all done and evaporated in the next 45 mins as I need it for my wife's dinner tonight (mac and cheese).
Since you add the sodium citrate powder to water to make cheese sauce, you could make a sodium citrate brine for that purpose and skip the work of drying it to a powder.
Is standing by stove an stirring necessary? Couldn't you just let it dehydrate? I suppose you would endup with large crystals but then couldn't you just grind that up in a spice grinder? I'm all about less work
Just a little note, anhydrous actually means the substance contains no water. You can be sure of this with crystalline things by popping on a baking sheet and leaving in a low oven overnight to drive off any water. For this kind of usage, anhydrous citric acid is asked for most likely to be sure that the exact amounts of the chemical are present so the reaction completes with no remaining unreacted molecules
Ben White To someone who cannot abide just "knowing how to" as against "understanding why", your explanation of the contribution that being anhydrous makes to accuracy is one of those little gems to be treasured and mulled over on nights that are dark and stormy... You have brought the sunshine back in....
If you have citric acid monohydrate (instead of anhydrous) like me, just use 81 grams of it instead of 74 grams. It should still dissolve in water, it just means it already includes some water of its own (so if we're being precise, you could use 118 g of water instead of 125 g to account for the extra crystalline water). It should also be possible to dry the monohydrate in the oven into anhydrous, but it will take the water back from airborne moisture over time.
@@jesselevine0 I emailed the customer support of the company that produced mine to ask. I'd wager a guess that it's most likely monohydrate, unless it's a fine powder in airtight packaging. (Anhydrous) citric acid is hygroscopic, so over time it will pull water out of air and form a monohydrate crystal structure. That's why I'd prefer using monohydrate, since I'd know the molar mass exactly, whereas anhydrous could have an unknown proportion of it as monohydrate.
@@S3lvah The citric acid I have sourced (>1 year ago) is loosely packed and sold for canning purposes. I don't know really what canning is, seems outside my interest range. I wasn't convinced my sodium citrate product was pure and suspected it had unreacted sodium bicarb when I was done, which I believe has a noticeable taste... I have decided it's not worth pursuing amateur home chemistry for this project and opted to pay my way out by ordering sodium citrate through a popular online shopping website.
I wish chemistry was not as difficult for me to understand. On paper I know concepts like molar mass and once knew how to do stoichiometry but I failed chemistry four times, which I have always felt very disappointed about.
@@jesselevine0 Tbh, although my sodium citrate ended up being usable, I also noticed a sodium bicarb taste in it, even though I measured everything precisely and used the correct, increased amount of citrate to account for the water weight. I think ordering ready-made sodium citrate is a good idea if it's easily available to you (wasn't for me here in the Nordics), considering it's supposed to be a cheap additive anyway. We use the same logic at my university - no sense in synthesizing something if it can be bought at a high purity for cheap.
I keep coming back to your videos Gavin. You are the guru when it comes to cheese. My goal is to make a thick cheese sauce for dipping, nachos etc.. Your recommendation is: "Cheese plus 35% to 85% liquid - thick and flowing cheese sauce, good for dips and quesos". 35-85% liquid is a bit wide I think. Could you narrow it down a bit or would the 35% be just as thick as 85% liquid? I don't understand here. Thank you again for excellent video (5 years ago)
Can you substitute lemon juice for the citric acid, maybe diluting it some? I've already got baking soda and lemon juice on hand. If I had to buy something special, I'd just buy the sodium citrate.
Lemon juice does contain citric acid but ofc not as much as pure citric acid. If you are going to use lemon juice you will probably need at least 10x the quality. But their is no way to be sure of what the condition of citric acid is in the juice.
No you can't substitute lemon or lime juice. While ot does contain citric acid it also contains alot of other stuff. Sugars would probably mess with the whole thing
If one only had access to citric acid monohydrate, couldn't they just use 9.3 % more of it (according to the molar masses)? At least where I live in northern Europe, it's hard to get a hold of the anhydrous kind. I also read that it's hygroscopic, so it might not even stay that way in storage. (I.e. it'd have an unknown ratio of monohydrate and thus not as reliably measured, I think?) Also, the monohydrate also dissolves in water just fine (I made a 3 m-% solution for acidifying garlic the other week); it's only that it contains some water weight that you have to account for.
This may be more than a lot of people want to wrap their heads around. But the ratio of these products can be figured out using moles. Sometimes you just have to get technical because it is. and it's the best way to explain it.
Thank you for the video and charts. I am sure they will come in handy. I do have one question though, at 4:49 you mention that you are technically making Trisodium Citrate. If that is the case, why is it always referred to as Sodium Citrate?
It's a problem will all cooking "chemicals". For example, common bicarb gets called "sodium bicarbonate" but (strictly speaking) that is misleading. From a chemistry point of view it would be more accurate to call it "sodium-hydrogen carbonate" There are 3 chemicals that commonly get called "sodium citrate" but in fact they should be called "sodium dihydrogen citrate", "disodium hydrogen citrate" and "trisodium citrate" In both cases it's just a shorthand way of saying the full chemical name. This causes confusion because most people don't realise it's not the full descriptive name. This actually applies to most of the chemical names in common use. Edit: fucked up the full names of the other citrates... oops. Also, I forgot to mention how much worse it gets when you try to use the internationally recognised fully descriptive names set out by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
Out of curiosity, there's a product sold in nearly every Indian grocery store called "Eno Fruit Salt", which is literally just a mix of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid. I wonder if you can just use that to get yourself started? I know it's commonly used for leavening the same way one might use baking powder, but it's also marketed as a stomach medicine, so there's a little excess sodium bicarb by design (it's said to be a 60:40 mix), but even so... it might be easier than getting things just stoichiometrically balanced for the layperson.
Im trying this but my solution wont get clear. I dont hear fizzing or see bubbles anymore so i subjected it to heat for 10 mins or so. Should i be stirring constantly to get it clear?
