Welcome to WTF, where we transform food here in the Modernist Pantry test kitchen.
Today, we pity the fool who is still trying to prep these with a knife.
We'll talk about Pectinex, pectin and how it's getting in the way of your recipes.
Hi everybody, I'm Mark Frechette.
And I'm Scott Guerin, the research and development chef here at Modernist Pantry.
So let's talk a little bit about today's ingredient is Pectinex, which as the
name implies, destroys pectin, but let's talk about pectin real quick.
What is it?
And what does it serve and for what purpose?
So pectin is basically what holds the cell walls together in many fruits.
So whenever you have oranges and you have all that, the white pith on the
inside, or the peels that are on them, generally, you have to do it by hand.
So if I were to take this orange here, I peel the outside with a paring knife,
and then I segment each and every one.
I'm leaving a lot behind because I'm leaving some of the pulp on the inside.
I'm leaving some of the juice and I'm really breaking it down so much
with that paring knife that I'm wasting time and I'm wasting money.
So what we have here is Pectinex, and it's very simple.
All you do is peel the outside of the orange.
And then I put one liter of water to five to six drops of the pectinex in there.
It's two, usually two milliliters to a liter.
But if you don't want to have to measure, it's totally fine to do five or six drops.
And then I separate my segments of orange.
I placed them in and you can do this with any citrus fruit.
You can do it with a lot of different fruits or anything
that contains pectin, really.
Sure.
And I allow them to sit for a few hours.
Even after about 20 to 30 minutes, you'll see it start to dissolve.
So it's going to dissolve all that white skin on the outside.
It's also going to dissolve all the pith that's on the backside of it.
And I have a few things here that I kind of want to show off.
Obviously this, they look like they came out of a can.
They do.
And you weren't cheating with this.
At this point yesterday, it was a normal, normal citrus fruit.
So it's not canned, even though it looks as perfect.
And I think it's important to know Pectinex isn't just for citrus, but this
is probably one of the most visually stunning ways to show off its raw power.
But, also we've got Pectinex has other uses that it's used for including
clarification, which we'll talk about, as well as these Supremes.
And some of the more exciting uses I've seen are I think Dave Arnold
uses it for, for a French fry recipe.
So yeah, anywhere pectin's getting in your way or needs to be
controlled in some way, that's where something like Pectinex comes in.
Yeah.
So.
Whenever you're using something like this, you want it to save you time
and you want it to save you money.
So you're not paying someone to stand there and peel the oranges.
Then usually you have to throw away those, you know, like the skins of the orange.
So you're wasting all that zest, unless you have someone zest all
those oranges, peel them, then Supreme them, and then you've spent
two hours doing a case of oranges.
With this, you can just peel them.
And if you peel them properly, like I kind of did here, and this is really cool.
This is the pure skin of an orange and here's one right before.
This is, has the Pectinex in it.
And you can kind of see, I just scrape off.
This is all pectin.
That's been broken down by Pectinex.
So you can save all the zest without having to do it
with a zester or microplane.
You can do whatever you want because it's in much larger
segments than you would just have.
And then you have all of the fruit.
There's no wasted fruit, no wasted juice, because it's all contained in here.
And you can see the back is completely cleaned.
And so is the front of every single segment that you have.
Now, something that I was, I was a little bit surprised because
when you told me like, oh, you just do it, you soak it in water.
I thought you'd lose some of that freshness.
This isn't a setup.
Like legitimately.
We were just surprised by this and it still smells amazing.
So it didn't lose any of the freshness or, or anything like that.
If you were to leave the zest in for too long, it will eventually break down
because it does have a lot of pectin in it, but I took it out and I rinsed it.
And that's a really big thing to know is that if you want to stop
kind of the breakdown of that pectin, take it out and rinse it.
Eventually it'll work its way through the zest.
If you were to take a full orange and put it in with some Pectinex and water over
time, it would break it down completely and just leave you with the segments,
but you don't really want to do that.
First off, it's going to take a long time, right?
So I just took the skin.
I soaked it for about 12 to 15 hours, which is easy.
If you do it and you show up the next day, you can take it
out and just wipe it right off.
These are grapefruit skins.
I want to do them 'cause they're a little bit bigger, so you can see
them a little bit better, but the orange, orange skin works just as fine.
So that's fantastic.
Now, now I got to ask you a question since it can break down most of the orange.
If I was taking Pectinex and put it in, say, a jam.
Is Pectinex strong enough to actually like break down a jam pretty well?
Yeah.
Pectinex, like we said, breaks down pectin.
If you put it on top of a jam and you can let it sit there, it's
going to work its way through and the enzyme will break it down.
Sure.
Eventually, if you leave Pectinex out at room temperature, which this is one
of the ingredients that we suggest you keep in the refrigerator, if you leave
it out at room temperature, eventually it will lose its really enzymatic power.
And that's what it is.
It's an enzyme that just breaks it down.
And the best part about an enzyme, like we said, if you leave it
out for too long, it breaks down.
But if you want it to stop doing what it's doing, just heat it up gently.
