How Does Cream of Tartar Work in Baked Goods and Beyond?

Cream of tartar is a kitchen ingredient most commonly used in baking, but it can help with everything from candy making to whipping eggs to cleaning up afterwards. It's also a byproduct of the wine industry. Learn how it works in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://recipes.howstuffworks.com/food-science/cream-of-tartar.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Volebaum Here with the holiday season upon us, I
wanted to talk about a common but slightly mysterious baking ingredient,
cream of tartar. Despite its name, it isn't creamy. It's
not made of dairy at all. It's also not used

(00:23):
in tartar sauce. It's actually a byproduct of the wine industry.
But we'll get into that later, okay. Cream of tartar
is a dry, mildly acidic powder most commonly used in baking,
but also in candy making, cleaning products, and other kitchen
jobs like whipping up fluffy eggs. It's like having lemon

(00:44):
juice or vinegar in a powder format, but it's flavorless.
In baked goods, cream of tartar is employed as part
of chemical leavening agents. Leaveners are the stuff you add
to help make baked goods nice and light and fluffy.
In general. These are compounds that will create carbon dioxide
bubbles in your dough and giving it a physical lift

(01:06):
and expansion. Then the heat of the oven sets the
dough around those bubbles. This is what's happening in yeast
phrased dough. The yeasts are microorganisms that produce carbon dioxide,
but sometimes you don't want to muck around with yeast
because it takes a couple hours to work, and that's
where chemical leveners come in. Modern chemical leveners are made

(01:29):
by combining baking soda aka sodium bicarbonate with an acid
and then getting them wet. That's because when baking soda
interacts with an acid and a moisture, a chemical reaction
occurs that instantly forms carbon dioxide bubbles. When manufactures package
baking soda with a dry acid light cream of tartar,

(01:49):
it makes it super easy for the user just add water.
This is what's going on in those fizzy bath bombs
you may have used, and also in baking powder. Cream
of tartar is a little bit on the expensive side,
so these days, a cheaper dry acid is probably at
work in your back bombs and baking powder. But baking
recipes do sometimes still call for baking soda and cream

(02:12):
of tartar, or for baking powder and an extra kick
from cream of tartar. But wait, there's more. Cream of
tartar can also help stabilize whipped eggs or whipped cream.
Its acidity helps the proteins in the egg whites or
in the cream unfurl and then stick together softly around

(02:33):
air bubbles without sticking so hard that they go rigid
and push water out. You may have had that happen
when you're whipping eggs or cream. You know it'll be
expanding and peeking up nicely, but then suddenly it'll break
and go lumpy and wet. A little bit of cream
of tartar can help prevent that. It also makes cakes

(02:54):
and meringues look brighter or wider because of two things.
First of all, it's acidity makes this pigment and flour
that's normally sort of parchment colored turn clear. And secondly,
because of that whipping thing, you can get the air
bubbles in a batter or a meringue smaller, which means
the particles of cake or meringue are smaller, which means

(03:17):
that they reflect light just a little bit differently. And furthermore,
cream of tartar affects the texture of sugar. A sugar
meaning sucrose likes being in a crystal state and it
likes clumping up. But when you're making smooth textured candies
like a caramel or lollipops or shiny icings or nice

(03:40):
chewy baked goods. You want your sugar to be liquid
or at the very least like not clumpy. Cream of
tartar helps because it breaks sucrose down into its components
glucose and fruititose, which don't crystallize and clump as much.
And because cream of tartar is lightly acidic, can help

(04:00):
some kinds of colorful produce retain their color when you
steam or boil them, basically because those pigments are stored
in acidic pockets in the produce, so making the whole
environment morcidic means they get to stay put. A cream
of tartar is also great for household tasks like cleaning
the blackening off of aluminum in other metals, or for

(04:20):
lifting rest and for helping clear drains. But I mentioned
the wine industry, so let's talk about where cream of
tartar comes from. A chemical name potassium by tartrate or
potassium hydrogen tartrate. Cream of tartar is the potassium salt
form of this acid called tatark acid, which is a

(04:43):
carboxylic acid which are commonly occurring and typically weak forms
of acid. Tataric acid is where we get the name
tartar in cream of tartar. Why cream was added to
the name is anyone's gas. Tataric acid is a compound
found in grapes. It's one of the things that makes
them tart. When this acid is partially neutralized, like on

(05:07):
the pH scale, it can form up with potassium, which
is also found in grapes, to create molecules of potassium
by tartrate. These are pretty soluble in warm water based solutions,
but will crystallize and settle out of the solution at
cooler temperatures, especially below about ten degrees celsius or fifty fahrenheit,

(05:28):
which hey is totally the temperature of the cold cellars
where wine is stored. In the wine industry, these are
sometimes called wine crystals or wine diamonds. You may have
noticed them yourself at the bottom of a bottle of
wine or in a crunchy little layer on the bottom
of the cork. They're harmless and not an indicator that

(05:48):
anything is bad about the wine, and some wine experts
actually like seeing them as it's a sign that a
wine hasn't been too heavily processed, but okay, cream of
tartar is not manufactured by filtering bottles of finished wine
or scraping crystals off of quarks. It's made by processing
wine waste, okay, very Basically, when you make wine, you

(06:12):
let grape juice ferment in a vat or barrel with yeast.
Then you separate the wine from the lees that is,
the dead yeast and other sediments by straining or draining.
As you bottle it. You're left with, yes, a dead yeast,
maybe some grape solids, and probably sort of a bunch
of potassium by tartrate that's then washed out and sent

(06:35):
off and purified and powdered and sold as cream of tartar.
This production process dates back to seventeen sixty eight and
Swedish chemist C. W. Shield. Throughout the eighteen hundreds, other
scientists studied the compound's physical properties, including Louis Pastor, who
basically invented pasteurization. One of the discoveries that came out

(06:57):
of this work with cream of tartar is the molecules
are in fact three dimensional, not two dimensional as was
thought at the time. Cream of tartar soon became a
popular ingredient in French cooking and spread from there to
change the world of baking, along with a few other ingredients, processes,
and technologies that were being developed around this time, such

(07:20):
as baking soda, modern ovens, and egg beaters that didn't
rely solely on arm power, but all of those are
topics for other episodes. Today's episode is based on the
article Cream of Tartar is a Baker's Best Friend on
HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jennifer Walker. Journey brain Stuff

(07:42):
is production of by Heart Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more
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