I just did this twice, the second time I applied a little heat after the initial reaction I put it over the smallest eye of the stove and turned on the gas at the lowest setting and stirred continuously. This small amount of heat (it wasn't boiling or steaming hot) lowered the reaction time down to about 10-12 minutes. Saved a lot of time.
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What you did here is monossodium citrate, not trissodium citrate, correct? It´s a weak melting salt, not the one used by the industry (trissodium). But it works well for sauces that are homemade. Thanks for the video!
It is in fact tri! The equation shown on screen at 0:48 is missing a '3' in front of NaHCO3. If you compare the gram amounts in the recipe to bicarb's and citric acid's molecular weights, you can see that it has 3 bicarbs for every (anhydrous) citric acid molecule.
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@@S3lvah Thanks. I am not an expert, but what I could find is that monosodium citrate is produced from baking soda. For trisodium citrate you need NaOH (sodium hydroxide).
@ Interesting, I'll have to look into it. If that were true, there'd be a bunch of unreacted baking soda in this after it was made. Trisodium citrate is only a mild alkali so I'd assume you don't need a strong one like NaOH to make it, but it's possible the reaction isn't 100 %. Perhaps even a mix of mono-/di-/tri-sodium citrate still works fine as an emulsifier, but I'd expect the finished product with ~1% NaHCO3 in it to taste soapy :o
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@@S3lvah I think it does react, but the final result is just weaker. Take a look at Reddit, there are some discussions about this.
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Still, it is good anyway. I used it to make "requeijão" (a creamy Brazilian cheese spread) and it tastes and looks like the industrial version. So thanks for the video.
The sodium citrate completely stuck to the base of my saucepan and would not come off!!!! So I poured off as much of the powder as possible and had to add a little water to the saucepan. I put it back on to a low heat and chiselled off the hardened powder with a spoon. I managed to chaff the bits off the saucepan, evaporated the water away, mixed in the rest of the already powdery stuff, dried it off and blitzed it in a spice grinder. Hope it still works
LMAO!!!! i made this today, but instead of a spoon i used a whisk, which was fine for the first mixing stages.... once it got reduced enough and was coming into paste it solidified in a lump inside the whisk. hahahaaa! now i have to sit and wait a couple days for it to dry out enough to break out of the whisk and grind into the final powder. some of the other clumps in the pan just turned into rock candy. interesting, though. the science of cheese chemistry...
Hello, so for Mac and cheese, if I use 200g of cheese, I need at least 170g of water and 11g of sodium citrate? Please advice if I got formula correctly?
For the 95% of us who live outside the US ( and Amazon) making our own isnt hard. For me to order online locally it was going to cost $19 for 100 grams and who knows how long a wait. . I made this today for $3 or so. I was stirring waiting for it to clear before heating for 2.5- 3 hours! It wouldnt clear so i wondered if i measured wrong perhaps. So, since i bought new bicarb and ctric acid i measured what was left. ( on.my new scale, so i was confident on precision)It was ok. Then i went comments ( always helpful) and saw someone accidentally had the heat on and it went clear. So i put the heat on and it went clear within a minute. On my gas cooktop i had it on low, a light simmer. I used a rubber spatula to stir from time to time. When it got paste -like on the bottom i constantly and carefully moved it around the bottom keeping it all fairly close together. Watch it closely at this stage. Eventually it formed a pile of dry powder that was fairly consistent and without big lumps. The final product weighed 110 grams. Use caution when stirring, try not to splash up sides of pot or it will harden there and youll lose some product in the end. I may have lost a couple grams, not much. I can't wait to use it tomorrow.
Because this is an endothermic reaction, couldn't I simply turn up the heat to speed the reaction along? It takes to hours to happen at room temperature and the vessel it's in gets really cold. Is there anything wrong with turning the heat in from the get go?
Chemist here. Probably not, just watch out for bubbling over, as the byproduct of this reaction is a good amount of CO2. Othervise your only other fear would be thermal decomposition of the citric acid, but that should not happen as long as there is water in there, keeping the temperature at max 100°C due to evaporative cooling
I am asking a question from a soaper's point of view. I heard someone I follow on UA-cam mention that sodium citrate is made from washing soda. What is the chemical difference between washing soda and baking soda? I want to make some to add to my soap as a chelator, rather than citric acid, which requires me to mess around with my lye amounts. Is baking soda or washing soda sodium bicarbinate? Thank you, anyone.
You can use both washing soda or baking soda with citric acid to make it since the reactions are similar. The ratios might be different, though. H3C6H5O7 (citric acid) + 3 NaHCO3 (baking soda) → 3 CO2 + 3 H2O + Na3C6H5O7 (sodium citrate) 3 Na2CO3 (washing soda) + 2 H3C6H5O7 (citric acid) → 2 Na3C6H5O7 (sodium citrate) + 3 H2O + 3 CO2
The ingredients list on the back of lemon koolaid packets just list citric acid but im 100% sure its been contaminated a lil bit with dyes, flavors and perfumes as koolaid usually does so im asking if it will interfere or am i ok?
Or use add a surfactant and water to make a detergent, stronger solution and 10% extra citric acid to make a toilet cleaner... it can be thickened using a gelling agent. P.s. Don't tell eCover that I told you ;)
About 5 years, according to google. It's a salt, and salts tend to be more chemically stable than their ingredients (for an extreme example, think NaCl vs. Na metal + Cl gas). If you meant how much cheese products you can make with it, he says at some point to use 2-3 % relative to its liquid (milk, water, whatever) content. So if you know the liquid content of your recipe vs. how much cheese product it makes, you can calculate it.