It was above 130 degrees where it kind of deactivates that enzyme and you
don't have to worry about it anymore.
Not that it would do anything, you know, digestively or, or it's not, it doesn't
have a flavor, which is really great.
But if you want to stop it doing what it's doing, gently heat it up.
Yeah.
We actually had a really great question where this was one of the possible solves.
Somebody was making canned, prepared salsa and they were having a problem with it
kind of getting a little bit too jellied up and you would identify, oh, it's
probably the pectin causing the issue.
And this was one of the possible solves was add some Pectinex and let it do
its job, then heat it to deactivate.
Yes.
All right.
I'm not going to spoil what the other solve was, but if you're looking for that,
head on over to blog.modernistpantry.com after this video, you can wait.
We'll find a new column called or newish column called Ask a Chef.
That's when a lot of you guys ask us questions, you probably get dozens a day.
We take some of the most interesting, intriguing or weird ones and, names
and faces changed to protect the innocent, and answer them publicly.
So if you're looking to see some of the strangest questions we get, or
the most common questions we get Ask a Chef over at blog.modernistpantry.com
has a lot of them, including this something that covered this as
problematic pectin and salsa.
So there's many other things.
It's not.
You don't just make segments out of oranges with this ingredient.
Like I said before, it's an enzyme that breaks down pectin and pectin is usually
in the cell walls of, of many things.
We have two different looking glasses.
Obviously this one looks like a smoothie and this one looks like a juice.
And these actually were those exact same.
Yeah, these were the exact same strawberries.
I mean side-by-side.
And all I did was I added Pectinex to this, and then I ran it through
this machine, which is kind of just sitting here, ominously.
Yeah, I remember him.
He's in he's in lost in space.
Well, we've taken them here and now we've kind of changed them a little
bit, or Dave Arnold has changed them, into an amazing culinary centrifuge.
It's really the only one that is made specifically for bars and restaurant use.
And what that basically means is that it takes in this product, you
know, it's, it's pulpy, it's got the seeds, it's got everything.
So I just put them right in the blender.
There's no water or anything in this.
I added the Pectinex to break down those cell walls and release all that juice.
And then I ran it through this machine, which spins at such velocity that
it separates the, the seeds and then the pulp, and then just the liquid.
And if there was any fat in it, it would actually separate out the fat as well.
Well, so it separates it all by density.
And then I have a beautiful strawberry juice that is crystal clear.
You can read through it and now I can use it for many different things.
And then I also have the pulp that's left over in here that I
can use to flavor more things.
So this is a really amazing use.
It's kind of a, you know, it adds on to helping with, you know, the
use of pectin because this, if you put it on any vegetable or anything
that contains pectin and run it through here, it's going to separate.
It's going to be really beautiful.
If you haven't had a chance to play with the Spinzall yet, it's, it's
definitely, it's a great way of getting, I think the way to put it would be the
extreme flavors out of stuff as well.
We were talking about using it for, for hot peppers to get, you know, clarified
hot pepper juice for use in vodka.
Separate episode that you'll never see.
But so there's lots of awesome, awesome uses for it.
So definitely check that out.
We've got a whole section on our YouTube channel.
If you want to look at it, oh, you might already be watching this on
YouTube, but head on over there and hit the subscribe button there.
And it's a great introduction to the Spinzall, how to
use it and stuff like that.
So definitely worth a shot if you love high-end kitchen gadgetry and what it
can do to really enable some superpowers.
This is a really impressive piece of kit.
And the best part about those YouTube videos on the Spinzall is it's by Dave
Arnold, the guy who invented this machine.
And David is an absolute genius when it comes to culinary technology as
well as, as ingredients and stuff.
So yeah.
So listening to those videos, he did them all one take and
he was just so knowledgeable.
Obviously he, he built and made this machine, so he knows everything about it,
but you can really understand how to use this machine and see some amazing things.
Yeah.
In fact, Dave Arnold, if you're watching this, your videos still
have more views than our WTF videos.
I'm coming for you!
But it's a wildly popular product.
Thank you so much for working with us on it.
Now, another thing, speaking of David Arnold, is he's
got some recipes out there.
I think the French fry recipe where he does call for a couple
of different kinds of Pectinexes.
Yeah.
So when, when those recipes were written, this specific product wasn't really
being used, or it wasn't even out yet.
He had two different types of Pectinex, or two different enzymes that did
basically what this one ingredient does.
So he's got to blend those old two.
So this is the winner of the pile.
There's the French fry recipe, which you can use to, you know, break down
some of the pectin, make a really nice crispy French fry, by the way.
Or he also has a, like a primer on making these orange or supremes,
everything up to pomelo, you know, using those two ingredients, but you
don't need those two ingredients.
So if for some reason you saw those and you're looking this up and you
stumbled across us, this one ingredient substitutes for both those ingredients.
And I don't even believe you can get those two anymore.
So the, the Pectinex SP-L is what you want to use.
We'll leave links.
Of course, we always leave links for the products down below in the show
notes at blog.moderndistpantry.com.
Or if you're watching this on YouTube, see the description.
