Cream of tartar4/3/2023 Eventually, the rest of the world caught on.Ĭream of tartar is actually made up of sodium bicarbonate ( baking soda) and tartaric acid (cream of tartar). Later, in 1847, Louis Pasteur also investigated cream of tartar, and it became wildly popular with the French for cooking. They are then removed and purified before being packaged in jars or tins or bags, and placed on the shelves of your grocer's baking aisle.įrench physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot, in 1832, is credited with discovering various physical properties of cream of tartar. When the water evaporates, the crystals - or wine diamonds - form. The process involves treating wine lees (the solids leftover from crushed grapes during winemaking) with hot water to dissolve the potassium bitartrate. If that still isn’t enough to make you appreciate cream of tartar, how about its cleaning abilities? A blackened aluminum pot will shine like new if you boil water with two spoonfuls of cream of tartar per liter in it. Finally, cream of tartar complexes iron so it will even take rust stains out of fabrics and the bathtub.The modern way of making cream of tartar dates back to 1768, thanks to Swedish chemist C.W. The addition of cream of tartar limits the extent to which proteins can bond to each other. Sometimes, however, the proteins form too many links to each other and overcoagulation results. Coiled proteins unwind and link up in a rigid three-dimensional network. That’s just what happens when we whip egg whites to make meringue. There is something else that cream of tartar can interfere with. If a small amount of cream of tartar is added, some of the sucrose is hydrolyzed to glucose and fructose which are less likely to form large crystals. But this has to be done in a fashion that ensures small crystal formation otherwise the candy becomes too brittle and crunchy. Candies are basically made by cooling down solutions in which a lot of sugar has been dissolved. The bubbling action can dislodge small blockages.Ĭandy makers also know all about cream of tartar. Just make up a mix of one cup bicarbonate, one quarter cup cream of tartar and one cup of salt (for increased density) and periodically pour a few spoonfuls down the drain. The same chemistry can be used to keep drains clear. When the mixture dissolves, bubbles of carbon dioxide are released. In fact, one version of baking powder is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate and cream of tartar. It is ideal for the generation of carbon dioxide from baking soda. It is a cheap, safe, readily available mild acid. And thus was born the idea of the tetrahedral carbon atom.Įmotional connections aside, there are still plenty of reasons to appreciate cream of tartar. A brilliant deduction! Eventually van’t Hoff and Lebel concluded that this was possible only if the molecules were not planar but three-dimensional. He then went on to suggest that the mirror image crystals were likely made of mirror image molecules and that nature produced only one of these two versions. He laboriously separated these with tweezers and discovered that one set of crystals was identical to the tartrate prepared from the “natural” source. When he examined the latter through a microscope, he found that it was composed of two kinds of crystals which were mirror images of each other. He found that sodium ammonium tartrate which he prepared from natural tartaric acid was not exactly the same as the version made from tartaric acid that had been synthesized in the laboratory. Pasteur became interested in the chemistry of winemaking and launched into a study of tartaric acid and its various salts. In chemical terms, it is potassium hydrogen tartrate which is basically partially neutralized tartaric acid. It is a byproduct of winemaking and remains behind as a sediment after fermentation. Cream of tartar is close to the heart of any organic chemist because the study of this compound by Louis Pasteur in 1848 was pivotal in leading to the understanding of the three dimensional structure of molecules.
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