How does one break a sauce? You ever seen a broken sauce? I bet you actually
have. If you're like me and Papa John's Pizza is something of a guilty pleasure around your house,
they send the pizza with these little cups of special garlic dipping sauce. It's delicious,
but when you open it up, sometimes it looks like that, all luscious and thick, and sometimes
you get it and it looks like that, super thin, almost like just straight melted butter. Indeed,
if we look on the ingredients, we can see that this is basically just a very loose margarine
or fake butter. It's based on soybean oil and some dehydrated garlic, garlic powder basically,
and it's all held together with emulsifiers like soy lecithin and vegetable mono and diglycerides.
Hey, what is an emulsifier? If you take some water molecules, pour on some oil molecules,
and stir them up, they will disperse. But rapidly, the electrochemical forces
of these respective molecules push each other apart and the oil rises to the top, because
it's less dense, and up there it will stay. An emulsifier is some kind of molecule, like
a protein, that is partially attracted to oil and it's partially attracted to water. And thus, the
two are bound. The resulting molecular complexes are big and they have a lot of electrochemical
drag, you could say. And the resulting emulsified liquids are generally viscous. Emulsified sauces
are thick, and therefore more of them sticks to the food that you're trying to flavor,
and that is good. It's awesome. But edible emulsifiers, like the
kind holding this together and making it all thick and luscious, they tend to be very,
very sensitive to heat. Throw the thick, luscious cup into a hot pan. It bubbles, and immediately,
the soy lecithin denatures and stops working. The oil separates from the other ingredients,
and thus the sauce is broken. This is how Papa John's special garlic sauce
often arrives at my house, irreparably broken. I have no inside knowledge. I just suspect that
these little cups just tend to get a little too hot at some point in the supply chain, possibly
inside the box with the hot pizzas where it gets too hot, and you just break the emulsifiers.
I'm really surprised this giant pizza chain has yet to come up with a more heat-stable means
of thickening their sauce. I don't know about you, but I suffer from a pretty disquiet mind,
which means that I'm constantly thinking about whether or not there's a more efficient way to
do pretty much everything. For example, I like finding interesting coffees from independent
roasters. It would be inefficient for me to go around and taste all of those coffees at
all the different cities all at once by myself, be far more efficient to let the folks at Trade
do that and then send me a coffee that I might like conveniently wrapped in a red Trade bag that
is compostable. And that's exactly what Trade does. And Trade is the sponsor of this video.
Trade is a coffee discovery service. They've helped me find all kinds of wonderful things
that I really like, including this wonderful family operation called Alma. Passion,
medium dark roast. I usually like a light roast, but let's try it dark. You just tell
them generally what kind of coffee you like or if you want to be surprised and they'll send you
bags on whatever schedule you prefer as fast as you go through it. And speaking of efficiency,
you know you can just boil coffee by the way. Give it a stir or wait two minutes and you
just strain it through whatever you have, and that's coffee. I like simple things. And when
coffee has been roasted within 48 hours of being shipped to you, as Trade coffee always is, it's
hard to screw up. You can get a fine fresh bag yourself free if you sign up for any subscription
using my link, drinktrade.com/ragusea. That's drinktrade.com/ragusea for a free bag with any
subscription purchase. Thank you, Trade. Anyway, we're going to spend the rest of
this video talking about how and why other kinds of sauces do or do not break. Here,
we're simulating some gravy with carton broth and miscellaneous plant oil. We're just simulating
the liquid that will be left in the bottom of a roasting tray. Notice the oil floating
on top just as we would expect. You can whisk it in to disperse the oil into tiny droplets,
but they can easily float around in that meaty water and they can link back up with each other
again. And they do. Gravy fixes this problem by simply thickening the liquid with starch. This
is some corn starch that I'm dispersing into a slurry with not hot stock. If you put it straight
into hot stock, it clumps. Stir, let it come to a simmer so the starch explodes and tangles
up into a water-trapping web. And now the sauce is thickened and it is emulsified too. And debatable,
but there's nothing holding the water and the oil together on the molecular level.
And thus you do see tiny oil droplets in there. I can show you better with this little camera.
The droplets will gradually link back up with each other but not for a while because they're
all stuck where they are in the mud. Everything in there is less mobile in the starch web, and
gradually you'll get an oil slick on top of the gravy, but it takes a long time to form and you
can just stir the fat back in. Plus gravy does not break. It has no chemical emulsifiers inside it
to break. When you think of gravy as being an easy sauce, this is why. Vinegarette is also as easy as
it is good. I like a little raw shallot in there, but that's extra. Some lemon juice or vinegar,
I like equal parts olive oil to lemon, but most people would want twice as much oil as that.
Season that, stir and we do break the oil up into dispersed droplets, but within seconds the oil and
the lemon juice crawl back into their respective corners. Everything is mobile in there. If you're
the Kraft company, you fix this by thickening the dressing with xanthan gum. But if you're me,
you just squeeze in a whole bunch of mustard because mustard is delicious and it contains
some emulsifiers. Plus it's just a lot of very fine particles for oil droplets
to stick to. Stir that up and it's not only thick, but it's pretty stable. I do not see
much separation happening there. It'll break eventually, but it only has to stay together
long enough to get on the salad. It can break on the plate. All the key ingredients will stick to
the leaves as you eat. Yet mustardy vinegarette is another very easy emulsion. Things get harder
when you start looking at the butter sauces. Butter itself is already a water-in-oil emulsion.
