1t-1T (teaspoon, Tablespoon) lemon/citrus juice and a literal two-finger tiny pinch of baking soda, without buying specialized chemical compound ingredients off of Amazon that may be lying about their contents.
Sodium citrate is already in citrus and the baking soda kills the acidity that may make the taste more harsh (another great trick is adding a pinch of baking soda to homemade tomato soup to kill the tomato acidity and blend it better with added milk/cream).
1T of white wine can do wonders for cheese sauce as well.
Citric acid is in the citrus. You're making sodium citrate when you add baking soda.
I keep citric acid around for cooking and adjust water pH for plants since SF water is so alkaline, so I just make it from that.
For x grams of sodium citrate desired, mix 0.744x grams citric acid and 0.976x grams sodium bicarbonate in enough water to dissolve. Stir until reaction stops. Boil off water if desired.
You need 2-3g of sodium citrate for every 100g of cheese.
There are no sodium atoms in citric acid, and losing protons to form a conjugate base won't create them. The citric acid will have to react with sodium already present if you don't add some, which may not be in sufficient quantity to neutralize the acid. Sodium citrate is only one of many citric acid salts, and even that has three varieties, so I hardly think you can say it's "part of the base of citric acid", no?
AFAIK, sodium citrate works by sequestering calcium in insoluble Ca-paracaseinate during the ion-exchange with the emulsifying salt, leaving soluble Na-paracaseinate, a potent emulsifier. Citric acid, though, doesn't have a sodium ion and the amount of citric acid you'd need to separate the calcium would make the cheese sauce too acidic.
> I think it’s important to discern that part of sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid.
That’s because the base of citric acid is citrate. So when combined into a solution with some kind of sodium you get the effects of creating sodium citrate. As you mention it is a thickener. There is sodium in the cheese you are using as well to help this process hence why you only need a little of sodium bicarbonate to help speed up and complete the break down.
As for why it didnt work for you, I also tried it this morning and had no trouble smoothing out and thickening a basic alfredo sauce. It works great. I now have a bowl of breakfast pasta.
Perhaps you didn’t wait long enough for the reaction to take place or your cheese didn’t have enough sodium.