Difference Between Tartar Cream and Tartaric Acid
Tartar cream is an incredibly healthy ingredient. With it, you can stabilize whipped cream, make your own baking powder, and make very fluffy scrambled eggs . However, there is a fairly common misunderstanding of what it is .
If you type “that cream tartar” into popular search engines, you get a whole bunch of articles and blogs that tell you what tartaric acid is. This is technically incorrect, but it’s okay because it gives me the opportunity to talk about salt, one of my favorite topics. While it is not itself pure tartaric acid, tartar cream is the potassium salt of tartaric acid, meaning there is a potassium atom where the hydrogen atom used to be. The chemical formulas of creams or tartar and tartaric acid are KC 4 H 5 O 6 and C 4 H 6 O 6, respectively. (Note that there is another H. in the acid.)
Tartaric acid is found naturally in citrus fruits, bananas, tamarind and, as we know, grapes. It plays an important role in the production of wine, influences the color, taste and taste of wine, and also lowers the pH during fermentation, preventing the growth of harmful bacteria.
The solubility of tartaric acid is highly temperature dependent. At temperatures below 40 ℉, free tartaric acid reacts with natural potassium to form salt and precipitate with the formation of “wine diamonds” in the barrel and (sometimes) on the cork of a particularly chilled bottle. These crystals are creamy tartar (also known as potassium bitartrate or potassium tartrate). Mostly they go unnoticed in red wine, which is rarely cooled below 40 ℉ and is prone to settling anyway, but in white it can be quite unsettling. If you see small crystals, don’t panic, they are completely harmless. Just filter them out.
You are unlikely to find pure tartaric acid at the grocery store, although it can be ordered from Molecular Gastronomy suppliers (and Amazon). Tartaric acid can be used as an acidulant (that is, imparts a sour taste) or as a preservative (by lowering the pH). It is used in a lot of fruit flavored sour candies, which are some of my favorites.
Tartar cream is incredibly common (and, if you keep it dry, very stable on storage), you can find it in just about any regular grocery store. When mixed with water and baking soda (the alkaline ingredient), tartar produces an acid-base acid that releases bubbles of carbon dioxide, and these bubbles cause your baked goods to rise. (This is probably where the “tartaric acid-tartaric acid” fallacy comes from. Although not pure tartaric acid, it is still an acidic salt and acts as an acid when dissolved in water and incorporated into a base.)
In addition to sourdough, tartar can also be used to stabilize whipped whites (or foods containing protein) such as cream or egg whites. It lowers the pH (and introduces more hydrogen ions), which changes the charge on the proteins and prevents them from binding too tightly. According to Slate , this keeps the proteins “aligned, but not too tightly held together,” and “the structure holds water and air bubbles in place, and therefore becomes stronger and safer,” but remains “supple and resilient.” (Lubricating yourself with tartar, unfortunately, will not make you more flexible or resilient, although it can work wonders with an old plate or metal utensil .)