Speaking of sharp cheddar, I'd love to see an Adam Ragusea-style deep dive into what makes cheeses "sharp". I've actually looked this up before without getting a satisfying answer, beyond "it's older and maybe fermented a bit more". If anyone could really break it down to the nitty-gritty, it'll be this channel.
Sharp cheddar is aged, and when it's aged it loses moisture. Moisture loss results in a more concentrated flavor, in addition to those flavor notes produced by fermentation. A summary I found that explains a little further: "During the aging process, cheddar cheese loses some of its moisture, taking it from smooth and creamy to firm with hard, salt-like crystals. These crystals develop when lactose in the cheese breaks down into lactic acid. The lactic acid binds with calcium ions, forming crystals made of calcium lactate. "
@@minch5537 I feel like this doesn't quite fully answer the question. There are many long-aged cheeses, including some cheddars, that barely taste 'sharp' at all to me, and many of the sharpest cheddars I've had have been the semi-firm 'brick' style cheddars from New York or Vermont that have a dense and solid but still smooth texture with none of those lactic acid crystals. In fact, when someone describes a cheddar as 'sharp,' I really associate it much moreso with those relatively softer American-style cheddars. Harder, crumblier cheddars tend to have developed sweeter, funkier flavors and are missing the super strong acidic tang of those New England-style semi-firm cheddars.
My question is “Sharp vs Aged”. The US has Sharp Cheddar Cheese. Aged Cheddar is an import product. The “sharp” cheese has a processed feel. Canada, UK and other places have “aged or old” cheese. The aged cheese (often sold by the number if years it has been aged) has a different texture. The older it gets , the more the cheese breaks into clumps/pieces. It is fabulous for eating, the older the cheese the stronger the flavour. It is not always the best for sauces and I would like to know what the aging process has done as a chemical change and how that effects cooking with it. I would also like to really understand the difference between Sharp and Aged.
As a 6 year papa john veteran, you are correct, the sauce breaks in the box, particularly if it sits on the warm wrack for too long when drivers are busy making runs
@@SimuLord my experience predates uber eats unfortunately. My sample size is limited to actual employees of papa John's delivering pizza. But I would presume if they take longer to pick up orders than yes. Sitting in the pizza box Def affects it, but sitting on the warmer does so more
It's science. There is a reason a lot of us never get married. They say love never fails but then life shows you nothing fails like love. Oh, you saw me talk to that woman I work with so you burnt down our house. It was a nice restaurant because we also had a client with us.
Related to the emulsifying salts in cheese sauces: the super-obviously-fake cheese singles have a lot of emulsifying salts in them. This means that they can kind of be used like cheese bouillon - throw one or two in a cheese sauce, and they'll provide enough emulsifying power for a lot of other, more real cheese.
do you put them in before the other cheese? like roux, milk, singles, then shredded cheese? ive added singles at the very end before just to get that nice stringy/creamy look but i really wanna try your way!
Yes, Adam showed on his silky mac and cheese video. I've done it a few times. I just mix milk with a slice or two of american singles and then add whatever shredded cheese I want.
America's Test Kitchen taught me a great trick for butter-based sauces a while back: You can whisk or beat together roughly equal parts hot melted butter and softened room-temperature butter to create a stable emulsion that can hold even at relatively high temperatures. I use this all the time to make buffalo sauce, I start with room temp butter, melt about half of it, and then vigorously beat the two together to a smooth consistency before slowly adding the hot sauce and/or any other liquid ingredients. It makes a wing sauce with a consistency almost close to ketchup that thins out but stays creamy and won't break when you toss it with freshly-cooked, still-warm wings.
Adam, I'm 66 (and counting) and have been a self-taught cook, love cooking, this video has been the single best "resaurce" on emulsification I've ever come across! Been added to my cook stuff playlist for ready reference and I'm extremely grateful to you that you took the time to make it. I noticed the absence of mayonnaise (which I invariably stuff up, damnit) but I've taken note of the lemon/bicarb cheese sauce and using cream rather than butter techniques and they'll feature in my recipes for the next few weeks as I get them down pat. Thank you.
