Cooking with Chemistry

I did a quick trip to my favorite Chinese grocery store yesterday evening and wandered down the aisle with all the varieties of sesame oils and vinegars, looking for a particular brand of black vinegar for a recipe I was making. Rice vinegar....Wine vinegar.....cooking sherry, with and without salt.....black vinegar (sweetened and unsweetened)..... Ah, there it is.

Just as I picked up the bottle, my eye fell on an adjacent one containing not dark brown liquid but a clear one, its label all in Chinese. Curious, I turned it around and read "Potassium Carbonate solution, with Sodium Nitrate." Huh? What's that used for? The very fine print gave the answer: "For reconstitution of Dehydrated Squid. Wash after use."

Guess I haven't gotten to that volume of the cooking encyclopaedia yet.

Musing on that juxtaposition of Chemistry lab and cooking ingredients during today's dog walk, I started making a mental list of other odd ingredients I'd heard about over the years. For example, a friend once told me of his Grandmother's special Christmas cookies, which included as an ingredient a substance she called "Baker's Ammonia" (a.k.a. Hartshorn, or Ammonium Carbonate,) which he recalled required a special trip to the Apothecary to purchase a tiny glass bottle of the pungent substance.

Then there's Sodium Hydroxide, Lye, which is of course famously used in Norwegian Lutefisk preparation. It's also used to process Southern corn grits, and for that matter to peel Peaches commercially. Hopefully, all such preparations include more than a token amount of post-processing neutralization ;-)

At the other extreme of the pH scale, there are the usual suspects -- Tartaric acid, Citric acid, Acetic acid, etc. Further afield, there are some old Cocktail recipes that include Hydrochloric acid, purportedly to "improve digestion."

So maybe the ultimate appetizer menu is Lutefisk with an Acid Tequila cocktail. NaOH plus HCl makes Salt --- instant Margarita!