It's a few water droplets with dissolved sugars dispersed inside dairy fat, and it's held to the
fat by the casein milk protein, which is an emulsifier, melt the butter gently without
denaturing the protein and it's already sauce. You can make it tastier and counterintuitively thicker
by whisking in a little water-based liquid. This is literally water and it's contributing
raw material to the emulsion. The casein isn't super powerful in this form, but it can emulsify
a little extra water. Butter and plain water emulsion is a terrific glaze for fancy vegetables.
But what happens if we bring this little sauce to a boil? The casein proteins denature in the heat.
They cease holding the water and the butter fat together and they fall to the bottom and
clumps. Those are the casein proteins and other milk solids just sitting on the bottom there.
And now this is thin and it tastes like browned butter, which is a very different
flavor. Breaking is even easier to see with a more common real world butter sauce. I'm talking about
beurre blanc, white butter, raw shallots in a pan along with half a glass of wine,
a big splash of vinegar, bring that to a boil to soften the shallots and evaporate the water, keep
boiling until almost dry, but not quite. Kill the heat so we don't damage the casein. And when the
bubbling stops, we can stir in a lot of butter. The emulsion is more likely to form if you stir
frequently. There's a whole stick of butter in there now, and that sauce is absolutely luscious,
a classic for a reason. The problem comes when you let it get too hot, once it starts bubbling,
the casein denatures, the oil and water phases split apart and the sauce is a broken mess.
It still tastes okay, but it's thin. And sauce should generally be thick. You can make a much
more stable butter sauce if you involve some egg, like egg yolk. Egg yolks are full of lecithin
proteins. You just have to be really careful about not getting the eggs too hot. Hence, you
traditionally do this in a metal bowl over a pot of boiling water. This just acts as a regulator
valve on your stove's heat. It prevents spikes and hotspots. We have egg yolks in there, some lemon
juice, salt, cayenne pepper, and whoops, that's what happens when you get the eggs too hot, they
curdle. The proteins denature and there's lots of them, they tangle up with each other in clumps.
Let's turn down the heat and try that again. Whisk and cook gently until the eggs and the lemon juice
are thick. Then gently melt in basically as much butter as you could possibly want.
And that is hollandaise sauce, which is more stable than beurre blanc because it has more
and better emulsifiers from the eggs. You can even let it bubble a little bit. But pretty soon all
those proteins start clumping up and this sauce is not broken. It's too thick for the oil and
the water to push away from each other. Rather, this sauce is curdled. Hollandaise curdles more
often than it breaks, and the protein clumps are just gritty. Speaking of gritty, let's talk about
the cheese sauces. If you just melt normal cheese inside some water or some milk to make a sauce,
all the cheese proteins will clump up and fall to the bottom. And the milk fat that those proteins
were formally emulsifying will just rise to the top in an oil slick. This is not a cheese
sauce. This is curds and whey with grease on top. The traditional way to emulsify a cheese sauce is
with a butter and flour rue. This is just going to be a thickener for the milk. The reason they
tell you to whisk in the liquid a little bit at a time is that otherwise you just splash
milk everywhere. Once it looks like gravy, you can melt in a lot of cheese. It'll be smooth. Though,
it'll still have that slight powdery texture that any starch-thickened sauce is going to have. And
if you get it bubbling hot, like say in the oven while baking mac and cheese, the emulsion of the
cheese is still going to break. The sauce is so thick that the fat and water can't separate far,
but you can still feel those cheesy protein clumps on your tongue. I'm not a fan. I'm a fan of the
more modern method where you actually chemically emulsify your cheese sauce with some emulsifying
salts like sodium phosphate or sodium citrate. The latter of which you can make at home because
you have citric acid. That's half a teaspoon of baking soda, just plain sodium bicarb. And
that's the juice of one lemon, about 50mL. Stir together, they will react and make CO2 bubbles,
as in your science fair volcano. And when they're done reacting, this should not taste
sour at all anymore. It should taste salty and fruity, but not tart. If it's still tart,
add more baking soda. Now we have a solution of sodium citrate. It still has some of the
more oily notes of the lemon, there's a little bit of lemon flavor in there, but no acidity.
And that lingering lemon flavor is going to be massively overwhelmed by sharp cheddar. Into that,
I like about 80 mils of milk or water or some such. And then that'll be enough to melt in about
200 grams of any cheese that you could like. This sauce has the unnaturally smooth, gooey
texture that I love from queso dip and Velveeta and such, and it is ridiculously stable. I can
boil this and it never gets gritty. All I have to do is thin it back out again with more liquid.
The sodium citrate effectively removes and replaces the calcium that's bound inside the
casein protein. And for science reasons, that just really improves the performance of casein
as an emulsifier. You know what also seems to enhance the performance of casein? Just leaving
the protein in the cream from once it came. The approximately 30% fat liquid that rises to the top
of unhomogenized milk, AKA cream — this is such a more convenient emulsifier than butter, even
though butter is just cream with most of the water and the whey protein taken out. Bring that cream
up to a bubble, evaporate out some water, maybe denature some of the proteins and get them to
tangle up a little and you get a delicious sauce that is perfectly emulsified and it is remarkably
heat stable. If you ever overcook it, just stir in some more cream and it'll probably be fine.
Churning cream into butter does result in some changes to the milk fat globule membrane surface,
and that is my best guess as to why cream is such an easier emulsifier than butter. I don't really
know, best guess, but it's true. However you keep your sauce together, just keep it together.