Can't say I disagree, I'm a cook by trade and I'm trying to cover all my basics before advancing further and some stuff I've learned on those videos just make me feel incompetent
I mean, ingredients-wise, hollandaise sauce is similar to mayo. Just replace the butter with regular vegetable oil and don't cook it (and add some vinegar, and other spices to taste)
FYI, CHEF John (not Papa J.), on Food Wishes , has crafted a fool-proof technique for 2 mn mayo, using the immersion blender and bowl, and the right order into which you pile up ingredients... It's a fast hit, rather vexing when you come to think of the sweat and time wasted on whacky results, but he hit it hard, and he's the kind who won't "let the food win"! So, when YOU feel ready, the master is waiting... My pleasure !
I'm not really much of a cook, but I am definitely a painter, and one with a lot of background in the traditional sciences. Half of the reason I like this channel is simply because Adam is one of the few people I've ever known of who can actually give pretty spot on explanations of fluid mechanics, and what is going on molecularly with different kinds of liquids, in a way that makes a decent amount of intuitive sense. These are typically pretty complex areas of study that require a lot of additional chemistry and material science knowledge, and having that knowledge set in order to talk about home cooking is really commendable.
Many whipping creams include emulsifiers to keep them from separating and breaking when whipped. The carton you used in the video is composed of "Heavy Cream, Carrageenan, Mono And Diglycerides, Cellulose Gum, Polysorbate 80". Apart from the casein in heavy cream, every added ingredient is an emulsifier. Carrageenan is a thickener and emulsifier derived from seaweed, mono and diglycerides act as emulsifiers, cellulose gum is an emulsifier, and polysorbate 80 is an emulsifier! It thickens sauces much better than butter because you have four extra emulsifiers along for the ride!
I've never been a papa johns family, but I have definitely had it a couple of time before, and I had no idea that garlic sauce WASN'T supposed to be just melted butter. If I had opened one of those containers and saw that it had been all emulsified, I'd have that it'd have gone bad
When you get extra sauces they'll often be like that, because they're in a bag and they're not exposed to heat [they're actually sometimes cold when you get them like that, i think they refrigerate them at the shop]
This is going to sound really weird, but Papa John's garlic sauce seems to re-emulsify if I leave it a month or so in a cool dark place. I do shake it before I open it (so maybe its just like the vinaigrette) but it stays very thick and creamy at least the length of one pizza. I found if I skip dipping for a bit (or really, just use extra of some other sauce from the pantry), I can rotate out my oldest sauces when I get Papa John's, putting the new ones in the back for the drawer and the older ones for that night's pizza. The weird part if that sauces shouldn't un-break on their own like that once the proteins are denatured.
@@araguseaour family keeps them in the door of the refrigerator. New ones go in, Old ones are used for that nights pizza. Creamy every time. Edit: we have a sauce drawer (think junk drawer with screws and trinkets but with packets of duck sauce and such) but putting milk based products in there has never crossed my mind... Nor will it.
I've been using an immersion blender for emulsifying things like mayo and buffalo sauce. You can usually blend a broken sauce back to being smooth again too. And vegan cheeses make for great sauces because they already have starches and emulsifiers (kinda like american cheese and velveeta). And wow, really cool to see homemade sodium citrate. Excellent video!
Immersion blenders are AMAZING for any kind of sauce. Because you can disperse oil and water so finely, it better connects to the receptors of the emulsifier. In the kitchen i work at where we make a dressing for 200 portions at once we just kind of put everything together for a vinagrette, and put the blender in and it makes a solid enough sauce. (Though it doesn't get as thick as if you add it in a thin stream )
Oils are not just less dense, but oils and other bulky hydrocarbons are hydrophobic because they are non-polar and have no charge and can therefore not be dissolved in water. Emulsifiers typically have a charged and a non-polar side that allow them to interact with both polar and non-polar molecules and create suspensions that mixes them together.