We'll also leave a link to the French fry recipe as well.
That was just a crazy read.
He ends up breaking out sandpaper for it, the texture.
It's the most in-depth read on a fried potato you have ever treated yourself to.
All right, now we've talked about some of the amazing uses for it.
I think this is an absolute time-saver.
This almost seems to me like one of those things where you volunteer
to take care of the supremes.
Set it all up and like take the day off and come back later
and be like, I did it all.
Took no time.
Well, no big deal.
Well then you can, you can make many more things in the time that you save.
So, yeah.
And that's one of the things we're always trying to do for you here on WTF.
It's not just about the new ingredients, but specifically trying to figure out
how these new ingredients can change your life is either a culinary fanatic or
for more of you, culinary professionals.
And in this case, Pectinex is pretty amazing.
As a clarifier, we see this a lot with wine making and stuff as well.
It's a great clarifier and certainly something to try experimenting
with as a, as a potential option.
The fact that it does these supremes, I think is probably one of the widest
available uses because you know, this is a really common thing to
have, and you don't have to use jars.
You can stay true to your freshness promises.
And at the same time, you don't have to spend forever trying to get the
pith off or even worse, serving it with that awful tasting white stuff on it.
One of the most common uses for Pectinex is actually in commercial juice making.
So yeah, it you've probably had this ingredient or, you know, it's been
used in something that you've purchased already, and now you have it at your
fingertips to do amazing things with.
So what are you going to do with this super power?
Let us know.
The best way to let us know is to take a picture of it.
Put all the right hashtags on it and tag us on Instagram.
You guys have been sharing some amazing stuff you've made from these WTF episodes
or just from our entire catalog of ingredients at modernistpantry.com.
So thanks so much, keep sharing.
It inspires us.
We love sharing that inspiration on.
Or just leave a comment down below on how you plan to use it.
Whether you're watching this on Facebook or YouTube, the comments section.
We read it.
He reads it faster than I do.
So if you ask a question, you'll get a response really quick as well.
Now we did talk about you know, we hinted a little bit earlier on it.
There are, well, this is really easy to use because you
can't really overdose on it.
That's probably a weird word, but you can't really too much, as long as, you
know, you can use the heat to shut it off.
What are some other, what are some ways you could really mess this up?
So the biggest way you can mess this up is leaving it out
on the counter for too long.
Well these are, these will be out for about 10 minutes.
They're still retaining a lot of their, you know, the
coolness from the refrigerator.
But if you leave it on the counter or on your, just your shelf, for a day
or two, they're going to start to you know, destroy the enzymes that way.
Yeah.
It's okay if you want to, you know, put it the enzyme on the fruit and
allow it to sit for a few hours on, you know, on the counter.
'Cause they worked pretty well at room temperature, but you wouldn't
leave just the entire bottle.
Also, like you said, overdose, which just means putting too much.
And at that point, yes, it will work a little bit faster.
Sure.
But you don't really need that, especially if you're going to let it sit overnight.
Why are you going to put more when you can just save a little bit of
money and just put the, you know, the two milliliters to a liter, or a four
to five drops to a quart or liter?
Outstanding.
All right.
So there you have it, Pectinex.
It's capable of pulling off some amazing tricks from taking all of the
pectin peel off of your oranges to clarifying juice, to taking the other
side of the peel off for perfect zest.
It happens to have some amazing other super powers.
Pectin-heavy, pectin-based, fruits and veggies, for example, I think
peppers, this would turn peppers down to a paste pretty darn quick.
Pretty much nothing.
It almost dissolves them to just red dust.
Yeah.
Which is kind of exciting to me.
And the best use for this probably hasn't been discovered yet.
That's going to be your job.
I love that.
You said that last time we got one of these things, stealing it for us.
Stole my line.
Forever.
You can say it now.
You already did a good job.
So is there anything else we need to know about Pectinex, how to use it?
Important how to spell it.
Pectin E X.
So it's all one word, but it's not pectin X.
Like it's a cool, you know, nineties prog rock band or something like that.
So definitely find that at modernistpantry.com, just go to the
search bar, Pectinex, all one word.
You'll find it.
Cool.
Anything else we need to know about now?
I think we hit all the points.
Outstanding.
Well, thank you so much for joining us here on WTF, where we transform food
in the Modernist Pantry test kitchen.
And that's actually WTF.
And my name is Scott Guerin.
Oh, did I say it wrong?
WDF.
WDF, oh dear.
Hey, do you like inspiration?
You've made it this far in the video, including the bloopers.
So.
Head on over to blog.modernistpantry.com.
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You'll find some of Scott's favorite recipes that we've posted up over time.
You'll also find that Ask a Chef column, we hinted at where we
answered the strangest coolest or most common questions we get.
And you'll find some backlogs of this series, WTF, where you'll learn everything
from how to make your own bacon, to our last episode, mastering culinary,
effectively, Pop Rocks, which if you miss that one, definitely head back for it.
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Have a wonderful day.
I'm Mark Frechette.
And I'm Scott Guerin.
Have a great day.