If you dry this out completely, this salt will most likely be in its anhydrous form, which is chemically stable. You should keep it away from moisture and store it in an airtight container though from pubchem: 3.2.4Stability/Shelf Life HelpNew Window STABLE IN AIR /DIHYDRATE/ The Merck Index. 9th ed. Rahway, New Jersey: Merck & Co., Inc., 1976., p. 1112 Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB) NOT AS STABLE AS DIHYDRATE; DRYING OUT ON EXPOSURE TO AIR & ALSO CAKING /PENTAHYDRATE/ The Merck Index. 9th ed. Rahway, New Jersey: Merck & Co., Inc., 1976., p. 1112 Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB)
Hi. I d like to ask how many grams of sodium citrate does this recipe yields. i need to know as i am not evaporating the water after the preparation. I want to use instantly with water in a recipe for rehydration drink. Or there a chemical type to calculate this? Thank you
For a cheese sauce, one other channel said to make sure not to go above 66C (150F) or the sauce develops a grainy texture. Is that about right? I made my first today with an aged cheddar and water with sodium citrate, and it seems to have grains in it. I used far too much water because it was very runny, but the cheese melted nicely in a double boiler. But afterward when I tried to reduce the liquid, it boiled a few times which is what I think led to the grains, unless those were the crunchy crystals I felt in the original cheese.
Question: Can I make this in an aluminum saucepan, or will it react too poorly with the metal? I try not to cook anything too acidic in these types of pots but I've a limited supply of stainless to choose from. ~Cheers~
with aluminum it's probably safer to use a larger amount of water and to make the citric acid solution in a seperate glass container. It will take quite a bit longer to evaporate though. the procedure would thus be: * in the aluminum saucepan: dissolve the sodium bicarbonate in an ample amount of water (about 500 ml) * in a seperate glass container: completely dissolve the citric acid in the lowest amount of water possible. pubchem lists the solubility of citric acid as around 59 g/l. * add the citric acid solution to the saucepan while stirring very quickly (this is to prevent large pH gradients and to keep it from flowing over) * proceed as shown in the video
Thanks for the video , it turned out very smoothly but in the final stage most of the under layer sodium citrate just stick to the pan like a rock ! Is it due to the type of the pan or i did miss something here?
I had the same thing happen. I then used a silicone muffin baking container. It made it possible to remove the dried salts, crumble then and store in a glass jar.
rather than evaporate the water, could you use that liquid solution as a sodium citrate concentrate for cheese sauces rather than using the powdered form?
I would say using distilled water will give you a more pure form of the sodium citrate as it has already had most of the minerals (impurities) removed. Using regular tap water will leave behind minerals like calcium, iron and various other minerals.
I know it won't be as accurate, but can you take a stab at converting quantities of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid into teaspoons/tablespoons? I don't have a scale and would love to make this.
not sure if you mean the process of making the sodium citrate or the process of using it to make smooth-melting cheese. for the former, no, that's just now how the chemical reaction works. for the latter, milk is the standard, but I've heard water can be used too, which is where beer cheese recipes come from, but I haven't tried it. for question #2, that's definitely possible for something like a room-temp nacho cheese that you'd want to stay a liquid, but you'd have to experiment to find out how much milk/water/beer and sodium citrate it'd take to achieve that result without separation.
I mixed the baking soda together with the water after I dissolved the citric acid in it and stirred but I didn’t get it to clear up yet. Have I not stirred enough and I need to start over?
Perceptive question! No, you cannot use this specific recipe, technique, and ratios, then substitute lime juice, and expect to get the same result. But! Yes, you can absolutely make a cheap and cheerful sodium citrate-containing liquid using lime juice and baking soda; and with it you can make smooth cheese sauces.
Not sure you’ll see this after so long but I tried to make sodium citrate but it turned out a grey/blue colour , should still try using it or discard it? Thanks
@@owldimtell8111 i totally agee. i used an aluminium pot and i think it must have reacted to the acid.... i discarded the contents anyway and just bought trisodium citrate lol. thanks for the reply though, its appreciated.
@@GavinWebber yes i agree and i think @oweldimtell8111 got the correct answer. i bought some trisodium citrate and made some cheese to your spec with the addition of mustard, chilli flakes and cracked black pepper and it is amazing..... my daughter thinks its banging whatever that means lmao.... anyway, love the videos. take care......
Anhydrous does not mean it dissolves in water, it means without water. I.e it is bone dry and there are no water molecules mixed in with the salt.
This is so perfectly informative and answered all my questions (even ones I didn't know I had)! Love this, thank you!
Rachel and Jun surprised to see you guys in the comments of random vid I clicked on lol.
Thank you for this. I’m not using sodium citrate to make cheese but I am using it in a homemade dish soap and rather than spending $20 for premade sodium citrate I thought I would make my own
This was exactly what I was looking for. So clear and simple. Thank you so much, it’s great!
Sodium citrate is one of the ingredients in the WHO (World Health Organization) recipe for oral rehydration solution, important for the treatment of diarrheal ailments, and it was the only ingredient I "thought" I didn't have when I went to mix up a batch recently during a bout with a nasty stomach bug. Turns out I had the makings of it in my cupboard after all!
You can buy the electrolyte solution at the pharmacy for USD $4 to $6 per liter (and you need two or three per day at least, if you're really sick) or you can make it yourself at home for pennies, so thank you for your very clear explanation and precise measurements. I'll be mixing up a batch of this to keep on hand in case I need it again.
Mr Webber, I followed your recipie to the letter, except that I used tap water instead of pure water. It worked out perfectly however, as I have just made an amazing cheddar sauce. Thanks so much for sharing. PS your scientific approach is much appreciated.
Okay, I just made this using the same ingredients and it went alright. I accidentally burned some of it near the end because I thought it wasn't dry yet.
Here are some tips:
1. Use distilled or deminiralized water.
2. Do not use a non-stick pan, use stainless steel or copper and make sure it is *very* clean.
3. Do not apply too much heat, let the water evaporate slowly.
4. Keep stirring when the crystals start to form, it has a tendency to stick. If it does stick to the pan and you can't get it off: Turn down the heat, dissolve with water and try again.