Which is how soaps work (detergent is just a kind of soap). Its half of what makes soap so important for cleaning dishes, as a surfactant/emulsifier it helps the food oils mix into the water. The other half of why they are great for cleaning dishes is that soap by definition is an antibiotic, and it works by shredding cell walls causing bacteria to lose structural integrity and pop/burst. (I hate "antibiotic" hand soap because its as dumb as buying "antibiotic" bleach)
Yup! to get more specific and also more vague, its not entropically favorable for oils and water to mix because oil want to minimize the amount of surface area capable of interacting with water, which it why it forms into round shapes almost instantly. @@jasonreed7522
A trick for anyone who gets their papa johns sauce broken; before you even open the packet to check, just shake well! It'll re-emulsify the sauce in the little container just from mixing and will be stable for long enough to use it, even if the proteins have denatured.
I've watched James make coffee in a percolator for funsies and Adam's coffee here was almost certainly better than that. In terms of resulting flavor, straight up boiling your coffee is only worse than about half of the common consumer coffee solutions lol
Just remember, a French press is just a jug with a strainer! Any method you do where you submerge the grounds and then strain them out is going to get you the exact same result as a French press, all other variables being equal.
@@aragusea I’m not criticizing you, I’m just saying the brew temperature is the variable. I’ll even try it tomorrow myself. But the brew temperature will be a lot higher than during a pour over or French press. It will bring out unwanted notes in some coffees, but heck it could bring out great notes in others
I LOVE hollandaise and I make mine using the "mayonnaise method." The same way you'd mix up a batch of mayo in a food processor or in a jar with an immersion blender, you can make hollandaise! 4 egg yolks, 1 Tbsp lemon juice, pinch of salt and cayenne, and then melt a stick of butter and pour it in while blending. It's magical, and as you might guess, I have that recipe memorized. 😂
Give maltaise sauce a try if you haven't. Just swap the lemon for orange juice. Blood orange (bit of a berry-ish flavor) to be strictly authentic but any will do. I once tried lime juice and don't recommend that but there are so many glorious derivatives born of hollandaise. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollandaise_sauce#Derivatives Noisette's a great one. Brown butter is delicious even on its own.
This is one of the most useful videos in this channel. Mastering sauces can be frustrating and I wish I had this knowledge when I first started learning about them.
Thanks for the sodium citrate tip to use with cheese sauce; I'm going to try that this year for Thanksgiving. I guess I had always just assumed I would need some obscure, hard to find chemical additives in order to make mac and cheese as smooth as the mass produced stuff, so I never bothered looking into it. Thanks Adam!
Im going to try that as well. Ive made far too many gritty mac n cheese sauces in my day. I never bothered to research what made it gritty though...but now I know
THAAAAAAANK YOUUUUUUUUUUU!!!! I’ve had such trouble with my sauces, and no matter how many people I watch online about making a sauce and their little “don’t break the sauce” warning, I never was able to truly figure out why I’d break the sauce a bunch. But you scientifically broke it down, and actually showed how I’m doing it wrong, and how I need to change. And for that, I thank you!
This is the best food related education I have ever received. Thank you so much Adam. Been following you since 2020 and I’m only more amazed everyday that you teach so articulately.
It's not that educational if he refused to include any scientific sources on the matter and potentially told us some myths and wrong explanations for his observations. Like in his bread experiment video where he ate bread baked with moldy/rotten dough and he foolishly believed that spoiled taste was just how wet cooked flour tastes without yeast. despite the obvious signs of spoilage and, you know, despite noodles also being cooked wet flour with no yeast and not tasting spoiled....
Its important to note that with some sauces and some culinary traditions, a "broken" sauce is actually preferred. A famous recent example is Uncle Roger's videos relating to Thai Green Curry. A thin green film of oil over a broken sauce is intentional in this case.
I've needed a thorough breakdown of emulsifiers for so long! I've done so much research but haven't had anything this well put together. So helpful! Great job.
