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Comment by righthand | Hacker News Reader

You also can do this with basic natural and readily available ingredients:

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.

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> Sodium citrate is already in citrus

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.

I think it’s important to discern that sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid. So while yes the sodium bicarbonate, baking soda, will break down the rest of citric acid and leave you with sodium citrate, the citric acid will be just as effective on it’s own for those without baking soda at the ready. The baking soda changes the flavor as well which may not be desirable. In the case of a cheese sauce you may not want lemon acidity flavors pulling through.

>I think it’s important to discern that sodium citrate is part of the base of citric acid.

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?

I won’t respond to this pile-on of criticism as you wrote this in an attempt at humiliation. I did however respond to the similar duplicate comment from another user below. Hope that helps. Know that it was just a typo.

I'm sorry you got that impression as it wasn't my intent.

Em. I just tried it with citric acid and it didn't work at all - just get an acidic grainy soup - probably from lowering the pH too much. I'm not entirely certain how it is expected to work.

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.

Apologies I meant to write:

> 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.

Author of the paper here! We actually tried the sodium citrate trick and it totally works. We did not explore the phase diagram in that case as thoroughly but we might see whether to put it in the published version in the supplementary materials. Thanks everyone for the great welcoming!

What measurements did you use for everything, cheese/sodium citrate/etc?

The baking soda trick works wonders with canned tomatoes that may have a tin-like taste too.

That's nice, I remember reading about sodium citrate and maybe having to bake baking soda in the oven or something like that. Getting it from lemon juice would be a lot easier.

And if you want the acid, don’t use the baking soda. You still get the sodium citrate.

What is 1T? Given the context I am assuming tablespoon, but that’s not an abbreviation I’ve ever encountered before (tbsp being the only abbreviation I have seen).

Big T is tablespoon, little t is teaspoon. Probably not common since a tablespoon is 3x the size of a teaspoon and people would mix them up and the flavor profile would be wrong. You might encounter these abbreviations in cookbooks or from more experienced cooks for the sake of brevity.

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