Thanks for the tips
I made this last night. Used it to make a cheese sauce for broccoli and maybe nachos. I followed your directions to the T. It worked out great. You weren't kidding about the wait time for the bicarb to stop reacting with the acid. Luckily, I was meal prepping, so I could stir it periodically while doing other stuff.
I did a 50/50 mix of liquid to cheese. Did 750g cheese to 750ml of beer and 36g of sodium citrate. I also diced and sautéed three poblano peppers. The poblanos really put it over the edge. It was a super hit in the house. We are enjoying it with lunch the next day right now. It reheats really well too.
Did you use any water when you mixed the beer and cheese?
@@BEDavisBrown
Nope
@@24framedavinci39 I'll bet that made some killer nachos! I want to use this to make some loaded chili cheese fries.
@@BEDavisBrown
It was extremely good. Definitely worth the effort. It's like nothing you'll ever get at a restaurant or from the market.
How long did your solution take to get clear before evaporating the water away?
Tried it worked like a charm. No more expensive processed (dont know what it is) melted cheese :)
Followed these instructions, but on low heat while constantly stirring and got a nice fine powder (like table salt). There were a few larger chunks/sheets that I forced through a sieve to get them into a fine powder, but this method worked perfectly. I have yet to try using it though. Hopefully, it will turn out well for mac and cheese! FYI - 1 teaspoon measures about 4g after I weighed it.
Just tried this. Did half size as that was all the citric acid I had. Took a couple of hours from when I turned off the heat when it was a paste, to when it got dry enough that I could pound it in a mortar and pestle to a fine powder, but other than that extra step, I followed the recipe and it worked great!
We tend to dry our relatively safe compounds on the log burner. :)
Thank you for this. So I figured it should be possible to make a cheese sauce with just lemon, bicarbonate and cheese, and I calculated the ingredients according to your data: ~175g of cheese, the juice of 1 medium lemon and 4g of bicarbonate. I'm sure this mix on low heat will make a nice fluid (hopefully elastic too) cheese sauce, the flavor and scent tho... I guess I'll just have to give it a try. It wouldn't be the first time I hear of mixing lemon or lime juice with cheese, so... If it works well then nice, cause it's not like one can find sodium citrate or even citric acid at every supermarket; at least not where I live.
Check below for updates.
The numbers:
According to different sources on the internet: Lemon juice contains anywhere between 4% and 8% of citric acid, and on average 5%. One medium-sized lemon has about 4 tablespoons of juice (3 in small ones, 5 in big ones).
Your bicarbonate to citric acid ratio is 97:74.
*A medium sized lemon contains 4 tablespoons(15ml) of juice, which are about 60ml.
*There are 3g (5%) of citric acid in 60ml of lemon juice: 60x5/100=3.
*To keep the bicarbonate and citric acid ratio we need about 4g of bicarbonate: 97x3/74=3.93 (It's funny how close this number is to 4, almost as if the sodium citrate formula originated from a natural recipe very similar to mine, as if I had reverse-engineered it, haha)
*For the sake of simplicity I'm assuming the rest of the juice to be water, even if it's not and must have other residue than citric acid, so: 60-3=57ml of lemon "water". Quite obviously I'm also assuming the rest of components are not going to affect the bicarbonate reaction significantly. After all it's an acid-base reaction and citric acid is the acidic part in there, no?
*Our resulting sodium citrate is 3g of citric acid plus 4g of bicarbonate: 3+4=7g of sodium citrate.
*Given sodium citrate should be a 2-3% of the cheese and water mix (and you used 3% in your example by the end): 7x100/3=233g of cheese and water. Note: As per your example by the end, the sodium citrate proportion is added to the 100% of cheese and water mix, and it's not part of the 100%.
*Our original part of water is 57ml or grams, so: 233g-57g=176g of cheese.
And GO FIGURE! Turns out this is roughly the same ratio of water and cheese you give by the end of the video! You said: 400g of cheese and 125g of water. 400x57/176=129,5g of water, very near the 125g of water! Which clearly shows it follows the lemon juice citric acid proportion.
It does look like sodium citrate must have come from this natural recipe after all.
I will let you all know how it turned out after I try it.
Cheers.
UPDATE 1:
SO HOW BAD DID THIS TURN OUT?
Well, it turned out kinda bad, but not for the reasons you may think! And I fixed it :)
I squeezed the juice out of a lemon and indeed the measuring cap marked it's a little above 50ml, so probably around those expected 60ml. Couldn't be bothered to measure it exactly. I didn't filter it out any further than what the juicer already did, which left a few pulp traces I can't bother myself enough to care about.
I put the juice in the pot and the fire on low, I put all the pieces of cheddar cheese and finally the sodium bicarbonate. The bicarbonate and citric acid bubbled as expected and then the cheese started melting little by little. After a while the cheese presented some lumps, so I raised the fire a little and kept stirring until they cleared a bit. Then I put it back on low and waited a while until the cheese showed a hardened layer at the top. Stirred again and the lumps were mostly gone. I served, not without difficulty (! :D).
Texture (the problem): The resulting cheese "sauce" was way too thick, more like a heavy paste.
Scent: I'm still unsure if it's from my hands (yes, I washed them after), or from the cheese sauce itself but I seem to notice some lemon scent. Nothing too strong but definitely noticeable. Not very disconcerting or unappealing.
Flavor: I don't think I would be able to tell there's lemon in this if I was served without knowing the ingredients, I swear.
After a while of putting up fight to dip the nachos in this thick paste, I had enough and thought this cannot be the way it was supposed to be. I got the chemical formulas of trisodium citrate, citric acid and sodium bicarbonate, and started trying to balance them. I just lack the knowledge to adjust this, but I guess some of the byproducts must need some water to be balanced and I think one of them is CO2, but I don't know the rest. The thing is, most probably this needs a higher proportion of water.
So I went back to the drawing board (that's the kitchen in this case), put the remaining cheese paste on high, added just a bit of water (about 20ml) and stirred until I got a liquid thing. Transferred back into the serving plate and I could experience a better sauce this time.