BTW if you want to make the Papa John's sauce, just take granulated garlic and melted butter. You can simi unbreak the sauce if it breaks just by letting it get cold, also it tastes better. It could not be more simple get granulated garlic (a good amount of it) out of it in something heat safe, melt butter pour to combine then shake. Temperature adjusts thickness.
Love everything you Do Adam! You're such a wonderful, bright and amazing guy! You're so meticulous and energetic about all you do! and it truly warms my hearth! your content has really helped me through this stressful few days! You're a breath of fresh air !
My head exploded upon viewing this video - how one person could take a subject and unpack it with entertainment and information at the same time is something I don't think I've seen too often. You deserve two and a half million subs!!!
I've only really made a hand full of decent sauces in the kitchen (one of them was the simple butter and a bit of water from one of your info/tutorials), but I was floored by the sodium citrate 'hack'. I tried making my own cheese sauce at home a while back and ran into the same clumping issue-- it was a frustrating experience to say the least. I'll definitely give it a go again, with being able to make my own sodium citrate at home. I don't mind using cheese slices to add on, but it's just not economical to do that for the _whole_ cheese sauce. Thanks for being as informative as ever, Adam!
I'd really really like a video on the basics of sauce, like sauce 101 where we'd learn about the 5 mother sauces or something and how to improvise one with basic things
the best kind of video, where I go in, thinking I know most of the stuff and then you introducue so many nuances to this topic that I feel educated and suprised of the minutiae of sauces
Consider a "Part 2" on how to fix broken sauces (if they can be fixed). One issue I've encountered is making a cream sauce (either with dairy or with coconut cream). The sauce will be perfect during the meal but after being refrigerated, the next day the sauce is a horrible broken mess. No idea why it happens or how to fix it.
It's likely because the butterfat in the cream wants to solidify at fridge temperature while the water wants to stay a liquid, and if your emulsion stays at a low enough temperature for long enough, the water molecules will eventually be squeezed out of emulsion by the fat molecules wanting to all pack together into a solid mass. This would be even further exacerbated with coconut cream because coconut oil is more saturated and therefore goes much more solid than butterfat. You can probably fix this by gently reheating the sauce on the stove and vigorously whisking in some extra cream. This is also why emulsions based on fats that remain a liquid at lower temperatures, like mayonnaise, can stay in the fridge forever without breaking like that.
Great video. As a pastry chef for 20 years I already know about emulsification and whatnots but getting a chemistry lesson on the subject is nice and I will use this language when teaching the young chefs. Knowing what works is important but knowing *why* they work helps you remember.
I love the visual metaphor for the emulsifier, it always lovely to see! I'm not sure if you got it from Alton Brown and Good Eats, but it's always helpful to new and old cooks alike!~
I was definitely getting Alton Brown vibes when I saw the cotton ball/pipe cleaner explanation of emulsion. I think Adam talked about Alton on an episode of the podcast.
This is the classic style Adam video that I fell in love with when I first saw the "Why I Season my Cutting Board, NOT my Steak" video. Love these forrays down the rabbit hole of small, but wide cooking topics.
I'm always impressed by how creatively Adam leads into his sponsors. You don't even realise it's happening until a few seconds in where you go "Oh, wait, this is the pitch."
Cool video! But one thing, if your Béchamel is gritty then you didn't cook the Roux long enough. I get really smooth sauces now that I learned to cook the raw flour for a minute or two before adding milk or cream. But I'm gonna try the citric acid method sometime, it looks good!
Thank you for the vid! I was searching for a long time for a proper explanation on how to make sauces because I suck at it. And you did a great job, thanks again!
I never knew you could get a stable garlic sauce from PJ's. Its always been a greasy mess that I take a few bites of before I realize Its not making anything better.
had no idea you could make sodium citrate at home, really good to know! is there a way to turn that liquid into a powder or make it otherwise shelf/refrigerator stable?
You could theoretically boil it down into crystals, but you probably wouldn't get all the water out and/or it would be hard to scrape all the crystals out of the pan so at that point I'd just order some online.
some baking powders are basically mixed citric acid with baking soda, or phosphoric acid with baking soda. There might be some starch as well, but if you don't mind that it works great.
