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

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