The sauce is really elastic as opposed to those cheese sauces made with white sauce (a roux). The flavor is intense enough but not as much as one may think, perhaps because the lemon might be neutralizing part of the fats and taste? Anyways, as it cooled down it became thicker again, so the next time I will try with a much higher proportion of water to start with, because after all, when all the water needed by the reaction is used up, you can just evaporate the remaining water, and until I figure a better proportion, I'd recommend you guys to try this just adding some more water from the beginning, say 50ml-100ml more, and do just that.
Until the next update, if any, and beyond!
I would suggest a small change for the next time you try this, add the sodium bicarbonate to lemon juice before you add in the cheese to get the sodium citrate to form before hand, see if it will make any difference in the texture.
Adam Ragusea has a Queso Blanco recipe that works this way, using lime juice and sodium bicarbonate to get lime flavoured sodium citrate, then using that to emulsify a cheese sauce.
Don't use a nonstick pan! I noticed it started to go dark in colour and was stripping the surface off my pot, lesson learned here haha
I've been searching all my life for this no lie.
Did you try it
Thank you, this was more than exactly what I was looking for. If that's even possible..
Hey Gavin! Have you tried or heard of the cheese spread "obatzda"? Its a traditional dish originating from the part of germany I live in.
You simply add 200g camembert, 50g butter, 100g cream cheese, a tablespoon of sweet paprica powder, some salt/pepper and about 100g of diced onion into a bowl and use a fork to make it into a chunky spread, then enjoy it with bread or crackers sprinkled with chives!
(Fun fact, people used to make this in the time when there was no refrigerators and they had to use up the cheese)
Thanks much for this. Just making the citrate now - it takes bloody ages for the reaction to end, doesn't it! I do hope I can get it all done and evaporated in the next 45 mins as I need it for my wife's dinner tonight (mac and cheese).
Heating it will speed up the reaction.
Gavin, I like your formula/method, why didn't I think of that?! Much better than using bicarb than washing soda, far more room for error!
3 ingredients, proper weights and heat component. No problem because science!!
Since you add the sodium citrate powder to water to make cheese sauce, you could make a sodium citrate brine for that purpose and skip the work of drying it to a powder.
thats brilliant but it would be hard to measure the exact amount to use for cheese sauce tho it wont be critical issue
If you have indigestion from eating too many jalapeno cheese nachos, the mix of bicarbonate of soda & citric acid is Alka Seltzer without the aspirin.
I just made it and it turned out perfect! Big thanks!!
Is standing by stove an stirring necessary?
Couldn't you just let it dehydrate?
I suppose you would endup with large crystals but then couldn't you just grind that up in a spice grinder?
I'm all about less work
You can do that if you want
Just a little note, anhydrous actually means the substance contains no water. You can be sure of this with crystalline things by popping on a baking sheet and leaving in a low oven overnight to drive off any water. For this kind of usage, anhydrous citric acid is asked for most likely to be sure that the exact amounts of the chemical are present so the reaction completes with no remaining unreacted molecules
Ben White
To someone who cannot abide just "knowing how to" as against "understanding why", your explanation of the contribution that being anhydrous makes to accuracy is one of those little gems to be treasured and mulled over on nights that are dark and stormy...
You have brought the sunshine back in....
I wish I was more interested in science when I was ast school 😩
If you have citric acid monohydrate (instead of anhydrous) like me, just use 81 grams of it instead of 74 grams. It should still dissolve in water, it just means it already includes some water of its own (so if we're being precise, you could use 118 g of water instead of 125 g to account for the extra crystalline water).
It should also be possible to dry the monohydrate in the oven into anhydrous, but it will take the water back from airborne moisture over time.
My citric acid doesn’t indicate what form it is. How can you tell mono vs anhydrous?
@@jesselevine0 I emailed the customer support of the company that produced mine to ask. I'd wager a guess that it's most likely monohydrate, unless it's a fine powder in airtight packaging.
(Anhydrous) citric acid is hygroscopic, so over time it will pull water out of air and form a monohydrate crystal structure. That's why I'd prefer using monohydrate, since I'd know the molar mass exactly, whereas anhydrous could have an unknown proportion of it as monohydrate.
@@S3lvah The citric acid I have sourced (>1 year ago) is loosely packed and sold for canning purposes. I don't know really what canning is, seems outside my interest range.
I wasn't convinced my sodium citrate product was pure and suspected it had unreacted sodium bicarb when I was done, which I believe has a noticeable taste...
I have decided it's not worth pursuing amateur home chemistry for this project and opted to pay my way out by ordering sodium citrate through a popular online shopping website.
I wish chemistry was not as difficult for me to understand. On paper I know concepts like molar mass and once knew how to do stoichiometry but I failed chemistry four times, which I have always felt very disappointed about.
@@jesselevine0 Tbh, although my sodium citrate ended up being usable, I also noticed a sodium bicarb taste in it, even though I measured everything precisely and used the correct, increased amount of citrate to account for the water weight. I think ordering ready-made sodium citrate is a good idea if it's easily available to you (wasn't for me here in the Nordics), considering it's supposed to be a cheap additive anyway. We use the same logic at my university - no sense in synthesizing something if it can be bought at a high purity for cheap.
You are brilliant!! Thank you for making this video! ❤❤
add the bicarb slowly to avoid the foam over.
I keep coming back to your videos Gavin. You are the guru when it comes to cheese.
My goal is to make a thick cheese sauce for dipping, nachos etc.. Your recommendation is: "Cheese plus 35% to 85% liquid - thick and flowing cheese sauce, good for dips and quesos". 35-85% liquid is a bit wide I think. Could you narrow it down a bit or would the 35% be just as thick as 85% liquid? I don't understand here. Thank you again for excellent video (5 years ago)
The more liquid, the runnier it will be.
