Bending the Spoon – Episode #3 – All about Acid

All about acid. Adding a little acid vinegar, lemon juice, wine to a dish can brighten the flavor and make the dish sing. We'll talk about acid and its role in flavoring foods and much, much more today on Bending the Spoon. But before we get to that, I'd like to remind you that if you like recipes, go to bonicellicookingclub.com and sign up for my email list and check out all of the options of participating in the club. And if you like what you hear today, hop over to podchaser.com and leave bending the spoon of positive review. Also, for the video version of this podcast, subscribe to Bonicelli Cooking Club on YouTube. Now let's talk about acid. Lemons, limes, oranges, and vinegars all contain acid and a lot of it, and so do many other foods at lower levels like tomatoes. As I was doing my research for this podcast, I was thinking about how many things I do without really thinking about it that involve acid in some way. And I'm not just talking about cooking and baking Around the house, I use lemon juice and salt to clean tarnished copper, and I use vinegar and water to wash my windows and clean my coffee pot and my dishwasher. I use lemon juice and vinegar on clothing and carpet stains. I make a homemade counter cleaning spray using lemon peels and rubbing alcohol. Now for skincare, I use apple cider vinegar in a calcium bentonite clay face mask twice a week. My home version of a facial, and I use red wine vinegar in my sugar scrub. Doctors recommend using a diluted vinegar and water solution to clean minor cuts because of the antibacterial germ killing qualities in vinegar. Years ago, I was on a camping trip where we used vinegar in lake water. That was the water we drank on the entire trip. The vinegar killed the germs and bacteria in the water, thankfully. They do make filtering systems nowadays for camping, and if you're going to drink lake water, I definitely go that way. Now in cooking and baking, I whip egg whites for meringues with crema tartar, which happens to be an acidic byproduct of wine making. And I also add a little bit of lemon juice to my cream cheese frosting just a bit. It makes it taste better. It's not lemonade at all. It's just better. I've been told it's the best cream cheese frosting on the planet, and that was by my grandson, and he is an expert.. I even put a splash of lemon juice and scrambled eggs to improve their texture. And if I need buttermilk and I don't have any, I put a little white vinegar in milk and let it sit for 15 minutes before I use it. I got that one from my mother. And if I'm making a salad, I dress it early. If I want the greens to wilt, I dress it right before I serve it. If I don't I add lemon juice to pesto to keep it green, and I rub artichokes with lemon juice to keep them from browning. I'll put a few drops of lemon or vinegar in water to hold apples after I slice them. And I put lime juice in guacamole to help the avocados hold their color, and for the flavor, of course. I make homemade ricotta regularly using lemon juice or buttermilk, usually buttermilk to facilitate the curd, and I often finish my mire poix, my vegetable flavor base with wine and cook it off, which makes the risotto or sauce or whatever I'm making wonderfully rich and complex. Adding lemon juice to jellies helps them to gel. We talked about in episode two all about salt, how salt can heighten and transform flavor, and a little bit of acid can also transform flavor, but in a very different way. We'll get to that shortly, but now it's time for our featured ingredient. This week's featured ingredient is apple cider vinegar. Over the years, apple cider vinegar has been credited with all sorts of phenomenal things from helping weight loss to curing cancer. Braggs is the brand I usually buy, and they even call their product a wellness elixir. But vinegar's potential medicinal qualities are not what I wanna talk about today. I want to talk about this scary, gelatinous alien thing floating in the bottom of this bottle. I know you've all seen it in some bottle of vinegar, and I always seem to have it in my apple cider vinegar, which is why I decided to feature it today. I'm sure many bottles of vinegar have hit the garbage can when a wiggly mass like this one is discovered. It's called Vinegar Mother. And even though it looks, let's face it, disgusting, it's completely harmless. So what exactly is it? A vinegar mother is just bacteria that feeds on alcoholic liquids. And the reason it develops in your vinegar is that there were some sugars or alcohol that weren't completely fermented in the vinegar fermentation process. So what do you do with it once it's in your vinegar? You have a few options. You can leave it. You can still use your vinegar. You just wanna pour carefully so it stays in the bottle, or you can strain it out. I recommend using a coffee filter, but the really cool thing is that you can use it to make more vinegar. I suspect that's why they call it a mother. Anyway. Don't worry about your mother. She's just fine. I find that thinking of salt as an agent for bringing out and enhancing flavor instead of being the flavor helps with avoiding oversalting. Acid, however, is more of a balancing act. Think of juicing a lemon, which is very acidic on its own. You wouldn't just drink lemon juice, straight lemon juice, but add sugar and water. It's still as acidic as it always was, but now it's delicious Lemonade, straight up acid is sharp and bitter. It needs other ingredients to work off of and balance with. Now, let's say I'm making a tomato sauce, adding a little sugar to balance the acid is something I often do. I also add a small amount of sugar to my coffee, not to make it sweet. It cuts the acidity of the coffee down and to my taste rounds out the flavor. Again, all about balancing. Or think of malt vinegar or ketchup on your fries. Fat loves acid. We appreciate the fat more with acid and frankly, pairing wine to food is exactly the same thing. We use a more acidic, tannic wine to