Amazing. I made a pan sauce for some pork chops the other night (milk, fond, flour, spices) and it broke right before I plated it. I knew it was time to investigate why this happens and then right on time you have an incredible and very in depth explanation.
Broken sauce can be made simply. For step 1 - all you need to do is break the fundamental laws of nature near where you are cooking the sauce, so it defies all laws of physics and you can control it at your will. For step 2 - Tell the sauce to ‘break’. Just make sure not to say it loud enough that the sauce gets scared and dissipates into hydrogen atoms, trust me, it’s not fun. Step 3 - Enjoy! (Just don’t tell anyone how you made it).
Man, that was beautiful. My chicken scallopini mushroom sauce broke the other night and I was very unhappy about it. Thanks for the assist to figure out why!
You've probably been told that before many times, but as a trained chemist I must say your videos (and general understanding of the topic) are spot on.
As a former PJ employee that is by design. The sauce will actually go back to bring homogenous if it's brought back down to room temperature but the sauce melts into a "butter" to be spread or dipped in with the crust
You sir, are a lifesaver. I've tried to make mac and cheese 3 times now and every time the cheese ended up breaking and turned out gritty. I'll have to give the sodium citrate a try!
Bravo! I think this is your best video that I've seen, and this is in the 99.9th percentile of RU-vid videos I've watched. I'm almost didn't watch it because I didn't understand the thumbnail, but I'm glad I clicked on it.
Master of the segue. Nice work Adam. I play a little game with myself where I try to predict when you're working your sponsors into the conversation. Keep up the great work.
After watching this cooking pod I went and made your sodium citrate cheese spread. I filled a jar with the thick version for later ready for mac & cheese. Took what did not fit in the jar, added more milk and chopped jalapeno and got a wonderful smooth quesadilla dip. I will never get the cheese dips on the rack next to the chips. I saw your older pods on cheese dip and was in a big hurry to go buy sodium citrate. The bicarb and lemon are items I keep on hand. So simple thanks. have been and will be a loyal fan.
Absolutely flippin' fascinating the practical chemistry this channel teaches. I mean, more than cooking is just generally "practical chemistry". Like I've not much interest in cooking and generally don't like to _eat_ sauces (I'm weird, don't worry about it), learning how this stuff actually works is, well, _fascinating_ ! And you're such a good storyteller in the way you explain things too. Have been watching for a while now but thought particularly to comment this as this video made me want to share it with some friends. Getting a video to "share to friends" level without it containing a bird or reptile is high praise!
@@grabble7605 Other verbs to apply to sauces other than eat: - Buy - Cook - Learn about - Leave in back of fridge until it grows mould - Throw in bin after realising it's grown mould 😛
I have to make many pounds of Hollandaise every day at work - I have a pretty basic understanding of the temperature and emulsification going on but it's wonderful to see a deep dissection and explanation of all the moving parts!!
Thank you so much for the tip on cheese sauce. I am in South africa, so we don't get velvita or anything like that. I have been trying to figure this out for years! Just tried it and made the most amazing jalapeño chilli cheese sauce! Thank you!
Not gonna lie - it's been a while since I watched one of your videos. This particular caught my eye because I've historically had issues with emulsions. I never realized I was denaturing casein so badly and so often! As someone who doesn't like some of your presentation style (which is entirely a personal taste thing and not meant as a criticism), I wanted you to know that the sheer density of useful information won me over on this one. Thanks!
this was a bunch of good information even for advanced home cooks. I did some of those things but didn't always know why they worked, knowing why/how it works lets you apply it much better to other things.
Your videos are always informative, but I did not expect this one to be so educational. I’ve never learned to cook but nonetheless I’ve cooked a lot of stuff, and most of the sauces I’ve ever made broke, or curdled, especially the cheese ones.
Wow so interesting, first the cheese sauce was very sour and clumped. It didn’t seem to work at all. But once i heated the sauce up it became super smooth, shiny and gooey. Great recipe!