Can you substitute lemon juice for the citric acid, maybe diluting it some? I've already got baking soda and lemon juice on hand. If I had to buy something special, I'd just buy the sodium citrate.
Lemon juice does contain citric acid but ofc not as much as pure citric acid. If you are going to use lemon juice you will probably need at least 10x the quality. But their is no way to be sure of what the condition of citric acid is in the juice.
No you can't substitute lemon or lime juice. While ot does contain citric acid it also contains alot of other stuff. Sugars would probably mess with the whole thing
Amazing video. Saving me a ton of money by not having to order from Amazon! More of these helpful videos would be awesome.
If one only had access to citric acid monohydrate, couldn't they just use 9.3 % more of it (according to the molar masses)?
At least where I live in northern Europe, it's hard to get a hold of the anhydrous kind. I also read that it's hygroscopic, so it might not even stay that way in storage. (I.e. it'd have an unknown ratio of monohydrate and thus not as reliably measured, I think?)
Also, the monohydrate also dissolves in water just fine (I made a 3 m-% solution for acidifying garlic the other week); it's only that it contains some water weight that you have to account for.
I just want some cheese sauce not a science lesson man XD
yeah that would work, since the reaction happens in an aquatic medium anyway
Just dry it before using
This may be more than a lot of people want to wrap their heads around. But the ratio of these products can be figured out using moles. Sometimes you just have to get technical because it is. and it's the best way to explain it.
Yes, but I just wanted to keep it simple.
Thank you for the video and charts. I am sure they will come in handy. I do have one question though, at 4:49 you mention that you are technically making Trisodium Citrate. If that is the case, why is it always referred to as Sodium Citrate?
It's a problem will all cooking "chemicals". For example, common bicarb gets called "sodium bicarbonate" but (strictly speaking) that is misleading. From a chemistry point of view it would be more accurate to call it "sodium-hydrogen carbonate"
There are 3 chemicals that commonly get called "sodium citrate" but in fact they should be called "sodium dihydrogen citrate", "disodium hydrogen citrate" and "trisodium citrate"
In both cases it's just a shorthand way of saying the full chemical name. This causes confusion because most people don't realise it's not the full descriptive name. This actually applies to most of the chemical names in common use.
Edit: fucked up the full names of the other citrates... oops. Also, I forgot to mention how much worse it gets when you try to use the internationally recognised fully descriptive names set out by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry
Out of curiosity, there's a product sold in nearly every Indian grocery store called "Eno Fruit Salt", which is literally just a mix of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid. I wonder if you can just use that to get yourself started? I know it's commonly used for leavening the same way one might use baking powder, but it's also marketed as a stomach medicine, so there's a little excess sodium bicarb by design (it's said to be a 60:40 mix), but even so... it might be easier than getting things just stoichiometrically balanced for the layperson.
I don't know, you are going to have to try it for your self.
Try it and tell us. Can use ethanol or an acid to purify.
You can also use baking soda and squeezed lime juice.
i mean yea but you will get a bad purity.
It’s the same main ingredients used to make bath bombs 🤩 That’s awesome!
excellent video but you forgot to balance the chemical equation at 1:02; it should be 3 molecules of sodium bicarbonate instead of 1
Im trying this but my solution wont get clear. I dont hear fizzing or see bubbles anymore so i subjected it to heat for 10 mins or so. Should i be stirring constantly to get it clear?
I just did this twice, the second time I applied a little heat after the initial reaction I put it over the smallest eye of the stove and turned on the gas at the lowest setting and stirred continuously. This small amount of heat (it wasn't boiling or steaming hot) lowered the reaction time down to about 10-12 minutes. Saved a lot of time.
What you did here is monossodium citrate, not trissodium citrate, correct? It´s a weak melting salt, not the one used by the industry (trissodium). But it works well for sauces that are homemade. Thanks for the video!
It is in fact tri! The equation shown on screen at 0:48 is missing a '3' in front of NaHCO3. If you compare the gram amounts in the recipe to bicarb's and citric acid's molecular weights, you can see that it has 3 bicarbs for every (anhydrous) citric acid molecule.
@@S3lvah Thanks. I am not an expert, but what I could find is that monosodium citrate is produced from baking soda. For trisodium citrate you need NaOH (sodium hydroxide).
@ Interesting, I'll have to look into it. If that were true, there'd be a bunch of unreacted baking soda in this after it was made. Trisodium citrate is only a mild alkali so I'd assume you don't need a strong one like NaOH to make it, but it's possible the reaction isn't 100 %. Perhaps even a mix of mono-/di-/tri-sodium citrate still works fine as an emulsifier, but I'd expect the finished product with ~1% NaHCO3 in it to taste soapy :o
@@S3lvah I think it does react, but the final result is just weaker. Take a look at Reddit, there are some discussions about this.
Still, it is good anyway. I used it to make "requeijão" (a creamy Brazilian cheese spread) and it tastes and looks like the industrial version. So thanks for the video.
Est ce que l'eau pure ça veut dire eau distillée ?
The sodium citrate completely stuck to the base of my saucepan and would not come off!!!! So I poured off as much of the powder as possible and had to add a little water to the saucepan. I put it back on to a low heat and chiselled off the hardened powder with a spoon. I managed to chaff the bits off the saucepan, evaporated the water away, mixed in the rest of the already powdery stuff, dried it off and blitzed it in a spice grinder. Hope it still works
It should be fine. Sorry about your saucepan.
@@GavinWebber لقد استفدنا انت استاذ
وتم الاشتراك
thank you so much !!! saved me a ton of money
LMAO!!!! i made this today, but instead of a spoon i used a whisk, which was fine for the first mixing stages.... once it got reduced enough and was coming into paste it solidified in a lump inside the whisk. hahahaaa! now i have to sit and wait a couple days for it to dry out enough to break out of the whisk and grind into the final powder. some of the other clumps in the pan just turned into rock candy. interesting, though. the science of cheese chemistry...
Always enjoy watching your videos.