balance foods that are higher in fat. It literally changes how we taste. The fat and the fat changes how we taste the wine. I also frequently add a drizzle of lemon juice or vinegar to finish dishes, anything from a soup to stews, meat, fish, poultry, vegetables, and fruits. This adds a little zing and brightens and balances. It also satisfies a craving for acid, which I think people have. It's why we like salsa with our eggs and vinegar dressings on our salads. Acid is a moving target, though vinegars vary acidic levels and so do tomatoes depending on their ripeness, variety, time of year, et cetera. Citrus fruits also vary greatly from type to type and fruit to fruit. Because of all of these variables when it comes to acid, your recipe may not hold up as written. You just have to taste your way through. the tip of the week is, once again, a recipe, but it's not one for eating, although you could eat this. The recipe is my sugar scrub. I love this scrub because it's not too goopy. It exfoliates beautifully. It smells great. It makes my skin incredibly soft, and I know exactly what's in it, and it's all from my cabinet. You can use it on your face and body. Just avoid your eye area. Here's the recipe. Four ingredients, three quarters of a cup of organic sugar or brown sugar. One quarter cup organic coconut oil. Soften and stir to a smooth consistency. Two tablespoons of honey and two tablespoons of red wine vinegar. Stir all of the ingredients together. Store in a glass jar with a lid in the refrigerator. Rub on your skin gently to exfoliate and moisturize. Avoid your eye area and rinse with warm water. Store it in your refrigerator and take it out a half hour before using. Out a half an hour before using red wine vinegar is great for your skin boosting antioxidants and balancing pH levels. I mix up a large batch and put it in small jars for gifts and just make sure I include instructions so that people know it's not for spreading on their bagels. You are listening to Bending the Spoon, the podcast dedicated to making you a better cook. I'm Chef Laura Bonicelli, and I want to remind you that if you like recipes, go to Bonicelli cooking club.com and sign up for my email list and check out all of the options of participating in the club. And if you like what you hear today, hop over to Podchaser.com and leave bending the spoon of positive review. Also, for the video version of this podcast, subscribe to Bonicelli Cooking Club on YouTube. Now back to our episode. We use acid in marinades to flavor and tenderize because acid has the ability to break down certain foods. Think of the lettuce I mentioned wilting. It also breaks down meats, poultry, fish and seafood. Lemon or lime juice, vinegar, or wine are typically used in a marinade base. I always make sure that I keep the ratio of acid to oil, one to one in marinades. Otherwise the acid can go too far and ruin the texture before you get to cooking. The acids job is to break down the raw meat, allowing the marinades oil and spices to deeply penetrate and infuse the meat with flavor and moisture. I wrote a beef pot roast recipe. It's the one I served in my restaurant. It's a perfect example of using acid to break down meat. During the brazing process, that recipe has balsamic vinegar, wine and tomatoes, and by the time the meat is done, it is fall off the bone tender. Acid. Also tenderizes dough. That's one of the reasons that you use buttermilk and biscuits. We also need the addition of acid. If you're using baking soda in baking, because baking soda needs acid to react and facilitate rising, that acid could be buttermilk, which is acidic by nature, or there's enough acidity and sugar, honey and cocoa powder, which can help to facilitate that reaction. Baking powder, by the way, contains baking soda, sodium by carbonate and cream of tartar. The cream of tartar is the acid, so baking powder doesn't need another acid involved to facilitate rising. Measuring liquid in a typical liquid measuring cup usually means you have to hold it level so you can see it from the side. Not convenient. You're either bending down to be eye level with your kitchen countertop, or you're holding it in front of you while the liquid sloshes around. Not accurate. That's why I was so happy when OXO came out with these Good Grip angled liquid measuring cups. You can pour in your liquid and see the measurement from the top. Accurate and you'll get it right the first time because you can see what you're doing. They come in a variety of sizes and if properly taken care of, they will last for years. You can learn more and get links for Oxo good grips, Angled Measuring cups. On my Benable site, there's a link in the show notes. One of the reasons you always need to have a couple of lemons in your fridge and vinegar in your cabinet is that apples, pears, artichokes, avocados, fennel, banana all oxidize and brown with exposure to air, a rub with a lemon or lime or vinegar or a few drops in water will slow that process. For salads. In my restaurant, we would hold sliced fennel and apples and pears in cold lemon water until we actually plated the salads and the slices where crisp and flawless. To recap our episode, we've talked about acids in their various roles in household cleaners, in homemade beauty products, medicinal uses, how acid enhances flavor, balances with other ingredients and works with fat, how it breaks down meats, poultry, seafood, and vegetables. And finally, how it keeps certain fruits and vegetables from oxidizing and browning. In the next episode of Bending the Spoon, we'll continue our conversation about manipulating the flavor of foods with all about fat. Till then, Thank you so very much for listening to this episode of Bending the Spoon. If you like this episode or if you think someone else would find it useful, please leave a review on pod chaser.com, and if you have any questions for me, find me on Instagram or YouTube or go to bonicellicookingclub.com and leave me a message. Thank you, and go and make some magic in your kitchen.