Hello, so for Mac and cheese, if I use 200g of cheese, I need at least 170g of water and 11g of sodium citrate? Please advice if I got formula correctly?
For the 95% of us who live outside the US ( and Amazon) making our own isnt hard. For me to order online locally it was going to cost $19 for 100 grams and who knows how long a wait. . I made this today for $3 or so. I was stirring waiting for it to clear before heating for 2.5- 3 hours! It wouldnt clear so i wondered if i measured wrong perhaps. So, since i bought new bicarb and ctric acid i measured what was left. ( on.my new scale, so i was confident on precision)It was ok. Then i went comments ( always helpful) and saw someone accidentally had the heat on and it went clear. So i put the heat on and it went clear within a minute. On my gas cooktop i had it on low, a light simmer. I used a rubber spatula to stir from time to time. When it got paste -like on the bottom i constantly and carefully moved it around the bottom keeping it all fairly close together. Watch it closely at this stage. Eventually it formed a pile of dry powder that was fairly consistent and without big lumps. The final product weighed 110 grams. Use caution when stirring, try not to splash up sides of pot or it will harden there and youll lose some product in the end. I may have lost a couple grams, not much. I can't wait to use it tomorrow.
love, love, love this video!!!! 💖
Thank you very much for this video :)
Because this is an endothermic reaction, couldn't I simply turn up the heat to speed the reaction along? It takes to hours to happen at room temperature and the vessel it's in gets really cold. Is there anything wrong with turning the heat in from the get go?
Chemist here. Probably not, just watch out for bubbling over, as the byproduct of this reaction is a good amount of CO2. Othervise your only other fear would be thermal decomposition of the citric acid, but that should not happen as long as there is water in there, keeping the temperature at max 100°C due to evaporative cooling
Could I use something called True Lime, which is lime juice and oil crystallized with citric acid or would that interfere with the chemical reaction?
Thank you! Never knew this cheesy secret!
I wonder if it would work on ricotta
This recipe is amazing thanks a lot mate ;)
Thank You! Genius level kitchen secret!
I am asking a question from a soaper's point of view. I heard someone I follow on UA-cam mention that sodium citrate is made from washing soda. What is the chemical difference between washing soda and baking soda? I want to make some to add to my soap as a chelator, rather than citric acid, which requires me to mess around with my lye amounts. Is baking soda or washing soda sodium bicarbinate? Thank you, anyone.
Baking sofa is Sodium bicarbonate whereas washing sofa is sodium carbonate. Two different compounds
You can use both washing soda or baking soda with citric acid to make it since the reactions are similar. The ratios might be different, though.
H3C6H5O7 (citric acid) + 3 NaHCO3 (baking soda) → 3 CO2 + 3 H2O + Na3C6H5O7 (sodium citrate)
3 Na2CO3 (washing soda) + 2 H3C6H5O7 (citric acid) → 2 Na3C6H5O7 (sodium citrate) + 3 H2O + 3 CO2
Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you Thank you !
I just came here from another video where you recommended this video.
Thank YOU!
The ingredients list on the back of lemon koolaid packets just list citric acid but im 100% sure its been contaminated a lil bit with dyes, flavors and perfumes as koolaid usually does so im asking if it will interfere or am i ok?
I don't know. I've never drunk the Koolaid.
@@GavinWebber 😂
I believe the first chemical formulas is wrong... I believe it is supposed to be written NaCHO3...Lol
potato potato
@@jocaingles8464 if you're making NaCHO cheese then you got to spell it right😂
Haha at first I thought "smartass!"... and then... clever there ;D
@@Proximo011 I think my cheesey pun is missing the mark... It seems people are taking me too literally.
@@adamflores4206 Nahh I think that just says more about them than you :D haha or anyone who gets it
Or use add a surfactant and water to make a detergent, stronger solution and 10% extra citric acid to make a toilet cleaner... it can be thickened using a gelling agent. P.s. Don't tell eCover that I told you ;)
Awesome! Thank you for the video!
I wonder what would happen if parmesan cheese was used in the American cheese recipe?
Thank you, very helpful, can someone tell me about how much will it last? Thank you
About 5 years, according to google. It's a salt, and salts tend to be more chemically stable than their ingredients (for an extreme example, think NaCl vs. Na metal + Cl gas).
If you meant how much cheese products you can make with it, he says at some point to use 2-3 % relative to its liquid (milk, water, whatever) content. So if you know the liquid content of your recipe vs. how much cheese product it makes, you can calculate it.
If you dry this out completely, this salt will most likely be in its anhydrous form, which is chemically stable. You should keep it away from moisture and store it in an airtight container though
from pubchem:
3.2.4Stability/Shelf Life HelpNew Window
STABLE IN AIR /DIHYDRATE/
The Merck Index. 9th ed. Rahway, New Jersey: Merck & Co., Inc., 1976., p. 1112
Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB)
NOT AS STABLE AS DIHYDRATE; DRYING OUT ON EXPOSURE TO AIR & ALSO CAKING /PENTAHYDRATE/
The Merck Index. 9th ed. Rahway, New Jersey: Merck & Co., Inc., 1976., p. 1112
Hazardous Substances Data Bank (HSDB)
Thanks to both of you, I meant the amount of time, so both answers were really helpful.
sodium citrate is readily available on ebay, and many stores where you can get citric acid.
Hi. I d like to ask how many grams of sodium citrate does this recipe yields. i need to know as i am not evaporating the water after the preparation. I want to use instantly with water in a recipe for rehydration drink. Or there a chemical type to calculate this? Thank you
107g
Made today, 110 grams
For a cheese sauce, one other channel said to make sure not to go above 66C (150F) or the sauce develops a grainy texture. Is that about right? I made my first today with an aged cheddar and water with sodium citrate, and it seems to have grains in it. I used far too much water because it was very runny, but the cheese melted nicely in a double boiler. But afterward when I tried to reduce the liquid, it boiled a few times which is what I think led to the grains, unless those were the crunchy crystals I felt in the original cheese.
Yes, sounds about right
Can i know how to make potassium citrate? Is it combine potassium bicarbonate + citric acid? But what is the measurements?
I just did this and I couldn't get it to be as dry as yours without burning it, and the pot. More of a sticky gel than a powder.
Question: Can I make this in an aluminum saucepan, or will it react too poorly with the metal?
I try not to cook anything too acidic in these types of pots but I've a limited supply of stainless to choose from.
~Cheers~
with aluminum it's probably safer to use a larger amount of water and to make the citric acid solution in a seperate glass container. It will take quite a bit longer to evaporate though.
the procedure would thus be:
* in the aluminum saucepan: dissolve the sodium bicarbonate in an ample amount of water (about 500 ml)
* in a seperate glass container: completely dissolve the citric acid in the lowest amount of water possible. pubchem lists the solubility of citric acid as around 59 g/l.
* add the citric acid solution to the saucepan while stirring very quickly (this is to prevent large pH gradients and to keep it from flowing over)
* proceed as shown in the video
It will react with it. Not worth doing huge batch. You would need a lot of water.
How to make calsium chlodride
Great video. Spot on.
Excellent video! Thanks!
Thanks for the video , it turned out very smoothly but in the final stage most of the under layer sodium citrate just stick to the pan like a rock ! Is it due to the type of the pan or i did miss something here?
I had the same thing happen. I then used a silicone muffin baking container. It made it possible to remove the dried salts, crumble then and store in a glass jar.
rather than evaporate the water, could you use that liquid solution as a sodium citrate concentrate for cheese sauces rather than using the powdered form?
Yes you can, I make nacho cheese this way.
You could do the cooking in a still and reclaim most of the water.
Very informative, thanks very much.
Okay, I missed the do the reaction part off the heat and it went clear fast (5 minutes maybe not two hours)! Did I just do something terrible...
Heat accelerated the reaction. It is fine.
do i need to use pure water lmao or can i use tap water if its extremely essential how do i make pure water
I would say using distilled water will give you a more pure form of the sodium citrate as it has already had most of the minerals (impurities) removed. Using regular tap water will leave behind minerals like calcium, iron and various other minerals.
Just made this it's awesome
Great 👍
Can you make it with baking soda,lemon juice and water?
No, different chemical reaction. Lemon juice contains more than just citric acid alone.
I know it won't be as accurate, but can you take a stab at converting quantities of sodium bicarbonate and citric acid into teaspoons/tablespoons? I don't have a scale and would love to make this.
Generally there is 4g per teaspoon but that’s for sugar and definitely not accuraten
@@lucieann21 Thank you! That's about the fourth reason this month that I definitely need a food scale.
can i use milk instead of water to add to cheese and will it remain liquid in a bottle
not sure if you mean the process of making the sodium citrate or the process of using it to make smooth-melting cheese. for the former, no, that's just now how the chemical reaction works. for the latter, milk is the standard, but I've heard water can be used too, which is where beer cheese recipes come from, but I haven't tried it. for question #2, that's definitely possible for something like a room-temp nacho cheese that you'd want to stay a liquid, but you'd have to experiment to find out how much milk/water/beer and sodium citrate it'd take to achieve that result without separation.
HI Mr Webber, Can i use this in natural Mozzarella? Will it still firm?
I haven't tried it in mozzarella. I couldn't tell you the results
Do you make any goat or sheep milk cheese?
I mixed the baking soda together with the water after I dissolved the citric acid in it and stirred but I didn’t get it to clear up yet. Have I not stirred enough and I need to start over?
Someone mentioned same thing and found that VERY low heat cleared it right up
Very good
thank you...It was quite useful 👍🏽
sir mention on sodium propinate
Can I just used tap or bottled water. Does it have to be pure water?
Kinda. Pure water will give you pure citric acid. In chemistry class you would have to use DI water to make sodium citrate.
Unless I'm mistaken the "pure water" looks to be a brand of drinking water, i.e. not distilled. But I could be wrong.
Could i use lime juice instead of citric acid? Does the ascorbic acit make that much of a difference?
No, you cannot use lime juice.
@@GavinWebber i ve heard some make this out of lime juice since it has citric acid. So why not?
@@bbb-th1vu Sugar is the issue.
@@GavinWebberYes you can
Perceptive question!
No, you cannot use this specific recipe, technique, and ratios, then substitute lime juice, and expect to get the same result. But!
Yes, you can absolutely make a cheap and cheerful sodium citrate-containing liquid using lime juice and baking soda; and with it you can make smooth cheese sauces.
I'm for sure doing this in a crockpot. How much did your final product weigh? Do you know?
sorry, I cannot remember
@@GavinWebber Thank you anyway.
The theoretical yield (max) is 99g, given the ingredients (97g &125g)
I just tried it successfully and the final product was 107 grams.
@@alberstv hmm... Interesting!
Can we use distilled car water ?
I suppose so.
Not sure you’ll see this after so long but I tried to make sodium citrate but it turned out a grey/blue colour , should still try using it or discard it? Thanks
Not sure. Must be some impurities somewhere
sounds like it could be some reaction from your pot?
@@owldimtell8111 i totally agee. i used an aluminium pot and i think it must have reacted to the acid.... i discarded the contents anyway and just bought trisodium citrate lol. thanks for the reply though, its appreciated.
@@GavinWebber yes i agree and i think @oweldimtell8111 got the correct answer. i bought some trisodium citrate and made some cheese to your spec with the addition of mustard, chilli flakes and cracked black pepper and it is amazing..... my daughter thinks its banging whatever that means lmao....
anyway, love the videos. take care......
about a year ago i tried to make my own flaky salt and it all turned grey because of my pot
Well done.
Why you didn't use it
I use meric a lot and I a Yank
Onde vejo a tradução?
Great video!!!
Brilliant!
that is just amazing. where has this information been all my life? _Thanks